Geolocated app connects Auschwitz visitors with survivors’ testimonies on horrors in camp
Titled The Last Ones, the application utilizes short interviews with Holocaust survivors to illuminate Nazi murders and torments — at camps and throughout Europe
Reporter at The Times of Israel
It’s only 41 seconds long, but the video leaves a powerful impression. Holocaust survivor David Schaecter discusses a nightmare train ride to Auschwitz in 1941, when he was 11 years old.
Later transferred to Buchenwald, the Czech-born Schaecter was the lone survivor in an extended family that once numbered 105. Arriving in the United States after the war, he eventually wound up in Miami Beach, where he established a Holocaust memorial alongside fellow survivors. Now he is one of multiple survivors transmitting their recollections on an app available to the public.
Titled The Last Ones, the app is the latest initiative of a wider project bearing the same name under journalists Sophie Nahum (the founder) and Leslie Gelrubin Benitah. Beginning in France as Les Derniers — a series of short interviews with Holocaust survivors — it’s extended to similar interviews worldwide, including in the US and Israel, and branched out into a documentary film, “The Last Ones of Auschwitz,” that was screened at the recent Miami Jewish Film Festival.
According to Gelrubin Benitah, visitors to Auschwitz can use “The Last Ones” geolocated app to connect with survivors’ pre-recorded testimonies related to specific areas within the notorious death camp.
“All the videos we have gathered from the survivors, specifically on Auschwitz, are geolocated very precisely at the spot where history unfolded,” Gelrubin Benitah, a French Jew now based in Miami, told The Times of Israel in an interview. She hopes that app users walking by the site of the former Auschwitz train platform will eventually be able to access, on their phones, “five, six, seven testimonies, [each] 30, 40 seconds, really short, of the survivors telling you exactly where they came out of the train for the selection.”
All four of Gelrubin Benitah’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. Her paternal grandparents, Yitzhak and Bajla Gelrubin, survived the ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw, as well as Auschwitz. Her maternal grandparents, Nusia and Dawid Birenbaum, escaped by hiding in a forest.
Three years ago, Gelrubin Benitah learned about Nahum’s project to make short video interviews with survivors.
“I felt that nothing had been done yet for the young generation,” Gelrubin Benitah said, adding that Gen Z has “a very short attention span.” Her reaction to Nahum’s project? “I really loved it, thought it was a great approach, supported it right away, donated money… introduced her to other donors and some survivors that I knew.”
Since then, it’s become a vocation for both herself and Nahum, one that has produced 160 videos to date, along with a documentary that was screened at the Miami festival, along with another project of Gelrubin Benitah’s: “Milk and Honey, Blood and Tears,” a documentary about Kibbutz Be’eri, which was devastated in the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on Israel.
The massacre saw thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invade southern Israel, slaughtering some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and kidnapping 251 to the Gaza Strip.
“The past 15 months, each time I talk to a survivor, I ask them their views on today’s world, how do they feel,” Gelrubin Benitah said. “They’re all so — I want to say ‘upset,’ but the word’s not strong enough — with the rise, the wave in antisemitism going on around the world. They never thought in a million years they would see this again in their lifetime.”
Not only the horrors at Auschwitz
She sees the videos as a corrective to antisemitism and to Holocaust denial. Now, there is an app that has been launched on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January. Available on Google Play and the App Store, it includes a map of the world that people can scroll across to find 130 geolocated testimonials from survivors. Zoom in on Poland and there are 14 such testimonials, with 10 relating to Auschwitz.
Schaecter’s discussion of his nightmare cattle car ride is linked on the app to the site of the former Judenrampe. The app connects the site of Gas Chamber / Crematorium III further west with the testimonial of French Jew Robert Wajcman, who says on camera, in French, that he “was a walking skeleton” upon returning home from captivity, weighing only 16 kilograms (35 pounds). Evelyn Askolovitch, a Dutch Jew, was incarcerated as a child at Bergen-Belsen, but she shares a tragic memory linked to Auschwitz: That’s where all but four classmates in her all-Jewish class in occupied Amsterdam were gassed to death — along with 230,000 other children over the course of the camp’s existence, according to the video.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia lists the overall Auschwitz death toll at approximately 1.1 million, including 960,000 Jews. With that in mind, Gelrubin Benitah criticized the current management of the Auschwitz site, adding that it motivated her to create the app.
“Today, Auschwitz is… under Polish control,” she said. “The way they present the visit is somewhat biased. They emphasize the victims and testimonies of Polish deportees, not necessarily focusing on the Jews.”
Gelrubin Benitah cited another motivation to develop the app, related to the dwindling number of survivors: “From the very first time I went to Auschwitz, it was a privilege to go with survivors. You go with a survivor, it’s really a different experience. To be honest, in 2025, how many survivors can do this trip?”
She credited a friend from the French tech world with a key role in developing the app: Philippe Corrot, co-founder and co-CEO of the e-commerce company Mirakl.
“He created one of the most famous unicorns in France and Europe,” Gelrubin Benitah said of Mirakl. “He is the tech king.” And, she said, “he happens to have the same family background as I do. One year ago — a bit more — he came back from Poland and said, ‘I think we should really do it, do this app…’ He loved the idea, said it was amazing, super useful, let’s go for it.”
“As a CEO in the tech industry, I deeply believe in the power of digital technologies to convey meaningful and impactful messages… It is our responsibility to use every tool at our disposal to preserve these lessons and to promote tolerance, understanding, and humanity,” Corrot told The Times of Israel via email.
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