The ceiling in the Hall of Names, bearing names and pictures of Holocaust victims, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. — AFP
HOLOCAUST survivor Josef Cipin is haunted by one big fear.
“I hope that they believe that we didn’t make up the stories,” said the 100-year-old Canadian, who worries what will happen when the last living witnesses of what was done by the Nazi are gone.
“We are still here, and they (the Holocaust deniers) are already saying it never happened,” he said.
Cipin’s fears are not unfounded. A Unesco study in 2022 found that a fifth of content on Twitter about the Holocaust either denied or distorted it. TikTok was almost as bad, with 8% of content on Facebook also questionable.
As anti-Semitism surges across the world, the fear that the genocide of six million Jews will be dismissed or forgotten has become more acute, particularly for the survivors themselves.
“Memory can disappear, fade, be lost or deliberately set aside if regimes find it inconvenient,” said Guy Poirot, one of the few children born in the Ravensbruck concentration camp to have survived.
The annual commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by the Red Army has never been more widely covered than it was this year, said the French historian Tal Bruttmann.
But the Holocaust specialist is deeply worried about rising revisionism and relativism which he sees “in some political currents now... A wish to move on, along the lines of, ‘We have already talked about it enough, there are more important things.’”
Bruttmann is also alarmed that this is happening as “(Donald) Trump spends his time denying reality”, and when gestures like Elon Musk’s fascist-like salute at a rally are dismissed as merely “clumsy”.
Even in Germany, where “the culture of remembrance is strong”, said Uwe Neumarker, director of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, it is “under strong pressure from the right” with the rise of the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) “but also a part of the left”, he added.
A woman viewing a Holocaust mural during the Yom Hashoah Commemoration event, which honours the memories of the victims and survivors, in Los Angeles. — AFP
Memorials are regularly vandalised, according to Andrea Despot, head of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation, and negationism is mounting.
“Declarations that would have been rejected as extreme a few years ago are now daily in the media.”
In France, school visits to its six Holocaust memorials went up by a fifth last year, and the teaching of the genocide “goes smoothly in most of them”, said their director Jacques Fredj.
“However, we are also seeing more uninhibited speech” that challenges established shibboleths and “competition over memory”, he said.
“It’s never enough,” said Cipin, who survived the Theresienstadt camp near Prague.
But with fewer survivors every year, the Blue Card organisation in the United States has found a novel way of keeping the memory alive.
It has created a portal allowing students to interact with a hologram of Sonia Warshawski, a 99-year-old survivor of Auschwitz and Majdanek, who can answer 455 questions about what she went through from “When did you see your mother for the last time?” to “What is your view of forgiveness?”.
Pinchas Gutter, a 92-year-old Canadian survivor of six death camps, was the first to do this type of virtual testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation.
And he also takes visitors to Toronto’s Holocaust Museum with him on a 3D tour of the Majdanek camp in the film The Last Goodbye.
“Nothing imparts empathy towards a person than seeing him in front of you,” said Gutter.
In France, home to the world’s third largest Jewish community, the Holocaust is taught from primary to high school.
“We are one of the rare countries where teaching about the Shoah is obligatory at three different moments in school,” said Fredj, whose Shoah Memorial has trained some 7,000 teachers.
Gabriel and his class of 14- and 15-year-olds from the poor northern suburbs of Paris visited the site of the Drancy transit camp near their school, through which most of the 76,000 Jews deported from France were sent to death camps.
“Right next to the memorial, there is a big area where they have flea markets which I used to go to with my mother,” he said.
“I didn’t know it had a history.”
In front of one of the cattle wagons into which Jews were packed, Laurine Bahloul, one of the memorial’s educators, explained to pupils from nearby Bondy how the camp worked between 1941 and 1944.
“The youngest person to be deported was 14 days old, the oldest 89. Between 70 and 100 people were squeezed into every wagon. All did not survive the journey,” she added, calmly outlining the brutal logic of genocide.
“I am not telling you this to shock you,” Bahloul said, “but to remind you of the nature of the crime. People were not targeted for what they did, but for who they were.” — AFP
