Belongings
and
Memories
A Speculative Memoir in Virtual Reality
A Work in Progress
by Carol Silverman
These are the facts: they were deported on short notice, with the clothes on their backs and one suitcase each, never to see their home again. They were citizens with family roots hundreds of years deep. Their crime? Being Jewish in Nazi Germany. It was October 1940, in the south western Palatine region. My mother, age 13, her mother, and her grandmother were transported by train from Mannheim, along with the approximately 6,500 other Jews living in the area, all the way across Vichy France to an internment camp called Gurs, near the Spanish border. It was a journey of two days and two nights.
I learned these facts about my mother’s and grandmother’s lives only after their deaths. My great-grandmother perished at Gurs. Much of their story is still shrouded in mystery. Somehow, aided by her uncle who had already escaped to New York, Ellen and Gertrud were able to leave Gurs, journey back across France to Marseilles, then to Lisbon, where they boarded a ship called the Nyassa bound for Cuba. From Havana, they sailed on the Cuba Mail Line, at last arriving in the United States.
Beyond the cold facts, what were their thoughts, their feelings? I can’t imagine what it must have been like to experience what they did, let alone at 13. I will never know what my mother thought or felt or the true depth of the shadow it cast across her whole life. Our relationship was the closest I have ever had or will ever have in my life. I didn’t know her at all.
About The Experience
Belongings and Memories is created to be experienced using a virtual reality headset. The viewer interacts with the personal photographs, documents, artwork, and possessions of its subject, Ellen Rauh, in an intimate story space where time present and time past coexist. The narrative is nonlinear. There is no prescribed path through the story. The guest gets to know Ellen and understand her life just as they would someone in the real world, out of order, a little bit at a time. The guest is free to choose which objects they want to examine throughout the experience. The only constraint is time, which is finite and beyond their control, just as it is in life. The guest must take action if they want to know what happens. The story will not be revealed otherwise, and time will run out, just as it does in life. The guest traverses the virtual space by walking around, picking up virtual objects directly with their hands.
Why tell Ellen’s story in virtual reality? My goal is to bring the guest into the story, giving them presence and agency. Nothing happens without them. They are the sole witness in that moment. VR is the only medium that can do this. The guest cannot sit back and be told this story. They must lean forward to grasp it for themselves.
Ellen Rauh had the misfortune to be born in a time and place ruled by hate and extremism. She had the good fortune to survive when millions did not. It probably did not feel like good fortune to her at the time. Every person affected by the Holocaust has a personal story. What happened to them cannot be denied. Their stories are being forgotten more and more every day. It is important to save them and to honor them.
Ellen Rauh was my mother. She wanted to forget the traumatic events of her childhood. In the end, she developed dementia and forgot everything. Belongings and Memories is an act of remembrance.
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Artist Bio
Carol Silverman is an artist working in analog and digital mediums whose practice centers on the narrative power of objects. She is creating Belongings and Memories, a 6 DoF, room scale narrative Virtual Reality experience. Carol has worked for many years as a film and television set decorator. Her work on the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire was recognized by the Television Academy with four Emmy Awards. Her experience in the field affords her a unique perspective on designing three dimensional spaces for storytelling in VR. Carol earned her MFA in Visual Narrative from SVA in New York in July 2020.