The final chapter raises the critical question of what it means for testimony to be composed by people — and technologies — other than the survivor. What are the ethical limits of using AI to interact with and even compose testimony? We start by analyzing data from tens of thousands of interactions with the “Dimensions in Testimony project” while situating the platform within the contemporary context of cultural memory machines and human-computer interactions. We then turn to Holocaust testimonies created by machines and people other than survivors. Here, we focus on two social media projects—@eva.stories on Instagram and the St. Louis Manifest project on Twitter—before discussing the use of generative AI in creating personal archives, structuring access to the past, and finally creating testimonial-like narratives using the unfathomable affordances of large language models. We conclude by underscoring the importance of digital provenance and refocusing attention on the question of ethics at the intersection of human and machine.
1. Eva Stories
By Mati and Maya Kochavi
In 2019, Israeli entrepreneur and filmmaker Mati Kochavi and his daughter Maya Kochavi launched @eva.stories, a series of Instagram stories and posts based on the diary of Eva Heyman, a 13-year old Hungarian girl who was deported and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. The stories, released on Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27th) 2019, imagine clips of what the life of a 13-year old Jewish girl could have been like during the Nazi occupation of Hungary if she had a smartphone.
2. St. Louis Manifest
By Russell Neiss
My name is Regina Blumenstein. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz. pic.twitter.com/W3K3HTJFxu
— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2023
Apparently for the Home Secretary "never" is a unit of time less than Liz Truss's tenure as prime minister…
And trust us — it never ends well when you stop the boats. pic.twitter.com/JC5KhNWiF5
— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) March 8, 2023
The St. Louis Manifest is a Twitter project by Russel Neiss that memorializes the Voyage of the St. Louis: in 1939, over 900 Jewish refugees sailed on the German liner St. Louis to seek asylum in the US. They were turned away at the US, Canadian, and Cuban borders and sent back to Europe, where 254 of them were killed during the Holocaust.
According to the project’s creator, the page tweets out the names and fates of the 254 known victims every year on Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27th), often on July 6th (the anniversary of the ship being escorted away from the US waters by the Coast Guard), and on a handful of other times that respond to contemporary asylum denial and the damage caused by the US government’s policies for refugees and asylum seekers.