Holocaust Education Center in Dania Beach opens interactive exhibits
FORT LAUDERDALE - "What was your favorite song?" CBS Miami Reporter Morgan Rynor asked Morris Dan.
Morris Dan broke out in song.
"What gave you hope to keep going in a concentration camp?" Morgan followed up.
Dan said he did not feel human when he was in Auschwitz.
Morris Dan answered everyone's questions on Sunday at the grand opening of the interactive learning exhibit at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Dania Beach.
The real Morris Dan, however, wasn't actually there.
"First time I've seen my dad kind of, he passed away in May," Samuel Dan said.
Dan flew down from New York to talk to his dad again. Morris Dan is a virtual exhibit that answers thousands of questions.
"I mean, it's bittersweet," Samuel said. "Tears come to my eyes, but it's also so nice to be able to almost have a conversation with my father again. I mean, whoever would think that this was possible to have a conversation with someone who passed away"
Patrick Gallagher planned the design of the museum which integrates technology in a first-of-its-kind way.
"This learning center will be part of how young people can engage in their own dialogue, ask their own questions, and really begin to understand what it means to be an upstander," Gallagher said.
These interactive boards ask people questions, like would you have survived being packed into a rail car with hundreds of other people with no food or water for several days?
"When they answer they see by the gradient, how others would have answered this," Gallagher said, "and then we can take them to a real story."
Norman Frajman doesn't have to guess. He lived through it.
"I was taken with my mom and sister into the extermination camp of Majdanek, which was one of the six camps designated specifically for murdering Jews," Frajman said at the grand opening. "So unfortunately, I came out alone, I left them there, they were killed, they were poisoned and cremated."
Now, at 94 years old, he said he has shared his story with at least a quarter million students.
"It can happen to everybody," he said. "So watch yourself, be kind to each other, love one another, and get rid of hate."
Morris Dan is one of 2,200 Holocaust survivors who shared their stories here at this museum. It's the largest collection of any museum in the country.
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