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Holocaust survivors from across Canada gathered on June 4 to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Azrieli Foundation's Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.

Friday, April 27Our team’s first stop was for a school presentation. With 120 middle and high school students in attendance, Leora Schaefer, Executive Director of the non-profit educational organization Facing History and Ourselves Canada, moderated an important conversation between Nate Leipciger and Theodore Fontaine, a Canadian Residential School survivor. The audience was engaged and attentive and asked some of the most thoughtful and profound questions we’ve heard. Facing History and Ourselves Canada has developed a resource for teaching about Residential Schools.Leora Schaefer moderates a conversation between Theodore Fontaine and Nate Leipciger at a school in Winnipeg.Saturday, April 28The next day, we accompanied Nate and his wife on a visit to Winnipeg’s excellent Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Spontaneously, Nate began speaking about his experiences to a group of students standing by the Auschwitz display. The students asked questions and were humbled to meet a survivor of the atrocities they were learning about in the exhibit.Sunday, April 29 Sunday was a busy day! In the afternoon, we led a teacher training workshop at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves Canada. The group of twenty-one Manitoba teachers left this professional development opportunity with resources and strategies for using personal testimonies to teach about the Holocaust and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.On Sunday evening we held a well-attended public event at the museum about the power of memoir and storytelling. Once again, Nate shared the stage with Theodore and Leora to have an honest and emotional conversation about using words to heal after trauma. The event received some local press coverage about these two men who “grew up on opposite sides of the planet, in different cultures, where powerful forces were at work trying to wipe out their identities."Nate Leipciger and Theodore FontaineAnd with that, our time in Winnipeg came to a close. Until next time…Dr. Stephanie Corazza is the Education and Curriculum Associate for the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. She received her PhD in History from the University of Toronto in 2017. Her research focused on social workers involved in child rescue networks in France during the Holocaust. In addition to experience teaching history at the undergraduate level, she has also served as an educator and historical consultant for Facing History and Ourselves. 

Every hour of the day during the week of March 12–18, the SXSW schedule was brimming with compelling sessions to attend. Every conference room in every major hotel in the downtown core was host to either a talk, a meet-up or a demonstration. I heard Melinda Gates talk about women in the workplace of the future. Speakers included Elon Musk, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. The roster of presenters was impressive.One panel stood out due to its subject matter: The Last Survivors: Memories of the Holocaust, took place at midday on Tuesday, March 12, at the Austin Convention Centre. Unlike the majority of the other presentations, which were largely theoretical and abstract in nature, this presentation included the man who was in many ways the topic of the panel itself – Pinchas Gutter, Holocaust survivor, author and educator.Prepping before the presentation, Jason Charters, Pinchas Gutter, Jody Spiegel and Stephen Smith meet.During the hour-long presentation to a packed room, the speakers presented case studies of three experimental approaches to engaging with the memories of Holocaust survivors: The Azrieli Foundation’s interactive online platform and documentary experience, Re:Collection; USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony, an interactive, responsive technology that allows people to engage with the recorded testimonies conversationally; and The Last Goodbye, an immersive virtual reality film. Pinchas Gutter, a survivor of six Nazi concentration camps, is at the centre of all three projects, and he told his story to the audience in a number of selective and innovative ways. At the centre of the SXSW panel The Last Survivors: Memories of the Holocaust and the source for much of the three experimental storytelling approaches was Pinchas Gutter’s traditionally published memoir, Memories in Focus. Panelists included Jody Spiegel, director of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivors Memoirs Program, Stephen Smith, Executive-Director of the USC Shoah Foundation, Pinchas Gutter and Jason Charters, writer/producer at Riddle Films.  Left to right: Jason Charters, Jody Spiegel, Pinchas Gutter and Stephen Smith.Riddle Films’ producer Liam Romalis setting up the livestream.Pinchas Gutter speaks to the audience.There was a special bit of wisdom that Pinchas shared with us toward the end of the presentation. Showing us his diary that he keeps with him at all times, he read a quote that he had written out by hand on the last page:“Remembrance is the secret to redemption. Forgetting leads to exile.” – Baal Shem TovPinchas and fellow panelists received a standing ovation, with comments from the audience: “Simply brilliant on multiple layers, including the content and the comparative analysis of how the content is disseminated.”“Wonderful session. Beautiful storytelling.”“An innovative project for humanity. Thank you! Audience member and grandson of a Holocaust survivor meets Pinchas and Dorothy Gutter after the presentation.Dorothy and Pinchas Gutter.After travelling the distance from Toronto to Austin, it felt good to see how The Last Survivors resonated with SXSW conference-goers and to see Pinchas’s story find a new audience.And perhaps most gratifying of all was being in the room and bearing witness to the surprising and fitting way that the panel presentation took on its own life to become the very act of remembrance that Pinchas alluded to in quoting the Baal Shem Tov.Watch the livestream presentation here: Born in Lodz, Poland, on July 21, 1932, Pinchas Gutter was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In 1945, he was liberated and taken to Britain. Pinchas lived in France, Israel, Brazil and South Africa before immigrating to Canada in 1985. He is the first Holocaust survivor to be immortalized in an interactive three-dimensional projection in the USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony. Pinchas Gutter lives in Toronto. Find Memories in Focus here.The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivors Memoirs Program publishes the memoirs of Canadian Holocaust survivors and creates materials for Holocaust education, including the online digital platform Re:Collection.New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) is a collection of interactive biographies from USC Shoah Foundation that enable people to have conversations with pre-recorded video images of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide.The Last Goodbye is a VR short featuring Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he takes you on an intimate journey through the Majdanek concentration camp. Jackie Shapiro works as the Creative Services Associate for the University of Toronto, Faculty of Arts & Science, and does freelance photography and graphic design.