You can have a one-on-one conversation with ‘Happiest Man on Earth’ Eddie Jaku and other Holocaust survivors at this experience.
When Eddie Jaku was 18 years old, he returned home from college to find his family home deserted. That night, he was taken from his bed by Nazi soldiers and transported to a concentration camp. His father managed to find him, but eventually, his whole family were taken to Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp. Several camps later, only Eddie and his sister survived.
Eventually, Eddie came to live in Australia, where in 2021, he died at the ripe old age of 101. Because he survived, Eddie made the vow to smile every day, becoming known as “The Happiest Man Alive” (which is also the title of his best-selling memoir). Thankfully, his story has been preserved at the Sydney Jewish Museum, where you can have “conversations” with Eddie and other Holocaust survivors. You can ask them anything you want, and hear their responses first-hand.
The museum’s new exhibition, Reverberations: A Future for Memory is a moving encounter with history that feels very much alive. The museum was established by the generation of Holocaust survivors who came to Australia, and the surviving founders are still sharing their stories to this day. The new interactive experience came about because most of the survivors are in their nineties or older – so the museum team started brainstorming ways they could preserve their stories in innovative ways for future generations.
This resulted in an inspired application of artificial intelligence (AI). The team filmed interviews with survivors, asking 1,000 questions about their experiences, their lives in Sydney, their fears, what brings them happiness, sadness and everything in between.
Read the article in TimeOut.