BERLIN — Charlotte Knobloch was 6 years old when she saw the synagogues of Munich burning and watched helplessly as two Nazi officers marched away a beloved friend of her father who was beaten up and bleeding on the forehead.
It was Nov. 9, 1938, or Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria.
On Thursday, the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Knobloch still remembers that night with horror and says it will be burned into her memory forever.
“My whole life, I’ve never been able to get those pictures out of my head,” she told The Associated Press.
Knobloch, 91, still lives in Munich where she is the President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria. She worries that the atrocities of the Nazis’ persecution of Jews may get forgotten and thinks it is especially important to teach the young generation about the past.
“We have to address young people, because without them there is no remembrance,” said Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor. “It is important that Jewish voices can still be heard in the future, because there are hardly any survivors left.”
So she teamed up with the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference, for an interactive, virtual reality experience to tell her story about the pogroms of that night.
“Kristallnacht was a critical moment in which Nazi propaganda and antisemitism turned from words of hate into physical violence against Jews,” said Gideon Taylor, the president of the Claims Conference, as he presented the immersive project on Thursday.
“This virtual reality project combines cutting edge technology with much needed Holocaust education,” he added. “This important collaboration provides a new lens to Holocaust education by providing an immersive experience that will help users, including future generations, understand the Holocaust from inside the historical moments in a way that has never been possible.”
The project, which the Claims Conference began shooting with Knobloch in Munich last month, includes video footage of her as she walks the viewer through the streets of her childhood neighborhood in Munich, just as she did with her father on Nov. 9, 1938, when they were afraid to go home fearing the Nazis would attack them there as well.
Knobloch guides users through interactive reconstructions of spaces, such as synagogues, that were destroyed during Kristallnacht, in addition to archival photos, video footage, and authentic audio recordings of speeches by members of the Third Reich.
During Kristallnacht, the Nazis killed at least 91 people and vandalized 7,500 Jewish businesses. They also burned more than 1,400 synagogues, according to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
In the Claims Conference’s virtual reality project, users will be able to engage in a Q&A, asking questions about Kristallnacht, Knobloch’s family and the Holocaust in general. The full immersive VR experience and accompanying education materials will be released in 2024.
The Claims Conference is creating the project in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation, Meta, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress.