Digital tools add new dimension to Holocaust memory

As eyewitnesses to the Holocaust become few and far between, new ways to memorialise the Holocaust have been digitised through technology, and are increasingly transmitted through social media.

Professor Jackie Feldman, who lectures at Ben-Gurion University, spoke at Limmud Cape Town 2024 about how fourth-industrial-revolution technology has changed the way we interact with and memorialise the Shoah.

“What happens when we move from an analogue to a digital generation? When the Yale Archive was instituted and you could see the faces of survivors on video, it wasn’t the content of what the survivors said but what they couldn’t say – their facial expressions, tears, and choking up that was emphasised. So, a transition took place. What counts as Holocaust memory is now also a function of technology. If there were no videos showing faces and all we had was what could be written, what couldn’t be written wouldn’t be remembered.”

“In the digital age, there’s a transition that takes place when memory is transmitted through visual images and video, soundbites, 30-second segments that can be interacted with comments and tags,” Feldman said, arguing that new media and technology has extended the way Holocaust memory is consumed, allowing more people to connect to the human story behind the picture.

For example, “Black and white photos have been reconstructed to be coloured photos with the goal of making people look like they aren’t simply a part of history but are real and can be identified with.” Additionally, in Germany and Eastern Europe, there are stolpersteine (stones that mark the names of where Jews and others affected by the Holocaust used to live). Feldman said there are many places where these stones aren’t marked, either because the people owning the land don’t want the mark in front of their buildings or because the stones simply haven’t been funded.

However, through the application Tracing the Past, one can see the residential street addresses of known victims of the Nazi regime who were persecuted. The app also allows users to see the biographies of the people who once lived there.

Other impressive technology includes hologram-like projections, less commonly known as “Pepper’s ghosts”, in which projections of Holocaust survivors are displayed. “These are testimonies that have been recorded in a series of hundreds to thousands of questions asked over a period of three to four days,” Feldman said. “The answers of survivors are fed through a computer programme. This data is fed through a screen or various screens – the technology varies – that make the survivor look three dimensional.” These projections, shown in museums across the world, are interactive and can be asked questions which will be answered by the projection of the survivor.

“This is a way of creating conversation with survivors who are no longer alive or aren’t able to be there in person,” Feldman said. Virtual reality (VR) tours have additionally become popular over the years. VR in the context of Holocaust memory has been used for tours of concentration camps, which has extended the reach for those who can’t visit Holocaust sites. Similarly, the Auschwitz Museum has chosen a project called Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes, in which people can do a live digital tour of Auschwitz in the museum with a guide.

With the digital age has come a rise in self-documentation through social media. Selfies “continue the tradition of photographs and portraits that began several centuries earlier”, Feldman said, however, selfies at memorial sites have generated heated public debate.

“Auschwitz curators said there was a phenomenon that took place around 2005. Before that, people were taking photos, but the camera swivelled around, and instead of people taking a photo of the site, they are now standing with their back to the site and making themselves the focus,” he said. Selfies make the photographer’s face the aesthetic focus, whereas most people believe that when viewing a memorial site, the focus should be on the memorialised tragedy. In this way, the selfie appears to be narcissistic and disrespectful.

However, Feldman argues that the act of taking a selfie can be seen as a person adding their presence to the collective act of remembering, in the same way that people may take photographs, write postcards, or buy souvenirs.

“In many ways, a precedent is created that allows people who take selfies to say, ‘Hey look, I was there, I was witnessing.’ So, whether selfies are an act of desecration or of bearing witness is a question I will leave open.”