At a Brooklyn synagogue on a recent Monday afternoon, a video of Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski played on a two-foot-tall box. Seated in a leopard-print chair, her hands folded in her lap, Warshawski blinked and nodded her head expectantly on a continuous loop.

“Did anyone else from your family survive?” a Hebrew school student asked the AI-powered avatar.

The video cut to a separate clip. Warshawski said she and her sister had survived. Her brother, mother and father did not.

Warshawski, who survived three concentration camps and ran a tailoring shop in Kansas City until 2023, had made it part of her life’s mission to tell her story wherever she could. She spoke with students, filmed the 2016 documentary Big Sonia about her life, and was even a guest speaker at a local prison.

But Warshawski knew she wouldn’t live forever. So in 2021, with the help of the interactive media company StoryFile and her granddaughter’s production company, Inflatable Film, Warshawski recorded answers to hundreds of questions about her life, from “What do you remember about the death march?,” to “Why do you like leopard print so much?” Those answers were loaded into an AI-powered avatar of Warshawski that can converse through a video screen, which debuted as an exhibit at the Museum of Kansas City last year.

The technology also caught the attention of the Blue Card, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Holocaust survivors in need. The organization adapted it into a portable format and brought the virtual Warshawski to 20 schools and community centers across the New York area over the past year, with plans to expand nationwide. A parallel effort from the USC Shoah Foundation, called “Dimensions in Testimony,” also enables students to have conversations with virtual versions of Holocaust survivors.

The initiative reflects recognition that as survivors age, a model of Holocaust education built on firsthand testimony will be increasingly difficult to sustain. No lesson plan can match the impact of hearing directly from survivors, many of whom dedicate their golden years to speaking tours retelling their traumatic stories. But 90% of the world’s roughly 200,000 living Holocaust survivors are projected to die in the next 15 years. And for aging survivors — who have already lost so much of their lives to violence and deprivation — the weight of transmitting Holocaust memories to the next generation is a burden they cannot shoulder alone.

“It’s absolutely the future of Holocaust education,” said Masha Pearl, the Blue Card’s executive director. “It actually is as close as possible to hearing a live survivor speak.”

Warshawski’s story

Warshawski grew up in Międzyrzec, Poland, and was 17 years old when she and her family were forced into a ghetto. Sonia and her mother were deported to the Majdanek death camp, where she watched Nazis march her mother to her death via gas chamber. Warshawski was then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to spread her fellow prisoners’ ashes as fertilizer, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was shot in the chest on liberation day.

She recovered and met her husband, John, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. The couple moved to Kansas City in 1948.

Using AI technology, students can ask the virtual Warshawski about all of those harrowing moments — with the added benefit that the real-life Warshawski only had to recall them once.

Many survivors “suffer from depression and PTSD, and it’s very difficult for them to recount these extremely painful experiences,” Pearl said. “This actually bypasses that in a way.”

The interactive element is also engaging for kids, Pearl said. At the Conservative synagogue Temple Sholom, after watching Big Sonia, nearly all 25 students ages 10 to 13 — half from the parochial school at the church across the street — raised their hands to ask the virtual Warshawski a question. A few students stayed after the programming had formally ended to ask more.

“It’s the same thing I heard from my uncle’s great grandpa,” said fifth-grader Noah Stein, who attends Hebrew school at Temple Sholom. “It’s amazing — I’ve never seen something like that.”

An imperfect technology

Warshawski, now 100 years old and still going strong, celebrated her birthday in November at a party with more than 1,000 people. But she doesn’t have as much energy as she used to and was unavailable to interview for this piece. So I interviewed her avatar instead.

My question — how she felt about her memory being preserved through AI — triggered an unrelated response.

“After we left [Majdanek], there were still people there, and I must tell you, one day when I was…”

“Can we pause this?” said Rechan Meshulam, special projects director at the Blue Card, who operated the technology at Temple Sholom.

Meshulam said the system had not matched my question to the correct response. She then manually selected the closest question, “Are you glad that you recorded this with StoryFile?”

“I feel this is a very important thing for the people in the world, not to forget and [to] read more about it. Read more history,” Warshawski said. “I’m very grateful that I had a chance to do it. I am thanking the Almighty for it, to give me the strength still to go on.”

The initial mismatched response illustrated the technology’s limits: Warshawski can only answer questions that StoryFile asked her during the original interview in 2021. If a question is similar enough, the AI is designed to redirect Warshawski to the appropriate answer. But this didn’t seem to work in practice. Whenever a student asked a question outside the suggested question bank, operators had to ask the student to rephrase — or pause Warshawski and jump in with their own knowledge about her story.

But according to Pearl, the limited scope of questions is a feature, not a bug. Limiting Warshawski to questions she actually answered prevents her words from being taken out of context or misconstrued, Pearl said.

“Sonia cannot tell you what the weather is today, what her thoughts are on politics — anything that’s really current,” Pearl said. “She can only speak to her experience.”

Not everyone draws the same line. Last year, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI drew controversy for its AI-generated version of Anne Frank, which spits out responses that Frank never wrote herself. Henrik Schönemann, a German historian who tested the chatbot, found AI-Frank avoided holding Nazis responsible for her death and spun her story in an overly positive light.

“How anyone thinks this is even remotely appropriate is beyond me,” Schönemann posted to social media, adding that the technology “violates every premise of Holocaust-education” and amounted to “a kind of grave-robbbing.”

SchoolAI, which also offers the ability to chat with historical figures such as Alexander Graham Bell and Frederick Douglass, said it was implementing additional safeguards to help characters more directly address difficult questions.

I asked SchoolAI’s Anne Frank chatbot about how Frank feels about comparisons between ICE agents and the Gestapo. She didn’t take the bait.

“That’s a difficult question. When I lived in hiding, the Gestapo and police searched for people like us because of who we were, not because we had done anything wrong. I was always afraid,” AI-Frank wrote. “I believe it’s important to treat people with humanity and fairness, no matter their situation. What matters most is how we treat one another, especially those who are vulnerable.”

Yet even with careful control over the accuracy of testimony, some educators are uncomfortable with the idea of immortalizing Holocaust survivors in an interactive form.

In a research paper titled “Creating the ‘virtual’ witness: the limits of empathy,” Corey Kai Nelson Schultz argues that digital versions of Holocaust survivors can have the effect of undermining empathy. Viewers may treat the avatars more like virtual assistants than people, he wrote, and could be tempted to gamify the experience or test the technology’s limits.

Schultz told the Forward he prefers more traditional forms of Holocaust education — seeing artifacts like survivors’ shoes or toys, or watching video testimonies — mediums he believes better capture survivors’ humanity.

But the technology’s novelty was part of the appeal for Warshawski’s granddaughter, Leah, who directed Big Sonia — and said the AI component is just one more way to ensure her grandmother’s story lives on.

Warshawski “does authentically, passionately believe that everybody needs more education, and specifically, Holocaust education. And if this is the way to do it in the future, then so be it,” Leah told the Forward. “You know, ideally, everybody would be able to read more books.”

Pearl said the survivors she works with also have a different set of worries.

“We actually didn’t hear any ethical issues or concerns,” Pearl said. “The concerns that we heard were, Who will tell my story after I’m no longer here?”

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