Abstract
Social media accounts created for Holocaust victims are a digital memorial phenomenon that has received mixed responses from the research community and the public at large. Whilst some maintain that such exercises trivialise the Holocaust, others recognise the value of these projects as a means of engaging the younger generation in a post-survivor age. This article will bring a fresh perspective to this debate by examining two such social media accounts—the Instagram account created for Eva Heyman and the Facebook page of Henio Zytomirski—as expressions of memorial engagement through imaginative play. The creation of and responses to these accounts will be analysed in terms of the interconnected themes of empathy and projective identification, and placed within the context of frequent references to dressing up and masquerade that appear in young adult Holocaust literature such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Black Swan, 2006) and Jeremy Dyson’s What Happens Now (Abacus, 2007). The chapter concludes by suggesting that the production and maintenance of such social media accounts could constitute productive memorial activities for teenagers, in their potential to promote the ‘interaction, understanding and engagement’ advocated by Gray in Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
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Notes
- 1.
In a SIP podcast broadcast on the 12th of August 2020, Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Henig discussed the extremely polarised reception of Eva Stories when it was initially advertised in Israel. Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Henig described a persistent trend of disapproval surrounding representation of the Holocaust using new media
- 2.
Eva Stories can be followed on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/eva.stories/?hl=en
- 3.
This predominantly references the Auschwitz Selfie Controversy ignited by the Twitter post of American teen Breanna Mitchell in 2014. The story was discussed in several major media outlets and the details are recorded in this 2014 article on Huffpost.
- 4.
The ‘Letters to Henio’ project is described in the English translation of the Brama Grodzka cultural center website.
http://teatrnn.pl/lexicon/articles/henio-zytomirski-the-project-letters-to-henio/
- 5.
Piotr Buzek’s comments were recorded in an article by Vierecke (2009).
- 6.
Henio Zytomirski’s Facebook profile is no longer maintained by its creator. It has been converted to a ‘No Limited’ profile and has 6392 ‘likes’ to date.
- 7.
The development of the ‘Dimensions in Testimony Project’ is outlined on the USC Shoah Foundation website.
- 8.
Information pertaining to the ‘Virtual Holocaust Memoryscapes’ research project can be found on the University of Leeds website.
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Stephens, C. (2021). Playing Pretend on Social Media. In: Walden, V.G. (eds) Digital Holocaust Memory, Education and Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83496-8_10
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