The @eva.stories project looks different four years later.

Thoughts for Holocaust Education Week in the wake of October 7.

Photo by Colin C Murphy on Unsplash

This week is Holocaust Education Week.

In the wake of an at least 400% rise in Antisemitism in the last three weeks, it has been a struggle to even begin approaching what to say this year. But, in the last few days, my mind has been wandering frequently to a 2019 project by Israeli tech entrepreneur and filmmaker, Mati Kochavi. Rather than creating a traditional film, Kochavi used his source material: the diary of Eva Heyman, a 13-year old Hungarian girl in 1944, to show what it would have looked like if a Jewish girl during the Holocaust had social media. The story recorded in Eva’s diary, which spans the last 8 months of her life before she was murdered in Auschwitz, is told through a series of Instagram stories on the account: @eva.stories. If you are unfamiliar with this project, or never had the time to view it before, I’m going to suggest that you stop right now and take the time to watch it before reading any further. 

It is easy to think that if a teenager with one million Instagram followers was posting the types of images and stories depicted by @eva.stories, the world would care; that maybe if the Holocaust had taken place in the age of social media, it wouldn’t have happened. We would like to think that if Jews in Europe in 1944 were posting on Instagram about Nazi soldiers forcing them out of their homes and into ghettos, there would be demonstrations all over the world calling on governments to do something about it. In the wake of October 7, I’m not sure that line of thinking is accurate anymore. 

Watching the videos in the @eva.stories project now is very different from when they were first released four years ago. It is no longer just a depiction of how Jews in much of Europe were living entirely normal lives when the Nazis came to power, and how those lives were decimated by hatred. The question at the center of the project: what would it have looked like if the Holocaust had taken place during the age of social media? was, at the time, unanswered.

I am still not in a place where I feel comfortable making direct comparisons between what took place in concentration camps and what is happening right now in Israel. I want to stay in this place for as long as possible. Yet, I have no choice but to acknowledge that while we are not living in 1944, we are edging towards 1936. There are disturbing parallels between the clips of Eva and her family waiting to be marched out of their home by the Nazis, and the social media stories of families in Israel sitting in bomb shelters waiting for Hamas terrorists to enter their homes and drag them out into the street.

Since October 7, we have witnessed how immediately the script is still flipped against the Jewish people. Within hours of the attack at the Nova Music Festival, statements began to emerge placing the blame on Israel. Before Israel and the Jewish community had an opportunity to mount a defence, or counterattack, there were voices chomping at the bit to blame victims. The situation is not as different as I, for one, would like it to be from the blame that was placed on Jews for economic hardships experienced, particularly by Germany, following the First World War that allowed many entirely normal people at the time to feel that ghettoization and deportation was justified. 

The phrase “Never Again” gets shared ad nauseum in Holocaust education. Those two words are intended to be a promise made by the world that we would never again allow 6 million people to be exterminated because of hatred. Since October 7, approximately 1,400 Israeli Jews have been killed. Very few of them were soldiers. They were killed because they are Jewish. Since October 7, as my social media feed has been flooded with videos of families in bomb shelters and photographs of hostages, my streets have been filled with marches calling for the end of the only Jewish State: the State that is the physical embodiment of the words never again. 

Mati Kovachi wanted to know what it would have looked like if the Holocaust had taken place in the broad daylight of the internet. Reflecting on the last month, I think we know the answer.