From where we are, fifty kilometers separate us from Michel Waksberg. A former elected official of Sarcelles (Val-d'Oise) who, as a child, during the Second World War, spent the first years of his hidden life because Jewish.
He is one of the witnesses we can hear and see the story thanks to the “Last” application, which has just been launched by the Ile-de-France region, while we commemorate this week the 80th Anniversary of the release of the Auschwitz camp. A tool for high school students, but not only, which puts geolocation at the service of a memory work.
Joseph Weisman, a former deportee, grew up in the Abbesses district of Paris. Esther Senot, taken to Auschwitz, tells her story from Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine (Seine-Saint-Denis). Shelomo Sellinger, artist, produced the sculpture of the Drancy Memorial (Seine-Saint-Denis).
They are among the last survivors of the concentration camps to have testified to the director Sophie Nahum in the documentary series “The Last of Auschwitz”. And “there are no longer very numerous,” she alerts. It was she who, in 2019, announced the death of Albert Veissid, another survivor, which she had been able to film in Marseille a few weeks earlier, for this project.
“A meeting between tech and memory”
“She has managed to bring the story out of the Holocaust textbooks and very classic documentaries to do something alive and much more contemporary,” welcomes the regional councilor Pierre Liscia, special delegate in charge of secularism and the citizenship.
-The “The Last” application has the same ambition, “by putting this memory in the pocket of all the kids in Ile-de-France and France”, explains Pierre Liscia.
Available for free, it was developed by the Mirakl unicorn, (a startup valued at more than a billion dollars, editor's note) “and this is the first time that we have such a meeting between tech and memory”, Slides the regional councilor.
Well beyond Île-de-France, she takes for example her user in Normandy, to hear the story of Bernard Kanovitch whose parents and sister died in Auschwitz. The application user receives a notification, when he approaches a place of memory. “It is a tool that is connected to a daily basis. The more you touch young people the better, ”explains Pierre Liscia.
At 35, he was part of a generation that could have access, during his schooling, to “direct” stories of survivors who came to testify in classes. But time passes and the “last” fly away. The application, which today gives access to 136 testimonies, aims to enrich itself.
