Los Angeles Holocaust Museum and Hollywood Artists Launch Innovative App

Holocaust survivor Harry Davids has dedicated his life to uncovering the stories of the parents he never knew.

Born in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Holland, 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 understand 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 the site where at least 170,000 people had been systematically killed.

According to Davids, the tenth and final stage of genocide is denial. The Nazis managed to make the evidence disappear at Sobibor and several other camps.

Today, thanks to a revolutionary collaboration between Hollywood and Los Angeles Holocaust MuseumThis lost history has been reimagined with 21st-century technology. The oldest Holocaust museum in the United States, the Holocaust Museum LA, has partnered with technology studio Magnopus, led by visual effects artists Craig Barron and Ben Grossmann, who won Oscars for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008 and Hugo in 2011, to create a new educational app that uses augmented reality to bring Sobibor to virtual life.

The AR exhibition of Sobibor, available for Free download The app, available on the Apple App Store, allows users to interact with a 3D model of Sobibor, with actor Ben Feldman serving as a holographic guide providing historical context and encouraging deeper exploration of the camp’s layout and daily life. The app focuses on the story of Polish survivor Thomas Blatt, who escaped from Sobibor during a famous 1943 uprising and created a detailed map from memory, including key locations such as barracks, guard towers, gas chambers and mass graves.

The museum, founded in 1961 by a group of Holocaust survivors, houses a model of Sobibor based on Blatts’ map. But Davids, who often speaks to young people about what happened to his family and millions of other Holocaust victims, says the app makes for a more immersive experience.

The glass covering the original model is removed and you sort of become part of the exhibit yourself, he says.

For the museum, which has already experimented with virtual reality technology in its exhibitions, the app represents a new way to engage younger generations with the history of the Holocaust. The museum has created a companion guide for teachers, and since launching the app last year, it says it has trained 123 teachers on its use, reaching more than 150,000 students.

“We know we’re at the point now where young people, when they come to the museum, think, ‘Oh, this is ancient history,’” says Beth Kean, executive director of the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum. “We need to grab their attention as soon as they get off the bus and make sure they understand why they’re here. We need to make this history relevant and accessible to them and teach it at a level that they understand.”

In 2019, the museum began partnering with cross-experience company Magnopus to develop the app, leveraging artifacts and photos from its collection as well as its physical model of the Sobibor camp.

“Most of us here at Magnopus work in the film industry in some capacity and we tell fantastic stories,” says Barron, the company’s creative director, who has worked on visual effects for films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Batman Returns and Titanic. “This was an opportunity to tell a true story. Thomas Blatt’s map was really a testament to his experiences that we could add value to and that we could take beyond the walls of a physical museum.”

For all involved, it was essential that the app be firmly grounded in primary historical documents and artifacts. “The ethos of our museum is that we believe primary sources and survivor testimonies are essential to Holocaust education and fostering empathetic responses to history,” says Jordanna Gessler, Holocaust Museum LA’s chief impact officer. “The Sobibor model seemed like the perfect object to launch this initiative because it embodies so much of that history and what this institution believes in.”

As part of its research, the Magnopus team studied primary sources, including home movies of Blatt visiting the Sobibor site, testimonies from the Nuremberg trials, and a photo album left by the camp commandant. Blatt himself died in 2015 at the age of 88, but his daughter contributed to the project.

“It all starts with a script, you know, it’s Hollywood, and we go back and forth with the museum to make sure it’s accurate,” says Vince Beggs, a museum experience specialist at Magnopus who has worked on hundreds of museum exhibitions and programs. “If we’re giving out the wrong information, we’re going to fail. We spent a lot of time asking, ‘What’s the story?’” A lot of people have memories of going to Sobibor, and we’ve seen those memories published, but that’s exactly Thomas’s point.

While Magnopus has a slew of stunning VR and AR tools, some of which were developed in collaboration with Epic Games, the goal was always to approach the app as an educational tool rather than a tech gimmick. “We steered away from anything that felt like a video game,” Barron says. “We had to treat the subject matter with the utmost respect and not try to make it theatrical. The fact that prisoners escaped is a compelling enough story, so we had to tell it as accurately as possible.”

For the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum, currently closed for a doubling of its space in Pan Pacific Park, the app offers a way to continue its mission at a time of rising anti-Semitism, fueled by the ongoing conflict over the Gaza war. According to an audit by the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents in elementary and secondary schools increased 135% in 2023 compared to the previous year. “When you look at what we’re dealing with, the statistics are horrific,” Kean said.

In this context, Magnopus is exploring other ways to collaborate with the museum on cutting-edge educational tools, including an app in which users would enter the pages of a Nazi children's propaganda book to learn how German youth were indoctrinated into anti-Semitism. Reaching out to children to destabilize them is a horrible thing, but we must not turn away from it, but rather immerse ourselves in it and share it with others.

Having spoken to thousands of young people about the Holocaust over the years, Davids is encouraged that future generations will have new ways to engage with this tragic chapter of history.

“It’s very encouraging for people like me to know that these new technologies are going to help that education,” says Davids, whose mother’s photo is included in the app. “We’re not just learning history, we’re learning Since When people like me are gone, someone has to speak for us. Who speaks for us? Whatever is left, whatever can be preserved.