Pinchas Gutter

Gutter was born in 1932 in Łódź, Poland. After the Nazis occupied his hometown, Gutter was sent to Warsaw along with his mother and sister to live with a relative; his father thought that it would be safer there for his family. Gutter's father eventually joined them where they lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. They survived the big deportations of 1942, but after the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was suppressed, they were rounded up by the Germans and sent to the Majdanek extermination camp. Gutter's parents and sister were killed. As recounted in Eli Rubenstein's Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations, Gutter saw his twin sister being taken with his mother to be murdered: "Who can forget Pinchas Gutter telling of the last time he saw his twin sister in Majdanek? All he can remembers the long, golden-blonde braid swinging behind her back as she was herded with their mother to her end. He cannot, try as he might, recall her face."^[4]

Gutter himself suffered a beating by a German guard, but survived and was then sent to a nearby labor camp, where he was part of a crew that manufactured mines and ammunition for the German army. Toward the close of the war, he found himself in Buchenwald. He was subsequently transported to another labor camp in Germany and later forced on a death march to Theresienstadt in northern Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. After being liberated by the Red Army in 1945, he was sent to Britain. In 1952, he enlisted in the Israeli army. He lived in Brazil and South Africa before immigrating to Canada in 1985.^[5][6][7]

Dimensions in Testimony is a project developed by Heather Maio of Conscience Display, made in a collaboration between the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and the University of Southern California's USC Shoah Foundation, a nonprofit established by American film director Steven Spielberg. It enables people—now and far into the future—to have a "virtual conversation" with Holocaust survivors about their life experiences.^[8]

The project integrates advanced filming techniques, specialized display technologies, and next-generation natural language processing to provide an intimate experience with Holocaust survivors who are uniquely qualified to offer personal reflections and answer direct questions about their firsthand experiences with the Holocaust. Algorithms dictate which responses are played back—akin to virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, except that while those pieces of software are designed to answer questions about emails or the weather, Dimensions in Testimony is based on communicating one person's experience of genocide.^[9][10]

Gutter was the first person to test-drive the new technology. On three occasions, he travelled to the Los Angeles-based foundation, where he sat in a dome lit by 6,000 LED lights, surrounded by 52 cameras. The lights were so blinding he had to wear protective glasses when he wasn't being filmed. He had to wear the same clothes and sit in the same position to maintain the continuity of the project. The prototype involved filming extensive interviews with Gutter. The team at ICT then used natural language processing software to help create an interactive version of the video footage, with vocal cues triggering responses from the pool of recorded speech in the 25 hours of video footage with Gutter, who spent a total of five days sitting in the sphere.

Drafting the more than 900 questions was also a challenge. Researchers had to start with the lowest level of knowledge about the Holocaust. One day, staff brought in their children to ask questions. Answers had to be recorded for questions that were off-topic and that were hypothetical. In testing, the software picked out the best answer for about 90 per cent of the questions asked.

The project won, among other awards, the interactive award and the audience award at the Sheffield documentary festival in 2016. The Illinois Holocaust Museum is the first Museum in the world to share the technology with the public at large. As of 2016, the project hoped to record ten survivors, five men and five women, who would reflect the diversity of the Holocaust experience, costing about $2 million initially and then $500,000 for each additional survivor who will be filmed. The ten testimonies from these Holocaust survivors were to be unveiled by the end of 2017.^[11]

For several years, USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen D. Smith and Gutter developed a friendship of trust in which they explored the life that resides in Gutter's memory. He took Smith into the world of the Gerrer Hassidimof Łódź, through the Warsaw ghetto uprising, to Majdanek and Terezín, London, Paris and Jerusalem. The film probes the dark corners of Gutter's memory and discovers how vibrant, and real memory can be, but also how dark and lonely and terrifying it is too. Loss and trauma, survival and hope, pain and healing, love and hate, people and their fading shadows are all there in the void, remembered and forgotten.

Zvike Nevo's documentary,^[12] which unfolds in chronological order from Gutter's birth in Łódź in 1932, is mostly about his survival as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland. Dow Marmur, rabbi emeritus at Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple said in his review in The Toronto Star that the film demonstrates that Gutter has harnessed his ordeal to the noble cause of tikun olam, the idea that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large.^[13][12]

Produced by USC Shoah Foundation with Ari Palitz and Gabo Arora and producer Stephen D. Smith in 2016, The Last Goodbye is a roomscale virtual reality experience that allows viewers to travel to the Majdanek concentration camp with Pinchas as he tells them about his early experiences there. The film premiered to high acclaim at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival^[14] and took home the VR-Documentary Jury Prize at the 2018 Lumiere Awards. In 2019, Pinchas himself dubbed the Virtual Reality film into five new languages with the intent of bringing the film to global audiences in 2020.^[14]

In 2016, Gutter was invited to travel with students of Saint Elizabeth University on a Holocaust study mission to share the experiences of his family in Poland during the Holocaust. The reactions of the non-Jewish students were filmed to create the documentary A Holocaust Journey: Lessons We Learned, in which Gutter leads the students through the Magdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland, explaining how his family was deported from the Warsaw ghetto, where he lost his family upon arrival, and where he thought he would be killed with Zyklon B gas.^[15][16]