VR: Holocaust Studies Immersive Experience

Summary: Biographical version of Anne Frank's life between 1939 when Holland was occupied, until her death at Auschwitz in 1945.

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Brenda Blethyn, Hannah Taylor Gordon, Tatjana Blacher, Joachim Krol, Jessica Manley, Nick Audsley, Jan Niklas, Lili Taylor.

The story of a Catholic war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who risked his life and went bankrupt in order to save more than 1,000 Jews from certain death in concentration camps. He employed Jews in his crockery factory manufacturing goods for the German army. At the same time he tries to stay solvent with the help of a Jewish accountant and negotiates business with a vicious Nazi commandant who enjoys shooting Jews as target practice from the balcony of his villa that overlooks the prison camp he commands.

"Germany 1958. In those years, "Auschwitz" was a word that some people had never heard of, and others wanted to forget as quickly as possible. Against the will of his immediate superior, young prosecutor Johann Radmann begins to examine the case of recently identified teacher who was a former Auschwitz guard. Radmann soon lands in a web of repression and denial, but also of idealization. He devotes himself with utmost commitment to his new task and is resolved to find out what really happened. He oversteps boundaries, falls out with friends, colleagues and allies, and is sucked deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lies and guilt in his search for the truth. But what he ultimately brings to light will change the country forever."

After the death of her father, Hannah becomes concerned with the strange behavior of her mother. Traveling to Berlin to interview a woman who knew her mother as a child, Hannah hears the story of a week in 1943 when the Aryan wives of Jewish men held captive in a building on Rosenstrasse protested in the name of love, and realizes how little she knew of her mother's troubled childhood.

The image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis was shaped by Anne Frank, whose house--the most visited site in the Netherlands-- has become a shrine to the Holocaust. Yet while Anne Frank's story continues to be discussed and analyzed, her experience as a hidden child in wartime Holland is anomalous--as this book brilliantly demonstrates. Drawing on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland, Diane L. Wolf paints a compelling portrait of Holocaust survivors whose experiences were often diametrically opposed to the experiences of those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, leading many of those interviewed here to remark, "My war began after the war." This first in-depth examination of hidden children vividly brings to life their experiences before, during, and after hiding and analyzes the shifting identities, memories, and family dynamics that marked their lives from childhood through advanced age. Wolf also uncovers anti-Semitism in the policies and practices of the Dutch state and the general population, which historically have been portrayed as relatively benevolent toward Jewish residents. The poignant family histories in Beyond Anne Frank demonstrate that we can understand the Holocaust more deeply by focusing on postwar lives.

A comparison of the three versions of Anne Frank's diary; Anne's original entries, including never-before-published material; the diary as she herself edited it while in hiding; and the best-known version, edited by her father. B & W photographs throughout

Jacqueline van Maarsen's first book My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank ends in 1947, two years after the death of her close friend Anne Frank. But Anne's death did not spell the end of the friendship. Otto Frank clung desperately to his deceased daughter's dearest friend. Having remained silent about her friendship with Anne Frank for decades after the war, Jacqueline van Maarsen finally decided to tell her story, hoping to expose half-truths and fabrications surrounding her former friend and to respect Anne Frank's legacy for what it is. While her books have been written in close cooperation with the Anne Frank Foundation, there are times when she has felt obliged to disagree with the Foundation and she has not shied away from confrontation. In her second book, van Maarsen returns in detail to the most dominant person in her life, her French mother who died in 1992 at the age of 101. The aftermath of an inheritance question in France in which the author had an important role to play, takes on tragic proportions, although the hilarity of the sometimes grotesque situation surfaces now and then. Inheriting Anne Frank is the continuation of Jacqueline van Maarsen's My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank, and is an important documentary contribution to our knowledge of Anne Frank and what happened to and on account of her renowned diary. It is also a stirring portrait of a woman's turbulent life in the twentieth century

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has been read by millions around the world and many of them have, since the house was opened as a museum in 1960, traveled to Amsterdam to see the building and the hiding place where Anne Frank wrote her diary. Visitors to 263 Prinsengracht are taken an a journey back in time; in each of the rooms hang excerpts from Anne's diary, providing an impression of what happened there during the hiding period-and visitors can trace the lives of each of the inhabitants of the Secret Annex and the four employees of Anne's father. Inside Anne Frank's House takes readers on the same journey, following the same route that visitors make on the physical tour. The same excerpts from the diary that appear in the house are included-with the addition of background information by the museum directors and designers, the words of Anne's father, comments from some of the people who have been affected by Anne's words, and a comprehensive history of the publication of the diary. The photographs compiled here are in black-and-white and in color; they are vivid and moving, and make a lasting impression. The reader experiences the house and its relics, and sees photos of Anne's family and their friends, as well as the people who helped them and the changing Amsterdam neighborhood where they lived. Without a doubt this essential photographic document is a thorough, disturbing, and crucial part of the testament to faith and humanity that continues to live on as Anne Frank's legacy. The Anne Frank House draws nearly one million visitors from around the world annuallyPublication to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of Anne's birth and te sixtieth anniversary of her last diary entries.

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl's words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author.

Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all.  In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans--from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States--tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history.   Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women's movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey's The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy.      Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.  

The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago and Florida--and spoke with him often on the phone--to discuss the subject that linked them: Reich's father, Robert Reich, and Wiesel were both liberated from the Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What had started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune quickly evolved into a friendship and a partnership. Reich and Wiesel believed their colloquy represented a unique exchange between two generations deeply affected by a cataclysmic event. Wiesel said to Reich, "I've never done anything like this before," and after reading the final book, asked him not to change a word. Here Wiesel--at the end of his life--looks back on his ideas and writings on the Holocaust, synthesizing them in his conversations with Reich. The insights on life, ethics, and memory that Wiesel offers and Reich illuminates will not only help the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors understand their painful inheritance, but will benefit everyone, young or old.

A moving, deeply researched account of survivors' experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives.   Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors--their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors' immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead.

The first installment of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal) and "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker). A brutally moving work of art--widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written--Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.

With black-and-white photographs, this eloquent memoir by Jopie, the best friend of Anne Frank, offers a firsthand perspective on life in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and an intimate, humanizing remembrance of perhaps the most famous victim of the Holocaust.