On Thursday, September 4, 2025, The Museum of Kansas City launched a new exhibit that features a conversational interactive experience with great-grandmother, businesswoman, and Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski—lovingly known as Big Sonia.
This new exhibit is located in the Museum’s third-floor gallery called Our City, Our Stories and admission is free. The exhibit is presented in collaboration with Leah Warshawski, the Impact Producer and Director of Inflatable Film and a granddaughter of Sonia, and StoryFile, a division of Authentic Interactions.
StoryFile created the personal and conversational interactive experience to preserve and share the powerful testimony of Sonia Warshawski in her own words. In 2021, Sonia was recorded in a professional studio setting, where she sat in her favorite leopard print chair and answered a series of more than 400 questions about her life, experiences, and lessons of resilience. Using proprietary technology, StoryFile trained the responses to allow users to engage in meaningful conversations with Sonia’s recorded likeness.
The exhibit interactive starts with an introduction by Sonia’s oldest daughter, Regina Kort. Then, when you ask Sonia a question, the system triggers the closest matching pre-recorded response, ensuring that every interaction illustrates Sonia’s own voice and testimony. StoryFile has not used artificial intelligence to modify, alter, or generate new responses. Every answer comes directly from Sonia, exactly as she shared it during the recording process.
The exhibit is made possible with the generous support from the Barton P. Cohen and Mary Davidson Cohen Charitable Trust housed at Midwest Trust Company.