In the virtual reality film “Walk to Westerbork,” Holocaust survivor Rodi Glass returns to Amsterdam to relive her childhood under Nazi Germany’s regime.
At the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s satellite location, 360 N. State St., visitors will feel as if they’ve been transported back in time alongside Glass and her family.
The film begins with a joyful, animated recreation of Glass’ fifth birthday party. Seated next to one of her family members, you’ll feel the joy of the moment suspended in time before her life is flipped upside down.
You’ll make the emotional and excruciating trek with the family to Camp Westerbork, a concentration camp in northeastern Netherlands, and experience the tight barracks filled with prisoners.
And you’ll feel anxious and inclined to hold your breath as you listen to the heavy footsteps of Nazi soldiers as they march past Glass’ grandfather’s shoe shop.
The virtual reality experience is all part of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s expansion in River North called Experience360, opening Tuesday.
The biggest draws for the new space are the Northern Trust Virtual Reality and the Lillian & Larry Goodman Foundations Holography theaters, which contain immersive experiences to learn from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides around the world.
It also features a gallery, “Stories of Survival: Object. Image. Memory.,” which comprises 61 carefully preserved objects and images from Holocaust and global genocide survivors.
Museum CEO Bernard Cherkasov said the satellite location is opening during a time when “the world feels in crisis.”
“There is dehumanization, there is suffering [and] polarization that’s happening in our own society and around the world,” Cherkasov said. “The Holocaust, as one of the darkest moments in our human history, has so much to teach people now.”
There are important lessons of “resilience, resistance, strength, love and compassion” to be learned through the five featured exhibitions, Cherkasov added.
Included among the exhibitions is “A Call to Action,” which details when the Jewish community in Skokie prevented a neo-Nazi group from demonstrating there in 1977.
There will be five rotating films each week in the VR theater. Their hyper-realistic imagery and sounds were produced in collaboration with East City Films, and each is approximately 15 minutes in length.
(Visitors beware: You might get a little dizzy during the experience because it offers a 360-degree perspective. The theater has swivel chairs and brand-new, high-quality VR headsets to elevate the experience.)
With help from the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, the museum created three hologram experiences that tell the stories of Holocaust survivors Glass and Marion Deichmann, as well as Rwandan genocide survivor Kizito D. Kalima.
Kalima is the first non-Holocaust survivor to be featured as a part of the museum’s theater offerings.
The holographic experiences begin with a video essay of each survivor’s story. After the screenings, guests can ask the holograms questions. The hologram uses smart technology with prerecorded answers to respond to visitors.
Producers asked Deichmann between 1,500 and 2,000 questions, according to Amanda Friedeman, associate director of education at the museum.
Friedeman accompanied Deichmann and her son to Los Angeles in February to film the interview over five days.
“The process is arduous,” Friedeman said. “It’s really a gift that the survivors give us to put themselves through that.”
Among the objects in the “Stories of Survival” gallery is a teddy bear that belonged to Ursula Meyer, a young German girl. Before she’d been placed in a concentration camp, she buried the bear in Bremen, Germany. Though she lost most of her family, the stuffed toy was the one item she could recover from before the Holocaust.
There is the striped and numbered concentration camp uniform of Henry Stone, a bullet-stricken wallet that saved a man’s life and the boarding pass of Kasim Hamo, who fled Iraq via Jordan in 2012.
Also on view is the bloodied clothing of Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculee Songa’s two daughters, who died in the conflict.
The young girls, Clarisse and Raissa, were murdered along with their father and Songa’s husband, Thadee. They’re among the 800,000 Bantu-speaking Tutsi people who were targeted and murdered by the country’s majority ethnic group, the Hutu, who ruled the Rwandan government at the time.
The museum will remain open until June 2026.
Tickets are $12 for adults and can include the hologram and VR experiences at no extra cost, but reservations are required.
Starting in September, admission to the museum will be free on the last Wednesday of each month.
Meanwhile, the main campus in Skokie, 9603 Woods Drive, is undergoing visitor experience renovations. Reflection spaces, an updated lobby and a revamped auditorium are being added.