Wojciech Soczewica: Liron, what has sparked this initiative and how did it come about?
Liron Or: As you all know, Auschwitz has been closed for the first time in history since 1947. Around June, three or four months after COVID had started, I read an article
in the newspaper that the place had been shut down. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor and since a part of our responsibilities at Appsflyer involves supporting
and being there for Holocaust survivors, for us, it was something we couldn’t cope
with or understand that nobody could visit this place. So, in June 2020, I naively wrote an email to Wojtek introducing myself and Appsflyer, very innocently saying that we would like to offer support, let’s meet and see what we can do. We met on Zoom
for the first time. Both of us didn’t know what we could achieve and how we could offer support, but from our side, we thought that we could support the educational programs. On our third meeting, Wojtek gave us a 45 minute tour of Auschwitz using his mobile phone. He was walking in the empty authentic place, it was very surreal. I was at home during the summer. The last time I had been to Auschwitz, I was 16, but felt that I was there with him. I could hear him walking, opening and closing doors, breathing, sharing, and giving explanations during the visit. When the tour came to an end, I told him
that this is what we are going to do. I didn’t have any idea of what I had just suggested.
I work in a tech company with over 100,000 apps, but I didn’t know how we could accomplish this. The next day, I went to my CEO and told him that I promised
the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum that we would develop an online guided tour
with them. […] We started working together and thinking about how it could be developed. We interviewed the best content and experience companies from all over the world because we wanted to find the best partner to work on creating and making it real. […] After a while, we were honored to find DISKIN, an Israeli company that became our best partner in developing the app. Because of Covid, we got to know each other
and worked on Zoom. […] For us, the most important thing was first to learn and understand how we can bring history into technology. It was a long process in which our friends here taught us as much as possible before we could start thinking
about the technology and the content. […]
From the left: Ran Diskin, Liron Or, Aya Feldman, Tomasz Michaldo, Zuzanna Janusik, Wojciech Soczewica,
photo: Press Office