As the firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors become increasingly scarce, the urgency to preserve these narratives has never been greater.

Comissioned by Illinois Holocaust Museum and award-winning production company East City Films, Walk to Westerbork is a remarkable virtual reality experience that shares an intensely personal account of a young girl’s survival during the Holocaust.

Audiences accompany Rodi Glass as she revisits the sites of her survival from Amsterdam, Westerbork transit camp, and Vittel internment camp. With immersive cinematography, stylized animation, 360 sound, and an incredible archive of family photos and documents, Rodi takes the audience through the often-neglected story of the annihilation of 75% of Jews from the Netherlands.

Ultimately, Rodi’s story is one of luck, resilience, and love for her family – and these are the threads that run through Walk to Westerbork, showing the capacity of the human spirit to not only survive but thrive.

Filmed on location in the Netherlands, France, and the United States, Walk to Westerbork is told in the first person from Rodi’s point of view as a young child during World War II. The virtual reality experience brings the audience directly into Rodi’s intimate family memories, the rollercoaster of their arrest, the three times they were imprisoned in Westerbork, and their time in a prisoners of war camp in Vittel as she reveals how they survived the Holocaust.

East City Films came to us to develop a trilogy of VR documentaries for the Illinois Holocaust Museum, sharing the stories of Survivors Marion Deichmann, Rodi Glass and Doris Fogel, working with Darren Emerson, Mary Matheson and Charlotte Mikkelborg respectively on each film.

Built to be installed in the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s VR Cinema for the HTC Vive Pro, running on Nvidia RTX 4080’s and using Unity’s High-Definition Render Pipeline, the 3 films combine detailed and realistic 6-DOF 3D environments which blend seamlessly with 360° 5.5k stereoscopic film and third order ambisonic audio.