Walk into the Alan and Halina Zimm Theater of Remembrance on the second floor of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, and at first, it feels like an ordinary lecture hall: forty-six seats, one large screen. Then the lights go down, a visitor raises a hand, a moderator repeats the question into a microphone, and the person on the screen answers — not a script that happens to fit, but a real answer to that real question, in a voice that pauses, remembers, and sometimes catches with emotion.
This is Dimensions in Testimony, developed by the USC Shoah Foundation, the organization Steven Spielberg founded in 1994 to record and preserve Holocaust survivor testimony. Instead of a survivor telling their story - start to finish, the program lets a visitor ask a question and receive a direct, spoken response from the survivor's own recorded image.
How It Works
Each Survivor sat for an extraordinarily long filming session — Halina Zimm, for example, was filmed six hours a day for five days, answering nearly a thousand questions about her life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Every answer was indexed by topic. When a visitor's question is repeated into the microphone, the system searches for the closest match and plays back the Survivor's own recorded response.
It is worth being precise about the technology, because the distinction matters. This is not generative AI inventing new sentences. It runs on adaptive AI, which only gets better over time at matching a question to the correct pre-existing answer. Every word a visitor hears came directly from the survivor during the original filming.
When the system cannot find a confident match, the survivor's image simply asks the visitor to rephrase — a small, honest reminder that this is a real process happening in real time, not a performance.
Why It Matters
Within the next decade, direct living testimony will no longer be available at all. Dimensions in Testimony cannot replace a living Survivor, but it preserves something a memoir cannot: the experience of asking a question and being answered directly. Since opening on November 1, 2024, the theater has welcomed over 2,600 visitors, including 21 school groups and more than 650 students.
Meet the Five Featured
The theater rotates monthly through five interactive biographies — four Holocaust survivors and one U.S. liberator:
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Halina Zimm, born in Łódź in 1927, survived in Warsaw under false papers, lived through the Warsaw Uprising, and later settled in Richmond, where she lives today. The theater is named in her and her husband Alan's honor.
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Pinchas Gutter, deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Majdanek at age eight, survived several camps including Buchenwald and now lives in Toronto.
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Eva Kor, sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her twin sister and subjected to Dr. Mengele's medical experiments, became a widely known Holocaust educator until her death in 2019.
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Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau as a member of the camp's women's orchestra, still lives in London.
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Alan Moskin, the theater's liberator, served in Patton's Third Army and helped liberate the Gunskirchen concentration camp; he passed away in 2023.
Is It Really a Hologram?
The survivor's image appears to sit in three dimensions on stage, which is why the term "hologram" has stuck since a 60 Minutes feature on a sister program. Technically, it is not. The effect uses a nineteenth-century stage illusion called Pepper's Ghost, updated with modern projection, which reflects a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional space. Whatever it is called, the effect is the same: it feels like sitting across from a real person — and in the way that matters most, you are.
Plan Your Visit
Dimensions in Testimony is included with regular Museum admission — no separate ticket required. Admission is $10 for adults 18 and older, and free for children, students, active military, and Museum members. The theater is open daily, with showings on the hour from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Reservations can be made at the front desk.
If you have not experienced Dimensions in Testimony yet, come ask your question.