Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on September 9, 2022

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindlers Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindlers former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

The new hour-long IWalk detailsin Czech and Englishhow Schindler created the factory in Brnnec and then bribed SS and Nazi officials to allow him to employ Jewish workers, thereby saving them from almost certain death in the concentration camps. The story of Schindlers enterprise came to world attention in 1993 with Steven Spielbergs award-winning film, Schindlers List.

The Brnnec IWalk tour features seven stops connected to the factoryincluding the railway line that brought Jews to the factory and the building in which they workedas well as testimony clips from those saved by Schindler, including Joseph Bau, Rena Finder and Leopold Page.

After WWII, the Brnnec complex continued to be used by different owners until falling into disrepair in the early 1990s. It was later purchased by Daniel Lw Beer, a descendent of the last pre-WWII owners of the factory, who created the Schindlers Ark Foundation to save the site. Lw Beer is currently restoring textile production at the factory as well as creating a modern museum to spread the legacy of the Schindler survivors to todays generations.

Andrea Sznyi, USC Shoah Foundations Head of Programs for International Education, said the IWalk is the first of a range of testimony-based educational resources to be developed for the planned museum.

It is a unique experience to be standing and walking around in the factory, an authentic space of important historical events, Sznyi said. It is even more so to be in the space and to listen to the voices and stories of survivors there. The connectionit creates and the learning it results in is unreplicable.

Launched in 2014 and available forIOSandAndroiddevices, the award winning IWalk mobile app provides visitors to locations like the Schindler factory in Brnnec with personalized multimedia toursor IWalksthat feature photographs, maps and testimony from USC Shoah Foundations Visual History Archive.The resulting in-person experience, with survivor testimony humanizing the surrounding spaces, is unique.

USC Shoah Foundation currently offers 52 mobile app IWalks in 12 countries and 12 languages.

Rena Finder is one of the Holocaust survivors featured in the new Brnnec factory IWalk. In this clip she remembers arriving at Oskar Schindlers factory after spending weeks in Auschwitz and recalls how the Schindlers risked their lives to save the lives of so many Jews during the Holocaust.

Link:

Oskar Schindlers Factory Added to USC Shoah Foundation IWalk App - USC Shoah Foundation |

Category: Shoah
Tags: