Daejeon, July 27–31
On the 9th of April 1940, Danish boy Steen Axel Metz and his parents moved to a new apartment in Hjallesevej 98 in Odense, Denmark. Three years later, when he was only eight years old, they were arrested and transported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Here they spent eighteen months under harsh conditions. Metz and his mother survived as two of 419 Danish Holocaust survivors. Metz' story exemplifies the distinctive experience of many Danish Jews who did not manage to escape Nazi persecution Danish Jews received food parcels from Denmark and were exempt from transports to extermination camps in the East. While it is often argued that Danish Jews had a privileged position, they still suffered from malnutrition and the harsh conditions in the camp (Fracapane 2020). The Dimensions in Testimony project is developed by the USC Shoah Foundation and creates interactive biographies of Holocaust survivor testimonies. More information can be found in Artstein et al. 2016.
We approach drawings as an active research and communication tool rather than a neutral illustration technique. Our art-based approach bridges the visual gaps in the historical record by combining memory, existing photographs, and textual sources. This allows for the reconstruction of lived experience through a visual layer that integrates place and embodied memory (Schallié 2025), thereby making the method applicable across different historical periods. In contrast to other forms of historical reconstruction (e.g., Zacho et al. 2025), these works function as historical reimaginations. They do not claim visual certainty but instead seek to relive the past through the situated perspective of Metz as Holocaust survivor, who appears as co-author and main character (Walden et al. 2023). To invite active engagement, allowing readers to explore these reimagined memories in a way that supports curiosity, interpretation, and sustained interest, we employed interactive narrative visualization methods (Meffert et al. 2024; Kusnick et al. 2026; Segel and Heer 2010).
To draw and write Steen Metz’ interactive story, we segmented his autobiography as a starting data point For this project, the second version of his biography, published in 2018, was used (Metz 2018). The first version was published in 2011. The second version contains more information about his experiences in Theresienstadt (i.e. he describes a roll call on November 11, 1943). The oral history interviews were conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Steen Metz' presentations are clearly structured, often using drawings and photographs from archives to introduce specific events during his time in Theresienstadt.
For the visual design of the scenes, we early decided for a grayscale color palette to preserve a handmade sketch style to underline the (re)imagination by Steen Metz, in comparison to realistic (colorful and more complicated) representations. Furthermore, we decided against the use of other specific colors (to for example highlight elements), because of their extensive culturally dependent interpretation (Adams and Osgood 1973).
To provide a responsive, setup-less IVN experience, we implemented A Drawn Testimony as a JavaScript web application. The screen is divided into three major areas: interactive drawing in the center, narrative multimedia (text, audio, images) on the right, and a timeline visualization at the bottom. This timeline enables navigation, by guiding users through the various story events through its temporal mapping and previews in thumbnail form.
The story events are framed by two explanatory screens that introduce and summarize the IVN. Additional geographical context is provided through map visualizations between scenes, highlighting changes in location as animated map dots (see Figure 3).
Even though the narrative appears linear, users can directly jump to any scene via the click interactions. In comparison to static graphic novels (e.g., Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives, 2023), discoverable interactive elements, such as the rooftop or cattle car (see Figure 4), enhance the exploration of the hand-drawn scenes. To increase the accessibility of these narrative-branching options, we also display them on the timeline as smaller thumbnails between the main scenes (see Figure 2). The interactive elements in the scenes are implemented via clickable outline paths in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files. When clicking on them, the view zooms into the focused element, and the multimedia contextualization on the left updates automatically. When clicking outside of these elements, the viewport and additional information get reset and all of them blink to indicate their interactivity.
These built-in interactive elements hold potential to further narrative branches by revealing hidden details upon interaction (see Figure 4). They also create a space that recontextualizes (re)imagined memories and descriptions, such as the detailed inscription revealed in the roof of the Theresienstadt train station by the historical photograph. The visual scene is enriched by oral history interview recordings in which Steen’s recollections add further layers of first-hand detail (see Figure 4.3).
A Drawn Testimony has not yet been evaluated on a broader scale with public users. It was presented during a project-wide meeting where affiliated experts expressed their appreciation for the hand-drawn scenes. They suggested adding color to increase immersion and emotional depth, and expressed interest in viewing the archival material alongside the drawings to enhance transparency. Furthermore, it was advised to expand the historical context textually and to include additional interactive multimedia, such as 3D models (Hájek et al. 2015) or individual and collective maps (Network for Nazism and Holocaust Studies 2018). These additions underline the subjective nature of Steen Metz’ recollections while also building on archival footage to maintain accuracy (Jones et al. 2023). Like other graphic novels Notably Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), but also more recently the short animation His Name is My Name (2022) by Eline Jongsma, or the graphic family saga Never Again Will I visit Auschwitz (2024) by Ari Richter which explore the artistic expressions of third- and fourth-generation descendants.
These various perspectives combined with the motivation to inform about (misconstrued) and prevent future atrocities are also reflected in Metz’ ongoing remembrance work as an active Holocaust educator. Since 2011, he has held 900 presentations, mostly at schools, where he reached out to, but also included 135.000 people through interactive Q&A sessions, which he also understands as a countermeasure against misinformation and Holocaust denial. Transferring this inclusive approach into the digital realm, we create a virtual space in which remote users can reflect on Metz’ experiences by browsing existing Q&A pairs or stating new questions to be answered by Metz as long as possible.
With A Drawn Testimony, we favour a human-centred approach to rendering textual and visual data into drawings, in comparison to the use of AI, which enables full control over the presented narrative and the reimagination of Holocaust memory. However, since such projects require manual labour and artistic skill, we encourage critical discussions on the values and threats of hand-drawn images vs. GenAI in this context. These approaches risk generalisation through larger, canonical datasets where small data and personal stories offer contrast (Rettberg and Wigers 2025). For instance, Steen Metz clearly remembers playing football with others in the Theresienstadt ghetto (See Figure 5), but no photographs exist. He is now able to “reimagine” and reinterpret his own testimony as co-creator by filling the visual gap (Walden et al. 2023). But models might be trained through our interactions with Metz, the descriptions of events, existing photographs, etc., to support the creation or generation of stylized scenes, given thorough data collection.
In the future, we plan to evaluate our approach with public users in several settings, potentially including an exhibition in Metz’ former hometown Odense and his current place of residence in Chicago. With A Drawn Testimony we build on top of and wish to contribute to Metz’ attempt of interactive Holocaust education, in an accessible, immersive, and meaningful way (Ebbrecht-Hartmann et al. 2025), to preserve and propagate his memories as one representative of the many unheard or silenced voices.