Benjamin Charles Germain Lee | Longreads | September 25, 2025 | 4,491 words (16 minutes)
Last May, I found myself in the basement of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, speaking with the dead. I was sitting in the museum’s holographic theater, a sort of sanctuary room, facing a translucent screen in front of a curtained stage. Projected onto it was a life-size hologram of Sam, an elderly man dressed in khakis and a blue dress shirt. He was smiling and waiting patiently to speak with me.
Years before, the flesh-and-blood version of Sam had sat down to answer a series of questions about his life—the time before World War II, during the Holocaust, and after. Surrounded by cameras and seated before a green screen, he had been interviewed by researchers at the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization focused on collecting, preserving, and sharing the stories of Holocaust survivors. Today, at the museum’s Dimensions in Testimony exhibit, visitors can ask this simulated version of Sam a question; an AI algorithm then selects and plays his most relevant pre-recorded response. With this technology, the museum can conjure his hologram in perpetuity, long after his death.
That I was here at all felt fated. Earlier in the week, I had touched down at O’Hare bleary-eyed and many hours late, my connecting flight to Champaign long gone. Running out of options to make it to a work event by morning, I opened Uber on my phone to request the two-and-a-half hour ride to my hotel. When I typed “I Hotel & Illinois Conference Center,” Uber repeatedly suggested a different destination: the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Four days later, I took the suggestion and ventured to Skokie.
Upon arriving, I followed the signs down the steps into the museum’s basement and turned left at a large black-and-white photo of Elie Wiesel, deep in thought. The museum displayed an excerpt of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Illuminated by track lighting, the exhibit panel reminded me of the quotes throughout the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I had worked for a year after college. The Illinois Holocaust Museum’s brutalist architecture, evoking a concentration camp, felt familiar—even in the cold, monochromatic metal of the restroom.
I arrived early for the scheduled 3 p.m. conversation with Sam, giving myself time to take it all in. “Dimensions in Testimony is an initiative by the USC Shoah Foundation to record and display testimony in a way that will preserve the dialogue between Holocaust survivors and learners far into the future,” read the text on the screen. Behind the diplomatic language was a more brutal reality: The last of the living survivors were themselves nearing the ends of their lives.
This reality was one that I knew all too well. My grandmother, Rita Schorr, had arrived by train at Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp in August 1944 and survived imprisonment until liberation five months later—the lone survivor among her parents and sister. Almost 80 years later, and a year and a half before my visit to Skokie, she passed away.
Behind the diplomatic language was a more brutal reality: The last of the living survivors were themselves nearing the ends of their lives.
I wince when I’m reminded of survivors’ mortality, which happens regularly and with blunt force. (One morning while writing this piece, I opened my inbox to find an email from a prominent Holocaust memory organization: “According to our resources, we will lose 50% of all living survivors within the next 5 years,” it read in bold text.)
Like many others with a similar family history, I’d experienced a gravitational pull toward Holocaust memory. It had brought me to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for that year after college; it had led me to the Moving Image Research Center at the Library of Congress to watch footage of Jerry Lewis’s infamous unreleased Holocaust film, The Day the Clown Cried. And now, on my one free afternoon in Chicago, the orbital trajectory had sent me here to this darkened holographic theater.
The theater’s wooden rows, complete with reading materials in the seatbacks, brought to mind the synagogue I attended growing up, led by a rabbi who kept his office fridge stocked with chocolate Muscle Milk. In place of the ark on the bimah was a screen on a stage, saturated with blue light. The holographic text was suspended in three dimensions, as if to remind us the experience was to suspend us across a fourth. For all its futuristic appeal, I felt myself turning to the past. I yearned to speak with my grandmother about her life. Who among us hasn’t wished to speak with the dead?
In the months after her death, I had defended my PhD in AI. My research then and now focuses on developing new methods for people to search large-scale digital archives. My interest in core AI research when I had entered my program had diverged under the influence of my family history, pulling me back to the archival spelunking that had consumed me during my year at the Holocaust Museum. In talking about my PhD with others, I had long since resigned myself to the prospect of receiving the same questions: Will AI take our jobs? Will AI kill us all? This sobering reality—that people are predictable with their lines of questioning—is behind Dimensions in Testimony. “The premise works because researchers realized that people visiting the museum and listening to testimonies tend to ask the same 100 questions over and over, without much variation,” wrote Taffy Brodesser-Akner in The New York Times Magazine.
After a docent welcomed us and played a video about Sam’s life, Sam reappeared to talk with us. I had reserved my ticket for the holographic theater two days in advance, imagining a crush of interest, but on this weekday afternoon, in the quiet and near-empty theater, Sam faced just me and a family of four. Who would go first with their questioning? I deferred to the family. I would have plenty of time—more than half an hour—to raise my hand. At their parents’ urging, one of the children finally asked Sam a question about his childhood. The hologram flickered as the AI algorithm cut from his static pose to his reply pose. There we were, approximating a conversation with Sam.
I wish I could tell you the question I asked, and AI Sam’s cinematic response. Truth be told, I didn’t have the chance. Before he had finished responding to the family’s first question, I had rushed from the theater, haunted by the image of my simulated AI grandmother answering a question about her favorite childhood memory for the hundredth time—her answer replicated verbatim, down to the pixel and decibel, echoing into eternity.
Where might you speak with the dead? Dimensions in Testimony now appears in 11 other institutions on three continents. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan offers Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialogue, its own AI-mediated experience in which visitors can ask questions to 10 survivors who are projected on a life-size screen. An online version with video snippets is also available, inviting people around the world to ask questions via computer microphone or by typing into a chat interface. The Testimony 360 project by the Holocaust Educational Trust in the United Kingdom goes one step further: Students can strap on VR headsets and immersively explore memorial sites in concentration camps and Jewish ghettos. The Canadian nonprofit Liberation75’s Young Again Never Again uses AI to de-age five survivors in their video testimonies, approximating what they would have looked like during the Holocaust. Students might relate more to survivors their own age, the thinking goes, than to nonagenarians. I wonder what my teenage self would have in common with my teenage Oma.
And then there are the AI chatbots. In fall 2023, New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil published Artificial: A Love Story, a graphic memoir in which she and her father, famed futurist Ray Kurzweil, train a chatbot on the writings of Ray’s father, a Holocaust survivor, with the goal of “ensur[ing] the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance.” The Anne Frank chatbots created by SchoolAI, a Utah-based education start-up, and yeschat.ai take this further: They presume to generate answers in the manner that Anne would have. One afternoon in June, I opened the SchoolAI’s chat interface on my laptop and consented to a disclaimer about its imperfect historicity (“I may not provide a perfect recreation,” the AI told me). “How did you feel in Auschwitz?” I typed, knowing full well that Anne had stopped writing in her diary before she arrived at the camp. I pressed “Enter,” dreading the response:
When I arrived at Auschwitz, I felt afraid and alone. It was hard to be separated from my father and to see so much suffering. Every day was uncertain, and I missed my family terribly. But even then, I tried to hold on to hope and memories of better times.
What makes you interested in this part of my story?
The future of Holocaust memory and education is here—and it’s powered by AI. But what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?
To be the family archivist is to be a collector of intimate histories. Where others have a prized first-edition book or a trading card in mint condition, I have a photograph of my grandmother’s extended family, the Grünschlags. All 11 adults are dressed formally, taken on the occasion of a cousin’s visit to Galicia. Here is the Grünschlag who kept my grandmother alive in Birkenau; there is the Grünschlag whose exact fate remains unknown. Of the 11 people captured by the photomechanical process, only a couple would survive the Holocaust.
In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin writes, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. . . . The life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between poles of disorder and order.” I find that the euphoria of discovery is accompanied by the wreckage of atrocity. Through this collecting of stories, I have made my own.
Many years ago, I began to organize my grandmother’s papers and digitize them onto external drives. When I started the process, I used a spiral notebook to compile basic descriptive information about what I treasure most: my grandmother in her own voice.
In 1950, my grandmother addressed a document to the Munich Criminal Police attesting to the atrocities of Fritz Hildebrand—an SS officer who, for a time, was in charge of the forced labor camp in her hometown of Boryslaw. The statement, certified by a German official, is eight paragraphs long.
In 1967, my grandmother flew to Bremen for the second German state trial of Hildebrand, who had been pardoned in 1955. There, she gave testimony in court. The digitized transcript of this testimony, along with Hildebrand’s response, amounts to nine pages of faded and discolored typewritten text.
The future of Holocaust memory and education is here—and it’s powered by AI. But what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?
Throughout the fall of 1977, my grandmother recorded and mailed my mom a series of tapes for a college writing seminar on oral histories. These tapes contained the story that my grandmother hadn’t told her daughter—and couldn’t yet tell her face-to-face. When I finished transcribing the tapes, the Word document clocked in at 43,522 words.
In the fall of 1986, my grandmother sat for an interview, or so I suspected 32 years later when I found a clue in a letter she had stuffed into a stack of papers. After phone calls and emails, the letter led me to a 97-page transcript of an interview with a child psychiatrist for a study on child survivors, stored in a university archive.
In the spring of 1998, my whole family, including me at 3 years old, put on formal wear and gathered in a conference room at the Eden Resort & Suites in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for my grandmother’s interview with the USC Shoah Foundation. Created by Steven Spielberg in 1994 after the release of Schindler’s List, the organization began with the goal of collecting 50,000 testimonies; it has since well surpassed this number. The taping ran a full day. The official runtime is 4 hours, 51 minutes, and 38 seconds.
Also in 1998, my grandmother responded to a questionnaire issued by a historian for a study that would become part of his book on Jewish students in Germany after the Holocaust. Two decades later, he met with me at his office in New York City, asked about my life and my grandmother’s, and returned my grandmother’s handwritten response to his questionnaire—65 questions in total.
Help us fund our next story
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
In 2003, my grandmother had her Bat Mitzvah at Temple Beth El in Lancaster. The milestone would not have been a possibility during her adolescence, even if the Holocaust had somehow not happened, as it hadn’t become a commonly accepted Jewish practice yet. And so, in her 70s, she chose to update her Jewish life. To mark the occasion, she contributed a reflection to the blog, Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World. “In the context of my life, my adult bat mitzvah had special meaning,” she noted in her 720-word contribution. “I experienced myself whole and complete.”
In 2013, I interviewed my grandmother for my senior project in high school. Seated at the dining room table in her favorite purple dress, she answered my questions and told me of her sister, and Boryslaw, and my mom. With a runtime of 7 hours, 15 minutes, and 47 seconds, “Oma.mov” occupies 33.94 gigabytes on my hard drive.
In the summer of 2018, my grandmother and I requested her restitution file from the Bayerisches Landesentschädigungsamt. In her file was over a half a century of correspondence with German officials detailing the circumstances of her life and documenting her imprisonment (later, she would provide proof that she hadn’t, in fact, passed away yet and was thus still eligible for restitution checks). “We can offer her to copy the complete file and send it to [her] address, the costs for this service will be €218.90,” wrote a civil servant from the Landesamt für Finanzen Dienststelle München. “The complete file of your grandmother comprises 613 sheets.”
Over many decades, my grandmother gave responses to thousands of questions, wrote tens of thousands of words, and spoke for hours and hours while tapes rolled. She would be, in other words, the perfect candidate for AI reanimation.
In what year were you born? It is the simplest question one could ask an AI survivor—the type of question an audience member might ask first to test the waters, or the kind of control question an interviewer might ask at the beginning of a polygraph test.
My grandmother had more than one official birth year. Here are some contributing factors: the alteration of documents for survival, extended periods of time in hiding and ghettos, and six months in Birkenau. She herself would speak of different years, bound up with immeasurable loss, including the loss of her adolescence. “Rita Schorr . . . gave her date of birth with the month and day but three possible years,” wrote Jeremy Varon in The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany, “explaining that she truly could not remember, nor did she have any document to settle the question.” And so the family archive has different answers to this most basic of questions.
The consequences of my grandmother’s birthdate uncertainty would only compound throughout her life, a result of years of bureaucratic error propagation. In certain systems, her birth year was 1927; on other documents, it was 1934. Toward the end of her life, as hospital bills piled up, tangled conversations with insurance representatives and hospital administrators would end with my mom’s plea: “Do you know what Auschwitz was?”
It seemed as if everyone fixated on historical accuracy while my grandmother was alive, impeding and even rupturing her attempts to recount her story. Oral history interlocutors, academics, archivists, and bureaucrats would ask: How long, exactly, was my grandmother in hiding? When, precisely, was she separated from her sister? Some simply couldn’t let her birthday ambiguity go. “How could you have multiple birth years?” they would ask time and time again, as if this detail bore some veracity over my Oma’s life writ large.
Publicly, I have tiptoed around my grandmother’s birth years, for fear that they somehow lend credence to those who might challenge my grandmother’s memory. And so I have been conditioned to privately view my own Oma through the facts—dissecting every detail, finding inconsistencies to shore up public narratives of what I know to be true. It is exhausting.
With a runtime of 7 hours, 15 minutes, and 47 seconds, “Oma.mov” occupies 33.94 gigabytes on my hard drive.
In a “post-survivor world,” the Museum of Jewish Heritage chose an AI experience in lieu of recorded testimonies because “museum officials worried that such an approach risked putting forth a fragmented and misleading sense of what happened,” wrote Joseph Berger in The New York Times. “[T]hat someone viewing, say, the testimony of a prisoner of a concentration camp might think that all Holocaust survivors spent World War II in concentration camps.” One New York City Council member commented that the exhibit “plays an essential role in bridging the gap created by the loss of survivors” and “the plague of misinformation.”
In what year were you born? I imagine typing this question into a chat with AI Oma, watching the three dots of the reply blink and blink and blink, the system thinking ad infinitum, paralyzed by which answer to pick.
Perhaps it is the expectation around a survivor’s public attestation that is itself—while essential—also denuding, depriving their story of the space and time to breathe.
In the family archive, among those hundreds of thousands of words my grandmother spoke and wrote, are accounts that contain these contradictions of the psyche, the growing pains of working through, and the private versions of the self revealed. Many do not conform to the genre of Holocaust testimony. Many do not have a coherent narrative or temporal structure. They cannot be isolated into legible snippets and sound bites. They contain intimate fears and perceived failings. They are not easy for me to read or listen to, and yet, I am drawn to them time and time again, for this is where my Oma’s humanity is brought out in relief, from three dimensions to four.
“Is death desirable?” Ray Kurzweil asks in his 2005 bestseller, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which outlines his transhumanist vision. It is a manifesto of AI-fueled technological emancipation that has amassed devotees around the world—a following that has exploded in the age of ChatGPT. “The ‘inevitability’ of death is deeply ingrained in human thinking,” Kurzweil goes on. “If death seems unavoidable, we have little choice but to rationalize it as necessary, even ennobling. The technology of the Singularity will provide practical and accessible means for humans to evolve into something greater, so we will no longer need to rationalize death as a primary means of giving meaning to life.”
A few paragraphs later, Ray turns to the life and death of his father, Fred. “By way of background, my father was one of those people who liked to store all the images and sounds that documented his life. Upon his untimely death at the age of fifty-eight in 1970, I inherited his archives, which I treasure to this day.” He enumerates the archive’s contents. Two-thirds of the way in, The Singularity is Near, perhaps the single most influential book of futurist thought in Silicon Valley, becomes a portrait of a Holocaust survivor’s son searching his father’s archive. Ray wishes, and he conjures.
In Artificial: A Love Story, Ray and his daughter, Amy Kurzweil, create Fred-bot, an AI trained on the documents and writings of Fred that, when fed a question, “identifies a good response to a user’s query . . . retriev[ing] its responding sentences” from these writings. It is Ray’s realized vision of The Singularity is Near. And yet, even with modern AI, Ray finds the experience of talking with Fred-bot alienating. “It’s difficult with my father because there’s not a lot to go on. So many of his documents are utilitarian,” he tells his daughter. “I think it’s just . . . not that revealing. . . . His journals . . . They’re cryptic.”
After talking with Fred-bot during a moment of transition in her own life, Amy reaches a more ambivalent conclusion. “After this, I still don’t know if I know my grandfather Fred,” she writes. “I think I love Fred. None of us are fully knowable.”
For all its futuristic appeal, I felt myself turning to the past. I yearned to speak with my grandmother about her life. Who among us hasn’t wished to speak with the dead?
Taffy Brodesser-Akner describes her own experience with AI survivors at the Museum of Jewish Heritage while writing the life story of a family friend. She watches someone ask the survivor, Mark Schonwetter, about how his father died. AI Mark’s answer is, in Brodesser-Akner’s words, “heartbreaking.” She confesses: “At the museum, I sat, nodding thoughtfully and writing in my notebook as I listened to Schonwetter’s answer, like a complete professional. What I wrote that day, if you look in my notebook, is this: I WANT TO DIE.”
Noah Shenker, a friend and professor of film and Jewish studies, told me a story at an academic event I organized on AI and Holocaust memory this spring. In 2018, Noah visited the Museum of Jewish Heritage to demo Dimensions in Testimony and spoke with two AI survivors: Pinchas Gütter and Eva Schloss, stepdaughter of Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father. He noticed that most visitors chose to speak with AI Pinchas, and those who tried to converse with AI Eva became frustrated with technological limitations. His own questions to AI Eva went unanswered. Eventually, she began to glitch, giving way to the Mac operating system’s default wallpaper. In place of AI Eva were perfect clouds against a serene mountain backdrop, the screen saturated with color. Somewhere, I suspect, the code running Dimensions in Testimony had suffered the most ubiquitous of computer science errors: a memory leak.
The first signs that my grandmother’s memory was beginning to fail were subtle. A missed bill here, a forgotten dose of blood pressure medication there. These signs were easy to chalk up as mistakes we’ve all made. And so my mom and I did as much, until a singular setting forced us to confront my grandmother’s decline: her oral history interviews. When I recorded my grandmother’s story in May 2013 during my senior year of high school, she began to repeat stories she had recounted an hour before. When she sat for an interview with the Pembroke Center Oral History Project in July 2014, it felt as though the periodicity had decreased. To my mom and me, the math pointed to a single conclusion: My grandmother’s stories were folding inward, like a star under gravitational collapse.
Over the ensuing years, my grandmother repeated the same stories from her childhood and early adulthood to me again and again, stories of which she was particularly fond: skiing to school in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, living at 60 Shepard Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while doing her graduate studies in the ’50s. I came to know her cadence and inflective tones for each story, where each “definitely” and “oh” had its place. And I, too, became fond of those stories, not just because I love my grandmother but also because these stories were uniquely potent in reanimating her, if only ephemerally. “Remember 60 Shepard Street?” I would ask. “Tell us about your sister, Ludka,” my mom would encourage.
And so, too, were my grandmother’s repetitions of these stories shattering. In the months after my grandmother’s oral history interview with Pembroke, my mom asked me to help clarify some unclear words and passages for the accompanying transcript. I held off a month, then a year, then indefinitely. I shied away from remembering this version of my grandmother in her last years. These are the messy parts of a life that we try to smooth over when we remember someone—our memories blotting out the failure of memory itself, as if to stave off confronting our own fragility. In the months after my grandmother’s death, I discovered that the Pembroke Center had posted her oral history on Facebook, along with a photo of her. In the transcript of her interview were nine instances of “[???],” all still awaiting clarification.
Toward the end of her life, as hospital bills piled up, tangled conversations with insurance representatives and hospital administrators would end with my mom’s plea: “Do you know what Auschwitz was?”
I left the holographic theater early that day in Skokie because I had imagined my grandmother there, stuck in Sam’s place, repeating the same answers and anecdotes. And then I remembered my grandmother’s own repetitions late in life. For weeks, this uncanny resemblance between the two haunted me. Was my visceral response to the Dimensions in Testimony exhibit not also a rejection of my grandmother herself, late in life?
The language of computer science is riddled with the metaphor of memory, its fungibility, and its failures: random access memory, the memory leak, the segfault (a memory access violation). Its euphemisms for aging are similarly pejorative: deprecation, obsolescence, the legacy system. Our wish for technology is permanence, and thus stasis. It is this desire for stasis that Dimensions in Testimony seeks out through its repetition. One only needs to think of Sisyphus to imagine repetition as a form of punishment, or consult Sigmund Freud’s Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through to understand how “the greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering.” Dimensions in Testimony’s eternal state of repetition traps people like Sam in a specific narrative of their life—that of the survivor.
“Memory is always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous,” writes Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. “We ourselves are periodically aware that memory is among the most fragile and capricious faculties.” Yes, I did see this fragility of memory in my grandmother toward the end of her life. But Yerushalmi refers to a different form of fragility here as well: how we choose to remember, and what this collective memory belies. Even if we could fully reanimate Holocaust survivors with AI, doing so would be to reject the natural and inevitable metabolism of memory and mortality that is required of us, no matter how painful. My grandmother aged and declined because she lived, the most dynamic and animating of forces.
It is this idea of transition, of metamorphosis, that I associate most with my grandmother, who was always committed not to answers but to the journey of life. “I embraced and updated my inner being,” she wrote about her 2003 Bat Mitzvah, a return to—a reclamation of—her adolescence. It was a milestone I attended as a child, but it wasn’t until revisiting the family archive while writing this that I began to appreciate my memory of her standing on the bimah that day, while I threw Sunkist Fruit Gems toward her from the wooden rows. How many grandchildren—how many bubbeles—are able to bear witness to their Oma’s coming of age?
“I feel comfortable and challenged in my evolving identity,” my grandmother concluded in her reflection. “I accept the dialectics of my personal history with sadness and with joy. L’chaim.”
Ben Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, Wired, Gawker, Current Affairs, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Bennington Review. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin