What If Instagram Existed During The Holocaust?

A father-daughter duo launched this fictional account to document what a girl's Instagram might have looked like during the Holocaust. These stories are based off the actual diary entries of a 13-year-old girl who died at Auschwitz in 1944.

What If A Girl Caught in the Holocaust Had Instagram?


What if a young girl caught up in the Holocaust had Instagram? Meet Eva, welcome to her page, follow her. This is her page for random thoughts, crushes, serious inquires. Her #BFFs. One day she’d like to be a famous reporter. But for now, she lives with her grandparents. Fictional Instagram account Eva Stories is based off the diary of real-life 13-year-old Hungarian Eva Heyman, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. 70 short episodes will be released taking followers through Eva's journey leading up to her death.


Maya Kochavi, Co-writer, producer of the Instagram series tells us, “I think young kids will really feel and relate to and hopefully this continues as her journey becomes more difficult and as she starts to experience some of the more horrific parts of the story. The reason for the idea was is how can you tell a story that happened in the first half of the former century, last century? How can you make this story relatable and relevant for children today? It's an important story for us and it's a story that we want people to know so that was the big question and that's the way we found ourselves eventually going to social media, going to Instagram and finding that Instagram is the best channel to tell the story.”


Though the account had more than 380K followers before its first story, critics are questioning
how the project could cheapen the horrors of the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were murdered.


Dr. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Lecturer, Hebrew University states, “New media is a chance, but new media is also a danger that somehow the history of the Holocaust becomes a banalized story among others, so we have to keep in mind that this is a very special history, especially for the Jewish people and that we have to find ways to honor the victims and to seriously present their fates and I think it's very important to give them a voice.”


Maya wraps up by saying, “I think kids are going to be able to really relate to her in a lot of ways. She deals with a lot of modern problems that kids in 2019 deal with, for example, her parents are divorced, she lives with her grandparents, there's a boy that she likes that's not paying attention to her, she wants to be a famous journalist when she gets older, so there's a lot of relatability.”


Brut.


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Brut.