How Survivor Testimonies Continue to Shape Culture, Education, Art, and Emerging Technologies
The Yale Genocide Studies Program and the Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Video Testimonies co-hosted a symposium in April titled “What Is Testimony For?” bringing together participants from the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria. Together, they explored the many ways survivor and witness testimony from genocides and other atrocities is being used in education, literature, the arts, and even video games.
The opening session featured graphic novel author-artists Victoria Aarons, Nora Krug, and Miriam Libicki discussing their approaches to difficult subject matter, the role of survivors’ own words in their work, and how aesthetics can help cultivate empathy in readers. The following session featured a conversation between graphic novelist Tobi Dahmen and Akram al Saud about their forthcoming collaboration centered on al Saud’s experiences surviving torture in Bashar al-Assad’s notorious Syrian prisons.
Two additional panels focused specifically on Holocaust testimony. Eugen Pfister guided the audience through a history of analog and digital games featuring Nazi roles, noting how Holocaust testimony has begun appearing in some recent games. Jacob Ari Labendz discussed the importance of allowing students to engage with Holocaust testimony using the tools — including AI — with which they are most comfortable. Noah Shenker and Dan Leopard offered a more skeptical assessment of whether multimillion-dollar AI-powered holographic simulacra can effectively serve that role. Hank Greenspan, Anna Veprinska, and Sara Horowitz then examined how testimony intersects with poetry, prose, and performance. Greenspan concluded the symposium with a performance of his one-person show, “Remnants.”
The symposium served as a forum for examining how atrocity-based testimony enters and shapes culture, and how public understandings of traumatic events may deepen through those encounters.
Co-sponsors included the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project, led and represented at the conference by Charlotte Schallié, and the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the University of Nebraska Omaha, represented by Mark Celinscak.