Holocaust survivor Harry Davids has dedicated his life to uncovering the story of the parents he never knew. Born in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1942, Davids was just an infant when his parents were deported to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland and murdered. After the war, he was raised by relatives in South Africa and spent decades trying to learn the details of his family’s history, a task made more difficult by the fact that the perpetrators had dismantled Sobibor after the war and planted trees to cover up the site where at least 170,000 people had been systematically killed.
“The 10th and final stage of genocide is denial,” Davids says. “The Nazis successfully got rid of the evidence at Sobibor and several other camps.” Now, thanks to a groundbreaking collaboration between Hollywood and Holocaust Museum Los Angeles , this lost history has been been reimagined with 21st century technology.
The oldest Holocaust museum in the U.S., Holocaust Museum L.
A. has teamed up with the technology studio Magnopus, led by visual effects artists Craig Barron and Ben Grossmann — who earned Oscars for 2008’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and 2011’s “Hugo,” respectively — to create a new educational app that uses augmented reality to bring Sobibor to virtual life. The Sobibor AR exhibit, available for free download in Apple’s app store, allows users to interact with a 3D model of Sobibor, with actor Ben Feldman serving as a holographic guide providin.
