Spotlight on Žanis Lipke Memorial

by Dr Kate Marrison

In this long-form series, we offer a deep dive introduction to digital projects at a Holocaust organisation. Each month, our ‘spotlight’ institutions will feature in our upcoming living database-archive.

The journey to the Žanis Lipke Memorial took us on-foot over the Vanšu Bridge, which crosses the Daugava River, in Riga. A quick online search reveals that the word vanšu refers to the cables suspending its deck, comparing them to nautical rigging (also known as shrouds in English). Upon reaching the other side, we arrived in Ķīpsala Island, which was originally a fishing village, and followed Google Maps down the 150-year-old cobbled streets to discover the entrance to the memorial tucked behind houses at the end of a quiet lane. Aptly described by some as “Riga’s best-hidden museum”, this memorial is dedicated to the memory of Latvian Žanis (or Jānis) Lipke, who saved Jews from the Riga ghetto by hiding them in an underground bunker during the Nazi occupation of Latvia. The 3×3 metres bunker, built in 1942, housed between 8-12 people at a time. In total, between 1941 and 1945, the Lipke Family and their helpers successfully saved the lives of more than 50 Jews.

The memorial itself, built in 2012, is next to the grounds where the actual bunker was situated (where the Lipke family still reside to this day). The architect, Zaiga Gaile, took inspiration for the exterior of the building from the Ķīpsala seamen and fisherman who built tarred sheds out of dark floating logs. Metaphorically, the structure evokes Noah’s Ark, or an upturned boat pulled ashore. Indeed, the theme of rescue is at the heart of the Žanis Lipke Memorial, which is neither a Holocaust Museum nor site of atrocity. Rather, remarkably, an artistic interpretation and private initiative created entirely through donations.

You have to physically make the effort to come to this place.

Upon entering we walk along a narrow pathway, noting the sharp retraction of daylight as the door closes behind us. The dark wooden barge boards which make up the walls of the structure emit a distinctive scent. It becomes clear from the outset that there is a performative and theatrical dimension to this space.

We were soon greeted by our host, Dr Raivis Simansons, curator at the memorial, who instantly tells us about the pioneering cinematologists and creatives behind the design, which is often referred to as a labyrinth. “You have to physically make the effort to come to this place” he exclaims. It reminds me of Geoffrey Hartman talking about survivor video testimonies at the Fortunoff Archives at Yale, in an interview with Jennifer Ballengee, in which he stated, “you have to come to the archive to see the entire tape. I think a person should make that effort”. Framed through the prism of effort and labour, our visit – or discovery of this ‘hidden’ museum, is endowed with a sense of responsibility for enacting a process of historical enquiry. Put differently, the blurring of the historical and present-day topography enfolds us into an embodied experience of engaging with this past, a journey which had begun before we crossed the Vanšu bridge.

Indeed, as will be explored below, the story of the largest rescue mission in Riga is entangled within the landscape and is articulated through an encounter with place and space, the material and the digital. Among its many accolades, it is worthy of note that upon opening in 2014 (the year Riga was the European Capital of Culture) the Žanis Lipke Memorial received the Kenneth Hudson Award. This is a special prize created in 2010 as part of the European Museum of the Year (EMYA) Project which recognises unusual, daring or controversial achievements (see Raivis Simansons’ 2021 article Influential interpretation and Communication of the Difficult Past for more).

Digital Innovation: The Lipke Bunker VR Project

The Lipke Bunker VR project, the first of its kind in a Latvian museum, launched in 2020 upon the 120th anniversary of Žanis Lipke’s life. Inspired by the Anne Frank House VR at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the VR tells the story of the bunker through the perspective of an 8-year-old-boy, Zigfrīds, the son of Žanis and his wife Johanna. This approach attempts to articulate the history of the bunker through a “visually immersive language” which positions the user in a non-linear first-person experience, encouraging them to register the scale of the bunker and the conditions within it, by interacting with the objects in the digital space.

Evolving from the RIGA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (IFF) GOES VR hackathon in September 2019, two teams of young developers and media artists pitched ideas on how to reimagine the Riga Ghetto in 1941 as a three-dimensional space. As a result, the Žanis Lipke Memorial continued working with the winning team (Ieva Vīksne, Līga Vēliņa, Kaspars Lēvalds and Lauris Taube) on developing the Lipke Bunker VR prototype (2019-2020), presenting the first iteration at the memorial in November 2020. Reflecting on this process, Dr Sīmansons reveals that it involved “trial and error” and the courage to try things out.

Working with creative technologist, Corey McLeod at Fallon Minneapolis (who has previously worked with the Riga Ghetto Museum), the second iteration was created in 2021 titled Lipke’s Bunker: A VR Documentary. In autumn the same year, Dr Sīmansons, alongside Diāna Popova and Elizabete Grinblate form the University of Latvia, conducted four focus groups with 18-25-year-olds to gain feedback on their opinion and experience of the VR. Received positively, the students emphasised that the VR should be integrated into the scenography of the memorial and should have a continuity with the artefacts and showcases in the permanent exhibition (see Popova, 2023 for more).

As the Žanis Lipke Memorial is visited by many high school students, it makes sense that the VR project, now in its third iteration, is principally designed as an educational resource for school groups. Responding to the feedback from the focus groups, then, the team have ensured the VR experience is now seamlessly embedded into educational visits to the museum. In fact, within minutes of arriving to the memorial, Dr Simansons invited us to shadow a group of students as they took part in the programme.

The Memorial’s Permanent Exhibition Space

Starting on the top floor in the attic, the educator welcomed the students to the memorial’s small exhibition space and provided some historical context. In the centre of the room is an open hatch in the floor through which the bunker at the bottom of the cellar can be seen and a documentary film about the Lipkes plays.

Around the edges of the dimly lit room are display cases that tell the story of Žanis, the Lipke family, and those who helped Lipke with his rescue efforts. These include personal items, documents, maps and letters. Photographs are blown up and projected as a digital backdrop or displayed in frames. Historical maps of Riga highlighted with light beams reinforce the emphasis on location and proximity and aim to situate the building within the landscape and in relation to other hiding sites to which Žanis and others transported those that arrived at this bunker. A magnifying glass enables visitors to physically lean in and examine the artefacts in detail, another invitation to perform the role of investigator.

Of particular interest is the display cabinet containing the original drawing of the bunker under the shed produced by Lipke’s son, Zigfrīds. This child’s pencil drawing is the only surviving artefact which gives a visual reference and impression to what the inside of the bunker looked like. Integral to the design of the VR project, the design team had to scrutinize every single detail of the drawing, to build the interior of the bunker to reimagine and envisage the three-dimensional space in VR.

By happenstance, the display cabinets in the permanent exhibition were undergoing a refurbishment during our visit and we were able to see the transfer of original artefacts and materials rearranged for display. In the case of Zigfrīds’s drawing, this included an illuminated LED version of his bunker etched into the tier below. Dr Simansons informed us that the display cabinets were being updated with ‘Groglass’ containing an anti-reflective coating, which helps to steer light through the glass, illuminate objects behind it and minimises reflective glare. Produced by a local manufacturer, just a 20-minute drive away from the memorial, Groglass with its straplines “home of transparency” and “see what’s important”, feels somewhat symbolic for the wider geo-political context of the memorial and the national lens through which the story is coming to light for young generations of Latvians (see Solveiga Krumina-KonKova’s 2021 article Dark Tourism and Sites of Selective Silence – Communication on [the] Holocaust and Its Memorial Places in Latvia for more).

VR Suite

We followed the group of students down to the makeshift VR suite, situated on the lower ground of the memorial building. The room itself is 3mx3m in size and is squeezed between the staircase and the toilet washbasins. Replicating the exact dimensions of both the historical bunker and the contemporary artistic installation representing it, the memorial continues to foreground the significance of proximity and spatiality.

One student is invited to take a seat on the swivel stool (also specially created for the memorial from a local company in Riga) and don the Oculus Quest VR headset, while the rest of the group huddle around the corners of the room. Casting enables the group to see what the user sees in the headset, as the VR is projected onto the walls and the soundscape fills the room. Stood shoulder to shoulder, the group watched as the student-player navigated their way into the bunker as the question “can you keep a secret?” reverberated around the room. Upon entering the experience they were invited to learn about the conditions in the bunker by using their touch controllers to engage in activities such preparing food, hearing a voice recite the Torah, to pick up a series of objects including Zigfrīds’s drawing that had just been encountered upstairs, and finally to leave the bunker once it is deemed safe to do so.

While casting a single user’s experience seems a practical solution to the time constraints placed upon a school group, there is nonetheless something powerful in the way the liveness of bodies in these spaces (the physical and digital) creates a kind of performative echo between the creative interpretation of the bunker in the VR and the physical manifestation of the 3mx3m memorial space – both adjacent to the physical site in which the historical bunker was situated. In the (approximately) 12-minutes it takes to complete the experience, the user is invited to spend a prolonged period inside the bunker itself. The time is registered most strongly by those watching, inadvertently encouraging reflection on the living conditions and what it must have been like for those who found refuge in the bunker.

Meaning Making: ‘Empathy Mapping’

As part of her PhD project, titled Dark Heritage in Latvia and its Interpretation to Young Audiences, Diāna Popova runs a series of ‘empathy mapping’ sessions in which each participant is invited to write down their thoughts and feelings on sticky notes before and after their tour of the memorial, including the VR experience, to measure impact. The students are invited to attach their sticky notes to a large poster divided in four quadrants what do I see? what do I hear? what do I feel? and what do I think?

Diāna Popova shared her experience of carrying this exercise out with multiple groups. Her research findings suggest that the students tune into more details of the experience and engage in meaningful discussion when it is built around the participants’ original contributions and prompts. She shared her wider observations which suggest that those who have little or no experience of engaging with VR respond strongly to the sense of presence and embodiment, while those who regularly engage with gaming or VR activities are less likely to comment on these elements.

Future Plans

While the VR has primarily been offered as an extension to the education programme, Dr Simansons and Ieva Vīksne shared with us that the memorial plans to make the VR experience freely accessible to the public. Recording Zigfrīds’s dialogue in both English and German has widened the scope for the project to reach international visitors. Moreover, adding an instructions sequence at the beginning of the VR experience enables the visitor to operate the VR autonomously, which is also part of the wider strategy to take the pressure off its small education team.

In summary, these are the key things I was struck by upon visiting the the Žanis Lipke Memorial:

• The shaping of visitor experience so that it encourages investigation and exploration
• the positive attitude to taking a “trial and the error” approach to digital innovation within the museum
• foregrounding the affective, performative and experiential dimensions to memory work
• the centrality of objects within the physical is reinforced and revivified within in the digital
• the specificity of the place and the importance of the local influences upon the design and exhibition

*all photographs were taken by Prof Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden and Dr Kate Marrison during a visit to the Žanis Lipke Memorial

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Want to know more?

Read our last spotlight feature on the Melbourne Holocaust Museum

Centralising the Human in Digital Humanities Methods

The Three Phases of Digital Holocaust Memory Development

Finding Virtuality in the Virtual Holocaust Museum