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#Holocaust: rethinking the relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration in the digital age

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#Holocaust: rethinking the relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration in the digital age

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Content 1

#Holocaust: Rethinking the Relationship Between Spaces of Memory and Places of
Commemoration in The Digital Age

Maria Zalewska

FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
(CINEMATIC ARTS (CRITICAL STUDIES))

University of Southern California

Degree Conferral Date – May 2019

2
Dedication

In memory of Jan Zalewski,
who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau before any of us could meet him.

3
Acknowledgements

To my family: Krystyna Zalewska, Małgorzata Zalewska, Maciej Zalewski, and my beloved
nephews Szczepan and Szymon.
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to you.

A very special acknowledgement goes out to my dissertation chair and mentor Anikó Imre.
Thank you for your invaluable and continued support. You have always challenged the habits of
my mind. The strength of your convictions inspired me to approach this project in a nuanced and
layered way.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael Renov, my mentor and friend. You were the first
person I met at USC and you never stopped believing in me. Thank you for always reminding me
that ethics and integrity matter in both career and personal choices. You, Cathy, Veronica, and
Maddie have treated me like family. It has meant everything to me.

I am also grateful for the advice of Ellen Seiter and Tara McPherson, members of my Defense
Committee. Thank you for championing my work and being so generous with your time inside
and outside of SCA.

Thanks to other members of Cinema and Media Studies faculty who have supported me since the
first year of my Ph.D.: Akira Mizuta Lippit, Priya Jaikumar, and Nitin Govil. You have all taught
me innumerable lessons; you have taught me what it means to be a teacher.

A special shout-out to my intellectual partner in crime: Sonia Misra. Your friendship has been
the most precious gift of these past six years. Thank you for our conversations about queer
temporality and Deleuzian politics; for Netflix all-nighters, and California road trips. You and
Jennifer have always been there for me.

Thanks to my cohort buddies, Mike Larocco, Isaac Rooks, and Anirban Baishya. You were there
with me from the beginning and never stopped supporting me in the most fun, friendly, and
encouraging way.

A great thanks to my ‘brother’ George Carstocea, his wife Kyra Lunenfeld, and her phenomenal
family: Susan Kandel, Peter Lunenfeld, and Maud Lunenfeld. You provided me with much
needed familial warmth and acceptance. You also showed me a vibrant, intellectually stimulating
and fascinating side of Los Angeles.

Thanks to my loving best friends who are like family: Ania Kempa, Anya Melyantsev, and Jacek
Kastelaniec. You have been witnesses to my life for a long time. You manage to put everything
into a perspective and remind me that I always have a home to go back to.

I am indebted to Peter Mancall, Amy Braden, and the Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities
Fellowship Committee. It was fantastic to work on my research with the generous support of
your guidance, encouragement, and funding.
4

A great thanks to my friend, Piotr M. A. Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum and Memorial. I have learned so much from our conversations. Thank you for trusting
me with your time and connecting me with the amazing staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum, who work to preserve victims’ memory and authentic remains of the camp.

Thanks to the staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation in Warsaw and the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Memorial Foundation in New York. Working by your side has been a true honor. You
are the most inspiring and inspired group of people I have ever had an opportunity to work with.

A special thanks to Stephen Smith, Wolf Gruner, Martha Stroud, Crispin Brooks, and Badema
Pitic from the USC Shoah Foundation and Center for Advanced Genocide Research for their
unfailing support and assistance during my archival research at The Visual History Archive
®
.

Thanks to the Oxford Internet Institute, Dr. Victoria Nash, and the summer 2017 cohort for
generously providing me with their feedback on many of the ideas that have been further
developed in this dissertation.

I feel grateful to Barbie Zelizer, James E. Young, and Janet Walker. Your books have inspired
me long before I had the privilege to meet you in person.

Special thanks to Andreas Huyssen. It was “Present Pasts” that got me interested in politics of
remembering and forgetting.

My professors Robert Service, Robert Pyrah, Mary Scott, Seth Jacobowitz, and Saul Steier have
been instrumental to my learning during the formative years I spent at San Francisco State
University and University of Oxford. You were the original inspiration for my academic life
choices. I would not have pursued a Ph.D. without your help and encouragement.

Thanks to my beloved California ‘grandparents’ Mike and Kay Lunine. Thank you for
encouraging me to always seek out ideas, not ideologies. Thank you for being so kind and
generous to my family and for visiting Poland to see the country I call home. You are the reason
why I have Walden, Why We Can’t Wait, and Bhagavad Gita on my bookshelf.

With a special mention to Christine Acham, Loretta Kania, Alicia Cornish White, Bill
Whittington, and J.D. Connor for helping me navigate USC with such kindness and patience.

Thanks to the USC students who attended my “Media Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in
the Digital Age” summer seminar. Your intellectual curiosity, emotional maturity, and inherent
inquisitiveness helped me work through concepts of this dissertation.

And finally, special thanks to my forever interested, encouraging, and always enthusiastic
partner Josh Kazdin: you always made sure I celebrated small victories and triumphed over
temporary setbacks with unyielding joy, dignity, and confidence. I am so thankful!

5
Table of Contents

Introduction
The Memory of the Holocaust in The Digital Age 6
The Background: Introduction to the Topic 6
The Research Focus 16
The Value of this Research 27

Chapter 1
Archives of Memory: The Evolution of Witness Testimony 35
Axiology of Witnessing: Face, Place, Archive 35
Media Memory and the Archive 45
Face-to-face with Pinchas Gutter 53

Chapter 2
Technologies of Memory: Social Media, Augmented Reality, and Taboo in the Age of
Digital Wayfaring 90
Silent Witnesses 90
Social Media Memory 93
Greetings and Smiles from Auschwitz 100
#AuschwitzBirkenau 106
Where Pokémon Should Not Go 123
Mobility, Sociability, and Spatiality 126
Technology of Memory | Techniques of Memory 130
When Places of Memory Become Spaces of Play 133
The Future Is Augmented 138

Chapter 3
Landscapes of Memory: post-1989 National and Transnational Modes of
Memorialization 140
Continuity and Contingency: Mapping History after the Cold War 141
Memory Through the Screen: Cinema and Television After 1989 157
2015-? 179

Conclusion
The Future of Memory: Empathy, Immersion, and Interactivity 186

Bibliography 196

6
Introduction: The Memory of the Holocaust in The Digital Age

“The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by
monuments and used to absolve all future sins.”

- Zygmunt Bauman
1

The Background: Introduction to the Topic

Each year fewer survivors arrive in Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the International
Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 2005, almost 1500 survivors attended the anniversary; in 2015,
only 300 survivors came to Auschwitz. This year, less than 60 former prisoners arrived at the
Memorial and Museum to commemorate the 74th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi
concentration and extermination camp. Therefore, as the last witnesses are dying and the memory
of the Holocaust increasingly depends on commemoration and re-telling of the story for new
generations, Holocaust-related educational institutions search for innovative ways to bridge the
past with the present. Simultaneously, our contemporary media landscape has borne witness to the
increased visibility of private modes of remembrance that complicate aesthetic and ethical aspects
of remembering and forgetting. In the post-Schindler's List era of social media entwined into our
daily live practices, popular forms of spectacularization of memory cease to be perceived as
transgressive. The interaction between digital communities and the past via images, blog posts, 3D
holograms, virtual and augmented reality applications, and social media shareable content is
becoming increasingly relevant to media and genocide scholars. As online archival regimes of
memory have reached beyond institutional walls, it becomes possible to ask whether new mediated
practices, which have been processing the memory of the Holocaust in private and public spheres

1
Stuart Jeffries, “Modern Lover: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” The Guardian, November 12, 2005.
7
for more than two decades, increasingly flatten our understanding of the traumatic past or
complicate it by revealing nuanced new ways of viewing trauma, memory, and collectivity.

Moreover, the new media revolution of the 21st century has created a friction between the well-
established tradition of cinematic representations of the Holocaust and the online Holocaust
discourse. While Holocaust cinema studies continue to grapple with problems of representation
and securing remembrance, several new avenues of enquiry employing novel communication
technologies have come to the fore. Film has historically forced audiences to face a broad set of
Holocaust themes. The emergence of new media, however, has challenged this multifaceted
approach to visual remembrance and representation of the Shoah. As survivors continue to shrink
in number, the re- telling of the Holocaust will be shaped by this increasingly visible tension in
media technology. New ways of commemorating and navigating places of memory through
previously unexplored methods, such as augmented reality and virtual reality, have already piqued
the interest of users and media content creators alike. Taking selfies or playing Pokémon Go! in
Auschwitz, as well as creating films that take audiences on virtual reality walks through former
concentration camps, resonate in productive ways with questions of individual and institutional
socio-historical agency in curatorship of 21
st
-century Holocaust memory and prompt discussions on
guardianship and claims to ownership of memory in the digital age.

Similarly, as we move further away from World War II, ‘Auschwitz’ becomes synonymous with
the ‘Holocaust’. A comparative look at the worldwide search volume of queries such as
“Holocaust”, “Auschwitz’, “Shoah”, and “Treblinka” over the course of ten years illustrates this
trend.

8
Image 1.

Source: Google Trends; compiled by the author in January 2019.

From 2009 till 2019, biannual spikes of Holocaust-related google search activity fell on the United
Nations designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day and on Yom HaShoah. While each
of these terms show a similar pattern of activity, the high ranking of “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz”
suggests the terms may be used interchangeably by internet users. We see some evidence for this
below, as “Auschwitz” clearly dominates internet searches relative to other Nazi concentration
camp terms. As historical facts fade from memory, our understanding of the traumatic past
increasingly flattens.

Image 2.

Source: Source: Google Trends; compiled by the author in January 2019.
9
Simultaneously, a discussion of the national framework of remembrance retains relevance in
places such as Poland where the continued discussion of the “Polish response to the Holocaust”
invites questions of the role of nationalism in contemporary Holocaust remembrance. The national
framework of remembrance seems to have been the dominant lens through which the cinematic
representations of the Holocaust have been analyzed and interpreted. Similarly, the homogenizing
habit of taking the notion of a ‘nation’ for granted has dominated political discussions in Europe.
A question that remains to be answered is: how can we productively complicate the inadvertently
assumed framework of national responses to the Holocaust within the context of an increasingly
heterogeneous and interconnected process of Holocaust remembrance? After all, new media have
been operationalizing the process of memory building on different levels of scale: private and
transnational. Because of all these technological and sociological changes, the complex
relationship between the physical place of commemoration –Auschwitz- and online spaces of
Holocaust remembrance has never been more pronounced. Symbolically, the ceremony
commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau heralded this
online-offline dynamic as a new focal point of Holocaust remembrance in the digital age.

In January 2015, Steven Spielberg joined the ranks of presidents, government officials, and
directors of Holocaust educational institutions from all over the world who gathered in front of the
infamous Death Gate of KL Auschwitz II-Birkenau to honor the memory of those who perished
and those who survived. Midway through the two-hour long ceremony, punctured by speeches
delivered by survivors; Bronisław Komorowski, the President of the Republic of Poland; Ronald
S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and others, Spielberg’s new film premiered
on the big screen mounted inside of the tent. Directed by James Moll, narrated by Meryl Streep,
10
with music by Hans Zimmer, this Spielberg-produced Hollywood short - dedicated to “memory of
1,1 million people murdered at Auschwitz” - introduced a novel amalgamation of key actors within
the international landscape of Holocaust memory preservation and curatorship. Featured
prominently in the movie’s credits were the names of Spielberg’s co-producers: Piotr M. A.
Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Memorial and Stephen D.
Smith, Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation.

Image 3. The 70
th
Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau; the Birkenau Death Gate.

Source: http://auschwitz.org/muzeum/aktualnosci/wielka-rocznica-wyzwolenia-auschwitz-juz-za-rok,2025.html.
Accessed on 01.03.2019

To an untrained eye, this was nothing short of expected. To Holocaust and memory studies
scholars, this coproduction gestured towards a significant shift in the way Holocaust memory
would be curated and represented in the years to come. After all, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum
and the USC Shoah Foundation have until recently represented two opposite approaches to
teaching and learning memory. While the former has underscored the importance of visiting the
11
physical remains of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps scattered throughout the
Eastern European countryside, the latter pioneered new technologies of virtualizing memory via
images, augmented reality (AR) applications, virtual reality (VR) documentaries, and world’s
largest archive of survivors’ witness testimonies. In other words, drawing a binary of analogue and
digital between these two actors has become a simplistic, yet popular way to view their respective
approaches to memory curation and representation.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum stands as the only former concentration and extermination
camp in which every single stage of the Nazi death machine has been preserved. As such, the
Museum defines its participation in the transnational project of Holocaust remembrance in terms
of ‘authenticity preservation’. To fulfil this objective, the Museum attempts to preserve everything:
original brick and wooden barracks, crematoria, towers, archival materials, photographs, suitcases,
prayer garments, glasses, pots and pans, shoes, works of art, and even Zyklon B cans. In other
words, the Museum refuses to replace anything with new components and substitute parts. One
could very well ask why would an institution undertake such an expensive and tedious project. A
thought experiment in philosophy known as the Ship of Theseus allows one to understand the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s motivation with more clarity.
2

Let’s assume that the ship sailed by the Greek hero Theseus has been docked at a harbor for
decades. As time passes and parts of the wooden ship begin to rot and disintegrate; old boards,
masts, and sails are gradually replaced by new ones. It is not long until all the parts of the original
ship have been substituted. The question, therefore, becomes: does the original ship of Theseus,

2
I have first introduced this idea during my talk “Preserving the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site,” presented at
the 3
rd
Annual Symposium of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation Committee; New York, November 8, 2018.
12
with all its components replaced, remains fundamentally the same ship? Or, does any object which
has all its components replaced remain fundamentally the same object? Taking this thought
exercise one step further, one may ask: do restored barracks and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau
remain fundamentally the same barracks and crematoria that stood as silent witnesses of the crimes
perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazis during WWII? Would altered barracks and crematoria of
Auschwitz-Birkenau remain reliable proof of the Shoah that Holocaust deniers have already
questioned for decades? The unequivocal answer of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and
Memorial is: no, they would not. That is why the Museum set out to protect the objects and
buildings that in many cases remain the only silent witnesses of lives and deaths of those who
perished. Here, the medium of witnessing comes in a form of silent objects.

Alternatively, capitalizing on its proximity to Hollywood, access to USC’s researchers, and
Spielberg’s cultural capital, the USC Shoah Foundation has invested into building an archive that,
echoing Marianne Hirsch’s term postmemory,
3
I define as rememory. Here, the Latin prefix “re”
evokes the notion of perpetuity and repetition. After all, the Foundation has not only created a vast
repository of audiovisual video testimonies, but it has also - more recently - re-interviewed some
of the survivors and rendered their memories interactive in a form of either “Dimensions in
Testimony” biographies that enable people to have conversations with pre-recorded video images
of Holocaust survivors or the first-ever Holocaust survivor testimony in room scale VR, The Last
Goodbye (2017) that takes audiences on a walk through a former concentration and extermination
camp Majdanek.

3
See: Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia
University Press, 2012.
13
The examples of these two institutions and their respective choices of techniques of memory are
conditioned by circumstantial limitations and opportunities. While the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum’s unequivocal commitment to hold the authentic remains of the camp against a harsh
reality of Polish winters and hot summers, changing winds of political discourse, as well as
oblivion and ignorance constitutes the core of its mission, the USC Shoah Foundation’s main
objective it to provide answers to the following questions: how do we keep the memories of the
survivors alive after their death and how do we make these memories captivating for millennial
digital natives? Situating itself in dialogue with the growing body of scholarship on new media, as
well as being deeply anchored in Holocaust studies, the USC Shoah Foundation’s has opened itself
up to scholarly criticism. Some of their projects, it has been argued, transgress the limits of
representation by seeking a liminal experience trotting between empathy and education.
4
Similarly,
the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has faced international and domestic attacks from various
political, religious, and cultural angles for either representing “too pro-Jewish,” “too pro-Polish”
or not “pro-Polish” or “pro-Jewish” enough educational angle.
5
As a result, in the recent years, an
already existing homogenizing habit of transnational commentators and journalists, as well as a
self-reflex of Polish domestic actors, to underscore the collective “Polish” response to the
Holocaust and its memory has continued to come through in the Polish media.

But while tempting, the analogue-digital binary fails to provide a nuanced way of looking at the
problem of memory curation in the digital age. Such a false dichotomy glances over issues that

4
See: Maria Zalewska, "Holography, Historical Indexicality, and the Holocaust," Spectator (Spring 2016); Dan
Leopard and Noah Shenker. “Pinchas Gutter: The Virtual Holocaust Survivor as Embodied Archive,” Digital
Approaches to Genocide Studies Conference. Los Angeles, USC, 23-24 October 2017.
5
The public attacks have been most significantly pronounced on Twitter. However, the director of the Museum has
received threats and hate mail in private emails and social media messages. Source: Piotr M. Cywinski, director of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum interview by the author, Stockholm, 01.24.2019.
14
problematize our understanding of places of commemoration and spaces of memory in the digital
age. For example, USC Shoah Foundation’s commitment to new technologies has been paired and
complemented by Stephen Smith’s long-standing commitment to strengthening personal
relationships with survivors, witnesses, and their families. In parallel way, the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum’s focus on artifacts preservation goes hand in hand with the Museum’s largely fulfilled
ambition to become the most impactful and consequential social media actor within the landscape
of online Holocaust remembrance domain. Finally, both institutions have acknowledged the
pressing issue of memory legacy. In January 2019, at a gala celebrating the last of the living
Holocaust survivors in Stockholm, directors of both institutions underscored how their efforts
complement rather than detract from each other.
6
Indeed, as the memory of the Holocaust
increasingly depends on commemoration and re-telling of the story for new generation, both
institutions search for new ways to work together to bridge the past with the present. Currently,
both institutions are unofficially developing plans to bring the USC Shoah Foundation’s archive
of audio-visual testimonies to Auschwitz-Birkenau and make it available to Museum’s visitors and
researchers.
7

Eschewing the rigid ‘pre-digital institutional authority’ vs. ‘digital online freedom’ binary, I
contend that changes in contemporary Holocaust memory mediation are a moment through which
the rules of Holocaust education and memory curation can be re-theorized and historicized. What
is the future of Holocaust history and memory? How do new developments in digital media and
humanities alter our dealing with the existential question of forever-lost witnesses? How do

6
Both Stephen Smith and Piotr Cywinski delivered speeches at the vernissage for “Speaking Memories: The Last
Witnesses of the Holocaust,” The Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, January 24, 2019.
7
Source: Piotr M. Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum interview by the author,
Warsaw, July 2018; Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, interview by the author, Los
Angeles, June 2018.
15
transnational modes of memorialization affect the direction of Holocaust memory at a national,
regional, and global scale? In this research, I answer these questions while raising others about the
relationship between interactivity, visual studies, and Holocaust memory. I critically explore how
new technologies and media impact the way people engage with memory. I discuss the existing
literature on Holocaust media and memory with a focus on trauma, Holocaust education, and the
politics and limits of visual representation.

By applying a spatial metaphor of landscapes of memory, I orient all emerging archival regimes
and technologies of memory vis-a-vis the ground zero of all Holocaust remembrance: Auschwitz-
Birkenau. By doing so, I focus my research on a sense of spatial self-imagination that has continued
to inform both transnational, as well as regional and national ways of interpreting and representing
memory. The central elements of this dissertation’s title –spaces of memory and places of
commemoration- remain, therefore, in conversation throughout this work. The opening word of
this dissertation’s title “#Holocaust” points to both a new way of cataloging and indexing memory-
related concepts that has been familiar to digital natives, as well as a potentially transgressive way
in which Holocaust-related context becomes simplified. In a sense, it evokes an internet adage
popularly known as the Godwin’s law which states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the
probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
8
This assertion speaks
volumes not only to the proliferation of the basic common historical knowledge of the Nazis but
also to the new ways in which Holocaust exists in digital communications regimes. It appears that
the Shoah can too become a meme.

8
Mike Godwin, “Meme, Counter Meme,” Wired, 10.01.1994. Accessed on 04.07.2016,
http://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/
16
Moreover, I engage issues of how new technologies are used and applied to various
commemoration projects, how they affect attitudes towards the past, and how they (re)shape
historical narratives. I engage with questions that have not been asked before in a comprehensive
scholarly work: why do people take selfies in Auschwitz? Should we be allowed to play
Augmented Reality games like Pokémon GO! in former concentration camps, and places of
commemoration in general? How is #Holocaust used on social media? Do augmented reality (AR)
and virtual reality (VR) allow us to rediscover survivor and witness testimonies? Why does the
“Polish response to the Holocaust” have such a stronghold on domestic and transnational way of
remembering? And lastly, by focusing my research on transnational modes and media of
memorialization, as well as digital spaces of memory, I pose this question: does physical space
still matter in the digital age?

The Research Focus

Situating my research in relation to the ever-expanding body of work on the Holocaust and the
established scholarship on cinema and media, I engage with fields of ‘media memory’ and new
media technologies that are challenging notions of representation, subjectivity, narrative, and
knowledge production. The term ‘media memory’ was coined in 2005 by Carolyn Kitch and, more
recently, systematized in an anthology On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media
Age by M. Neiger, O. Meyers, and E. Zandberg.
9
The volume gives expression to a new type of
research on collective memory that informs the theoretical framework of this dissertation: it
explores how memory and historical consciousness are constructed and narrated by the media;
how they are transmitted and enacted through the media; and how visual culture mediates

9
M. Neiger, O. Meyers, E, Zandberg, eds, On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
17
collective and individual pasts. Culling from this relatively new subfield of memory research,
which combines media research and memory scholarship, this dissertation employs a two-pronged
approach to the ways in which digital technologies afford an opportunity to think through the
limitation of memory representation. First, it underscores a close historical relationship between
the evolution of media and Holocaust remembrance that is currently being challenged and
transformed by the impending death of all the survivors and witnesses, as well as by the new ways
of virtualizing memory. In that sense, this research historically positions different ways in which
media gives expression, as well as facilitates memory.

Additionally, reflecting upon S. Pink and L. Hjorth’s notion of digital wayfaring
10
that
conceptualizes our contemporary entanglements between on- and offline practices, I argue that
recent examples of a changing contemporary ‘media memory’ landscape gesture towards a
hybridization of previously separate registers of memory and a paradigm shift in the way we
spatially and visually mediate our encounters with places of Holocaust commemoration. Between
the 2018 Japanese high-school students' production of a virtual reality experience of the Hiroshima
bombing, the new smartphone augmented reality application launched by the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and the success of the 2015 Gabo Arora’s
Clouds Over Sidra about the Syrian refugee crisis, we have witnessed a rapid growth in the scope
and educational ambition of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)
technologies. Similarly, the emergence of mixed reality (MR) games, like Pokémon Go!, and most
recently the introduction of iPhone X with augmented reality capability are already impacting the
way media-generated virtualities fill places of commemoration and remembrance. In other words,

10
L. Hjorth and S. Pink. “New Visualities and the Digital Wayfarer: Reconceptualizing Camera Phone Photography
and Locative Media,” Mobile Media & Communication, 2(1) 2014: 40–57.
18
we have entered a stage in memory production that comprises of constant exchanges between
virtual and material contexts, as well as online and offline archival regimes. The gamification, or
‘pokemonization’ of memory mediation is currently changing our understanding of how people
engage with specific ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de memoire)
11
. It also invites us to rethink
‘environments of memory’ (milieux de memoire)
12
that are the overarching processes that carry,
evolve, and change the collective discourse on memory production. While this dissertation does
not attempt to expand, or engage directly with theories of place and space developed by Henri
Lefebvre, Pierre Nora, and Edward Soja, it does analyze places of commemoration through the
lens of a complex network of spatial practices, values, and meanings that underwrite their curation
and politics.
13

This dissertation remains deeply anchored in a theoretical investigation of different media’s
relationship to memory. That, in turn, allows me to use Shoah remembrance as a case study of a
larger problem pertinent to media and memory studies of how our collective and individual pasts
are mediated through visual culture in the digital age. Three main areas of cinema and media
studies have become crucial for the theoretical part of my project. First, I draw from theories of
documentary film that connect the notion of representing the past with cinema’s penchant for
documenting reality to engage with collective and personal archives of memory. Acknowledging
documentary film’s essential role in the communication and circulation of personal and collective
histories, I use my case studies to inquire about the ontology of the image, epistemology of

11
See: See: Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations, Special Issue:
Memory and Counter-Memory, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24.
12
Ibid.
13
Other works that have impacted my way of thinking about this project are: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Places,”
Diacritics 16.1 (1986); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2003); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley, 1992); Doreen Massey, “A Global
Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (June 1991); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in
Critical Social Theory (London: Verso Press, 1989).
19
perception, and ethics of representation. In my meditation on memory and technology, I begin with
theories that focus on the “governing discursive conditions which give rise to what is branded
‘nonfiction’”
14
.

For example, Michael Renov bridges the already developed study of fiction films
with documentary studies by stating that “in a number of ways, fictional and nonfictional forms
are enmeshed in one another - particularly regarding semiotics, narrativity, and questions of
performance. At the level of the sign, it is the differing historical status of the referent that
distinguishes documentary film from its fictional counterpart not the formal relations among
signifier, signified, and referent.”
15
I take Renov’s assertion as an instructive methodological
principle in my research on media representations of the Holocaust. It is the identification of the
historical status of the referent that guides me in my discussions of fiction and nonfiction
representations of the Shoah, thus allowing me to connect the two under one umbrella term of
‘media as history.’

Second, I begin to reflect on the process of memorialization via filmic medium by evoking Philip
Rosen’s list of different ways in which history, historiography, and historicity
16
relate to each
other. With the solidification of film studies as a scholarly discipline in the second half of 20
th

century, academia became interested in the film-history dynamic. On the one hand, early 1970s
witnessed “important attempts to reconceptualize film history or the history of filmic textuality in
ways that took into account the fields of subjectivity and ideology central to the new developments
in film theory.”
17
Similarly, scholars began to include social and economic aspects of film into

14
Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), 22.
15
Ibid., p. 2.
16
Here, I am using Rosen’s terminology, who defines historiography as a “text written by the historian,” history as an
“object of the text, the ‘real’ pastness,” and historicity as a “particular interrelations of the mode of historiography and
the types of construction. See: Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xii.
17
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film; Film on History, (Harlow: Pearson, 2012), xxi-xxii.
20
their research on history of cinema. Alternatively, others became interested in analyzing narrative
films whose goal was to represent history. Indeed, academic interest in the relationship between
history and film should be contextualized within broader explorations of different
conceptualizations of the production of knowledge. Or, as Robert Rosenstone calls it, with more
precision, “an investigation of the rules of engagement with the past.”
18
By evoking Hayden
White’s neologism ‘historiophoty’ (“the representation of history and our thought about it in
visual images and filmic discourse”
19
), Rosenstone invites us to consider “the relationship of
[media] constructions to the more traditional form of history written in words”.
20
As part of his
broader project, Rosenstone attempts to convince historians that films are History (as works that
consciously recreate the past) and “bring the practice of history kicking and screaming into the
21st century.”

In its most basic formulation, historians and film scholars have approached the film-history axis
in a twofold way. Some, like the French historian Marc Ferro, have inquired how history films
relate to written history. Indeed, one of the main questions formulated in Cinema and History by
Ferro is: are there ‘cinematic writing of the past’?
21
Others, claimed that writing of the past is less
important (as a subject of scholarly inquiry) than the meaning produced by the on-screen story.
Additionally, the focus of the latter group has been on what history film reveals about the historical
moment in which it was produced and how it embodies national myths and ideologies. I situate
this dissertation research somewhere between these two extremes. By extrapolating Hayden

18
ibid., xvi.
19
Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” American Historical Review 93/5 (1988): 1193.
20
Rosenstone, xii.
21
He answers his question by admitting that on rare occasions filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Visconti, of the Polish Film
School create independent interpretations of history and thereby make ‘“an original contribution to the understanding
of past phenomena and their relation to the present.”
21
White’s historiophoty to new media, I am concerned with both: how different forms of
technological mediation write WWII history and what these new forms of representation say about
our current relationship to the Holocaust memory.

The question of the ontological status of the media representation becomes especially pertinent to
my research on archives of testimonies. As Janet Walker states, media studies’ “nuanced debates
about the vicissitudes of representation and subjectivity have a lot to offer testimony studies.”
22
Similarly to Renov’s articulation of the constructed nature of a document, Walker points to the
constructed nature of the testimony: “Whereas literary, history, and other non-media specialists
often misconstrue the medium-specificity of audiovisual testimony, seeing it as residing in the
‘dimension of the real, (…) we feel prepared to inject a note of constructive criticality (...) about
the complicated construction and uses of video testimony.”
23
What happens, however, when there
are no more witnesses to share their testimonies? USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive biographies
and virtual reality films that break spatiotemporal barriers, become the digital age negative to
Holocaust experimental films that Jeffrey Skoller discussed in the context of their relationship to
epistemological shifts in 20th century’s historiography. By providing a close textual analysis of
Signal-Germany on the Air (dir. Ernie Gehr, 1982-1985), The March (dir. Abraham Ravett, 1999),
Un vivant qui passe (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1999), as well as Cooperation of Parts (dir. Daniel
Eisenberg, 1987) and Persistence (dir. Daniel Eisenberg, 1997), he argues that these films
“implicitly, and often explicitly, take up the question that is at the center of postmodern
historiographic concerns: the recognition that there are historical events that by their nature defy

22
Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering. Routledge, 2009, p. 2.
23
Ibid.
22
representability but nevertheless play an important part in the ways we understand the present.”
24

Indeed, the experience of the Holocaust marked a historical, political, and ethical caesura of
Western society. It prompted thinkers to either consider the post-Shoah limits of artistic
representation of trauma (responding to Adorno’s famous notion that there can be no poetry after
Auschwitz, Hayden White and Saul Friedlander have written on this topic) or to argue against this
postulate of unrepresentability (Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman
among others proposed that unrepresentability is never a feature of a historical event).

Skoller brings these discourses together by gesturing towards a consideration of the filmic
language employed by different types of productions (narrative, documentary, experimental) and
its relationship to the process of writing history. Echoing Hayden White’s preoccupation with
history as a form of narrative, Skoller argues that both history and cinema are “structured by what
is missing and by the resulting gaps and elisions that can only be imagined or inferred.”
25

He goes
on to state that “conventional histories and films often work to hide the fragmented nature of their
narratives through elaborate formal means that create seamless movements through time.”
26

Experimental films, on the other hand, “work to emphasize the fragment as a central element of
historical and cinematic thinking. Meaning accrues through the constellation of bits and pieces and
the spaces between them, rather than the illusory totality of a seamless whole.”
27
Here, the
postmodern historiographic crisis becomes a factual, intellectual, and emotional crisis: an attempt
to cinematically represent or narrate a historical event like the Holocaust is always already doomed

24
Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards; Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), xvi.
25
Ibid.
26
ibid.
27
ibid.
23
as it inevitably removes the audience one step away from the subject of the story (via its narrative
function).
Similarly, it becomes impossible to enclose the experience of the Shoah into a two-hour filmic
production. Experimental films and some museum installations attempt to mitigate this disjuncture
by discussing the Holocaust in terms of audience’s own contemporary (hi)story, as well as through
evoking their affective responses. These films are more concerned with the effects that history and
the past have on the present than with the recreation and documentation of the past. The USC
Shoah Foundation’s interactive biographies and virtual reality films, on the other hand, attempt to
negate the passage of time by perpetually unlocking the spatiotemporal experience of a one-on-
one interview with a survivor by creating an open-ended experience.
The third group of theoretical texts I employ to explore how technology impacts the way people
engage with memory. It consists of both seminal works on politics of remembering and forgetting
by Andreas Huyssen
28
, cultural memory by Marita Sturken
29
, and visual culture of the Holocaust
by Barbie Zelizer
30
and James E. Young
31
, as well as research on (digital) media and memory,
with a special focus on technologized memory archives, AR, and VR
32
. These works resonate in
productive ways with questions on not only new types of Holocaust memory representations

28
See: Andreas Huyssen. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
29
See: Marita Sturken. Tangled Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
30
See: Barbie Zelizer. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000; Barbie Zelizer, ed. Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2001.
31
See: James E. Young. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
32
See: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual
Window From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009); Alexander
Galloway, The Interface Effect (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Joanne Garde-Hansen, Media and Memory (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Mark Hansen. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. Routledge, 2012.
24
(selfies, holograms, etc.) but also on new modes of Holocaust memory production (such as
augmented and virtual reality applications, algorithm-based simulations, visualizations, artificial
intelligence, natural language recognition programs, etc.). Questions of virtual reality’s mediation
and documentation of embodied experience and affective relations of time, space, and memory are
becoming increasingly important to media scholars and theorists due to the medium’s expanding
popularity and political potential. As cinema expands into the realm of virtual reality, scholars and
practitioners have experimented with VR’s nascent possibilities and questioned the theoretical and
formal limits of a medium largely colored by commercial hype. While much of this discourse
highlights VR’s potential for radical empathy, I look at VRs promise of immersion through
seemingly indexical moments of audience’s contact with places where historical events, like the
Holocaust, happened. I engage with these notions by focusing on the first-ever Holocaust survivor
testimony in room scale VR, The Last Goodbye (2017) and argue that we are witnessing a
paradigm shift in the design of witness testimonies that are moving away from static bodies of
archived knowledge towards a network of dynamic and interactive memory practices.

Many of the works I engage with, become especially pertinent to a discussion on guardianship and
ownership of memory. As Joanne Garde-Hansen argues, there has always been tension between
democracy and control when media were concerned.
33
Indeed, the idea that technologies create
new forms of sociality is not a new one. Now, however, “new media technologies of digital and
online media are thought to be key players in [the] process of freeing information and
knowledge.”
34
I only partially agree with Garde-Hansen’s sentiment. Traditionally, milieux de
memoir of Holocaust have been limited to highly curated processes of memory production. That

33
See: Joanne Garde-Hansen. Media and Memory. Edinburgh University Press, 2011, p. 70.
34
Ibid.
25
included the top-down process of writing Holocaust discourse via official, institutionalized, and
structured educational institutions (like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad-
Vashem, or national educational curricula among others), as well as through curated and externally
funded cinematic and televisual representations of the Holocaust (the linkages between official
political memory discourse and filmic representations of history are clearly more pronounced in
Europe than the United States). Yet, the sole fact of an online presence of Holocaust discourse
does not guarantee a fully democratized conversation. It is not the digital communication
technology per se that guarantees democratization of any historical discourse. Indeed, in the era of
‘fake news’ and social media information distortion, the wide-ranging and free access to social
media and collaborative educational platforms offers, but not guarantees, a potential to stimulate
a heteroglossia of historical perspectives.

In that sense, new technologies of memory become instructive case studies of networks of
remembrance without any top-down curatorship; not in terms of funding, not in terms of its
didactic mission, not in terms of ideology. My research investigates whether this unrestrained
space of online discourse has a power to shape our attitudes towards the past or even reshape the
Holocaust discourse. This field encompasses the study of ‘techniques of memory’, which includes
film, television, new media, built environment, landscape, and monuments. In part, it complements
the exploration of the relationship between the (digital) space of Holocaust memory (on a national
and transnational level) and concrete places of its commemoration (e.g. films and museums). It
also argues that these workings of memory not only operationalize the process of remembering
and identity-building but also embody the paradox of shifting memory. On a more abstract
26
theoretical level, this research examines the relationship between trauma, technology, and the
politics of memory.

While the range of these theoretical preoccupations is broad, I narrow the scope of my dissertation
by anchoring my research in several case studies that, put together, allow me to think through the
possibilities of the future of Holocaust memory, as well as the relationship between spaces of
memory and places of commemoration in the digital age. Chapter 1, “Archives of Memory: The
Evolution of Witness Testimony,” tracks the evolution of Holocaust witness testimonies from
video and 3-D holograms to virtual reality. I build my argument around the case study of Pinchas
Gutter’s witness testimonies (video; hologram; VR) that reveal different ways in which we
commemorate and learn about the Holocaust today. Using the USC Shoah Foundation’s Holocaust
Archive as my point of reference, I explore epistemological and ethical issues associated with the
design and development of contemporary archives of Holocaust memory. Here, Emmanuel
Levinas’ notion of the face-to-face relation (rapport de face à face) becomes an instructive
theoretical principle that opens my discussion up to notions of human sociality
35
and empathy.

Chapter 2, “Technologies of Memory: Social Media, Augmented Reality, and Taboo in the Age
of Digital Wayfaring,” discusses the relationship between specific places of commemoration and
more abstract online spaces of memory. I narrow the scope of the discussion by interrogating
specific ways in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum curates and engages with visual content
on Instagram. I discuss the problem of taking selfies in places of commemoration, as well as map
practical preoccupations with contemporary gamification of memory. This chapter argues that we

35
See: Emmanuel Levinas, “The Face to Face – An Irreducible Relation,” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, Emmanuel Levinas (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012).
27
are witnessing a unique phenomenon: as technology progresses, the institutional power over how
the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum is represented and how Holocaust memory is curated has eroded.

Finally, chapter 3, “Landscapes of Memory: post-1989 National and Transnational Modes of
Memorialization,” looks at the problem of a nation within the context of contemporary Holocaust
remembrance. By using Poland as a case study, it investigates the process of contemporary
Holocaust memory building, while establishing a conceptual map of a transnational Holocaust
memory that has Auschwitz-Birkenau at its epicenter. It argues that using a homogenizing nation-
based framework perpetuates notions of essentialist prejudice, nationalistic egotism, and fear.
Here, Anikó Imre’s multi-disciplinary work on Eastern European media, (post)socialism, and
nationalism becomes an instructive theoretical tool that allows me to complicate the nation-based
approach which has dominated Holocaust memory research in Europe. In other words, the last
chapter of this dissertation verbalizes the tension between the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ and
analyzes the way the space of historical memory is filled, organized, and produced by the people
who currently inhabit the “contaminated landscape” (Kontaminierte Landschaften)
36
of post-
WWII Eastern Europe.

The Value of this Research

Engaging with perennial issues that have affected Holocaust scholars from the moment the first
witness testimonies were recorded in 1945, this dissertation is the first comprehensive effort to
take into account the significance of different key actors, as well as new modes of commemoration
that have impacted and continue to shape the memory of the Holocaust in the digital age. In this

36
Here, I am using the expression coined by Martin Pollack. See: Martin Pollack. Kontaminierte Landschaften:
Unruhe bewahren. Residenz Verlag: 2014.
28
work, I look at the future of the memory of the Holocaust in the 21st century at a time when the
survivors and witnesses are dying and when new technological advancements are changing
archival regimes of memory. I investigate the reconfiguration of existing mediation and cultural
practices in places of commemoration and view AR and VR as cultural phenomena that invite both
memory and media scholar to ask a plethora of ontological, ethical, and epistemological questions.

Therefore, the death of the survivors and witnesses and the technological mediation of memory in
the era of digital revolution are the key circumstances that prompted this dissertation study. They
also become the connecting themes of my argument. Acknowledging that contemporary media
landscape has borne witness to a paradigm shift in the curatorship of Holocaust memory, I
investigate the direction in which the Shoah discourse is currently moving. I ask whether new
mediated practices increasingly flatten our understanding of the traumatic past or complicate it by
revealing a nuanced new ways of viewing trauma, memory, and collectivity. Recognizing
contributions of multitudinous Holocaust institutions that participate in the global project of Shoah
remembrance and bringing together media and memory research, this dissertation anchors itself
spatially in between places of commemoration and spaces of memory in the digital age. Through
the lens of contemporary workings and techniques of memory, this diagnostic and analytical
project reorients ‘media memory’ around the shifting relationships that define the memory of the
Holocaust in the digital age.

This research contributes to a growing subfield of media memory, as well as Holocaust scholarship
by providing a map of contemporary new media practices that are interconnected, and perhaps,
complementary. While there have been studies that engaged with organizations mentioned in this
study, none have put together a comprehensive map of contemporary landscapes of Holocaust
29
memory in the digital age. Yet, this introduction would be remiss not to mention works that have
informed and contextualized the study at hand. One of the most recent comprehensive studies of
the USC Shoah Foundation’s audio-visual archive is a 2017 monograph by Jeffrey Shandler. The
misleading title, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media
Practices, overpromises a complete look at new mediation practices that the USC Shoah
Foundation has been pioneering in the past decade. However, Shandler mentions Dimensions in
Testimony only once
37
and focuses the bulk of his in-depth research on traditional audio-visual
testimonies and the way they are archived, indexed, and made available online.

A lot of research on digital monuments and the growing dissemination of online memorial sites is
being conducted in Europe. In his postdoctoral research, Mykola Makhortykh (University of
Amsterdam), writes about new media’s participation in the process of collective trauma processing
in Eastern Europe, as well as the relationship between trauma and digital archives. In Framing the
Holocaust Online: Memory of the Babi Yar Massacres on Wikipedia, Makhortykh uses qualitative
content analysis to examine different types of frames and content features that are used in different
language versions of Wikipedia to transcribe the narrative of the Babi Yar as an online
encyclopedia entry.
38
Additionally, in an article written with Anna Menyhert, he presents an
argument that a growing subfield of digital trauma studies brings a novel and interdisciplinary

37
In 2017, Shandler writes: “Its presence at USC also provides the Foundation with opportunities to explore new
technologies for preserving and providing access to interviews with survivors of mass atrocities. Among these
endeavors is New Dimensions in Testimony, developed in concert with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies,
which will enable audiences ‘to interact personally with testimony through true holographic display’ of a Holocaust
survivor. (…) While this project continues the Shoah Foundation’s mission to use state-of-the-art technology and
record and disseminate survivors’ memories, the interactive holograph shifts the mode of engaging survivors’
memories from searching and utilizing the extensive amount of information to be found in the VHA to interacting
with a simulation of a living survivor.” (19). See: Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’
Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford University Press, 2017.
38
Mykola Makhortykh, “Framing the Holocaust Online: Memory of the Babi Yar Massacres on Wikipedia,” Digital
Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, No. 18 (2017): 67-94.
30
approach to trauma research. They argue that digital trauma studies “scrutinize the impact of
technological innovation on the transmission and processing of individual and collective trauma
by examining trauma-related texts and gestures produced through the digital environments.”
39

Similarly, Vlad Strukov and the editorial team of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and
Central European New Media have disseminated research on new media conducted in Eastern
Europe, including studies on trauma, commemorative practices, and nationalism.

Center for Advanced Genocide Research funded by and located at the USC Shoah Foundation is
a research institute of growing international importance and recognition. In 2017, it organized a
multiday conference Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies that examined new digital
methodologies, practices, and ethics of contemporary Holocaust and genocides studies research.
The breadth and scope of presented papers informed my understanding of the current cutting-edge
research on the Holocaust and confirmed my thesis that the USC Shoah Foundation and the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum are treated as two poles of the Shoah memory axis. In between and
with the support of these two institutions, sits a plethora of pioneering new work that employs
digital tools, methods, and information technologies to deepen our understanding of the past. One
of such projects, “Holocaust Geographies Collaborative” asks: what can we learn from using
mapping and geography to examine spaces and places of the Holocaust?

39
See: Mykola Makhortykh and Anna Menyhert, “From Individual Trauma to Frozen Currents: Conceptualizing
Digital Trauma Studies,” Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, No. 18
(2017): 1-8.
31
Set up in 2007 by an interdisciplinary group of scholars with interest in both the Holocaust and
geography
40
, the project aims to expand our understanding of the Shoah by employing key
geographic concepts of location, scale, space, place, and territoriality. Bringing together diverse
set of methodologies and expertise, the collective set out to answer questions about the study of
the Holocaust that few had asked before: “how much insight and understanding one can gain by
asking spatial questions and employing spatial methods to investigate even the most familiar
subjects in the history of the Holocaust” and “how spatial analysis and geographical visualization
of the built environment and forced movement of people during the Holocaust might inspire new
research questions and pedagogical applications”? Indeed, theirs was a first major attempt at
defining and operationalizing ‘geographies of the Holocaust’.

Since the spatio-temporal focus of their study lends itself well to visualization, the affordances of
GIScience became central to setting priorities and defining broad themes for the group’s research.
Questions of “when?” and “where?” studied at different levels of scale - from individual to
collective - allowed the scholars to generate visualizations that “combine multiple variables,
display change over time, and combine and manipulate information from huge sets of statistical
data.”
41
This, in turn, allowed “for a wide range of new analytical approaches to even the most
familiar evidence from the period.”
42
In other words, the Holocaust Geography Collaborative culls

40
Among them, there were specialists in history, Holocaust, and genocide studies (Prof. Waitman Beorn; Prof. Simone
Gigliotti; Prof. Anna Holian), geography and social history (Prof. Tim Cole; Prof. Alberto Giordano; Prof. Anne Kelly
Knowles), art history (Prof. Paul Jaskot), geographic information science (GIScience), interactive information
visualizations, and cartography (Erik B. Steiner). I have further developed a detailed description of this project in my
article “Mapping the Holocaust: Holocaust Geographies Collaborative,” Memoria No. 6 (March 2018).

41
Beorn, Waitman, Tim Cole, Simone Gigliotti, Alberto Giordano, Anna Holian, Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly
Knowles, Marc Masurovsky, and Erik B. Steiner, “Geographical Record: Geographies of the Holocaust,” The
Geographical Review 99(4) October 2009: 564.
42
Ibid.
32
from historical data sets (like the Holocaust Museum archives and Registry of Survivors databases)
to then capture, represent, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze its geographic aspects,
which in turn serve as a starting point for new original academic inquiries. While the scope of this
research is broad, the group decided to focus on six themes that, in turn, constituted the basis of
their 2004 book Geographies of the Holocaust: the spatio-temporal aspects of the Nazi
concentration camp system in Europe; the arrests during the Holocaust in Italy; the spatialities of
the Shoah in the East; the shifting geography of the Budapest ghetto; the materiality of construction
and physical rendering of the spaces of power in Auschwitz-Birkenau; as well as the visual
representation of evacuations from Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. Constantly zooming in
and out between different levels of scale, authors engage with notions of national, regional, local,
and individual/personal experiences of time and place. As a result, this “geography of oppression”
allows us to understand the Shoah as a “profoundly geographical phenomenon.”

Finally, this dissertation has been enriched by conversations, conference lectures, and meetings
with representatives of Holocaust educational institutions from all over the world. Among these,
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. has pioneered new ways of
experiencing the built environment of Holocaust exhibitions. In 2018, it launched an augmented
reality technology to not only mediate the memory of the Holocaust but also spaces of the
memorial itself. The newly developed
43
smartphone augmented reality application allows the
Museum’s visitors, who walk through the “Tower of Faces” part of the main exhibition, to learn

43
August 2018. For more information about this project, see the official website of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum and an article “Connecting to History through Augmented Reality,”
https://engage.ushmm.org/2018-augmented-
reality.html?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTURRd016azBNakl6T0RVeSIsInQiOiIwMWtuYXlDTUI4aFZFeWhYa1JFYjZSaVd
WTklDWFlTWisrXC9NQ
33
more about the lives of Jews who lived in a pre-war Lithuania. Similarly, the Los Angeles Museum
of the Holocaust has established a close working relationship with the USC Shoah Foundation and
is now offering its visitors “an opportunity to take a virtual reality tour through a concentration
camp with a Holocaust survivor with USC Shoah Foundation-The Institute for Visual History and
Education's award-winning virtual reality experience, The Last Goodbye.”
44

Other institutions, like the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews situated on the site of the
former Warsaw Ghetto, have championed the importance of cultivating the memory and visiting
the actual historical sites where Shoah took place. Correspondingly, the newly opened permanent
exhibition at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw – “Czego nie
mogliśmy wykrzyczeć światu /What we were unable to shout out to the world"- emphasizes the
spatial and material connection to the memory of the Holocaust. By metaphorically and literally
bringing to light unearthed documents of The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, the so-
called Ringelblum Archive created by a clandestine group Oneg Shabbat- it invites visitors to
learn more about the daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto. It also forces us to consider the complex
network of spatial and historical layers of an urban landscape of Warsaw.
45

Bringing these and other projects into a conversation, this dissertation argues that contemporary
Holocaust remembrance can be seen as a case study of a broader problem of how our collective
and individual pasts are mediated through visual culture in the digital age. On a more abstract
level, examples of memory mediation presented in the three chapters that follow respond to an

44
See: The official website of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and an article “The Last Goodbye: A Virtual
Reality Experience,” http://www.lamoth.org/exhibitions/temporary-exhibits/last-goodbye/
45
See: Pawel Spiewak, ed. Letters to Oneg Shabbat. Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2017.
34
existential preoccupation that has been receiving exponentially more attention from both scholarly
and popular sources: what does the ‘digital’ do to forgetting and remembering? While scholars
analyze how memory has been constructed, narrated, and transmitted by the media since the
beginning of filmmaking to the digital age of memes, selfies, emojis, and augmented and virtual
reality apps, popular media content creators visualize our current obsession with remembering,
forgetting, and immortalizing in shows such as Black Mirror and Westworld. Indeed, in the fourth
episode of the second season of the HBO-produced science fiction television series Westworld,
Akecheta – a native American host and the leader of Ghost Nation – seemingly responds to many
of the questions that this research asks: “you live only as long as the last person who remembers
you.”
46

46
Westworld: The Riddle of the Sphinx, dir. Lisa Joy (original air date: May 13, 2018).
35
Chapter 1
Archives of Memory: The Evolution of a Witness Testimonies

“...we know now, under the lights, in front of the camera, listening to the echo of our own voices,
that this live moment will be able to be - that it is already - captured by machines that will
transport
and perhaps show it God knows when and God knows where, we already know that death is here. (...)
And this machine works like a kind of undertaker, recording things and archiving
moments
about which we know a priori that, no matter how soon after their recording we die,
and even if we were to die while recording, voilà, this will be and will remain “live,” a simulacrum of life.
A maximum of life (the most life [le plus de vie]), but of life that already yields to death (“no more life” [“plus de
vie”]),
this is what becomes exportable for the longest possible time and across the greatest possible distance -but in a finite
way.
It is not inscribed for eternity, for it is finite, and not just because the subjects are finite,
but because the archive we’re talking about, too, can be destroyed.”

– Jacques Derrida, in a conversation with Bernard Stiegler
47

“Modern memory is above all archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace,
the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.”

- Pierre Nora
48

Axiology of Witnessing: Face, Place, Archive

“Heute ist der vierundzwanzigste April 1945. Mein Name is Hela Goldstein. Ich erzähle (…) was
ich erlebt habe in der Lager Bergen Walde.”
49
These words begin one of the first audio-visual
witness testimonies of the Holocaust recorded by the British Pathé after the liberation of Bergen-
Belsen. Mounds of dead corpses fill the background of a static medium shot of Ms. Goldstein
50
,
as she looks straight into the camera and testifies about what had happened in the camp days before.
The style of filming, together with a non-diegetic voice of an interviewer who prompts Hela in

47
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (Polity Press, 2002), 38-39
48
Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26: p. 13.
49
Author’s translation from unaltered interview in German: “Today is April 24, 1945. My name is Hela Goldstein. I
am talking about what I went through in the Bergen camp.”
50
Hela Goldstein turned twenty-two on April 15, 1945: the day of liberation. By the time she testified about the horrors
of the Shoah, her father was killed in the Łódź ghetto in 1942 and her mother perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.
36
German and Polish to begin –“Also, bitte! Proszę!”
51
- come together as formal elements of a
witness testimony used after World War II by filmmakers all over the world. The recording was
part of the liberator’s ethical assessment of human rights violation committed by the Axis powers.
At a time of Goldstein’s testimony there was no universally agreed upon way of defining the laws
that Nazis had broken during WWII.
52
Yet, thousands of naked dead bodies and stories told by
those who survived the camps called for an immediate reaction akin to a moral duty. Three
elements were of principal importance to the British Pathé filmmakers: the face of the survivor,
the acknowledgement and visibility of the place where the atrocities took place, and the
repeatability and multiplicity of survivors’ stories. It was then and there that the archive of
Holocaust survivors’ testimonies was established.

Image 4. Hela Goldstein interviewed by the British Pathé.

Source: British Pathé, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep3QkJTKqrE, accessed 09.20.2018

51
Author’s translation: “So, please! Please!”
52
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. It has prompted several legally binding
international human rights treaties. For more information on the Foundation of International Human Rights Law, see
the United Nations official website: http://www.un.org/en/sections/universal-declaration/foundation-international-
human-rights-law/index.html
37
When asked about this ninety-three-seconds-long clip recorded by a British cinematographer,
Goldstein recalls that her focus was not on the camera but on the audience outside the frame. Her
former captors, who were now prisoners of war, stood in front of her and behind the camera
listening to her testimony that was meant as both memory and evidence of crimes against
humanity. It was a “moment of great fear,” as Goldstein “assumed that there would be somebody
(…) that would shoot [her] the moment [she] told the truth.”
53

The effectiveness of the medium to communicate the urgency of Hela Goldstein’s story is
apparent. First, as we see her prematurely aged twenty-two-year-old face, we are reminded that
survivors carry indexical traits of the past. The presence of her body –a living receptacle of
memory- stands in stark contrast to the nameless corpses that fill the mise-en-scène. Second, we
hear her voice that bears witness to her traumatic experiences. Hela’s mnemonic certainty about
what she saw and what happened to her underscore the individual and subjective value of witness
and survivor testimonies that are meant to be listed and heard. In the words of Michael Renov, it
is through the act of testifying that one “takes responsibility for the truth of that saying.”
54

Simultaneously, the recording of the voice and face of the witness challenges the viewer to watch,
listen, and “share the positionality of the speaker and thus to forge, in Shoshana Felman’s phrase,
a ‘community of witnessing’.”
55
Here, the emphasis is on the facts and information conveyed by
Hela in a matter-of-fact voice. Therefore, in their original formulation witness testimonies were
not meant to evoke empathy, but rather they responded to a moral imperative to document and

53
For a more in depth account of Stephen Smith’s interview with Hela Goldstein, see: Stephen Smith, “Interactive
Holocaust Biography: Literacy, Memory, and History in the Digital Age,” Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies
Conference. Los Angeles, USC, 23 October 2017.
54
Michael Renov, “The Testimonial Interview in the Work of J. Michael Hagopian”, Visible Evidence XXII
Conference. Toronto, 19-23 August, 2015.
55
Ibid.
38
remember. This, as this chapter argues, has been slowly changing as new forms of witness
testimony mediation replace the format established by Hela and other survivors in 1945.

Before 1945 and the informal establishment of what would grow out to be a transnational effort to
archive Holocaust testimonies, there was another attempt to catalog and systematically record,
albeit in a written form, the experience of the Shoah. Three years before Hela stood in front of the
camera in Bergen-Belsen, members of Oneg Shabbat –a clandestine Jewish group active in the
Warsaw Ghetto– created and hid under the ground the so-called Ringelblum Archive. As news of
mass killings and extermination reached Warsaw, what initially started as Dr. Emanuel
Ringelblum’s effort to chronicle daily life in the ghetto for a broader monograph on the Jewish life
in Poland
56
turned into a desperate attempt to document the destruction of the Jewish community.
One year after the end of World War II, one of the three surviving members of Oneg Shabbat –
Rachel Auberbach– initiated the excavation of the documents hidden in barrels and milk canes
covered by the ruins that had burnt down during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On September
1946, the first tin boxes were unearthed. In December 1950, the second part of the Ringelblum
Archive was accidentally discovered during ordinary post-war construction work in Warsaw. The
last part of the archive is still buried under the ground that belongs to the Embassy of the People's
Republic of China in Warsaw.

56
“According to Dawid Graber’s account, the documentation had been collected at the Borochov school since late
1941-early 1942, when information about the destruction of the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilnius arrived
in Warsaw. According to A. Bańkowska and A. Haska, hiding the first part of the Archive in metal boxes
(15 x 30 x 50 cm) must have taken several days, as proven by excerpts from Abraham Lewin’s diaries and Izrael
Lichtensztajn and Gela Seksztajn testaments. [1] The last part of the documents was buried on 3 August 1942 at 4 PM,
which we know from Dawid Graber’s testament.” Source: Jewish Historical Institute “We Must Rescue the
Ringelblum Archive!”, https://www.jhi.pl/en/blog/2018-09-17-we-must-rescue-the-ringelblum-archive. In 2018,
Roberta Grossman directed Who Will Write Our History, a documentary film that tells a story of the Ringelblum
Archive.
39
Among archived notes, posters, newspapers, and personal diaries that are currently housed and
exhibited at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, one finds a letter written by an eighteen-
year-old boy who fought against time by writing a testament that he then hid in the same soil that
was soon to cover his own ashes. Faded words call for our action: “I do not know my fate. I do not
know if I will be able to tell you what happened next. Remember, my name is Nachum Grzywacz.”
Here, remembrance, not compassion or empathy, becomes a moral imperative for generations that
came after Nachum. Could that be too demanding for contemporary audiences that have grown
accustomed to Holocaust ‘education through emotion’ that relies, in terms of modes of persuasion,
primarily on pathos?
57
Inevitably, Nachum’s call to action to remember for remembrance's sake,
evokes questions that particularize the collective experience of six million Jews: who was
Nachum? Where did he live? Where did he die? What did he look like? We come to learn that
there are no visual traces of his life left in the archive.

Image 5

Source: Jewish Historical Institute.

57
One of the examples that comes to mind, is the the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s identification
cards project: “when visitors enter the Museum’s Permanent Exhibition, they receive an ID card telling the true story
of a person who lived during the Holocaust.” For more information, see: https://www.ushmm.org/educators/teaching-
materials/identification-cards-and-personal-stories
40
As we never see Nachum’s face, we develop no visual memory of his indexical presence in the
Warsaw Ghetto. Hela’s face, on the other hand, will forever provide us with an image of a survivor
standing at ground zero in terms of Holocaust trauma and memory. More than an indexical trace,
Hela’s testimony triggers an ethical call to action: to see her is to be responsible for her and her
story. Here, Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the face-to-face relation (rapport de face à face)
becomes an instructive theoretical principle. In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority,
Levinas’ phenomenologically-oriented ethics offer the grounds for care for others. By analyzing
the “privilege of vision,” he gestures towards the relationality between the subject and gazed upon
objects: “inasmuch as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a
power over them.”
58
Yet, the face of another human being refuses to be contained and in that sense
“it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed.”
59
Levinas demands that the recognition of the
Other’s dignity and humanity be not dictated by the identification of commonalities but rather by
the acknowledgement of the absolute difference. The face of the Other signals the Other’s alterity
that demands our unidirectional responsibility for the Other with no expectation of reciprocity.
The phenomenological question of how we experience the world, here becomes a question of
ethics of responsibility for the Other.

Amit Pinchevski reminds us that Levinas’s face of the Other not only establishes the presence of
the Other but also engages us in a relationship by speaking. In that sense, Pinchevski argues, it
goes beyond Martin Buber’s concern with addressability and otherness:
60
“the Other for Levinas
is not only an interlocutor with whom to reciprocate in dialogue. The Other has priority:

58
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Springer Science & Business Media, 1979), p.
194.
59
ibid.
60
Here, Pinchevski is referring to Martin Buber’s book “I and Thou” (“Ich and Du”) published in 1923.
41
responsibility is unidirectional, proceeding without concern if and how the Other responds back.”
61

It is our experience of the relation to the face of the Other that becomes the grounds for ethics:

Ethics is not conception but relation—a relation with the other person who is encountered
precisely as Other. The Other is not an alter ego, a version of the self; rather, self and Other
are separated by an irreducible difference. That difference, however, is not inimical to the
ethical relation, but is in fact what constitutes it in the first place. Ethics thus proceeds as
the relation with the Other who escapes full knowledge and resists presumed commonality.
There is always something about the Other that remains beyond the self’s grasp—the
Other’s alterity—and that alterity demands acknowledgment and respect. Denying the
integrity of another as Other signals the beginning of aggression and violence. In this sense,
Levinas deems the ethical relation as responsibility—responsibility to and for the Other.
62

Writing Totality and Infinity almost twenty years after WWII and having experienced years of
imprisonment in a POW camp in Fallingbostel in Germany,
63
Levinas grapples with notions of
violence and peace. He concludes that the relation between us and the Other is “maintained without
violence, in peace with this absolute alterity. The ‘resistance’ of the other does not do violence to
me, does not act negatively: it has a positive structure: ethical. The first revelation of the other,
presupposed in all the other relations with him, does not consist in grasping him in his negative
resistance and in circumventing him by ruse.”
64
Using Emmanuel Levinas’ idea pertaining to
human sociality
65
, our face-to-face encounter with Hela Goldstein triggers our recognition of her
otherness.

61
Amit Pinchevski, “Emmanuel Levinas: The Other,” in An Encyclopaedia of Communication Ethics: Goods in
Contention, eds. Ronald C. Arnett, Annette M. Holba and Susan Mancino (Peter Lang, 2018), p. 280.
62
Amit Pinchevski, Emmanuel Levinas, The Other, p. 279.
63
Emmaneul Levinas wrote Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority in 1961.
64
Levinas, 197
65
See: Emmanuel Levinas, “The Face to Face – An Irreducible Relation,” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, Emmanuel Levinas (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012).
42
In this otherness, we discover her sovereignty as her face “resists possession, resists [our]
powers.”
66
The power relation that Levinas discusses has an added meaning in the context of
defenseless Hela Goldstein who faces her perpetrators over the mass grave of murdered Jews. In
that moment, the camera seems to be in a privileged position recording moments of true
vulnerability. Yet, as she speaks to us, her face “invites [us] to a relation incommensurate with a
power exercised, be it enjoyment of knowledge.”
67
Her words evoke feelings of responsibility for
her story, memory, and testimony. Hela Goldstein thus demands not empathy from the spectator
but rather an ethical responsibility to humanize without familiarizing. Moreover, the truth claim
68

of the audio-visual testimony is here of utmost importance. The indexical relationship between
Hela, her background, and the resulting recording of a testimony serves not only as way to
remember but also as a form of legal evidence of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Hela’s
testimony signifies one of the first j’accuse
69
moments in filmic historiography of the Shoah.

Image 6. Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Source: http://www.lamoth.org/exhibitions/virtual-tour/

66
Levinas, 197
67
ibid. 198
68
Here, I am using Tom Gunning’s phrase. For more details, see: Tom Gunning, "What's the point of an index? or,
Faking photographs," NORDICOM Review. 5 (1/2) 2004: 39–49.
69
Here, I am referring to the famous open letter written to the President of France Félix Faure by Émile Zola. In it,
Zola accused the French government of anti-Semitism in its dealing with the French army general, Alfred Dreyfus.
43
It is no accident that faces constitute a recurring theme and visual element of Holocaust educational
programs and museum exhibitions. From the Tower of Faces (the Yaffa Shtetl Collection) at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Tree Testimony at Los Angeles Museum of
the Holocaust to the visual style of various educational websites, faces of those who perished and
those who survived suspend us in a spatiotemporal continuum of memory and forgetting. In a
sense, the archives of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies have been formally and metaphysically
collections of faces of those who bear witness. In his article “Archive, Media, Trauma,” Amit
Pinchevski recalls an older version of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
website that described audio-visual testimonies as the “living portraiture.”
70
Pinchevski quotes the
former director of the Yale archive, Geoffrey Hartman, who called the Fortunoff collection an
“archive of conscience” that consists of “living portraits [that] are the nearest our descendants can
come to a generation passing from the scene.”
71

Yet, beyond notions of empathy building, the audio-visual archive in its first video format provided
the viewers with the embodiment of survivors and their memory at a time when most of the
surviving Jews left Eastern Europe. Due to the Cold War exclusion and marginalization of Eastern
European countries from pluralistic historical narratives, as well as topological remoteness of
concrete places of memory, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, or Treblinka, the gap between
transnational Holocaust memory and the experience of being where the Holocaust took place
widened. Being unable to model testimonies after Hela Goldstein’s interview, post-WWII audio-
visual testimonies continued to use a blank background as empty canvas for the survivors and
witnesses’ memory. In that sense, Hela Goldstein’s testimony is an exception.

70
Pinchevski, 256
71
ibid 257
44

It is precisely that relationship between individual witness testimonies and the specific places
where the Holocaust took place that is the recurring theme of this chapter. In the spatial sense,
archives have been analyzed in terms of locations where analogue and digital collections are stored
and controlled.
72
Additionally, the “topological transformation of the archive” has been viewed in
terms of its analogue-to-digital evolution: “no longer circumscribed and exclusionary, the digital
multimedia archive is an on-line network archive – an inter-archive – which is, by default,
accessible and shareable.”
73
I take four different examples of witness testimonies given by the
same survivor as a case study of memory archives at large. In other words, I treat individual
testimonies as visual microcosms of memory archives that they represent. This in turn, allows me
to perform an analysis of ethical, ontological, phenomenological, and topological layers of witness
testimony evolution.

In the remaining part of this chapter, I look at the evolution of a witness testimony of a singular
survivor: Pinchas Gutter. By taking Levinas’ ethics as a guiding theoretical framework and by
focusing on the notion of the face-to-face encounter, I trace the evolution of witness testimonies
through different media: from video, through 3-D holograms (‘Dimensiond in Testimony’ project)
to virtual reality (VR). Using the USC Shoah Foundation’s Holocaust Archive as the source of this
case study, I explore epistemological strategies associated with the design and development of
contemporary archives of Holocaust memory. I argue that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in
the design of curated systems of Holocaust memory which are moving away from statically

72
For theories of the archive, see: Diana Taylor, “Save As… Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital
Technologies,” Imagining America keynote speech, 2010, http://imaginingamerica.org/wpcontent/
uploads/2015/08/Foreseeable-Futures-10-Taylor.pdf; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, University of Chicago Press:
1998.
73
Pinchevski, 255
45
archived and mediated bodies of knowledge towards a network of interactive memory practices.
Additionally, linking themes of this chapter with the guiding question of this dissertation, I ask
what the evolution of witness testimony can tell us about the changing status of real-world places
of memory.

Media Memory
74
and the Archive

Technological transformations of the past few decades have not only reimagined our
understanding of what an archive is, but also reshaped our social practices of inclusion and
exclusion, as well as remembering and forgetting. We are witnessing a burgeoning hybridization
of previously separate registers of memory: individual and collective; private and public; local
and global; analogue and digital; physical and virtual. Consequently, the technological apparatus
of the archive has become a topic of both popular and academic debates.
75
From the precarious
nature of digital storage capabilities to discussions on data privacy, such as the controversial
European Union’s data protection legislation ‘the right to be forgotten’ that is meant to secure
potentially damaging information about individuals,
76
problems of knowledge and transmission
have captured media scholars’ attention. Diana Taylor ascribes the anxiety of our digital Zeitgeist
to the temporal dislocation that we are experiencing: as “technologies offer new futures for our
pasts, the past and present are increasingly thought through in terms of future access and

74
In the past few decades, media memory has emerged as a new field of study. As a distinct field, it is a descendant
of both media research and memory scholarship – two interdisciplinary fields in their own right. The term ‘media
memory’ was coined in 2005 by Carolyn Kitsch.
75
The 2018 Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Facebook and its potential privacy violations serves as a
relevant example of a current discussion of social media archives and privacy.
76
For more information see: Alessandro Mantelero, “The EU Proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation and
the roots of the ‘right to be forgotten,” Computer Law & Security Review, Volume 29, Issue 3, June 2013, p. 229-
235. And: “When 2 + 2 Might Equal 5,” The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/opinion/google-
right-to-be-forgotten-first-amendment.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-
heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-
region
46
preservation.”
77
Among debates on different types of archive –the everyday archive
78
, the affective
archive
79
, the remixed archive
80
- the topic of archives of trauma has come to the fore.

In Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst Wolfgang invites a question: “What new kind of
knowledge will exist exclusively in the form of images?”
81
In other words, are new forms of
mediation producing new types of knowledge about the past at a moment of “the transition of
living memory (survivors) to mediated memory, which is fixed by paper or audiovisual records in
order to transmit it to the future”? While rigid, Wolfgang’s binary take on Holocaust memory
mediation offers a productive lens through which we can begin to analyze the evolution of witness
testimony. Pinchevski polemicizes with the dichotomy between living/natural memory and
technological/prosthetic/external memory first introduced by Pierra Nora, who famously
developed the notion of realms of memory (lieux de memoir) [that is further discussed in Chapter
2 of this dissertation]:

“Not only is this dichotomy historically questionable, it essentially contradicts the very
logic of memory, which is always affected and conditioned by its aide-memoire, the
‘artificial’ means and modes of memorialization and recollection. (…) I want to suggest
(…) that with the advent of electronic audio-visual technologies, and more intensively with
the introduction of interactive new media and multimedia, the archive has undergone a
profound technological transformation and no longer operates according to the heterotopic

77
Diana Taylor, “Save As… Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies” (Imagining America
keynote speech, 2010), http://imaginingamerica.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/08/Foreseeable-Futures-10-Taylor.pdf
78
See: “Everyday Archives,” In Media Res (2013), http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/theme-
week/2013/43/everyday-archivesoctober-21-october-25
79
See: Ann Cvetkovich with Allyson Mitchell, “A Girl’s Journey Into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge,” GLQ 17,
Number 4 (2011): 603-618; Lesbian Herstory Archives and Allyson Mitchell’s “A Girl’s Journey to the Well of
Forbidden Knowledge”.
80
See: Virginia Kuhn, “The Rhetoric of Remix,” in Transformative Works and Cultures 9, eds.Francesca Coppa and
Julie Levin Russo (2012), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/358/279; “Video Slam
2013: Remixing the 1965 State Propaganda Film,” EngageMedia (Nov 14, 2013),
https://www.engagemedia.org/Projects/g30s_remixed
81
Ernst, 2012; p. 133.
47
logic [of Foucault]. In fact, rather than calcifying memory, the archive has become an
eminently social practice, a veritable living memory.”
82

Following Pinchevski’s polemic with Wolfgang and Nora and bringing in a topological aspect of
new regimes of memory, I view archives in the digital age as media of memory themselves.
Seemingly, the notion of an open-ended, negotiable, and living memory opposed to its fixed
mediated counterpart obfuscates the limits that audio-visual regimes of memory have always put
upon the memory of survivors and witnesses. If the visual turn of the 20
th
century gestured towards
the rising cultural importance of image-based forms of memory representation, the early 21
st

century digital turn calls our attention to the rapidly proliferating digitization of memory and its
concomitant archives. This chapter argues that as the last Holocaust witnesses and survivors are
dying, the content of their recorded memory is becoming a source for endless manipulation and
creative experimentation. While finite in number, the content of survivors’ testimonies is currently
going through a radical process of examination during which a new type of content is being
produced, as well as disseminated with relative ease in a globally networked world. In effect,
contemporary archives of memory are governed by a logic of reinvention and perpetual empathy
production that caters towards the millennials for whom the Holocaust is an abstract concept. In
doing so, the emphasis is placed on compassion and emotional invocation rather than on the duty
to remember for the sake of remembering. Therefore, as the memory of the Holocaust increasingly
depends on commemoration and re-telling of the story for the sake of the new generations, various
Holocaust-related educational institutions come up with innovative ways of bridging the past with
the present. One of them is the USC Shoah Foundation.

82
Pinchevski, 254
48
In 1994, inspired by his experience of filming Schindler’s List (1993) in Poland and meeting
numerous Holocaust survivors, Steven Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation in Los Angeles. Its original goal was to secure video-based testimonies from
living survivors and witnesses of the Shoah.
83
In 2006, the Foundation became part of the USC
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and changed its name to the USC Shoah
Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, which reflects the broadened mission
of the Foundation: “to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry through the educational use
of the Institute’s visual history testimonies”
84
. Keeping with this sentiment, it has gradually
become an umbrella institute for the collection and curatorship of testimonies from the survivors
of the Rwandan, Armenian, Guatemalan, and Cambodian genocides, as well as the Nanjing
Massacre.

In 2012, eighteen years after its foundation, the USC Shoah Foundation completed the Holocaust
testimonies project, which will “guarantee that survivors’ voices will be heard, that their faces will
be seen, and that their memories will endure for generations to come.”
85
Symbolically, this archival
achievement contributes to transnational efforts of genocide oblivion (and denial) prevention.
Further emphasizing the relationship between personal and collective histories, the USC Shoah
Foundation has championed new technologies and digital media literacy in all their
commemoration projects. One of them, the online Visual History Archive (VHA), provides
educational resources to students and teachers in a form of a searchable testimony database.

83
“While most of those who gave testimonies were Jewish survivors, the Foundation also interviewed homosexual
survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid
providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants.” See:
USC Shoah Foundation official website, accessed 04.08.2015, http://sfi.usc.edu/about/institute.
84
Ibid.
85
“USC Shoah Foundation Institute Completes Preservation of Holocaust Testimonies,” accessed 04.08.2015,
https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2012/06/usc-shoah-foundation-institute-completes-preservation-holocaust-testimonies
49
The USC Shoah Foundation VHA consists of a collection of 54,449 digitized and fully searchable
video testimonies from survivors and other eyewitness of the Holocaust, the Rwandan,
Guatemalan, Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, as well as the Nanjing Massacre in
China and others. It is the largest digital collection of this kind in the world and it is globally
accessible. Among these different experience groups, there are 51,357 Holocaust-specific
testimonies. The methodology for conducting and taping audio-visual interviews has been
consistent since the creation of the Foundation. Interviews are conducted at the interviewee’s
home; the language is always chosen by the interviewee; the interview is guided by the interviewer;
the interview consists of open-ended questions and some follow-up clarifying questions.

The basic unit of the archive is, therefore, a testimony that documents a full life history of a witness
or a survivor. It covers prewar, wartime, and postwar periods. It often concludes with the
interviewees discussing photographs, documents, and artifacts that they show the interviewer on
camera. Some interviewees introduce family members; others perform literary or musical works
or display original works of art. The average length of an interview is 2 hours, 8 minutes but
interviews range from half an hour to sixteen and a half hours.
86

86
All the information about the VHA was shared with me by Martha Stroud, the Research Program Officer for the
Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the USC Shoah Foundation during interviews conducted by me in August
and September 2017 in Los Angeles.
50
Image 7. Georg Citrom, Holocaust survivor, interviewed by the USC Shoah Foundation in 2010.

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/vha

To ensure the testimonies stored in the Visual History Archive are accessible worldwide, every
testimony is digitized and fully searchable to the minute via indexing. This means a scholar,
researcher, or student can instantly access the exact point within the 114,000 hours of testimony
in the Archive that matches their query. This is made possible by the use of more than 64,000
keywords that have been assigned directly to digital time codes within testimonies where the
specific topics are discussed. Indexing involves the Institute’s proprietary software for which it
was awarded 11 patents. Keywords that indexers used cover geographic and experiential indexing
terms, about 1.8 million names of people mentioned in the testimonies or recorded in pre-interview
questionnaires, and biographical information for each interviewee, including city and country of
birth; religious identity; places of incarceration (e.g., camps and ghettos) and hiding, flight or
resistance details. Similar to the index of a book, indexing terms point directly to specific points
of interest. But instead of taking users to pages, the Visual History Archive’s terms lead to digital
time codes (one-minute segments) within the testimonies. The navigation of this digitized
testimony collection prioritizes the search functionality of the index. Additionally, users can search
51
by collection (Holocaust; Armenian Genocide; etc.) or by advanced search options, such as
experience group (witness, survivor, etc.), person (name of the interviewees or people mentioned
in the testimonies), or place (fragments of testimonies that discuss specific geographic locations).

As there are 115,649 hours of video testimonies in VHA, it becomes imperative to have a clear
sense of methodology and research scope before going into the archive. In the past years, a number
dissertations, journal articles, and books have been written about specific aspects of witness
testimonies or about the archive at large.
87
Jeffrey Shandler 2018 book Holocaust Memory in the
Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices offers the most comprehensive overview
of the archive while also engaging with close textual and formal analysis of survivors’ stories. He
points out that the funding of the VHA “coincided with an unprecedented level of attention to
Holocaust remembrance in the American public sphere, in the form of official days of
remembrance, widely seen feature and documentary films, the inauguration if high-profile
museums and memorials, a proliferation of education programs, and increased scholarly attention
to memory practices centered on the Holocaust.”
88
Emphasizing the VHA’s preoccupation with
the “temporal boundary marked by the loss of living witnesses,”
89
Shandler acknowledges the
transition from the analogue to digital methods of capturing and storing testimonies. While he
contextualizes the Archive within a broader set of memory ethnographic projects and VHA’s

87
Besides Shandler and Schenker’s work on the VHA, this chapter would be remiss not to mention innovative research
performed in the past few years at the USC Shoah Foundation. For more information on innovative new tropes of
Holocaust research, see: Kathryn Brackney, "Phantom Geographies in Representations of the Holocaust," lecture at
Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC, March 22, 2018; Lukas Meissel, “SS Photographs from Concentration
Camps: Perpetrator Sources and Counter-Narratives of Victims,” lecture at Center for Advanced Genocide Research,
USC, February 12, 2019; Gabór Tóth, “In Search of the Drowned in the Words of the Saved: Testimonial Fragments
of the Holocaust,” lecture at Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC, April 2, 2019.
88
Shandler, Jeffrey. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford
University Press (2018): 3.
89
Ibid., 3-4.
52
content and format, he focuses on reading testimonies “against the grain” of the Foundation’s
institutional logic. He views them as “simultaneously autobiographical narratives, collaborative
performances, works of video, and archival documents.”
90

Similarly, Noah Shenker provides us with a systemic analysis of the archive and its singular parts.
In his article, “Through the Lens of the Shoah, The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting
Genocide Testimonies,” Shenker argues that testimony interview methods are never neutral. What
shapes the content and reception of the testimonies are the “institutional protocols that are not
always apparent on screen (…), on-screen issues ranging from the depth and nature of interview
questions, the lighting setup and the placement of interviewees within the camera frame (…)” and
other “material structures and architectures of testimonial remembrance.”
91
Schenker then
introduces the helpful term of “testimonial literacy,” which denotes “an eye and ear for sensing
the layers, ruptures and tensions that mark the process of giving and receiving account of the
Shoah.”
92
Yet, there are two elements missing from these two arguments. First, neither Shandler
nor Schenker address the issue of new technological developments that are impacting the direction
into which the VHA is currently moving: beyond audio-visual testimonies towards augmentation
and virtualization of Holocaust memory
93
- a process that has started in the early 2010s. Equally
important for the purpose of the present discussion is their omission of the way the medium impacts
the manner in which memory is not only registered but also transmitted to and received by the

90
Ibid., p. 5.
91
Schenker, Noah, “Through the Lens of the Shoah, The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide
Testimonies.” History & Memory, Vol. 28, No.1, Spring 2016, p. 144-145.
92
Ibid., p. 145.
93
Schenker is currently co-writing an article with Dan Lepard on the “New Dimensions in Testimony” project. The
first version of this article was presented by Schenker and Lepard at the Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies
Conference; Center for Advanced Genocide Research; USC Shoah Foundation; Los Angeles, 22-24 October 2017. I
was not able to obtain a draft of the article while working on this dissertation.

53
audiences. By tracking the evolution of Pinchas Gutter’s testimony over time and over different
media and by pulling from an empirical study I performed with my students, I suggest that the
choice of the medium of memory proves Marshall McLuhan's truism that the medium is the
message.
94

Face-to-face with Pinchas Gutter

There are four different recordings of Pinchas Gutter’s memory of the Holocaust stored and
available through the USC Shoah Foundation’s platforms. First, there are two audio-visual
testimonies recorded in 1993 and 1995 respectively. Then, there is an interactive testimony,
formerly known as a “hologram” that has since evolved into the 2-D interactive biography
“Dimensions in Testimony (DiT)”. Finally, there is the first-ever Holocaust survivor testimony in
room-scale VR, The Last Goodbye (2017). They differ in length and require varying levels of
media literacy. What they all have in common, however, is the individual memory of Pinchas
Gutter’s days in Majdanek, a German concentration and extermination camp built and operated by
the Nazis in South-East Poland. It is estimated that 78,000 people were killed in Majdanek, 59,00
of whom were Jewish. This repeated trope of Pinchas’s last memories of his family provide me
with a comparative and methodological framework for tracking the differences and evolution of
his testimony over time.
Year Type Length/Number of Answers Interviewer
03.15.1993;
03.22.1993
Video testimony 243 minutes (243 one-minute
segments)
Paula Draper (for Toronto
Jewish Congress; Holocaust
Documentation Project)
01.12.1995 Video testimony 122 minutes (122 one-minute
segments)
Larry Silverberg (for the USC
Shoah Foundation)
2015 Dimensions in
Testimony
Over 2,000 answers Stephen Smith for the USC
Shoah Foundation
2017 Virtual Reality Film 16 minutes Stephen Smith for the USC
Shoah Foundation

94
Here, I align myself with McLuhan’s claim with an acknowledgment of its utopianism and idealism of his claim.
54
The 1993 interview begins with Pinchas revealing his rationale for sharing painful memories: “My
name is Pinchas Gutter, I’ve come to do this interview for posterity I will tell you a little bit about
myself.”
95
Looking at a camera with a calm smile, Pinchas paints a picture of a happy family life
that was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II when he was just seven years old. We learn
that his family belonged to the conservative Hassidic community of pre-war Łódź (Poland) and
owned a prosperous winemaking business. As there were only two Jewish families in Poland at
the time that had received a concession from the state allowing them to make wine, Pinchas takes
pride in his ancestors’ four-hundred-year-long history of working in the trade. Hence, the temporal
axis of his story is established. Within the first few minutes of the testimony, the medium elevates
the status of Pinchas’s individual memory to the cultural memory of millennia of Jewish-Polish
relations and cohabitation.

His father, Menachem Mendel Gutter, was a wealthy and respected leader of their community – a
fact that later helped them survive the first few years of the war. Despite Pinchas’s fluency in
Polish, the primary language used at the Gutter house was Yiddish. Pinchas’s mother’s name was
Haja Yenta (Helena), she came from a family of farmers: “they were tall and they were strong…
people of the earth.”
96
As all women in their community, Helena was more secular and less
“sheltered from the world” than the father.
97
And then there was Sabina, Pinchas’s twin sister. Her
Jewish name was Shifra Trana. Here, at the nineteen-minute mark of his first testimony, Pinchas
pauses for a moment before confessing: “I find it difficult to talk about my sister. I find it more
difficult to talk about my sister than anybody else. I am not sure why. It is possible that it’s because

95
Pinchas Gutter; interviewed by Paula Draper for Toronto Jewish Congress; Holocaust Documentation Project
(1993); segment 2.
96
Ibid., segment 15.
97
Ibid., segment 17.
55
she was a twin and we were almost like one person - although she was a girl and I was a boy (there
was this very demarcated division between boys and girls in the Jewish religious homes).”
98

Evoking notions of melancholia, which Freud categorized as a pathological type of grieving that
takes place in our unconscious without our full comprehension or identification,
99
Pinchas reveals
looking off-camera to his left: “I am not sure why but I find it very difficult to come to terms with
the memories of my sister. There are a lot of things which I don’t remember and there are a lot of
things that I would like to remember. They are obviously so shut up in my subconscious that unless
I would want to go and take a course of a drug therapy (which I am not going to), I don’t think I
will ever remember it. The snaps come from time to time...”
100
At the time of this first recorded
testimony, Pinchas doubts that memories of his sister will ever come back to him:

“Very rarely do I have to talk about my sister. (…) [Pinchas lowers his voice.] I don’t
remember all the things that I could remember. Obviously, this memory of my sister is so
wrought with pain that I looted out a lot of it. (...) My memory is extremely good and I
remember things about my father, mother, and the whole family and the details that I am
quite surprised that I remember… I remember my sister’s hair. She had the most beautiful
blonde hair and they either were flowing right down to her waist loose or my mother used
to sometimes make one plaid or two plaids and she had those magnificent kokardy [Polish
for hair bows]. She was very proud of her hair so much so that in the Warsaw Ghetto my
mother tried to cut her hair because it was difficult to be hygienic in the Warsaw Ghetto
and because of this she had such an abundance of hair; she had head lice and my mother
always tried to get nafta [Polish for paraffin oil) to wash her hair and all kinds of things
which were difficult to get. To keep it clean and soap was difficult to come by. But she
would not let it. And she went to her death with her hair. [Long pause]”
101

98
Ibid., segment 19.
99
See: Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917).
100
Pinchas Gutter; interviewed by Paula Draper for Toronto Jewish Congress; Holocaust Documentation Project
(1993); segment 20.
101
Ibid., segment 22-24.
56
Indeed, he does not talk much about her in the remaining part of the first testimony.

Image 8. 1993 testimony; Pinchas Gutter remembers his sister Sabina.

Source: http://vhaonline.usc.edu

Before discussing his imprisonment in Majdanek, Pinchas reveals an acute awareness of not only
the process of memory mediation but also of the power of the photo camera: to capture, to bear
witness to the indexical trait, and to mummify the reality. He compares himself to a movie camera
that moved through the Warsaw Ghetto where his family lived from 1940-1943:

“I became a nocturnal animal that goes out and forages. Except, I was not foraging for
food. I was foraging for maybe knowledge. I was like an observer. It was almost like a
camera, like the camera I am looking into now. Because whatever I saw in the ghetto and
I don’t think I can really tell you all the things I saw in the Warsaw ghetto. I observed
depravity, kindness, I grew up in the ghetto on my own by learning things I did not
understand at the time. (...) I saw dance halls in which people were dancing surrounded by
dead bodies on the street. (...) I saw people doing business: selling in the street, buying in
the street the same second hand goods. (...) People walking, marketing, children selling
cigarettes, bakeries (...) with the most magnificent collections… Of course, that stopped as
things got worse in the ghetto. Progressively, these things disappeared. You would see
women dressed elegantly like women on the 5th Avenue in New York City. (...) I saw
prostitutes picking up men. (...) All these things registered. I saw people carrying parcels,
57
running back and forth; people shouting and talking. Basically, I lived in the street. I would
say that a lot of my character, a lot of my survival instinct was learned in the streets of the
Warsaw Ghetto. Because every aspect of goodness to bestiality happened was present
there. People lived in the street. People died in the street. People were kind, people were
terrible. There were Jewish police that were nice, there were Jewish police that were… I
mean I saw children who used to smuggle… (...) Policemen would beat up children. (...) I
saw Germans beating up Jews. I saw German soldiers coming in on conducted tours of the
Warsaw Ghetto with cameras, smiling and laughing pulling Jewish beards and pejes
[Yiddish for sidelocks], and giving out little sweets and cigarettes and treating you almost
like little animals in the zoo.”
102

Here, the brutal reality of the Warsaw Ghetto pushes Pinchas’ psychological identity to become
one with a film camera. His phenomenological seeing becomes photographic seeing.
Simultaneously, a photo camera becomes an object of intrusion and aggression, a mark of the
German power and continued dehumanization of the subjects they photograph. Paraphrasing Susan
Sontag, it becomes a way of imprisoning reality
103
. It is a way of violating people “by seeing them
as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.”
104
What,
then, makes these different ways of recording Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust
fundamentally different? Pinchas is clear that the intension behind the act of photographing is what
deems a photo as either a transgressive act of subjugation or, as is the case of the testimonies that
he is participating in, a product of a thoughtful process of documentation and preservation. And
therefore, the voice and intentionality of the interviewer become fundamental elements of the
testimony itself.

102
Ibid., segment 87-89.
103
Susan Sontag, On Photography (Macmillan, 2001), p., 7.
104
Ibid., p.14.
58
The delivery of Pinchas’s memory works within two intertwined systems: the formal elements
established by the genre and the constantly competing authorial voices of the interviewer and the
interviewee. Sometimes, moments of silence tell us more about survivor’s inability to discuss
memories of things remembered than words ever could. As Shenker argues, “it is not enough to
extract the essential historical details or the ‘raw’ emotive resonances of the Holocaust (…), there
is also the need to train our eyes and ears to detect the dialogues, and often frictions, between
witnesses and the archive – the exchanges that challenge the imposition of closure and redemption
by calling attention to the intertwined relationship between the form and content of testimonies.”
105

Pointedly, Paula Draper, the interviewer, gives Pinchas time to pause, look away, and discuss
notions that stray beyond the factual demands of a testimony. It is no accident that the 1993
testimony is longer and paced differently from other testimonies found in the Visual History
Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation. It was originally recorded for the Toronto Jewish Congress
as part of the Holocaust Documentation Project that afforded more time to the interview and the
interviewee. Indeed, the most powerful moments of Pinchas’s testimony are those that become
part of a conversation between Paula and Pinchas that we are privy to witnessing.
106

Such is the case when the first part of Pinchas’s testimony ends at the 124-minute mark and
reconvenes one week later with Pinchas discussing a song he learned on the streets of the Warsaw
Ghetto. Without being prompted by the interviewer, Pinchas looks down and sings quietly in
Yiddish. For two and a half minutes, the still uninterrupted image of Pinchas singing with his eyes

105
Schenker, 148.
106
Here, the mode of a thoughtful interview by Paula Draper reminds one of a testimonial structure of the recordings
collected by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. We might contrast them (as well as the Paula
Draper interview) with the USC Shoah Foundation’s testimonies that tend toward a more prompted structure. For a
thorough discussion of differences between different conventions of Holocaust testimonies, see: Noah Shenker,
Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Indiana University Press, 2015.
59
looking down fills the screen. While his eyes disappear, he reveals himself to us in this medium
close-up with a transformative force and poetic insistence of, what Béla Balázs called, a “lyrical
charm” of a tragedy expressed through his “microphysiognomy.”
107
When he finishes with the
words “‘Treblinka, the Jewish place of peace. Who goes there will not be coming back,” Draper,
recognizing the importance of this memory to his whole story, asks him: what images come to
your mind when you are singing?” Here, the subject of the conversation shifts away from facts and
memories to Pinchas’s feelings about those facts and memories. It not only pulls him away from
the conventions of the act of witnessing but also, using Deleuze’s description of a cinematic close-
up, “abstracts [him] from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises [him] to the state
of Entity.”
108
Nowhere is the dialogic dimension and the ethics of the documentary situation more
pronounced than in this moment of Pinchas’s testimony.

Image 9. 1993 testimony; Pinchas Gutter sings a song he learned in the Warsaw Ghetto

Source: http://vhaonline.usc.edu

107
Béla Balázs, ‘Theory of the Film’ in Gerald Mast & Marshall Cohen (ed), Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford:
Oxford Uni Press (1979), pp. 288-298.
108
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 95-96.
60
Continuing his story, Pinchas approaches the 147
th
minute of his testimony: “and then we drove to
Majdanek…” He looks down and after three minutes of discussing abstract notions of human
kindness and the will to survive, he says: “And [long pause] the most painful memory I have is the
one which I am going to tell you now… [he looks down]. And that is when we were thrown off
the trucks.” It seems as if the whole testimony led up to this point of climax. Pinchas continues
while looking away from the camera:

“We were in the field in Majdanek. And the Germans were separating children from
parents. (…) they were shouting and beating continuously… (…) Everything: quick, quick,
quick. So you would not even have a thought in your mind. [The tempo of his speech picks
up]. And my mother… I was there still. They tried to separate… actually it was a Jewish
prisoner who said ‘you should give up your child, otherwise you will go to death.’ My
mother said she was not and then the German came and said ‘quick, quick, quick’ and my
mother went with my sister. She did not want to be separated. And my father said I must
say I am eighteen and go with him. (…) They marched us to what they told us would be
showers. (…) All the time being chased down and beaten. (…) They told everybody to
undress and when we were naked they told us we must start running. My father was just
behind me. There was a German standing there (…) with a little stick directing people left
and right. (…) Everything is hazy about this. As a matter of fact for a long time I found it
extremely difficult to even remember this because it is one of the most painful memories
when I was separated from my father… (…) First they shaved you. They took all the hair
from your body and then you went into the vet. And then you went into the showers and
water came out… Where I went, water came out and you washed yourself. And then you
ran and they gave you striped clothes and they gave you wooden clogs and then raus raus
raus raus… I don’t know. It’s like 5 milliseconds this whole episode in my mind. And then
you spewed yourself out into the open. (…) And I started crying… but I don’t even know
what the crying was all about. I mean I am not sure. To this day I can’t remember the
feelings that were going through my mind at the time… It was like… I have been trying
for the longest time to recapture the actual feelings of that moment and all I can think of,
all I can feel is that I just did not accept the fact that I came out and my father didn’t. (...)
That we both were running with our hands high and suddenly he disappeared and I came
61
out and he didn’t... (…) That I came out and he wasn’t behind me. And… [long pause] that
was Majdanek. That was my entrance to Majdanek.”

Majdanek as a location of Pinchas’s final moments with his sister and parents also became a place
of his entrance into adulthood. To survive, he had to learn how to become invisible. He always
looked down and made himself “as inconspicuous as possible (…), the tiniest possible insect.”
Being seen, “being visible was no good.”
109
He learned that when one of the camp guards beat him
so severely with his leather boots that he “injured [him] inside.”
110
Pinchas recalls that “It was my
rectum that he damaged. It kind of like started festering (…) I had pain and I did not know what
the pain was and after war I was examined by a physician in London” who treated him. Pinchas
underwent three surgeries after the war due to the injury perpetrated by the camp guard. This
memory is quickly followed by the interviewer’s follow-up question: “What happened at night in
Majdanek?” Seemingly, the word ‘survivor’ gains a double meaning in Pinchas’s testimony as he
pauses, sights deeply and reveals:

“I find it really difficult to talk about that. (…) We had… every block had a Blockalteste.
He was a guy who was in charge. He could be Jewish, he could be German, he could be
Czech, he could be anything. There were many nationalities in Majdanek. He could be
Polish. (…) at night, these kapos in cahoots with this Blockalteste they would get drunk.
(...) They used to go around looking for good looking young children. And not only that
they sodomized them but they used to hang them. In my, in my, in my…. [Pinchas is
visibily struggling to talk about it] … In my camp, in my block, the Blockalteste was a
particular sadist, and he used to hang people and every morning when you woke up there
were one or two young good looking children, usually. (...) They were hanging from the
rafters. And they would just say that they committed a suicide and they would be taken
outside and thrown on a heap. There was always a heap of dead people. (...) So when you
lay on those wooden tiers at night, you were all the time… that I remember… shivering at

109
Pinchas Gutter; interviewed by Paula Draper for Toronto Jewish Congress; Holocaust Documentation Project
(1993); segment 160.
110
Ibid., segment 162.
62
night wondering who is going to be next. Whether I am going to be next taken… I didn’t
even realize what they were doing at the time… I mean I know now but I didn’t realize it.
Because I didn’t know anything about sex, about anything. I was just an innocent religious
child brought up in the bosom of his family. (…) And I can’t get over that. I got over lots
of things but for prisoners to do that to the other prisoners is something I’ve never been
able to get over. I find it extremely difficult to talk about. I find it extremely difficult to
experience. And usually when I talk about it, I get nightmares again. That is why I don’t
talk about it. Because the nightmares come.”

This traumatic and vague memory concludes the part of Pinchas’s testimony that pertains directly
to Majdanek. As it is relatively rare to come across survivors’ testimonies that address the problem
of sexual abuse in the camps – particularly among male survivors – a lot is left unsaid. Here, one
more time, we become confronted with the medium’s immediacy and the interviewer’s authorial
positioning somewhere between our curiosity and empathy, as well as Pinchas’s pain. We are
offered a subtractive interpretation of his words: we can only learn what the interviewer and the
interviewee deem important to convey. In the light of the near-unspeakable trauma conveyed by
Pinchas’ remarks quoted above, we are forced to respect the silence that falls over unspoken
memories.

Alternatively, the ‘Dimensions in Testimony’ project affords an opportunity to ask Pinchas follow-
up questions. Keeping this in mind, should we think across material artifacts such as photographs,
audio-visual testimonies, 3D ‘holograms’ and virtual reality films for their embodiments of
memory and history, or are we speaking of fundamentally different ways of archiving memory?
To avoid lumping of different categories of mediated representations and running a danger of
gliding over medium-specific questions, this chapter mitigates such a risk through a creation of a
comparative taxonomy of Pinchas Gutter’s memories, followed by the presentation of an
anonymous empirical survey results.
63

The 1993 testimony of Pinchas Gutter leaves the audience wanting to understand more. In an
attempt to catalogue questions that arise after watching the four recorded testimonies of Gutter, a
group of four undergraduate students at University of Southern California performed a
comparative study of all of the recordings during a month-long summer seminar on the memory
of the Holocaust in the digital age.
111
After having watched the 1993 testimony, they wrote down
questions that the first iteration of Pinchas’s testimony triggered. Some of them revealed a two-
pronged approached to Pinchas’ testimony. First, there were specific inquiries into details of his
life and testimony:

- “What nationality was the Blockalteste who hurt you?”
- “If you think in Yiddish when recalling these events, then why do you
choose to do your interviews in English?”
- “What do you hope will happen as a result of your testimony?”
- “What do you want the audience to come away thinking?”
- “You mention in your first interview that you were telling your story ‘for
posterity.’ What motivated you to take part in another testimony two years
later?”
- “When did you start to remember your time at Majdanek?”
- “What affected you so much about the cruelty of your fellow prisoners who
served as kapos when you were surrounded by so much cruelty on the part
of your Nazi captors?”

Second, students asked metaphysical questions about the nature of remembering and forgetting, as
well as trauma processing and forgiveness:
- “How do you remember all these details?”

111
“Media Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Digital Age,” University of Southern California, Cinema and
Media Studies Undergraduate level seminar; Summer 2018.
64
- “What happened in therapy to help you?”
- “Why did you decide to tell your story instead of avoiding the pain?”
- “How did you manage your trauma while building a family?”
- “You were subjected to an inhuman amount of suffering and deprivation.
How did you prevent your worst impulses from dictating your behavior as
you struggled to survive?”
- “Do you think anyone, under certain conditions, is capable of the abject
cruelty the Nazis displayed during World War II, or is cruelty to that extent
a quality one must be born with?”

With these in mind, students watched the 1995 testimony that failed to answer most of these and
other questions triggered by the 1993, thorough four-hour-long testimony. Pinchas Gutter
confirmed the inability of the second interviewer to engage with his life’s story. During his
conversation with Stephen Smith, director of the USC Shoah Foundation, Pinchas Gutter revealed
that the Toronto interviewer “was excellent” and that the second interviewer assigned by the USC
Shoah Foundation “had no clue what he was talking about.” To illustrate this point, Smith brings
up a moment of “an egregious breach of protocol during the second testimony (…) [when] the
interviewer says: ‘You need to hurry up, I am nearly out of tape!’”
112
Indeed, Pinchas seems more
closed-off and reluctant to share details of his life during the second interview, which was recorded
in 1995, only two years after his first testimony. He mentions his sister Sabina only five times
during his interview but does not use her name. In the beginning of his story, he briefly mentions:
“I was a twin, I had a sister.”
113
Then, in the twenty-fourth minute, he discusses his mother and

112
Stephen Smith, “Interactive Holocaust Biography: Literacy, Memory, and History in the Digital Age,” Digital
Approaches to Genocide Studies Conference. Los Angeles, USC, 23 October 2017.
113
Segment 9. Pinchas Gutter; interviewed by Paula Draper for Toronto Jewish Congress; Holocaust Documentation
Project), 1993; segment 160.
65
sister’s passing for Polish women. They spoke fluent Polish and, he adds, “my sister had long
blond plaids, so she was fine.”
114

Image 10. 1995 testimony; Pinchas Gutter describes his family’s arrival in Majdanek.

Source: http://vhaonline.usc.edu

Finally, his story takes him back to Majdanek. He starts a more detailed, yet less emotional,
account of what happened:

“When we arrived in Majdanek, we were pushed out of these wagons and immediately we
were separated into men and women. And then: grownups and children. My father told me
that I must say I am 18 years old, so I stayed with him. My mother somehow, and that
scene I remember, lost sight of my sister. My sister was kind of pushed towards the
children. And although I was pretty tall and my sister was not much smaller than me, I
don’t know what happened but somehow, she got pushed towards the children. My mother
was screaming and then she went towards and she would not give up my sister. So, they
pushed my mom towards that part where there were children. A lot of other women went
there too. It’s the last time I saw my sister and my mother. [pause] (…) I thought we were
going to the gas chamber. (…) It looked like a Trojan horse. We had to take our clothes

114
Pinchas Gutter; interviewed by Larry Silverberg for the USC Shoah Foundation, 1995; segment 24.
66
off. (…) My father was in front of me. He was there one second and then the second
moment he disappeared. And that was the last time I saw my father. [pause] There was a
German standing pushing people this way and that way. I did not know what was going
on. For a long time, I did not even remember it and I kind of blanked it out. But I
remembered this scene some years later. [pause] And I was pushed into a room where there
were lots of barbers who were shaving you from head to toe. Your whole-body hair.
Everything was shaved. And all the time I was thinking ‘this is the end’. (…) And they
knocked you over the head. Now, I am retelling this now in a kind of slow manner but this
was going on in the most chaotic maelstrom. It was as if you were in the eye of the storm.
It was like peace on the outside but storm on the inside. Or storm on the outside and peace
on the inside. I don’t know what was going on. I really did not know what was happening.
I remember being knocked over the head. (…) And I was convinced all the time that the
next thing that is going to happen will be gas coming out. Because we knew in the Warsaw
Ghetto what was happening. The whole story of Treblinka we knew before. And… water
came out. (…) When I came out, I was looking for my father. I didn’t find my father…
(…) I started crying but I wasn’t crying because I didn’t see my father. I want to be quite
honest. I was crying because I was crying. I just didn’t know what was going on. My whole
world came to an end; that was the beginning of one part of my life and I saw that it was
finished. I thought my life was finished there. (...) I was crying for myself, for my father,
relief maybe that I wasn’t killed. I was just crying.”
115

Suddenly, Pinchas concludes his story about Majdanek. Before he moves on to a different memory,
he quickly reveals a new fact that answers one of my students’ questions: “We had a Jewish
Blockalteste. He was a block leader who was a sadist. Who was obviously a schizo-paranoid - I
don’t know, you name it. (...) I knew what he was doing but I didn’t know why he was doing it.
He would hang little boys. At night. He would get little boys, he would abuse them and then he
would hang them and then in the morning we would wake up and we would see 2-3 little boys
hanging from the rafters. He could do it because Majdanek was a law of itself.”
116
Here, Pinchas’s

115
Ibid., segment 69-76.
116
Ibid., segment 77.
67
testimony goes against the redemptive grain of the USC Shoah testimonial archive
117
and evokes
similarities with post-war memoirs written by Tadeusz Borowski in Poland and Roman Frister in
Israel. Borowski, an Auschwitz survivor, addresses transgressions perpetrated by indifferent and
dehumanized inmates in his collections of short stories: This Way to the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen. Similarly, facing accusations of nihilism and taboo-breaking, Roman Frister’s The
Cap: The Price of Life sparked controversy in Israel for discussing sexual exploitation of prisoners
by their inmates and reporting on the moral ambiguity of some Jewish prisoners.
118

The rest of the traumatic past becomes embalmed in Pinchas’ silence. The finality of the recording
breaks any hope that we can learn more about Pinchas’ past than he allows us to. In terms of
authorial control, it is the survivor who remains the main curator of the depth of the testimony.
Pointedly, the rhetoric and creative aesthetics of post-WWII testimonies, so different from Hela
Goldstein’s testimony, have been impacted by spatial and temporal limitations such as lack of easy
access or knowledge of smaller camps and places where mass executions took place, complete
destruction of places of the Shoah, or survivors’ reluctance to travel back to Eastern Europe to
testify at the actual locations where the genocide took place. The blank static background reminds
us that witness testimonies, as fragile audio-visual captures of one’s trauma, are more than just a
piece of history: they are filmic representations. Through his narrative, Pinchas is thus able to
reconstruct himself and his story and, metaphorically, fill in the blank canvas that the format of
the testimony affords him. Lastly, the 1993 and 1995 testimonies emphasize an ethical

117
Noah Schenker writes about how Annette Wieviorka “compares the development of the Fortunoff Archive with
that of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (its original name). She found influence of Spielberg’s
film on the development of the Shoah Foundation particularly distressing, arguing that the Foundation, in contrast to
the Fortunoff Archive, privileges redemptive and accessible narratives over anti-redemptive, impenetrable
accounts…”, p. 146
118
See: Tadeusz Borowski, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Viking Penguin, 1967); Roman Frister, The
Cap: The Price of Life (Grove Press, 2000).
68
preoccupation with a fragile balancing act between discovering traumatic history and protecting
the psyche of an interviewee. Pinchas’ inability to find words for some of his memories gesture
towards a difficulty to interweave mnemonic and discursive worlds of memory that is always
already present in the witness testimony format. What happens, however, when there are no more
witnesses and survivors to share their testimonies? 2-D interactive biographies “Dimensions in
Testimony’ (DiT), formerly known as ‘holograms’, created by the USC Shoah Foundation embody
the intention to mediate the loss of living witnesses by creating their interactive substitutes.

By emphasizing the relationship between personal and collective histories, the USC Shoah
Foundation has championed new technologies and digital media literacy in all their
commemoration projects. Six years ago, the Foundation announced its newest and most ambitious
undertaking yet: a holographic testimony-based project. In short, a select group of Holocaust
survivors is interviewed for few days while being filmed by over fifty cameras capturing their
every move. Their answers become a data set, thus allowing a creation of an interactive question-
and-answer nonlinear conversation between the interactive recording and an interlocutor. These 2-
D interactive biographies, initially conceived to be 3D holograms
119
, support the foundation’s
educational efforts and are meant to evoke an emotional connection between the survivors’
testimonies and the youth. More than a dozen survivors have already been or are soon to be filmed
for the DiT project, which – undeniably - speaks to the Foundation’s earnest desire to preserve the

119
Jean Baudrillard provokes one to question the three-dimensionality of the originally conceived hologram as a
guarantor of the real. He argues that three-dimensionality claims to be more real, but “paradoxically, it has the opposite
effect. (…) The closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum (…), the more evident it becomes (…) how
everything escapes representation, escapes its own double and its resemblance. If a hologram reveals the real it is
always already in the past. In other words, the hologram (via its illusory liveness) (re)produces the past. The (historical)
indexical moment of one’s contact with the survivor is replaced by one’s contact with the past (of the limited
recording). See: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994), 106.
69
memory of the Holocaust.
120
In the context of other material artifacts that embody Holocaust
memory, this project is unique for a couple of different reasons.

Stephen Smith, the Executive Director of the Foundation, explains the methodology behind the
design and the actual creation of the first DiT in March 2014:

“Pinchas Gutter sits in a red chair surrounded by bright green fabric under the glare of
several thousand LED lights, 53 cameras capturing his every move. This is the world's first
ever full-life history captured in true 3-D. As I interview him, I perch on a stool 8 feet away
at 90 degrees to Pinchas. We can see each other through a mirror angled at 45 degrees. I
have 400 questions in front of me as we settle in for five days of intensive interview. This
is not the fireside chat in the comfort of the interviewee's home. We are joined in the studio
by a host of graphic and natural language scientists, multiple interviewers and producers
frantically scribbling notes. Oral history just changed irreversibly. New Dimensions in
Testimony, the first truly interactive question-and-answer program, is the brainchild of
concept designer Heather Maio. Frustrated by the lack of human dialogue with digital
content in an interactive age, and concerned that conversations between survivors and
young people would be forever lost, she set out to beat the clock. Her criteria were
demanding: content must be natural language video conversations rendered in true
holographic display, without the 3-D glasses. (…) [She] brought together the USC Shoah
Foundation, the largest archive of testimony in the world, with USC institute for Creative
Technology, the only lab in the world that could capture true 3-D imaging with the
language-processing skills to build a voice-recognition system to make conversation-based
testimony.”
121

How is, therefore, this new form of a survivor testimony different from traditional video
interviews? Is the memory digitization merely a consequence of technological advancements?

120
In 2018, the USC Shoah Foundation extended the Dimensions in Testimony project to include testimonies by the
Nanjing Massacre. Madame Xia was the first survivor from China interviewed by the Foundation.
121
“Anita Lasker Wallfisch Records Interview for New Dimensions in Testimony,” accessed October 15, 2015,
http://sfi.usc.edu/news/2015/09/10073-anita-lasker-wallfisch-records-interview-new-dimensions-
testimony?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=October%202015
70
“What makes this so different is the nonlinear nature of the content. We have grown used
to hearing life histories as a flow of consciousness in which the interviewee is in control of
the narrative and the interviewer guides the interviewee through the stages of his or her
story. With the Maio methodology, the interviewee is subject to a series of questions
gleaned from students, teachers and public who have universal questions that could apply
to any witness, or specific questions about the witness’s personal history. They are asked
in sets around subject matter, each a slightly different spin on a related topic. In order to
get to those specific questions, the interviewee does provide a life history (in this case to
the USC Shoah Foundation). They also provide a five-minute, 15-minute and 40-minute
summary for use with different future audiences. Then a long series of stand-alone
questions are asked, such as, “Did you ever find your sister?” “Do feel hatred or the need
for revenge?” Do you believe in a God?” “How do you feel when you see genocide
happening to others?”
122

Stephen Smith ends his account by summarizing the experience of interviewing Gutter and
explaining the type of labor this Holocaust survivor from Poland put into the project:

“Pinchas is placid, adaptable, and takes direction well. That is just as well, because he also
has to provide comments like, “I am sorry, can you repeat that?” “Let's stick to the topic,
shall we?” And, “I am really pleased to have shared my thoughts with you.” When the New
Dimensions project is complete, you will be able to go to a museum, such as the Illinois
Holocaust Museum, listen to Pinchas give his 15-minute story, then ask questions that
comes to mind, and Pinchas will be able to answer your questions about the Holocaust and
his life before and after, as well as what he thinks about issues in the world today.”
123

Spotlighting the importance of witness testimony and the impending threat of losing all the living
survivors, the DiT undeniably and inevitably attempts to ‘replace’ the dead by preserving the
experience of engagement and interaction with the witness. Its aim is to be the educational
surrogate. The imitation of the survivor is meant to present an objectively hyper-real yet

122
ibid.
123
ibid.
71
subjectively engaged testimony. Or, in the words of the creators, “the goal is to preserve as much
as possible of the experience of face-to-face interaction.”
124
Using Emmanuel Levinas’ idea
pertaining to human sociality
125
, this encounter with the DiT intends to evoke the feeling of
responsibility for the Other’s story, memory, and testimony. The direct contact with the imitation
of the survivor’s body and memory is paramount. Jacques Derrida’s thoughts from Echographies
of Television apply to the first affective impression this project triggers, as we already feel and
“already know that death is here”
126
. Indeed, the recognition that Pinchas sits motionlessly on a
chair and patiently responds to 400 questions precisely because his death is imminent becomes
one of the first cognitive and affective sensations and side effects this project creates. In many
ways, this realization extends to other technologies of commemoration. It evokes basic theories of
mimesis and reproduction of reality and rests on the assumption that something in the photograph,
film, or the hologram is immediate.

In What Is Cinema?, André Bazin introduces the notion that Western lineage of art consists of this
mummification effort, as to “preserve, artificially, (…) body appearance is to snatch it from the
flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life.”
127
Despite the fact that
photography, film, and the hologram differ from previous art forms, our obsession with realism
and liveness (as a mode of sustaining life) has carried over. The “complex” of the plastic arts lives
on, and the hologram becomes a new form of mummification and a relic of a survivor. In the same
text, Bazin notes that the “production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology

124
Traum D. et al. “New Dimensions in Testimony: Digitally Preserving a Holocaust Survivor’s Interactive
Storytelling,” in: Schoenau-Fog H., Bruni L., Louchart S., Baceviciute S. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS
2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9445. Springer, Cham, 2015.
125
See: Emmanuel Levinas, “The Face to Face – An Irreducible Relation,” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, Emmanuel Levinas (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012).
126
Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 39.
127
André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 9.
72
of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from
all other picture-making.”
128
Indeed, the notion of objectivity and sincerity applies to this
discussion of the holographic simulation of liveness. The imitation of the survivor is meant to
present an objectively hyper-real yet subjectively engaged testimony. However, since the idea of
simulation presupposes a form of artifice it is worth asking: what kind of illusion is it?

Pointedly, Roland Barthes elucidates this ‘phantom discourse’ further in Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography. He argues that every photograph, despite the assuredness of the
reality it captures, evokes the acknowledgement of the absence (of that object being photographed)
in the future. Instead of liveness, the image conveys perpetual death. He describes this
catastrophical realization in the context of Alexander Gardner’s photograph of Lewis Payne from
1865: “The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is
going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an
anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the
photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.”
129

This reciprocal relationship between photography, nostalgic pleasure, past, and death applies also
to one’s experience of and with the DiT. While it forces one to acknowledge that the ‘real survivor’
must have been present in front of and captured by multiple cameras, the DiT does not grant access
to all reality, or, all memory of the survivor.
130

128
Ibid., 13.
129
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 96.
130
Here, one might also consider Walter Benjamin’s theorization of the trade-offs in the age of mechanical
reproduction. The ‘aura’ wanes but in its stead one gets portability, access, reproducibility – even close-ups. See:
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
73
Image 11. Pinchas Gutter is being interviewed for Dimensions in Testimony (DiT)

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust/ndt

The notion of historical indexicality invites the consideration of the technology behind the DiT as
this project is not simply about turning a video into an interactive biography. At its core, the project
uses language recognition technology, called time-offset interaction
131
, that simulates human
cognition. In other words, the brainy part of the technology matters just as much as the simulated
achievement of semblance. Could one argue that both the body and memory of the survivor
become an artifact? Seemingly, this question takes us back to Bazin’s famous formulation of art’s
mummification effort discussed on previous pages. In a sense, the DiT project presupposes our
taking for granted the fixed relationship between the survivor (reality) and his/her ‘mummified’

131
For more information on time-offset interaction – a new technology that enables conversational interaction with a
person who is not present, using pre-recorded video statements, see: Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, Heather Maio, Tomer
Mor-Barak, Carla Gordon, and David Traum. “How Many Utterances Are Needed to Support Time-Offset
Interaction?” the Twenty-Eighth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference,
Hollywood, Florida. May 18–20, 2015.
74
representation (DiT). However, what takes place is the mummification of the body (semblance)
but not of the mind. On the contrary, the project creates an ontologically new entity, whose goal
is not necessarily consistent or compatible with the objective of the living survivor. In other words,
the durable goal of the survivor is to be a human and a witness. The DiT, on the other hand, works
according to its main objective: the constant improvement of its function and functionality. One
can imagine that the future DiT might use artificial intelligence, thus further deepening the gap
between the reality and the artifact. One could also imagine a potential for manipulating the data
and hacking the DiT’s ‘memory’, thus obfuscating and changing the historical narrative. This
project becomes, therefore, a sign of incredible trust that survivors put into this commemorative
project.

Image 12. Pinchas next to his DiT avatar.

Source: Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust/ndt

When asked to explain his rationale behind DiT, Stephen Smith points to the effectiveness of the
medium to communicate the testimony. Dimensions in Testimony, he argues, respond to the
75
demand set up by new generations for whom the Holocaust is becoming an abstraction.
132
To test
this hypothesis, I invited my four students to write down twenty questions they had for Pinchas
after watching two of his video testimonies. Then, thanks to the USC Shoah Foundation’s staff,
my students spent one hour interacting with Pinchas’ DiT. The list included very few specific
questions: ‘When did your memory of Majdanek come back to you?’, ‘What do you call the
Holocaust?’, ‘Do you have any relationship with other survivors?’, and ‘Why did you choose to
do your interviews in English?’. The majority of things my students wanted to learn pertained to
abstract notions of right and wrong, forgiveness and hatred, as well as remembering and forgetting:
‘How did you prevent your worst impulses from dictating your behavior as you struggled to
survive?’, ‘Do you think anyone, under certain conditions, is capable of the abject cruelty the Nazis
displayed during World War II, or is cruelty to that extent a quality one must be born with?’, ‘How
has your relationship with the Jewish faith changed over time?’, ‘Have you found happiness since
the liberation?’, ‘What is the best way for the horrors of the Holocaust to be taught (especially to
people who have no personal connection to these events)?’

Surprisingly, when asked to discuss the educational benefits and challenges that a project like DiT
introduces, students reflected on their hour-long interaction with Pinchas’s interactive biography
and unanimously agreed that they felt more emotionally connected to Pinchas while watching the
1993 and 1995 testimonies. While one of my students argued that traditional testimonies are easier
for him to process because of their inherently chronological logic, another student learned more
historical details about the Holocaust and appreciated how emotional Pinchas got during his 1990s

132
Stephen Smith, “Interactive Holocaust Biography: Literacy, Memory, and History in the Digital Age,” Digital
Approaches to Genocide Studies Conference. Los Angeles, USC, 23 October 2017.
76
testimonies. While engaging and fascinating, the DiT testimony lacked the emotional depth
necessary to fully empathize with Pinchas.

Image 13. Pinchas Gutter’s DiT the way my students saw him on screen.

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/05/15761-vox-media’s-code-conference-feature-new-dimensions-testimony-
and-“-last-goodbye”

Table 1. Survey: the educational benefits of Dimensions in Testimony (DiT)
QUESTIONS STUDENT 1 STUDENT 2
What are your
first impressions?
It’s a lot more realistic on the
large screen as opposed to the
computer. It was simple/easy
to ask questions.
My initial thoughts were that we were experiencing
the next frontier of education and learning, as even
just the sight of a virtual Pinchas sitting in front of
us – the technical difficulties notwithstanding – was
a powerful and spellbinding sight.
How does this
form of learning
about the
Holocaust differ
from the other
two testimonies
of Pinchas we
watched?
This testimony is a lot more
extensive and interactive.
One crucial distinction between DiT and the two
more conventional testimonies of Pinchas that we
watched is that unlike the conventional testimonies,
in which Pinchas recounted the story
chronologically, DiT is geared toward a more free-
flowing dialogue between Pinchas and the viewer.
Additionally, rather than exclusively speaking about
his personal experience, DiT allows Pinchas to
discuss his points of view regarding his story and the
Holocaust as a whole.
What are the
biggest
opportunities this
project opens for
Holocaust
education?
This project teaches those
who don’t know much about
the Holocaust to ask
clarifying questions.
I think the ability to interact with a virtual survivor
through DiT will confer upon Holocaust education
a poignancy and credibility that will endure long
past the last survivor has passed away.
77
What are the
biggest obstacles
or potential
problems this
project faces?
It makes me uncomfortable
that testimonies can be
paused.
I think one potential problem the project may
encounter is that as the technology becomes more
prevalent and less awe-inspiring for viewers, the
magnitude of the stories therein will be diminished.
Would you
recommend your
friends to interact
with DiT without
any prior
knowledge of the
Holocaust?
YES! Although, I may
recommend doing a brief
history lesson so they know
what questions to ask.
No, I wouldn’t recommend interaction with DiT to
someone completely lacking prior knowledge about
the Holocaust because I think at least a rudimentary
baseline of familiarity with the themes the survivors
discuss is required to appreciate what they’re
saying. I would, however, highly recommend DiT to
a friend who has some basic knowledge of the
Holocaust, but doesn’t fully comprehend its gravity
or significance.
Would you
recommend your
friends to interact
with DiT without
any prior
knowledge of
Pinchas Gutter’s
story?
YES! I think someone with prior knowledge of Pinchas
Gutter’s story – who, therefore, can ask specific
questions – is ideally suited for interaction with DiT.
However, I would still recommend it to friends
without a prior knowledge of Pinchas’ story, as they
can still gain valuable insights about human nature
and the Holocaust in general.
What was the
most memorable
part of this
experience?
The most memorable part
was hearing that he won’t
talk about sexual assault.
The most memorable part of this experience was
Pinchas’ answer to my question of whether humans
are good or evil. He did not pretend to be overly
idealistic, but it was amazing to see that Pinchas
retained some genuine, clear-eyed faith in humanity
after he was subject to the worst of human nature.
What was the
most difficult or
frustrating part of
this experience?
The most frustrating part of
this experience was having to
simplify our questions.
The most difficult part of the experience was re-
wording my questions in a manner that the AI
program could comprehend, which in a few cases
ultimately distorted their meaning.
Did you learn a
lot?
Yes, but I already knew a lot
about Pinchas’ experience.
Though I had extensive prior knowledge about
Pinchas’s story and the Holocaust as a whole, I
learned new subtleties and details through DiT that
enriched my pre-existing knowledge, such as the
story of his chance re-acquaintance with Jacob,
whom he first met in a concentration camp and had
long assumed to be dead, many decades later.
Did you feel
emotionally
connected to
Pinchas?
Yes, very. He reminds me of
my family.
Yes, after having studied Pinchas’s story so closely
this semester to the point that he is the Holocaust
survivor I’ve had the most indirect contact with, I
felt very emotionally connected to him.
And if so, did you
feel more
connected to him
via DiT or via
preciously seen
testimonies?
I felt more during the 1993
testimony. He explained a lot
more details and was much
more emotional during that
testimony.
I felt more connected to Pinchas via previously seen
testimonies. I think this is the case because my brain
is better at processing information chronologically,
which is how his story is presented in the more
conventional testimonies he recorded in the 1990s.
Source: compiled by the author in June 2018.
78
Zooming in on the importance of the spatiotemporal elements of Pinchas’s testimony about
Majdanek, students prompted the interactive biography of Pinchas to talk more about his memories
of Sabina. Replying to their question, Pinchas shared a slightly changed version of his 1993
answer:
“My memories of Sabina are several but most of them are from the ghetto in Warsaw. The
first one: she had very beautiful long blonde hair which my mother used to either have two
plaits or just one plait; and in the Warsaw Ghetto it was very difficult to keep your hair
clean because people didn't have shampoo. There's not very much soap and my mother
tried to cut her hair uh short, so it could be easier to keep clean but she wouldn't let her. So
I remember kind of almost like happenings that every few days my mother would wash her
hair with nafta
133
to kill the lice and the eggs of the lice which in Polish were called gnidy
and actually you could see them. They were like… they were like little… uh you know
little white things sticking to the hair. My mother would spend an hour or two trying to
clean her hair but she wouldn't allow her so that's a memory that actually sticks in my mind
very much so…”

The memory of Sabina’s blonde hair becomes a motive whose importance is further explained as
we ask Pinchas more pointed questions about the last time he saw Sabina. The memory of arrival
in Majdanek evokes notions of mourning and temporal experiences of loss. When asked to
remember the place where he saw his sister for the last time, Pinchas responds with two different
types of prerecorded answers:

“I never saw my mother after the image that I’ve got in my mind when Sabina comes, runs,
and hugs her and there my mother looking down upon her and then the women were made
to march or disappear and… and even if they didn't I just lost complete track of them and
that's the last image that I have of my mother and my sister. And of course, I have the image
of my mother but I only have the braid of my sister… And my father… the last image of
my father is: we were undressing naked before the selection in the barrack; he started
running with our hands up; we were running and for years I didn't know why they made us

133
Paraffin oil.
79
run with our hands up and then I learned that running with our hands up meant that they
could squeeze more and more people into the gas chamber. So, my father was running in
front of me and suddenly he disappeared and I was pushed to the right to those that were
going to live…”

“As soon as we arrived in the first concentration camp, which is Majdanek, they separated
my family. My… my sister went with my mother and I went with my father and since that
time when my sister hugged my mother all I can remember of her is her long… she had a
long braid a blonde braid and that's all I can remember about my sister… and I went with
my father, with the men. My father told me to say that I’m grown up that I’m eighteen
years old. I was eleven.”

In 2017, Sabina’s braid became the main element of the artwork for The Last Goodbye’s movie
poster heralding the intimacy with which Pinchas approached this interactive testimony recorded
during his last trip to Majdanek. The documentary that was co-produced by the USC Shoah
Foundation and directed by Ari Palitz and Gabo Arora,
134
who is behind the famous 2015 live-
action VR documentary Clouds Over Sidra,
135
allows individual members of the audience to
experience Gutter’s last trip to the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Majdanek
with Pinchas as their guide. While the head-mounted display enables viewers to see a 360-degrees
panorama of Majdanek, the room-scale design paradigm allows them to virtually walk and co-
inhabit the space of the camp alongside Pinchas. The 360-degree tracking system translates
viewers’ real life movements into their movements within the virtual world experienced on screen.
In other words, we can walk alongside Pinchas, we can move around the barracks, crematoria, or
walk up intimately close to tall cages filled with thousands of shoes of the victims that are

134
It should be noted that the movie was co-produced by Chris Milk, Patrick Milling Smith, and Samantha Storr. Milk
is one of the most prominent enthusiast and pioneers of the virtual reality technology who advocates that the medium
has a potential to the world.
135
Clouds Over Sidra was directed by Chris Milk and Gabo Arora; the movie was sponsored by the United Nations
and premiered at the World Economic Forum. For more information, see: Sasha Crawford-Holland, “Humanitarian
VR Documentary and Its Cinematic Myths,” Synoptique, Vol. 7, no. 1, pp: 19-31.
80
displayed in barrack 52. The spatial dimension of the experience allows the users to metaphorically
imprint themselves onto the landscape and get a sense that they have, indeed, visited Majdanek
and know what it feels like and what it looks like to be there. The goal of the creators was to
involve audience’s corporeal bodies in a mediated interaction with the virtualized space of the
camp that can create strong affective experiences. Bringing associations with Claude Lanzmann’s
methodology for filming some of the survivors’ testimonies in situ, Stephen Smith – the producer
of the movie – argues that filming in Majdanek allowed for a heightened spirit of fidelity. He
reveals that having Pinchas narrate his walk through the camp while being physically present in
Majdanek was of utmost importance to the whole team. They did not want to film him in front of
a green screen and they “agonized over how to accurately capture the sinister essence of the camp,
mindful that it has since been turned into a museum.”
136

Image 14. The Last Goodbye movie poster (2017).

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/05/15761-vox-media’s-code-conference-feature-new-dimensions-testimony-
and-“-last-goodbye”

136
Michelle Boston, “USC Shoah Foundation-backed film Last Goodbye offers haunting reminder of Holocaust
history,” USC News, https://news.usc.edu/147224/remembering-the-holocaust-film-the-last-goodbye-usc-shoah-
foundation/ (accessed, 10.14.2018).
81
Indeed, as Pinchas guides us from his hotel room into the camp and places where he saw his family
for the last time, we are confronted with a materiality of the camp’s remains: barracks, baths,
crematoria, and even gas chambers. The movie, which is sixteen minutes long, begins in Pinchas
Gutter’s hotel room. We see him moving around the room but he is not addressing us directly. We
hear his voiceover:

“Even though I have done this trip so many times, I am just afraid of doing it again. I am
subject to nightmares that start all over again. So, all my feelings are not to want to do it. I
am not young anymore, I am 80 years old and my greatest fear is that even when I come
back home I’m going to start suffering from the same nightmares over and over again. I
think you have to confront pain to be able to heal it. I come back to Majdanek, to this
camp, to convey the truth of what actually happened. Unless you have somebody that can
say, ‘I was here, I saw this, this was done to me,’ I don’t think that people will accept the
gospel truth.”

Next, an establishing shot captures an exterior of a train car. Yet, the face-to-face relation (rapport
de face à face) and familiarity of Pinchas’s grimaces of pain and hesitation that became a visual
anchor in all his previous testimonies, give way to Pinchas’s voice. In the next couple of scenes,
Pinchas is not visible; his voice guides us through the scripted storyline. As Gutter’s narrative
unfolds, we are shown images that illustrate memories rising from his memory. He says: “When
we were pushed in those wagons to take us to the east. We didn’t know where we were going. All
I remember screaming and the crying of children. And people were dying from suffocating.” This
shot cuts to one inside of a wooden train car that has become a symbol of WWII mass deportations.
This is the only interior shot that was not filmed in Majdanek but rather in a WWII-era train car
that is currently archived in Los Angeles.
137
Ignorant of this fact, we are free to walk around the
claustrophobic car, see the light shining through the cracks in the ceiling, and almost touch the

137
Stephen Smith interviewed by the author, Los Angeles, June 2018.
82
wooden wall boards. Here, as one of my students observed, the challenge is to reconcile one’s
excitement over participating in a VR experience that is both captivating and overwhelming with
one’s obligation to reflect the solemnity of the subject matter being discussed. Indeed, the two
types of methods of filming used in this movie convey an uncanny sense of hyper realism. While
some of the scenes were shot using a 360-degree camera that allows audiences to stand and look
around the perceived space, the rest of the scenes were shot using photogrammetry, a technique
that first captures tens of thousands of individual high-resolution photos to then digitally stitch
them together. In effect, the audience can wander around and explore the details of the virtualized
spaces.

The next shot brings us to the tragic climax of Pinchas’s testimonies: the moment when he saw
Sabina and his parents for the last time. We find ourselves standing outside of the barracks in a
small space fenced off with a barbed-wire. Pinchas is standing in front of us gesturing towards the
remains of the camp that stand as silent witnesses of his trauma. Unlike the memory of Abraham
Bomba triggered by Lanzmann in the infamous barbershop scene of Shoah, Pinchas’ recollection
stops at the same moment it did in all of his previous testimonies. He evokes the familiar narrative:

“And when we arrived to this place here, they were sorting man from women, women with
children, children on their own, women alone. And I lost sight of my sister Sabina. But I
was watching my mother all the time but suddenly she must have noticed my mother too.
So, she must have separated herself from the children. And she ran towards my mother.
And as she was running, I was watching the beautiful golden braid she had. She came to
my mother, and she hugged her. So, I was watching her back and I was watching again that
golden braid of Sabina. And that was the last time that I saw my sister Sabina. And my
parents. And not only that but I lost the sight of her, I cannot remember anything about
her except that golden braid.”

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Image 15. Pinchas Gutter stands at the exact location where he saw his sister for the last time.

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/05/15761-vox-media’s-code-conference-feature-new-dimensions-testimony-
and-“-last-goodbye”

The prevalent rationale behind educational uses of VR is its promise of immersion through
seemingly indexical moments of audience’s contact with places where historical events, like the
Holocaust, happened. Indeed, as Pinchas Gutter continues to guide us through the camp, we come
close to understanding what the interior of the buildings looks like. He shows us the inside of the
bath rooms with real showers where Nazis disinfected those prisoners who were meant to live. In
one of the most poignant, and unscripted, moments of the movie, Pinchas confesses: “When I came
out, I noticed these showers. And I said to myself now I am going to die because in the Warsaw
ghetto we knew the Germans, the Nazis tried to fool us that we were going to have showers but it
was gas that came out of the showers, not water. So, I decided immediately to say my prayers
because I knew I was going to die. So, I started saying my prayers…” For a long moment, we are
standing in front of Pinchas who is praying in Hebrew, frozen in a spatiotemporal axis of here and
then. “But,” he continues, “water came out of these showers.”

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Pinchas’s role in this movie ceases to be primarily the one of a witness. He becomes our guide
whose voiceover directs our engagement with spaces - the silent witnesses - of the Holocaust. In
the most controversial moment of the movie, Pinchas stands in the doorway to the sacred space of
the gas chamber that is closed-off from visitors. In Majdanek, a thigh-high threshold divides the
space of the corridor from the space of the gas chamber. We hear Gutter’s voice: “And now I am
standing here and looking at this place with such dread. Because I find it so difficult to imagine
the manner in which they died, choked to death. innocent, wonderful human beings.” Subsequent
silence fills the space around the viewer who is confronted with an ethical decision to either take
a transgressive step into the room of the gas chamber or wait outside with Pinchas. The creative
decision to film the inside of the gas chamber meant that the filmmakers mounted a 360-degree
camera on a long pole and pushed it inside above the threshold to film the entire space without
walking into it.
138
The Last Goodbye, therefore, offers a reimagined, or virtualized, experience of
visiting Majdanek, in which no spaces remain hidden from the eye of a camera.

Image 16. Pinchas Gutter showing one of the barracks in Majdanek in The Last Goodbye

Source: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2017/05/15761-vox-media’s-code-conference-feature-new-dimensions-testimony-
and-“-last-goodbye”

138
Lauren Carter interviewed by the author. Los Angeles, 12 June 2018. This way of filming evokes comparisons to
Werner Herzog’s similar use of capture in his filming of the paintings in the Chauvet Cave in Cave of Forgotten
Dreams (2010).
85
Reframing Levinas’ ethics that demand a radical form of responsibility for the Other around new
technologies of virtual reality, this project evokes notions of politics of empathy. One of the VR
pioneers and co-producers of The Last Goodbye, Chris Milk, has heralded VR’s potential to make
us more compassionate, empathetic, and connected. In effect, he argues, we will “become more
human.”
139
This technological deterministic assertion has been questioned by scholars, such as
Grant Bollmer, who argues that “technologies designed to foster empathy presume to acknowledge
the experience of another, but inherently cannot. The user of these technologies, instead of
acknowledging another’s experience, hastily absorbs the other’s experience into their own
experience. This leads to a position where your experience cannot be acknowledged as the basis
for any political or ethical claim until it can be expressed in a form that I can directly experience,
without clear mediation.”
140
He then proposes to eschew VR’s obsession with empathy production
and, instead, he introduces a notion of radical compassion, which akin to Levinas’s philosophy,
“refuses a form of ethics that negates the experience of another in favor of my own experience,
and refuses to reduce the other to myself in the name of reductive tropes of ‘connection’ or
‘association’.”
141

If, according to Levinas, it is the face of the Other that triggers our recognition of the Other’s
humanity and dignity, then experiential medium of VR obfuscates this process in a pronounced
way. The awareness of the solipsistic gap between us and Pinchas that permeated the audio-visual
and DiT testimony formats is pushed to the background and replaced by other, mostly emotional
and physical, sensations that the audience experiences. As we lose the spatial awareness of here

139
Chris Milk, “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine,” March 2015, TED video, 10:26,
https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine.
140
Grant Bollmer, “Empathy Machines,” Media International Australia 165.1 (2017): 64.
141
Bollmer 65.
86
and now, our movement in the virtualized spaces of Majdanek dictates what we observe and focus
on. While in previous testimonies Pinchas’s face challenges us to recognize his alterity and
demands our unidirectional responsibility for him and his memory, The Last Goodbye prioritizes
the phenomenological question of how we experience the world of the camp by putting us at the
center of the experience. Finally, the semi-scripted nature of The Last Goodbye problematizes the
testimonial value of Gutter’s narrative. In many ways, The Last Goodbye is not a VR testimony
but rather a documentary film governed by the logic and qualities of the observational mode.
Filmmakers allow us to experience the golden moments that spontaneously unfold before the
camera, like Pinchas’s spontaneous Hebrew prayer in the shower room.

Circling back to the perennial question of this dissertation, we ask again: does physical space still
matter in the digital age? On the one hand, The Last Goodbye recommits us to learning about the
actual places where the Holocaust happened. On the other hand, by virtualizing the space of the
camp, it created a false sense of immediacy that, in turn, negates audience’s real life desire to visit
one of the former camps. As one of my students argues, she would not want to travel to Majdanek
as she feels she “has seen enough.” She thinks, “it would be too hard to physically be there.” The
evolution of Holocaust witness testimonies from video to virtual reality analyzed in this chapter
illustrates how virtualization of places of memory unambiguously minimizes the status of real-
world places of memory, as well as the importance of visiting the actual places of commemoration
scattered throughout the Eastern European landscape. As we think across material artifacts such
as photographs, films, media posts, museum installations and virtual reality films for their
embodiments of memory and history, we become aware that they consist of radically different
ways of archiving memory. The next chapter continue this discussion by zooming in on social
87
media’s and digital technologies’ interventions in spaces of cultural sacrum. What is at stake in
Chapter 2 is turning places of memory into spaces of play.

Table 2. Survey: the educational benefits of VR, The Last Goodbye (2017)
QUESTIONS STUDENT 1 STUDENT 2
What are your
first impressions?
Wow, tragic but beautiul. I
got emotional when I saw the
crematorium right in my
face.
“The Last Goodbye” was my first experience with
virtual reality, so I was immediately struck by the
experience of having Pinchas by my side and I
immediately forgot where I was. From the outset, I
recognized this would be one of the most engrossing
education experiences I’ve ever encountered.
How does this
form of learning
about the
Holocaust differ
from the other
two testimonies
of Pinchas we
watched and the
DiT?
It’s much more
overwhelming and intense.
The testimonies we watched were more clinical and
straightforward in conveying first-hand accounts of
the Holcoaust, whereas “The Last Goodbye”
appealed to viewers’ emotions and utilized poignant
imagery and allusions to achieve its educational
objectives.
What are the
biggest
opportunities this
project opens for
Holocaust
education?
It forces people to really
immerse themselves and
visualize what happened.
Many people can’t afford to
visit Europe and see for
themselves.
One of the foremost merits of using virtual reality to
teach about the Holocaust is that it forces viewers to
be engaged participants. In my view, a major
hindrance to learning for students from elementary
school all the way up to college is fear that overtly
engaged learning and personal connection to the
curriculum will be regarded as socially undesirable
by their peers; the intimately individual-oriented
experience that VR-based projects like “The Last
Goodbye” offer will enhance Holocaust education
by eliminating such a hindrance.
What are the
biggest obstacles
or potential
problems this
project faces?
If people don’t know the
background of the Holocaust
and size of the mass killings,
then they may not have as
impactful of an experience.
An obstacle that VR-based projects like “The Last
Goodbye” face is that they are inherently
supplemental learning. Because education through
VR seems conducive to emotional appeals like those
contained in “The Last Goodbye,” rather than the
transmission of background information about the
Holocaust, students not adequately aware of the
project’s context will not gain many substantive
insights from the experience.
Would you
recommend your
friends to watch
The Last
Goodbye without
any prior
It depends. I would
recommend they see the VR
film if they do some
background research first.
As I mentioned in the previous answer, watching
“The Last Goodbye” would be a futile educational
endeavor for students without prior knowledge of
the Holocaust. For “The Last Goodbye” in
particular, knowledge about the historical
background and scope of the Holocaust are vital, as
88
knowledge of the
Holocaust?
those critical subjects are at most mentioned in
passing.
Would you
recommend your
friends to watch
The Last
Goodbye without
any prior
knowledge of
Pinchas Gutter’s
story?
Yes, I don’t think it’s
necessary to have prior
knowledge of Pinchas’ story.
I would recommend watching “The Last Goodbye”
to friends even if they lack any prior knowledge of
Pinchas Gutter’s story, as Pinchas recounts the most
important elements of his story in the production
and I would like to think that pre-existing familiarity
is not needed to empathize with Pinchas’s and his
family’s plight.
What was the
most memorable
part of this
experience?
The most memorable part
was feeling so close to all the
objects: shoes, shower heads,
ovens, etc.
The most memorable part of this experience was
watching Pinchas sing a song he wrote for his sister
in Hebrew as he stands next to the ashes of the
victims killed at Majdanek. This moment will stick
with me the most because it’s powerful to see what
a strong bond Pinchas still has with his sister over
seventy years after her death.
What was the
most difficult or
frustrating part of
this experience?
Nothing was too frustrating,
except maybe giving a trigger
warning would be beneficial.
The most difficult part of “The Last Goodbye” was
trying to reconcile my excitement over participating
in a VR experience for the first time with my
obligation to reflect the solemnity of the subject
matter being discussed. I should have abstained
from haphazardly walking around the room to
experience the feeling of VR for the first time in
order to completely focus on Pinchas’ narration.
Did you learn a
lot?
Yes, I learned a lot about the
inside of the camps.
In “The Last Goodbye,” I learned a lot about the
emotions associated with a survivor visiting the site
of his hardship and trauma, which was often
uncomfortable to experience but is ultimately very
valuable as a matter of reflection and human
inquiry.
Did you feel
emotionally
connected to
Pinchas?
Yes, I feel very connected to
him.
I felt the most emotionally connected to Pinchas yet
when watching ‘The Last Goodbye,” as the
experience enriched my prior knowledge of his
story by presenting visual depictions of the places
within Majdanek that Pinchas spoke about in his
oral testimonies.
And if so, did you
feel more
connected to him
via The Last
Goodbye or via
previously seen
testimonies?
I felt most connected to him
in The Last Goodbye.
I felt more connected to Pinchas via “The Last
Goodbye,” because the visual backdrop of
Majdanek added a layer of intimacy and attachment
that Dimensions in testimony and the previously
seen testimonies couldn’t.
Did The Last
Goodbye make
you want to visit
Majdanek or one
of the other
No, I feel like I’ve seen
enough. I think it would be
too hard to physically be
there.
Yes, ‘The Last Goodbye” made me want to visit
Majdanek or one of the other former camps, because
such a visit would entail the consummate real-world
supplement to what I’ve learned about the
Holocaust so far.
89
former
concentration and
extermination
camps?
Did The Last
Goodbye make
you feel like you
visited
Majdanek?
Yes, definitely. “The Last Goodbye” was such an engrossing
experience that at many points I forgot where I was
and felt like I was with Pinchas in Majdanek.
However, I’m sure that actually visiting Majdanek
would evoke an even greater level of solemnity and
reflection.
Source: compiled by the author in June 2018.

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Chapter 2
Technologies of Memory: Social Media, Augmented Reality, and Taboo in the Age of Digital
Wayfaring

“All reality is mixed reality.”

- Mark Hansen
142

Silent Witnesses

In 2009, the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne opened the exhibition “Vincent van Gogh:
Shoes,” a celebration of the painting that inspired philosophers from Martin Heidegger to Jacques
Derrida. The artwork is “the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant’s shoes, is in
truth,”
143
Heidegger argued four years before the outbreak of World War II. For him, the invitation
to investigate the essence of the object (shoes) and the truth about the owner (peasant women) is
integral to the act of representation. Van Gogh’s shoes stand testament to the liveness that once
filled them. Ten years after The Origin of the Work of Art was written, countless numbers of empty
shoes remained the only silent witnesses of the materiality of lives killed in the Shoah. Today, the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s archival collection includes more than 100,000 historical objects
as well as 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, and almost 90 lbs. of reading glasses. If stacked in a
pile, the documents kept at the museum would go 820 feet high.

The archives of survivors’ memories recorded and stored by the USC Shoah Foundation
[introduced in Chapter 1] consist of individual memories that have become a repository of cultural
memory and influence. Just like the process of mediation discussed in Chapter 1 elevates the status
of memory from individual to collective, the act of archiving and displaying personal objects that

142
Mark B.N. Hansen, Bodies in Code (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6.
143
Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art (1934), p. 664.
91
once belonged to Holocaust victims shifts the scale from individual to collective trauma. These
objects, just like videos, holograms, or virtual reality films, are technologies of remembering.
Marita Sturken has written about the process of cultural memory production via objects, images,
and representations. “These are technologies of memory, not vessels of memory in which memory
passively resides so much as objects through which memories are shared, produced and given
meaning,”
144
she argued at a time when memorial culture resurged in the United States thanks to
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt. Yet, the objects stored at Auschwitz-
Birkenau, an institution that this chapter will focus on, are part of a larger body of memory: the
camp itself.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum supervises nearly 500 acres of the grounds, 155 buildings,
and 300 ruins, which include the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. One of the criteria
provided by UNESCO for the Museum’s inclusion in the World Heritage List in 1979 was that the
“monument (...) bears irrefutable evidence to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against
humanity.”
145
Here, again, Sturken’s discussion on technologies of memory becomes an
instructive theoretical principle. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s notion that technologies are
social practices implicated in power dynamics, Sturken expands her definition of memory objects.
“The embodiment of memory (and its perceived location in objects that act as substitutes for the
body) is an active process with which subjects engage in relation to social institutions and
practices. (…) The memorial is perhaps the most traditional kind of memory object or
technology.”
146
The authenticity of the remains of the Nazi camps and the indexical imprint of

144
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.
University of California Press, 1997: 9.
145
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/31
146
Ibid., p. 10
92
those who were killed there, like the ashes stored in the camp’s soil or nail scratches on the ceilings
of the gas chambers, point to the fact that Auschwitz-Birkenau is not only ground zero for all
Holocaust memory but also an embodiment of memory where networks of memory practices
intersect. With its institutional capital and internal politics of commemoration, the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Museum and Memorial is also a technology of memory. Therefore, in the spirit of
keeping the main through lines of this dissertation and anticipating the discussion of landscapes of
memory in Chapter 3, this chapter turns to the discussion of what happens when a lieu de
mémoire
147
intersects with digital spaces of memory of social media and augmented reality.

In his attempt to problematize the notion of spaces of memory, Thomas Lahusen invites us to
consider the Janus-faced nature of the space-place dynamic by applying Pierre Nora’s terminology
of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) and milieux de memoire (environments of memory) to the
study of collective memory.
148
While the former designates material or non-material entities
imbued with symbolic and/or historical significance by a collective (e.g. the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’
gate; Auschwitz-Birkenau; Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog; or the Holocaust as an event), the latter
describes the site of “everyday habits, traditions, and social interactions”; it is an open-ended
process of memory building (e.g. the way we behave at Holocaust memorial sites; the way we
interact with the survivors; the way we teach cinematic representations of the Shoah; or the way
we self-identify against the Holocaust: as Jews, gentiles, Germans, Israelis, etc.). This distinction
allows us to differentiate between specific sites where memory settles and the overarching
processes that carry, evolve and change the collective discourse on memory productions (on both
national and transnational levels). These processes, in turn, become an objective articulation of an

147
Drawing from Pierre Nora’s definition of sites of memory
148
Lahusen 2006, p.736.
93
aggregate of subjective social relations or perspectives on distinct sites of memory. In other words,
we can analyse an objective (often transnational) discourse of Holocaust memory at large by
zooming in on particular representations of that memory that imbue it with value (like selfies taken
at former concentration camps). These mediated representations of memory become aesthetically,
ethically, epistemologically and ontologically charged “mnemonic aids and remembering
devices.”
149

This chapter anchors the discussion of different ways social media and augmented reality apps
mediate our encounters with places of commemoration by focusing on two case studies: ubiquitous
selfies from Auschwitz and the summer 2016 phenomenon of PokemonGo! in Auschwitz.
150
The
direction in which the memory of the Holocaust is moving and the ubiquity of social media posts
and AR applications forces institutions like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to valorise, react,
and engage with new media content. Therefore, these two case studies encapsulate questions of
individual and institutional socio-historical agency in the curatorship of 21
st
-century Holocaust
memory, as well as discussions on guardianship and claims to ownership of memory in the digital
age. Contending that the Museum asserts itself as an increasingly visible actor in the transnational
new media Holocaust discourse, this chapter traces the history of the Museum’s new media
presence and engagement.

Social Media Memory
In the months preceding the 70
th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, amid the

149
Garde-Hansen 2011, p. vii-viii.
150
Ideas presented in this chapter were further developed in my article “Selfies from Auschwitz: Rethinking the
Relationship Between Spaces of Memory and Places of Commemoration in the Digital Age.”
94
multitudinous voices concerned with the future of the memory of the Holocaust in the world
without survivors or witnesses, several popular media outlets decried social media users for
employing Holocaust-related visual content as affective devices of transgression and insensitivity.
First, a June 2014 article in The New Yorker drew critical attention to the Facebook page With My
Besties in Auschwitz, set up and curated by an anonymous woman, which gleaned images of Israeli
youth smiling and posing in front of crematoria and the Arbeit Macht Frei gate during educational
trips to former Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In an authorial gesture initially
designed as a jest for her friends, the curator of With My Besties in Auschwitz captioned photos
found on the internet in a caustic and sarcastic manner that publicly shamed what she came to view
as the “disturbing phenomenon” of taking selfies in places of Shoah remembrance.
151
Three weeks
later, numerous websites picked up a story first published by the New York Post about a high
school graduate from Alabama, whose smiling selfie taken in front of barracks in Auschwitz
captioned: “Selfie in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp 😊”.
152
The post went viral on Twitter
and became one of the trending topics on 20 July 2014. As a young woman defended her choice
to take and publicly post her ‘Auschwitz selfie’ on Twitter as a way of commemorating the
memory of her father who taught her about the Holocaust right before he died in 2013, thousands
of people took to Twitter to attack what they perceived as a flagrant example of digital era
narcissism.

151
Margalit, 2014.
152
Perez, 2014.
95

Image 17. Screengrab of the New York Post article on the first highly publicized “Auschwitz selfie”.

Source: www.nypost.com (accessed 10 October 2017).

At the time of this writing, there is one more recent example of visual social media inviting us to
think critically about material, social, and virtual spaces of Holocaust commemoration in the
digital age: the controversial 2017 art project ‘Yolocaust’ (combination of a word ‘Holocaust’ with
a popular internet acronym ‘yolo’ that means ‘you only live once’) by Israeli-German artist Shahak
Shapira, which stigmatized contemporary digital media culture and the proliferation of selfies
taken at the Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In a web-based artistic
intervention, Shapira juxtaposed original images of the dead bodies of the victims of the Holocaust
with contemporary selfies and other photographs taken at the Berlin memorial. Visitors to
www.yolocaust.de hovered over recent images of selfie-takers (that were culled by Shapira from
Twitter, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr) to witness the backgrounds instantly change from the
Memorial to original imagery taken at Nazi German extermination camps. This form of
96
communicating one’s contempt for selfie-takers’ actions provoked a reaction of shock, anger and
disgust with both authors of original social media posts, as well as with Shapira’s methodology.
In the aftermath of Shapira’s project’s short-lived online presence
153
, a lot of people shamed by
Shapira took ‘Holocaust selfies’ down from their social media profiles and wrote to Shapira
apologizing for their insensitivity. These comments are still available on Shapira’s website. This
conscious artistic treatment of the problem of selfie-taking in places of commemoration and sites
of collective trauma is not only in dialogue with the other two examples mentioned above, but it
also allows us to consider new theoretical perspectives on digital visual culture practices of Web
2.0 in the context of individual and communal online memory and trauma processing.

Image 18. One of the images created by Shapira, alongside the original selfie.

Source: www.yolocaust.de (accessed 19 January 2017). These images are no longer accessible.

Traditionally, audio-visual lieux de memoir (sites of memory) of the Holocaust have been limited

153
The project was taken down after just one week.

97
to highly curated processes of memory production. That included the top-down process of writing
Holocaust discourse via official, institutionalized and structured educational institutions and
memory archives (like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, Yad-Vashem, among others), as well as through curated and externally funded cinematic
and televisual representations of the Holocaust. (The linkages between official political memory
discourse, state funding and filmic representations of history are clearly more pronounced in
Europe than in the United States). A few exceptions included experimental and avant-garde films,
photo albums and gallery installations that underscored the limits of trauma representation by
“implicitly, and often explicitly” taking up “the question that is at the centre of postmodern
historiographic concerns: the recognition that there are historical events that by their nature defy
representability but nevertheless play an important part in the ways we understand the present.”
3

These films
154
, however, had a limited distribution and reach, and did not decisively shape national
and transnational processes of Holocaust memory production.

Now, new media increasingly impact the way the memory of the Holocaust is represented,
disseminated, and consumed by transnational audiences. Contemporary Shoah online discourse
consists of various bodies of intersecting mediated texts: social media (Twitter, Instagram, and
Facebook); websites
155
, blogs, and online archives
156
; as well as video-sharing services that

154
Skoller 2005: xvi. Here, Skoller discusses the following films: Signal-Germany on the Air (dir. Ernie Gehr, 1982-
1985), The March (dir. Abraham Ravett, 1999), Un vivant qui passe (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1999), as well as
Cooperation of Parts (dir. Daniel Eisenberg, 1987) and Persistence (dir. Daniel Eisenberg, 1997).
155
‘The Holocaust Geographies Collaborative’ is one of the examples of innovative Holocaust research native to Web
2.0. It is an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional collaborative research project that uses geography and GIScience to
re-examine places and spaces of the Holocaust. For more information, see: Holocaust Geographies Collaborative,
accessed December 10, 2017, https://holocaustgeographies.geo.txstate.edu and
156
For a detailed account of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive
®
, see: Michaelis, Andree (2016)
‘Bridging the Gap Between Subjectivity And Historical Generalization In Shoah Video Testimonies: The Work Of
Interpretation And Two German Case Studies’ Holocaust Studies: A Journal Of Culture & History 22.4: 398-416;
Shandler, Jeffrey (2017) Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. Palo
98
circulate user-generated content (e.g. YouTube). Simultaneously, interactive, augmented reality, or
virtual reality technologies mediate the past in previously unimaginable ways. Chapter 1 of this
dissertation provides us with two pertinent examples: the USC Shoah Foundation’s New
Dimensions in Testimony
157
project and the 2017 Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz’s The Last Goodbye,
the first immersive virtual reality film/testimony about the Holocaust that takes viewers on a walk
through the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Majdanek. As survivors continue to shrink
in number, the remembering of the Holocaust continues to be shaped by the tension between old
and new ways of narrativizing and animating history.

Additionally, as new media are not static, memory production in the digital age continues to
evolve. While Web 2.0 from the beginning allowed for decentralized, democratized, and – often –
text-heavy mediation of Holocaust memory via websites and blogs, the more recent examples of
online memory mediation present an increasingly image-centred content. These visual mediations
simultaneously operate on different levels: local and global, private and public, national and
transnational, searchable and not searchable. Similarly, the role of authorial agency in its manifest
relation to new technologies constantly oscillates between individual online engagements and
institutionally curated projects. Eschewing the rigid ‘pre-digital institutional authority’ vs. ‘digital
online freedom’ rigid binary, I contend that changes in contemporary Holocaust memory
mediation are a moment through which the rules of Holocaust education and memory curation can
be re-theorized and historicized. As Joanne Garde-Hansen argues, there has always existed tension

Alto: Stanford University Press; Shandler, Jeffrey (2013) ‘Survivors on Schindler’s List’ American Literature 85.4;
Shenker, Noah (2016) ‘Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide
Testimonies’ History and Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring): 141-175.
157
See: “New Dimensions in Testimony,” accessed October 10, 2017, https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust/ndt
99
between democracy and control when media were concerned.
158
Indeed, the idea that technologies
create new forms of sociality is not a new one. Now, however, “new media technologies of digital
and online media are thought to be key players in [the] process of freeing information and
knowledge.”
159
By zooming in on the case study of selfies taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the first
part of this chapter begins to investigate the potentialities and limitations of a seemingly
democratized Holocaust discourse in the digital age that operates at the nexus of individual and
institutional entanglements between on- and offline memory practices.

Responding to a contemporary new media landscape that has borne witness to a paradigm shift in
the representation and curatorship of Holocaust memory, the case study of selfies from Auschwitz
allows me to investigate the direction in which the Shoah discourse is currently moving and ask
whether new mediated practices, which have been processing the memory of the Holocaust in the
private and public spheres since the rise of Web 2.0, enrich or increasingly flatten our
understanding of the collective traumatic past. While the range of this topic is broad, I narrow the
scope by anchoring this analysis in a specific relationship that the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum
developed with social media users who post Holocaust-related visual content on their public
Instagram profiles. To demonstrate the relationship between places of commemoration (the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum) and more abstract spaces of Holocaust memory (social media
Holocaust discourse), I investigate the history of the Museum’s social media presence, its role in
the process of Instagram curatorship and censorship, as well as its attitude towards ‘selfies from
Auschwitz’ in the context of a broad epistemological, aesthetic and ethical shift in the way we
approach taboos of Holocaust representation.

158
Garde-Hansen, p.70.
159
ibid.
100
The ubiquity of selfies taken, geotagged in Auschwitz-Birkenau, tagged with #Auschwitz,
#AuschwitzBirkenau, #Birkenau and publicly posted online has encouraged the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Memorial and Museum to establish informal yet comprehensive rules of online practices
for the institution’s social media presence. Therefore, this case study resonates in productive ways
with questions of individual and institutional socio-historical agency in the curatorship of 21
st

century Holocaust memory, as well as with discussions on guardianship and claims to ownership
of memory in the national and transnational context that are further developed in Chapter 3.

Greetings and Smiles from Auschwitz

The ‘spatial turn’ of the late 20
th
century has encouraged scholars in the humanities and social
sciences to regard space as a dense entity that is actively produced.
160
Spatial dimensions of
colonialism, nationalism and imperialism have invited studies of space as a set of social and power
practices. More recently, the rise of digital media and the intensification of globalization have
shifted scholars’ attention towards virtual and technologized spaces.
161
Considerations of the ways
in which space informs culture (and its texts), politics and our reading of history can be
summarized in one broad question: how does space function heuristically and what do we learn
about ourselves based on our relationship to different spaces and places? By drawing from studies
on place and space, we begin to unpack theoretical potentials of contemporary landscapes of
Holocaust memory.

160
Some of the examples include: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Places,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986); Andres Huyssen,
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); Henri
Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley, 1992); Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (June
1991); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso
Press, 1989).
161
Some of the examples include: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994);
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Press, 2009); Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Joanne Garde-Hansen, Media
and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
101
Stepping back, we should address the problem of differentiation between geography and history.
Building from Edward Soja’s polemic against the long-standing distinction between history and
geography, I view his critical assertion of history as a temporal and spatialized discipline as a
useful theoretical tool.
162
Soja’s intervention forces us to examine how seemingly innocuous space
consists of power relations. It also gestures towards an examination of how these power relations
are further inscribed into specific sites of memory. This notion seems to respond to late 20
th
century
scepticism towards historical meta-narratives described by Jean–François Lyotard and then
articulated in the context of different forms of mediated historical ‘writing’ by Hayden White.
However, in the digital age, sites of memory viewed as specific points where time and space
intersect cease to be the exclusive domain of public authorities, institutions or other power groups;
they become participants in the layered process of collective memory building. Nowhere is this
shift more visible than in the process of building new types of decentralized archival regimes of
memory that is currently happening online. Selfies from Auschwitz are one of the many examples
in which contemporary public visual discourse counters the one previously established by
Holocaust-related educational institutions.

The problem of marking one’s presence in specific places of commemoration is not, however, a
new and uniquely digitally-driven phenomenon. The 19
th
century witnessed the rise of an extensive
industry of travel images: the travel genre was one of the most popular and developed genres in
early film and postcards became a major form of travel imagery. The latter marked the evidence
of travel; they functioned not only as souvenirs, but as the journey’s goal and purpose. Seemingly,
therefore, it should come as no surprise that post World War II tourists traveling through Poland

162
Soja, 1989
102
sent postcards upon visiting the small Polish town of Oświęcim and the remains of the Nazi
extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau located within the town’s limits. This phenomenon is
well documented by Polish anthropologist and visual artist, Paweł Szypulski, whose 2015 photo
album Greetings from Auschwitz provides a comprehensive survey of analogue predecessors to
Instagram selfies geotagged at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
163
Indeed, it could be argued that before the
era of ubiquitous digital mobile photography, postcards as acts of marking one’s presence at a
specific location and sharing information about it via sent mail responded to the same documenting
impulse that many have situated in the heart of modernity and photography, in general. Postcards
appropriated the visited landscapes and places and marked them as owned. They provided images
for people without cameras and, while they did not establish any indexical relationship between
tourists and their surroundings, they allowed travellers to objectify the places they visited.

Almost all the postcards featured in Szypulski’s collection had been sent and postmarked. Most of
them feature friendly greetings addressed to the sender’s family members, friends, or colleagues.
A brief “Greetings from Oświęcim! PS. Everything’s great. The only things missing are you and
the sun!”
164
accompanied by a grim panoramic photograph of Auschwitz concentration camp with
the crematoria chimney, and the infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate is one of the many examples
of postcards curated by Szypulski for his artistic project. Another card features an image of the so-
called ‘Death Block’ - brick barrack number eleven that became synonymous with cruel
punishments, torture, and starvation that its prisoners were subjected to. This particular photo

163
It should be noted that there is more to Szypulski’s artistic project that providing a collection of postcards sent from
Auschwitz. In an attempt to extend the discussion on representability of trauma, he juxtaposes the collection of
postcards from Auschwitz with one of the photos taken by members of the Sonderkommando analyzed by Georges
Didi-Huberman in Images In Spite of All.
164
“Pozdrowienia z Oświęcimia” PS. “Wszystko jest w porządku, brak tylko Ciebie i słońca”.
103
comes with a bizarrely worded inscription that could be the sender’s attempt at gallows humour:
“Sending you a transport of warm wishes from Oświęcim! With a soft noise of the wind in the
background - sister Cześka”
165
. While the oldest postcard featured in Szypulski’s album was issued
and sent in 1946 shortly after the liberation, similar postcards featuring panoramas of the Memorial
Site are still available for purchase. One could venture a guess that the rise of photography and
consecutive proliferation of mobile cameras have impacted the sales of these forms of travel
souvenirs. What has not changed is the impulse to produce and share visual content that celebrates
one’s mobility and ability to tag places and spaces.

Image 19. Postcards collected by Paweł Szypulski

Source: Paweł Szypulski

As the analogue world unwound, photos and - most recently - selfies from Auschwitz replaced
postcards from Auschwitz. Defining this documentary impulse as central to modernity, Tom
Gunning writes that “in the modern era the very concept of travel becomes intricately bound up
with the production of images. The image becomes our way of structuring a journey and even
provides a substitute for it. Travel becomes a means of appropriating the world through images
166
”.

165
“Transport gorących pozdrowień z Oświęcimia z szumem letniego wiatru zasyła siostra Cześka”.
166
Gunning 2006, p.27
104
Susan Sontag also calls upon travel photography as an opportunity to highlight a discussion of
photographing as a way of consuming and objectifying our surroundings. She remarks that as a
“way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting
experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is
soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.
Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable
that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.”
167
However, selfies from
Auschwitz mark a new stage in the way people process visits to sites of commemoration.

Many have linked the ubiquity of selfies in places of commemoration and remembrance to the rise
of the genre of dark tourism that became prominent in 1990s, flourished in 2000s and gained more
visibility with the rise of Instagram and other social media in recent years.
168
One of the online
archives of dark tourism photos that researchers quote when analysing this phenomenon is the
Tumblr account Selfies at Serious Places, which consists of a repository of selfies taken at funeral
homes, places of commemoration, cemeteries, etc. Some scholars present a case for technological
determinism arguing that social media and new technologies have the power to alter people’s
behavior
169
and that digital photography and social media have inspired people to fight for their

167
Sontag 1977, p.10
168
See: Stone P., Sharpley R. (2008) ‘Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective’ Annals Of Tourism
Research 35(2): 574–595; Hodalska, Magdalena (2015) ‘Selfies At Horror Sites: Dark Tourism, Ghoulish Souvenirs
And Digital Narcissism’ Researchgate
www.Researchgate.Net/Publication/310480879_Magdalena_Hodalska_Selfies_At_Horror_Sites_Dark_Tourism_Gh
oulish_Souvenirs_And_Digital_Narcissism (09.09.2017)
169
For a discussion of socio-technical agency, technological determinism, and social constructivism, see: Winner, L.
(1993) ‘Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology’
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 18(3), 362-378; Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J., & Foot, K.A. (eds.) (2014)
Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
105
followers’ attention at the expense of breaking the rules of decorum. Magdalena Hodalska finds
linkages between the internet environment that activates narcissistic tendencies of social media
users and the emotional detachment that further permits taking selfies at “horror sites”. In a
seemingly moralizing gesture, she argues that “tactless and goofy selfies (…) are a signal of a
meaningful shift and a proof of empathy decline, together with the growth of digital narcissism,
which combined with other factors may lead to a significant cultural change.”
170

Image 20. Screengrab of Selfies at Serious Places Tumblr page.

Source: http://selfiesatseriousplaces.tumblr.com (accessed 20 September 2017).

Others, like Mark Nuns, argue that selfie taking, just like many other technologically-conditioned
phenomena, are socially, economically and culturally situated. Nunes refuses to condemn the
phenomenon and explores it as a new aspect of contemporary digital citizenship. These “out-of-

170
Hodalska, 2015
106
place selfies” constitute a negotiation between two overlapping frames: “one embodied and
physically situated, and the other circulating within an affective imagined community. This act of
‘self-witnessing’ serves as a form of parasocial civic engagement that attempts to communicate
one’s own place within interpenetrating social spaces, no matter how gawking or disengaged they
may appear at first analysis.”
171
The question that seems to be in the heart of most of the recent
research on selfie taking in places of death is the one of sociotechnical agency. Similarly, the case
study of selfies taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau resonates with questions of individual and
institutional socio-historical agency in curatorship of 21
st
century Holocaust memory. The
remaining part of this section considers one of the ways cultural and historical trauma of the
Holocaust is processed in the framework of a relationship between two actors: a collective of
Instagram users and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. While considerations of epistemological,
ontological, and aesthetic differences between selfies and earlier forms of imprinting oneself onto
a visited landscape are vitally important to add to the body of scholarly work that explores how
new media gives expression to ‘the self’, the remaining part of this chapter investigates how social
media posts, their various spatial and temporal entanglements, and the affects they can produce
influence the institutional discourse of Holocaust remembrance.

#AuschwitzBirkenau

Within the context of post-World War II Eastern European history, few words carry as much weight
as Auschwitz. After the war, it quickly became a symbol of the Holocaust and genocide in general.
However, the memory of other places of the Shoah also existed in the collective memory of
(especially) Eastern Europeans who inhabited what Martin Pollack calls, contaminated

171
Nunes 2017, p.109
107
landscapes.
172
Bełżec, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Chełmno, Dachau, Majdanek, Mauthausen-
Gusen, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Sobibór, Stutthof, Theresienstadt, Treblinka and others are
the words inscribed in the Eastern European collective memory by the generation that is now
fading into history. However, it is ‘Auschwitz’ that became a global symbol of the Shoah, as well
as a fixed literal and metaphorical centre of all Holocaust memory productions. Similarly, the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum established in 1947 is the most frequently visited
former Nazi concentration camp in Europe.

Table 3.
Name of the Memorial Number of visitors per year Date when it was established
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Memorial and Museum
c. 2,000,000 1947
Dachau Concentration Camp
Memorial Site
c. 800,000 1965
Buchenwald c. 500,000 1958
Sachsenhausen Memorial and
Museum
c. 300,000 1961
Bergen-Belsen Memorial c. 300,000 1952
Mauthausen Memorial c. 190,000 1949
Majdanek State Museum c. 120,000 November 1944 (first
museum commemorating
victims of WW II)
Treblinka Memorial and
Museum
c. 60,000 1964
Gross-Rosen Museum in
Rogoźnica
c. 40,000 1953
Bełżec Museum and
Memorial Site
c. 30,000 2004 (as a branch of the
Majdanek State Museum)
Sobibór, the Museum of the
Former Death Camp
c. 18,000 1965
Kulmhof/ Chełmno c. 15,000 1990
Data obtained on 14 October 2017. Source: compiled by the author.

172
See: Martin Pollack, Kontamienierte Landschaften (Residenz Verlag, 2014).
108
The new media revolution of the 21st century has created a friction between the well-established
tradition of institutional curatorship of the Holocaust memory and online Holocaust discourses.
While the discussion of old media representations of the Holocaust is further discussed in Chapter
3, it should be noted here that cinema and television had played a crucial role in the production
and promulgation of Holocaust education in the form of narrative of documentary
representations.
173
Until recently, it was precisely that productive cooperation and tension between
centres of Holocaust education and old media that constituted the main axis of Holocaust memory
discourse. Now, as the last witnesses are dying and the memory of the Holocaust increasingly
depends on commemoration and re-telling of the story for new generations, Holocaust-related
educational institutions search for innovative ways to bridge the past with the present.
174
While
they continue to grapple with problems of trauma representation and securing remembrance,
several new avenues of enquiry employing new communication technologies have come to the
fore. As film persists in engaging with a plethora of Holocaust themes, ethical considerations
175
,

173
Between 1945 and 1989, Polish (and other Eastern European) cinematic productions as forms of national and state-
subsidized artistic expression became intrinsically linked to Moscow’s historical interpretation of WWII and the
Holocaust. While some Polish filmmakers addressed the problem of Nazi terror and concentration camps, the
relationship between the official Soviet discourse and the memory of Shoah remained problematic. For both
geopolitical and ideological reasons, Soviet propaganda displayed forms of popular anti-Semitism in periodic swings
throughout the Cold War. These characterizations trickled down into public discourses of Eastern European satellite
states and added to their problematic attitude towards the Jews. The end of the Cold War gave voice to previously
silenced topics in Eastern European countries, significantly enriching Holocaust discourse over the past twenty years.
As both the Soviet Union and satellite states were engaged in falsification of memory and manipulation of cultural
and cinematic production, the post-1989 period became a fertile ground for the celebration of counter-memory. Since
1989, such efforts have been significantly more pronounced in Eastern Europe than they have been in Russia.
Moreover, the urgency of discussing the truth about Eastern Europeans and their pre-war Jewish neighbors became
more pressing as the last witnesses of that time were dying. However, the most recent shift in the European political
climate and the rise of nationalisms and anti-European sentiment may herald a reversal of this tendency to openly
discuss the triangular relationship between victims-witnesses-perpetrators in Eastern Europe.
174
By emphasizing the relationship between personal and collective histories, the USC Shoah Foundation has
championed new technologies and digital media literacy in all their commemoration projects. See: Shandler, Jeffrey
(2017) Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age. Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices, Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press.
175
From Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), through Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), to Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List (1994) and Ferne Pearlstein’s 2017 documentary on the limits of humor entitled The Last Laugh.
109
and modes of representation
176
, the emergence of social media has increased the ubiquity of the
Holocaust discourse in contemporary media.

Undeniably, new media have created new spaces for people to communicate, build identity, and
discuss the memory of the Holocaust across the globe. Yet, the seemingly open and democratized
online discussion of the Holocaust does not necessarily reflect the complexity and nuances of
Holocaust memory. By analysing the number of Instagram hashtags associated with the three most
often visited former Nazi concentration camps, which accompany visual content posted on users’
public profiles, we begin to see that Auschwitz-Birkenau holds the first place in this collective
visual regime of digital memory. At the time of this writing, the total number of public tags
177

associated with Auschwitz-Birkenau and used since the launch of Instagram in October 2010
reached 368,317. If we add misspelled hashtags (e.g. #Aushwitzbirkenau), the number goes up to
370,734 tags. This does not mean that 370,734 people posted public posts in which they discussed
or condemned the Holocaust, but it does indicate that a significant number of Instagram users use
this Holocaust-related tag more often than almost any other Holocaust-related keyword. While
these numbers seem trivial compared to the most popular hashtags on Instagram (#love:
1,169,407,552; #picoftheday: 345,894,512; #selfie: 320,054,390), they are impressive when
juxtaposed with #holocaust that has been used in 463,746 Instagram public posts. Predictably,
Instagram users who tag their visual content with Holocaust-related hashtags, treat Auschwitz as

176
From the most recent Auschwitz-focused films Denial (2016) and Son of Saul (2015) through Aftermath (2012)
that tackles the problem of post-WWII Eastern European collective memory to, finally, Polish documentaries and
avant-garde visual media installations that discuss - among others - the problem of previously silenced topics of
Eastern European anti-Semitism.
177
It is hard to estimate the total number of private posts using these hashtags; similarly, there is no actual public data
on the total number of private vs. public Instagram profiles; however, the 2016 study by Optical Cortex, a digital
product agency, examined a sample of 21,239 Instagram users and learned that 28 percent of these users had their
profiles set to private.

110
a proxy term for all the Shoah.

Table 4.
Name of the
Memorial
#hashtag Number
of
public
posts
Total
Buchenwald
Memorial
8,639
#buchenwald 7,940
#buchenwaldconcentrationcamp 384
#buchenwaldmemorial 295
#buchenwaldkonzentrationlager 15
#buchenwaldmonument 2
#buchenwaldcamp 3
Dachau
Memorial
Site
75,785
#dachau 65,875
#dachauconcentrationcampmemorial 133
#dachauconcentrationcampmemorialsite 579
#dachauconcentrationcamp 8,393
#dachaumemorial 582
#dachaucamp 169
#dachau_concentration_camp 16
#dachaukonzentrationslager 38
Auschwitz-
Birkenau
368,31
7
#auschwitz 247,455
#birkenau 60,271
#auschwitzbirkenau 35,360
#auschwitzi 333
#auschwitzmemorial 6,146
#auschwitz2 652
#auschwitz1 922
#birkenaucamp 1,747
#birkenauconcentrationcamp 892
#auschwitzbirkenaugermannaziconcentrationandextermi
nationcamp
23
#auschwitzcamp 635
#auschwitzstudygroup 1,533
#auschwitz70 2,537
#auschwitzmuseum 683
#auschwitzsurvivor 318
111
#auschwitztour 256
#auschwitzconcentrationcamp 5,352
#auschwitzmemorialmuseum 767
#auschwitzii 702
#auschwitziibirkenau 576
#auschwitzliberation 261
#auschwitz_birkenau 473
#auschwitz2016 102
#auschwitzbirkenauconcentrationcamp 52
#auschwitz2015 30
#auschwitz2017 30
#auschwitzgate 36
#auschwitz2014 43
#auschwitzguide 63
#auschwitzhands 27
#auschwitzpoland 27
#auschwitz2013 13
_________ _________________________________________ _____ _____
#auschwitzbikernau 22
#aushwitzbirkenau 2,369
#auschwitzberkinau 26
2,417
Data obtained on 14 October 2017. Source: www.instagram.com.

It is estimated that over 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram every day and over
40 billion photos and videos have been shared on Instagram since its launch in 2010. A qualitative
search of the Instagram hashtags mentioned above reveals an array of content ranging from serious
photos that document the remains of the extermination camp and selfies taken in from of the
barracks to Holocaust-themed memes with additional captions like #auschwitzmemes. Images that
are specifically geotagged at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Memorial seem to be
more thematically consistent. For the purpose of this study, I analysed 1000 Instagram images
geotagged at “Auschwitz Memorial/Muzeum Auschwitz”, as well as 897 images posted by the
112
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum during the period between December 2, 2012
178
and October 15,
2017.
179
In order to protect the privacy of Instagram users who post ‘Instagram selfies’ online, I
refrain from showing original Instagram posts and images in this paper.
180
I will now briefly
describe two types of the most frequently posted content.

First, there are photographs that document the place; the memorial, the museum. These are meant
to capture the artefacts that testify to the place’s authenticity: the infamous gate, Birkenau train
tracks and the place of the former ramp, the vast grounds. They also archive the materiality of the
place most susceptible and vulnerable to the passage of time: victims’ shoes, hair, belongings,
wooden barracks, ruins of gas chambers and crematoria. On the affective level, these
documentations of material spaces are in relation to personal pasts of the victims, as well as shared
emotions evoked by hashtags: #neverforget; #holocaust, #holocausteducation. Their content seems
to be serving a dual -educational and testimonial - purpose. In both cases, authors of the photos
seem to be attesting to their respectful discomfort with the scale and horror of the place. Drawing
from Garde-Hansen’s discussion on digital memory, I can call these images “visual anchors that
manifest [their] temporary attachment to a particular place.”
181
While they convey a sense of
intimacy and one-to-one engagement, they inevitably get pushed down on one’s Instagram feed

178
The date of Museum’s first Instagram post.
179
The topic of the relationship between institutions and individuals as rendered through social media is a relatively
new research area. While digital spaces like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook enable scholars to test hypotheses
empirically, the purpose of this paper is to develop a qualitative approach to motivate future quantitative work in the
field.
180
Writing about ‘selfies from Auschwitz’ forces me to consider complexities of internet research ethics. I refrain
from using images culled from Instagram in my work. The notion of users' understanding of privacy terms and
conditions is problematic. Similarly, it is not my intention to shame individual social media users who post ‘selfies
from Auschwitz’. Nor is it my goal to create an image-based archive pulled from social media without users' consent.
That, in my opinion, would be unethical. For more on Instagram research and various methodological, conceptual,
and ethical considerations, see: Highfield, Tim and Tama Leaver (2015) ‘A Methodology for Mapping Instagram
Hashtags’ First Monday, 20 (1). For those interested in learning more about the phenomenon of ‘selfies in Auschwitz’,
see: Emma Szewczak-Harris’s 2016 short film Selfies at Auschwitz.
181
Garde-Hansen 2011, p. 139
113
and replaced by another visual anchor. What connects this first category with the next one is the
fact that they are both geotagged at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Paraphrasing Garde-Hansen’s thoughts
on connections between memory and space: thanks to these registered images that get released
into an online transnational space of remembering, their memory of being there “becomes
something tangible, physical and positioned in space: they capture it, archive it, (…), play with
it.”
182

The second category is less educational and more controversial: it is a collection of selfies. These
feature smiling people in front of the barracks, the gate, the barbwire, or the piles of suitcases.
They also include staged pensive portraits, zoom-ins on people’s faces or clothes they wear. In
sum, they are images of people marking their presence as if the surroundings were irrelevant.
Seemingly, these Instagram posts are taken by people whose behaviour is inadequate to the
seriousness demanded by the place. They violate the rules of decorum (the form does not
correspond to the content) thus potentially offending aesthetic sensibilities. Refusing a moralizing
impulse, one must still acknowledge the fact that the reason why selfies from Auschwitz became
an international news story lies in the fact that there seems to be a fundamental disagreement
between selfie takers and selfie viewers about what visiting Auschwitz means; who we are while
being in Auschwitz; what our relationship to that place is; what our relationship to people who
were there before us means; and what our relationship to the victims of the Holocaust should be.
Stepping back again to our discussion of travel photography, if we consider these selfies at their
face value (ignoring captions that may alter our reading of authorial intentions), they seem to
privilege ‘the self’ over the surroundings and context within which they are taken. For authors of

182
ibid., 140.
114
these images, Auschwitz becomes one of the landscapes or backdrops for their self-portraits. It is
their presence that fills and defines these images. Authors become their own subjects. The place
of commemoration matters only as much as it provides a background for authors’ perspective and
subjective history. The space and memory become objectified.

Lastly, by geotagging this visual content at Auschwitz, authors of these images make a statement:
“I was in Auschwitz.” A claim that itself is an impossibility. One cannot utter this sentence because
on a linguistic and semiotic level this sentence is reserved for Auschwitz survivors. Indeed, authors
of these photos went to Auschwitz but they cannot say that they were in Auschwitz. Paradoxically,
this sentence is both true and false. In the context of this free-flowing and un-curated milieu de
memoir, physical place assumes a rather ambivalent spot. On the one hand, it functions as a
geotagged marker of one’s visit to Auschwitz; on the other, paraphrasing Anne Friedberg, this
space ceases to be one’s windows into the world but rather it becomes a window through which
the world is asked to look at the individual and his/her Instagram photo gallery.
183
Another way to
think about it is through Jean Baudrillard’s formulation of the concept of simulacra: copies that no
longer have an original. Baudrillard uses On Exactitude of Science by Borges to conceptualize of
a whole world that is nothing but a simulacrum (a detailed map of the original world).
184
Would a
loss of the original artefact (Auschwitz) matter to the on-line milieu de memoir of the Holocaust?

The importance of securing the preservation and conservation of the original physical remains of
the Nazi extermination and concentration camp animates the bulk of the Museum’s work.
Additionally, the Museum does not rely on any kind of technological aids for its system of guided

183
Friedberg, 2009
184
Baudrillard, 1994.
115
tours. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, Director of the Museum, emphasizes the need for unmediated human-
to-human interaction that allows for a balance of silence, stillness and conversation that addresses
visitors’ individual levels of knowledge, interests and emotional investments. In other words, the
Museum favours ’analogue’ educational tools. However, an increasingly digital educational
environment of global Holocaust discourse has encouraged the Museum to explore alternative
avenues of engaging with its visitors and social media users alike. In October 2009, the Museum
became the first Holocaust-related educational institution in the world to launch an official
Facebook page. It quickly garnered a lot of media attention and is currently liked by 256,708 and
followed by 247,570 Facebook users (at the time of this writing
185
, the Facebook page of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum is liked by 531,176 people and the one of Yad Vashem: World
Holocaust Centre in Jerusalem is liked by 174,830 people).

The head of the Museum’s Communications Department, Paweł Sawicki, recalls that the
motivating question that has inspired the Museum to become an important actor in the social media
Holocaust memory sphere was simple: is there anything on social media about Auschwitz-
Birkenau

that is educational, respectful, informative, curated? The original goal was to allow
people to seek information from the source.
186
Additionally, the notion of visitors’ increasingly
digital media literacy played an important part in the initial stages of the launch. Situating the
Museum’s Facebook mission in dialogue with its overall didactic mission, Sawicki rhetorically
asked: "If our mission was to educate the younger generation to be responsible in the contemporary
world, what better tool could we use to reach them than the tools they use themselves?"
187
The

185
July 2018.
186
Author’s interview with Paweł Sawicki, July 2017.
187
Berg, 2009.
116
Facebook page, therefore, became an addendum to the information already shared on the
Museum’s website; its specific focus is on historical education, sharing links to Holocaust-related
articles, posting news and information about the Memorial, sharing links to the Museum’s
YouTube channel, etc. Additionally, Sawicki publishes photos from private collections that are sent
to the Museum, as well as interviews with the Director of the Museum. To retain a high level of
consistency and curatorial control, Mr. Sawicki is the only person with admin privileges who can
post content. Yet, despite all these precautions, the launch of the Museum’s Facebook page became
a source of certain anxiety about navigating uncharted waters of social media without diminishing
the seriousness of the Museum’s mission. During a 2009 interview, Sawicki admitted that initially
“it was just an experiment”
188
launched to see how the world reacts. Despite its initial apprehension
and caution, the Museum instantly engaged with its users in an open and frank online discussion
about the merits of their decision. One of the questions back in late 2000s was: should a place of
memory like Auschwitz-Birkenau have social media presence at all? When users ask direct
questions, Sawicki uses the reply function to answer with the hopes of educating about the
Memorial and its significance.

Taking advantage of social media affordances, the Museum’s Facebook became a place for
discussion and exchange of information that was not available to users on the official website.
From the very beginning the Museum’s Facebook page was a virtual extension of the Place of
Memory and the rules set for the Facebook page were consistent with the rules of decorum of the
Museum: social media page was not a place for a worldview debate but a place for learning more
about the Memorial and Museum. Therefore, the notion of instant interactivity and letting go of

188
Ibid.
117
control inspired the Museum to retain a form of curatorship over content posted on the Museum’s
profile: users were not allowed to write full posts on the Museum’s page nor post images; they
could only comment on the content carefully curated and shared by the Museum. Mr. Sawicki
admits that the stakes for the Museum are very high as far as online presence is considered. Every
mistake or inaccuracy might be seen by thousands and potentially damage the reputation of the
Museum. That is why the Museum considers its social media presence as one of the most important
ways of communicating its mission to the world. Yet, the measure of its success does not come in
the number of likes or followers but in a creation of a voluntary network of supporters and
contributors. Initially, all posts were written in both English and Polish. As the page became
increasingly popular, the Museum witnessed a development of an online community of volunteers
who translate the Museum’s posts into their native languages. To maintain and strengthen this
spontaneous network of contributors, the Museum created a private Facebook group for people
who want to help: they receive English posts from the Museum, translate them and send them back
to Sawicki who then posts them on behalf of the Museum. The total numbers of volunteers
constantly fluctuate; currently, the Museum has ten languages covered by this system of organic
grassroots network of supporters.
189
This, and other Facebook initiatives, have created an
atmosphere of mutual trust between the administrator of the page and its users; the page became
“a place of communal and living memory” for those who visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and for those
who cannot make a long journey to the Southern part of Poland.

In the past six years, the Museum became active on Twitter (approx. 105,000 followers), YouTube

189
These volunteers have been devoted to this translation task for years and two of them volunteers received the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s award for their contribution.

118
(approx. 1,500 subscribers), Instagram (approx. 40,000 followers), and Pinterest (2,000 followers).
Thanks to social media, the institution reaches over 150,000 people from all over the world on
daily basis. The strategies employed for the Museum’s Instagram account are, however, different
than the ones used for Facebook. Referencing controversies mentioned in the opening pages of
this chapter, Sawicki admits that visual documentation of Auschwitz-Birkenau is more
controversial than its written counterpart. The focus on the Museum’s Instagram has become a
promotion of “positive examples of commemorating Auschwitz-Birkenau through images”. Here,
counterintuitively, the emphasis is not on the quality or aesthetics of published photos but rather
on how “wise” these images are. Sawicki appreciates images that reveal a new way of looking at
the remains of the camp.

Image 21. Screengrab of an Instagram profile for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

Source: https://www.instagram.com/auschwitzmemorial/ (accessed 9 September 2018).

119
To shy away from memory dogmatism, Sawicki argues that the rules of engagement with
Instagram posts should not be seen in terms of moral binaries as most of the images he comes
across “fall somewhere within the grey zone”. In other words, what becomes of crucial importance
to the Museum is the intention behind a photograph; that, according to Sawicki, includes taking a
closer look at the impulse motivating taking and sharing ‘selfies from Auschwitz’.
190
Here,
however, a close qualitative study of images geotagged at Auschwitz-Birkenau or tagged with
appropriate hashtags reveals that a formal visual analysis is not enough. To understand the context
and motivation of the author, which is frequently revealed in a nuanced fashion, we must take a
closer look at the captions and hashtags that accompany these images. Paradoxically, sole images
are no longer the reflection of the subjectivity behind the lens (as Roland Barthes claimed
191
). The
purely visual content of Instagram posts must be analysed side by side with the accompanying text
that becomes an additional and, perhaps, an inherent part of the image.

Often, it is the text that subverts the meaning of the image: a smiling selfie with a solemn caption
“Thinking about my family members that perished here in the Holocaust” becomes an act of self-
witnessing. Similarly, a black and white photo of a woman posing in front of one of the barracks
in Birkenau evokes associations with fashion photoshoots. These, however, are undercut by a
thoughtful caption: “’Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ #auschwitz
#auschwitzbirkenau #concentrationcamp #poland #peace #love (…) #history.” Alternatively, a
black and white artistic capture of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate that seems to offer a meditation on
death and loss, can evoke an affective shock when accompanied by a caption denying the

190
Author’s interview with Paweł Sawicki, July 2017.
191
See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).

120
Holocaust or mocking its memory. One of the specific examples illustrating this phenomenon is a
solemn selfie of a pensive Museum visitor taken by the Auschwitz barbwire with a caption “A
#flashbackfriday (…) An experience I got to scratch off my bucket list! #fbf #onthemove #vacay”.
Often, both the image and the caption strengthen each other’s message. One of the examples
analysed for this research reveals an image taken by an aspiring fashion blogger within the grounds
of the Museum and Memorial; the staged photograph is tagged with a collection of unambiguous
hashtags: #fashiondiaries, #fashionaddict, #fashionista, #instafashion, #fashiongram,
#fashionblogger, #fashionblog, #styleblogger, #style, #winterfashion, #winteroutfit. Taking
advantage of Instagram’s affordances, the Museum also, albeit sparingly, uses hashtags to draw
attention to its content. While most of the photos have zero to small amount of tags used in
captions, the examples of hashtags used by the Museum in 2017 include: #Auschwitz, #Birkenau,
#German, #Nazi, #concentration, #camp, #extermination, #Germany, #Holocaust,
#Shoah, #history, #ww2, #worldwar2, #memorial, #auschwitzmemorial, #memory,
#remembrance, #unesco, #heritage, #worldheritagelist, #photo, #education,
#humanrights, #remembrance, #instafollow, #follow, #architecture, #fence, #architecture,
#barracks.

Even though the Museum has given Instagram users a green light to express themselves visually
during or after their visits to the Museum (there are no “no selfies” signs in the Museum), it does
actively monitor the open-to-all, searchable, not curated and scalable Instagram archive of
Auschwitz-related content. The process consists of Sawicki checking photos that are geotagged at
“Auschwitz Memorial/Muzeum Auschwitz” and those tagged with some of the most popular
Auschwitz hashtags (e.g. #Auschwitz). If Sawicki comes across a post that is offensive or
121
insensitive, he engages in a didactic conversation with the author and encourages him/her to
consider re-editing the original content. Alternatively, when he comes across a photo that could be
used for educational purposes on the Museum’s own Instagram page, Sawicki reposts it crediting
the author. Sometimes the process of reposting includes the Museum leaving a long note under the
original image on the author’s Instagram page:
“Thank you for visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and sharing the image. We hope
that your journey through the authentic site of the former German Nazi concentration and
extermination camp was not only a valuable history lesson, but also a significant personal
experience. Share your story with others. See also our virtual visit:
panorama.auschwitz.org. Auschwitz is an extremely important place where we learn what
hatred, antisemitism and contempt for a fellow man and his rights resulted in decades ago.
Auschwitz is a place where we can reflect on our individual and collective responsibility.
We have a duty to remember not only to commemorate the victims. Memory can help us
resist new gusts of populism, different slogans of propaganda, various ideologies and
attitudes of insensitivity in the future. We all share the responsibility for a better world.
You can also do something to make it better. Thank you for your remembrance.”

The images found and reposted by Sawicki are always measured and consistent with the
educational tone promoted by the Museum on Facebook, Twitter, and the official website. Yet, in
my analysis of 1,019 images posted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum during the period
between December 2, 2012
192
and September 9, 2018, I found at least three examples of the
Museum expanding its discourse into new areas of online dialogue. On April 16, 2016, the
Museum reposted an image of a visitor standing inside of ‘Block 5’ in Auschwitz I, next to the pile
of shoes robbed from the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The glass wall safeguarding the shoes
reflects the flash of a camera and exposes the face of the author. As a result, the image becomes an
accidental spectral selfie that features a blurry reflection of the visitor’s figure dissolving into a

192
The date of Museum’s first Instagram post.
122
pile of shoes. The next example of the Museum expanding its discourse, includes a meta
conversation about Instagram Verified Badges. On June 17, 2017, the Museum posted a screenshot
of its own Instagram page and directly addressed Instagram asking to receive a verified badge that
would help users to more easily find the Museum’s account on Instagram. The caption stated:
“Dear @instagram, Over 25,000 people already follow the official account of the Auschwitz
Memorial here on #instagram. We try to show that images can be a very powerful tool of
remembering history. Perhaps it’s time to verify this account. Thank you.” The account was indeed
verified soon after this appeal appeared online. Similarly, on December 30, 2015, the Museum
addressed its Instagram followers in a post that featured a collage of its most popular images from
2015. Emphasizing its educational and didactic mission, the Museum wrote: “Thank you all for
remembering history with us and supporting the mission of the Auschwitz Memorial here on
#Instagram. Thank you for all the tags, likes, and comments. Thanks to all of you who have joined
us here in 2015. Images can be a powerful tool which helps us not to forget.” Through all the forms
of engagement with Instagram users analysed in this study, the Museum asserts itself as an
increasingly visible actor in the transnational social media Holocaust discourse.
193

The ubiquity and the democratizing impulse of visual content posted on social media changes the
way we view the symbolic marking of one’s presences within various geographic locations.
Consequently, it forces institutions like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial to
navigate the digital environment suspended between physical places of commemoration and
virtual spaces of memory. The case study of the Museum’s attitude towards Auschwitz-related
visual content shared on Instagram reveals tensions between individual and institutional agency in

193
Pointedly, linguistic constraints of the Museum’s employees, as well as demographic and language bias of social
media, limit the reach and dialogue to mostly young and English and Polish speaking communities.
123
digital curatorship of Holocaust memory. It also brings attention to one of the paradoxes of
contemporary curatorship of Holocaust memory: to retain a semblance of a human-to-human
interaction with social media users, the Museum assumes a position of a social media user itself
and engages in a form of online didactics. The direction in which the transnational memory of the
Holocaust is moving and the ubiquity of social media posts, forces institutions like the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Museum to valorise, react and engage with social media content. While the Museum
exerts less control over new channels of communication and representation, it places users and
their responsibility for the content they choose to post at the centre of the debate on sociohistorical
agency in the digital age. We are witnessing a unique phenomenon: as technology progresses, the
institutional power over how the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial is represented
(specifically) and how Holocaust memory (in general) is curated has eroded. This is further
illuminated by the next case study discussed in this chapter: Pokémon GO! in Auschwitz.

Where Pokémon Should Not Go

In the first weeks of July 2016, the augmented reality phenomenon of Pokémon Go! began to
unfold in public spaces and places in the United States and subsequently all over the world. People,
who downloaded the game and entered the augmented reality, wandered around their
neighborhoods experiencing surroundings through the screens of their raised smartphones. They
searched for Pokémon creatures that appeared seemingly unprompted within the familiar urban
and rural landscapes alike. As the gaming experience of this geolocation-based and enabled game
extends centrifugally from users’ smartphones out into the real world providing them with a live
view of their physical environment augmented by computer-generated input, fictitious creatures
blend with humans and their daily surroundings. In other words, this hybrid reality requires users
124
to move through physical space as they tag, collect, trade, and battle for digital artifacts and player
achievements, accessing a micro-world through their smartphones via the digital overlay of game
objects and virtual locations across the actual environment. Few days after the game was released,
New York Magazine reported a reader’s tip that it was now possible to play Pokémon Go! and catch
Pokémon within the perimeter of the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp:
the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
194

Image 22. The visual layout of the game world.

Source: pokemongolive.com

One day later, The New York Times drew critical attention to the problem of new media
technologies creating avenues for potential decorum transgressions at places of commemoration
and rhetorically asked whether there are “places where Pokémon should not be allowed to

194
Brian Feldman, “Yes, You Can Catch Pokemon at Auschwitz,” New York Magazine, July 11, 2016,
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/yes-you-can-catch-pokemon-at-auschwitz.html.
125
tread”.
195
As popular media picked up the topic, two Holocaust-related institutions responded to
the controversy. First, the head of Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s Communications Department,
Paweł Sawicki, issued a statement sent to the New York Times that “allowing such games to be
active on the site of Auschwitz Memorial is disrespectful to the memory of the victims of the
German Nazi concentration and extermination camp on many levels.”
196
He confirmed that he had
reached out to the maker of the game and asked that they do not “allow the site of Auschwitz
Memorial and other similar sites to be included in the game.”
197

Similarly, the head of communications at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington D.C., confirmed that his museum was also requesting to be excluded from the game
while adding that “technology can be an important learning tool, but this game falls far outside of
our educational and memorial mission.”
198
Indeed, the USHMM just launched
199
a smartphone
augmented reality application that allows visitors who walk through the “Tower of Faces” part of
the main exhibition to learn more about the lives of Jews who lived in a pre-war Lithuanian shtetel
Eisiskes
200
. As visitors’ hold their smartphones up and point towards black and white portraits
hanging on the wall, they receive additional layers of content: personal histories and details about
the people photographed. Similarly, the USC Shoah Foundation is currently developing their own
augmented reality educational tools.
201

195
Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Where Pokemon Should Not Go,” The New York Times, July 12, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/technology/where-pokemon-should-not-go.html.
196
ibid.
197
ibid.
198
ibid.
199
August 2018. More information about this project: https://engage.ushmm.org/2018-augmented-
reality.html?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTURRd016azBNakl6T0RVeSIsInQiOiIwMWtuYXlDTUI4aFZFeWhYa1JFYjZSaVd
WTklDWFlTWisrXC9NQ
200
Most of the town’s 3,000 Jewish inhabitants were murdered over the course of two days in 1941.
201
Author’s interview with Stephen Smith, June 2018.
126
The emergence of mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) games and applications and
most recently, the introduction of iPhone X that is specifically designed for augmented reality
202
,
is already impacting the way media-generated virtualities fill places of commemoration and
remembrance. In other words, we have entered a stage in Holocaust memory production that
comprises of constant exchanges between virtual and material contexts and online and offline
archival regimes. The remaining part of this chapter expands the discussion of a paradigm shift in
the way we understand visual mediation of encounters with places of commemoration. Drawing
from Pink and Hjorth’s notion of digital wayfaring

that conceptualizes our contemporary
entanglements between on- and offline practices
203
, it focuses on the new encounters between
augmented reality technologies, spaces of memory, and places of commemoration. It specifically
interrogates whether (and how) augmented reality (re)shapes our attitudes towards physical, real-
world environments of memorialization (such as Auschwitz-Birkenau). This investigation is
framed by questions of individual and institutional socio-historical agency in curatorship of
memory of the Holocaust in the 21
st
century, as well power relations negotiated through space and
embedded in particular places of commemoration.

Mobility, Sociability, and Spatiality
Existing literature regarding the memory of the Holocaust in the context of augmented reality and
mixed reality is minimal: emerging literature focuses on the ontological, epistemological, and
ethical considerations of these respective technologies outside of the context of the Shoah studies.
However, the 2016 phenomenon of Pokémon Go! has garnered a significant interest among new

202
Mahita Gajanan, “Apple’s New iPhones Are Designed for Augmented Reality. What Is That?,” Time, September
12, 2017, http://time.com/4937533/new-iphone-8-augmented-reality/
203
See: L. Hjorth and S. Pink, “New Visualities and the Digital Wayfarer: Reconceptualizing Camera Phone
Photography and Locative Media,” Mobile Media & Communication, 2(1), (2014): 40–57.
127
media scholars. To date, most studies examining this game have framed it in the context of playful
mobile media. As Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson note, the game “sits at the nexus of several
technological and cultural trajectories: the playful turn in contemporary media culture; the ubiquity
of location-based and haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the
effects of digital mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and art; our
individual and collective memories of playworlds and transmedia universes; the increasing
importance of issues concerning privacy and risk in public spaces; the ongoing digital and
networked augmentation of place and space; and the politics embedded in this hybrid experience
of the lifeworld.”
204

Putting Pokémon Go! in dialogue with notions of mobility, sociability, and spatiality, Adriana de
Souza e Silva draws critical attention to game’s simultaneous anchoring in physical and digital
spaces. She argues that thanks to the game’s augmented reality component that enables users to
view Pokémon creatures superimposed onto their real-world surroundings via their cellphones
screens, the game - counterintuitively - “promotes a stronger connection with physical space and
highlights the fact that urban spaces are the playing field.”
205
In encourages players’ mobility and
encourages them to explore previously unknown urban spaces, while at the same time increasing
their potential to meet new and connect with existing players. Frans Mäyrä adds an important point
linking game’s cultural significance to the notion of “ludic society” and the “era of games” that
we might have entered. As ludification relates to “play and playful elements emerging in different

204
Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson, “Pokemon GO: Mobile media play, place-making, and the digital wayfarer,”
Mobile Media & Communication, 5(1), (2017): 5.
205
Adriana de Souza e Silva, “Pokemon GO as an HRG: Mobility, sociability, and surveillance in hybrid spaces,”
Mobile Media & Communication, 5(1), (2017): 21.
128
areas of culture and society,”
206
media literacy and common understanding of the emerging tools,
as well as their limitations and potentials become of crucial importance. According to Mäyrä,
“managing and mastering games that take place in multiple layers of reality (…) that can create
conflicts with the social and cultural norms relating to proper behavior in private and public places,
in schools, libraries, or in cemeteries, for example, means they also function as training grounds
for people to evolve ludic literacies.”
207
This, inevitably, points towards an educational potential
of augmented reality apps and their role in shaping the future attitudes towards public places and
spaces.

While some critics emphasize positive aspects of the game, such as the game’s productive social
dimensions (it encourages users to go outside, exercise, and explore parts of the city they did not
know before), others have voiced their concerns with potential safety risks (the estimated number
of traffic accidents that have been caused by people playing Pokémon Go! Reached 100,000 in
November 2017
208
) and the problematic surveillance aspect of the game. Pointedly, what seems to
be at stake in most of the discussions concerning the game is the allocation of sociotechnical
agency either in the hands of the individual (user) or the technology (or, alternatively, the tech
company that designed and sold the game). Eschewing technological determinism, Lee
Humphreys argues - after Eszter Hargittai - that “the problem isn’t technology, but rather how
some people use it. (…) Totalizing language regarding the effects of media technologies is not

206
Frans Mäyrä, “Pokemon GO: Entering the Ludic Society,” Mobile Media & Communication, 5(1), (2017): 49.
207
Ibid.
208
Craig Smith, “85 Incredible Pokemon Go Statistics and Facts (January 2018),” accessed January 11, 2018,
https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/pokemon-go-statistics/.
129
only empirically inaccurate, but also stifles more complex understandings and literacies regarding
the very media technologies that have become central to our everyday lives.”
209

Additionally, Miguel Sicart invites us to reconsider the notion of augmentation as an inherent
condition of our relationship to the world and places that surround us arguing that “reality has
always been augmented, and it has always been a space for play.”
210
What is “revolutionary” about
this game, however, is the fact that it popularized a certain type of computational technology that
made “audiences worldwide (…) aware of augmented reality as a way of engaging and playing
with the world.”
211
Indeed, Pokémon Go! captured interest of users that go well beyond the well-
established e-game communities. At the time of this writing, the estimated number of Pokémon
Go! Downloads to date has reached 752 million times.
212

The popularity of the game might offer one of the explanations as to why popular media picked
up the topic of Pokémon Go! and decried the “revolting” celebration of “the Pokémonization of
the globe as the ultimate realization of the merged social and technological potential of modern
life.”
213
As Brendan Keogh points out, “the increased ubiquity of the smartphone and its tendency
to reconfigure existing media and cultural practices (…) has allowed the novelty of augmented
reality and the nostalgia of Pokémon to converge in a perfect storm of branding, design, preexisting

209
Lee Humphreys, “Involvement shield or social catalyst: Thoughts on sociospatial practice of Pokemon GO,”
Mobile Media & Communication, 5(1), (2017): 17.
210
Miguel Sicart, ”Reality has always been augmented: Play and the promises of Pokemon GO,” Mobile Media &
Communication, 5(1), (2017): 31.
211
Ibid.
212
Craig Smith, “85 Incredible Pokemon Go Statistics and Facts (January 2018),” accessed January 11, 2018,
https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/pokemon-go-statistics/.
213
Ian Bogost, “The Tragedy of Pokemon GO,” The Atlantic, July 11, 2016,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-tragedy-of-pokemon-go/490793/.
130
data, and established technologies.”
214
Alternatively, I argue that Pokémon Go! marked a
symbolic, and to some degree, an actual transformation of power relations negotiated through
space and embedded in places of memory. The transgression of being able to play Pokémon Go!
in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau reverberated in the media across a variety of issues and drew
critical attention to a paradigm shift in the representation and curatorship of cultural memory in
the digital age.

Technology of Memory | Techniques of Memory

The first part of this chapter developed a theoretical framework around contemporary landscapes
of Holocaust memory by drawing from academic literature on place and space. However, how do
we begin to theorize ephemeral media that is not meant to represent the memory of the Holocaust
(like cinema) or document one’s encounter with the specific sites of Holocaust memory (like
selfies)? How do we conceptualize of a constantly evolving set of augmented encounters with real
places of commemoration that are not meant to be archived? One of the ways in which we can
approach this set of questions is by expanding Marita Sturken’s discussion of technologies of
memory and making a distinction between technologies of memory through which people engage
with the past (cinema, photography, etc.) and techniques of memory that include the built
environment, landscape, and monuments. Many have written on these two aspects of Holocaust
memory: from Barbie Zelizer who wrote about the significance of photographs as the basis of our
memory of the Holocaust
215
and Georges Didi-Huberman who discussed representability of the

214
Brendan Keogh, “Pokemon GO, the novelty of nostalgia, and the ubiquity of the smartphone,” Mobile Media &
Communication, 5(1), (2017): 38.
215
See: Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000); Barbie Zelizer, ed. Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2001).
131
Holocaust in Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz
216
to James E. Young who
interrogates how contemporary artists remember and render an event like the Holocaust
217
and
Martin Pollack who writes about the “contaminated landscapes” of Eastern Europe, where most of
the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were built.
218

Pointedly, Pokémon Go!’s purpose is not to engage, represent, or visualize memory or history per
se. Rather, it is to mediate player’s encounters with real-world environments in real time, some of
which constitute culturally and historically imbued symbols (like Auschwitz-Birkenau). However,
by focusing on the game’s engagement with places of commemoration, I argue that the game falls
somewhere in between the two categories of technologies and techniques of memory. While it
mediates one’s encounter with history (via visual overlay superimposed over one’s view of specific
places of commemoration), it also actively engages in the ever-evolving production of that space
itself. Indeed, the latter issue not only echoes Lefebvre's consideration of space as a complex social
construction
219
, but it also introduces one of the most provocative and problematic aspect of
Pokémon Go! as far as places of memory are concerned. Taking advantage of augmented reality
affordances, users who enter Auschwitz-Birkenau playing Pokémon Go! produce that space anew
enabling Pokémon creatures to pop up inside of the barracks and crematoria buildings.

The augmentation of physical environments constitutes the core appeal of ephemeral messaging
applications like Snapchat, impressive AR software baked into features of the new iPhone X, or -

216
See: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008).
217
See: James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
218
See: Martin Pollack. Kontaminierte Landschaften: Unruhe bewahren (Residenz Verlag: 2014).
219
See: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley, 1992).
132
most recently - AR apps specifically designed for Google Pixel phones (like the augmented reality
Star Wars and Stranger Things 3D stickers that allow users to place R2-D2, Stormtroopers, and the
Demogorgon within the frame of their photos and videos). What makes Pokémon Go! different
from other AR apps is a mutually perpetuating and stimulating relationship between the player, the
space around him, and the medium itself. Celebrating and capitalizing on the nostalgia for the
original Pokémon video game series released twenty years ago, Pokémon Go! continues to tell its
players that they “gotta catch ’em all”. Now, however, once players open the game and enter the
augmented reality, they can capture Pokémon creatures anywhere (park, street, inside buildings,
etc.) randomly distributed on the map. Pokémon spawn and pop up spontaneously guided by
player’s location, so wherever he or she will go, there will be Pokémon to catch. In that sense, the
user and his free will to choose where he goes, activates the overlaid sensory information of the
game. However, certain locations, designated as Pokéstops and tied to real-world locations, lure
users with a promise of a high number of Pokémon spawning within their vicinity. In other words,
the game leads its users into locations that they otherwise might not have wanted or intended to
visit. Therefore, it could be argued that once the game is on, the user relinquishes a certain type of
control over which spaces and places he/she will venture into.

Circling back to the Summer 2016 Pokémon GO! controversy, it should be noted that the New York
Times’ tipster reported that there was a “blue square thing” at Auschwitz indicating that the area
was likely explicitly designated as a Pokéstop. The article also explained that the developer,
Niantic, was not directly at fault for including Auschwitz-Birkenau in the game as it used location
data gleaned from Google Maps and Pokestop locations are often imported from user suggestions
133
made on previous Niantic game, Ingress.
220
The creators of the game have not publicly commented
on ethical or legal considerations that shaped the game’s geolocative strategies. Therefore, we can
only assume
221
that nobody has made a conscious decision to include places like Auschwitz-
Birkenau within the game’s cartography. On the other hand, it would have been simple to restrict
certain areas from the game reach and prevent Pokémon from appearing inside or around buildings
that comprise the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. And that is exactly what happened
after the Museum intervened.

When Places of Memory Become Spaces of Play

Spatial considerations of AR inevitably bring us back to the notion of sociotechnical agency. While
questions of power have been central to technology and internet scholarship, it has been less central
to the interdisciplinary field of media memory which explores how collective pasts are narrated
“by the media, through the media, and about the media.”
222
The case study of Pokémon GO! invites
us to consider the problem of technological determinism vis-a-vis notions of choice and
contingency; the app reveals tensions between individual and institutional socio-historical agency.
As Pokémon GO! is not about animating and narrativizing history, but rather about active
production of space and one’s attitude towards that materiality, the usage of the game in places of
memory triggered widespread concern among institutions and museums all over the world. What
they found most unsettling was the lack of limits imposed on game’s map/world.

220
Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Where Pokemon Should Not Go,” The New York Times, July 12, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/technology/where-pokemon-should-not-go.html.
221
The author has unsuccessfully reached out to Niantic for a comment on legal and ethical considerations that shaped
Pokemon Go’s geolocative strategies.
222
M. Neiger, O. Meyers, E, Zandberg, eds, On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 1.
134
In July 2016, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and the Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington D.C. were only two among many historical and cultural institutions that
protested their geographic inclusion in the game. On July 12, the Arlington National Cemetery
tweeted: “We do not consider playing ‘Pokémon Go’ to be appropriate decorum on the grounds of
ANC. We ask all visitors to refrain from such activity.” Going one step further, Japanese
Hiroshima officials demanded that Pokémon GO! creators keep virtual creatures outside of
Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome and Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On August 8
th
, the Associated
Press reported that the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Memorial was now a “Pokémon No” zone.
223

These public reactions underscore the problem of institutional ownership and curatorship of places
of memory, as well as the one of potential censorship of public spaces. Religious institutions, parks,
and other public places have long established rules of conduct for people who enter them. New
media complicates society’s ability to moderate affronts physical places imbued with symbolic
meaning. Pointedly, the case study of Pokémon GO! reveals a wide-spread online agreement that
a digital transgression of certain places of memory balances on the edge of breaking a taboo. In
many places in the Unites States, citizens took it to social media to decry Pokémon GO! for
entering memorials like the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Similarly,
Brooklyn artist Muna Mire rhetorically asked on her Twitter: “Tell me why so many of the
Pokestops in Bedford–Stuyvesant are memorials to dead Black children. Seems… Inappropriate.”
Unintentionally, the game triggered a conversation on the nexus of physical places,
commemoration, institutional entanglements, and individual behavior in the digital age.

223
“No more ‘Pokemon Go’ at Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial,” Associated Press, accessed January 8, 2018,
https://apnews.com/90520fd445d54369b3dc73cc793e52c9
135
Image 23. Muna Mire’s Twitter page.

Source: Twitter.

It is possible for Pokémon Go! users to mistakenly transgress a place of commemoration by
walking through dense city spaces and indiscriminately catching Pokémon lured by Pokestops. It
is much harder, however, to use the same argument when we consider catching Pokemon in remote
locations (like former Nazi German concentration and exterminations camps, majority of which
are located within the remote Polish and German countryside). In the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
one could not simply argue that the game guided a player to the Memorial Site. It takes about 90
minutes to drive from Krakow (closest big city) to Auschwitz and it is safe to suppose that visitors
who decide to come to the Memorial Site understand the cultural and historical importance of that
place. Therefore, the notion of individual responsibility for choosing to catch Pokémon or
institutional agency to limit access to the game in places like Auschwitz reveals an altogether
136
different problem. It is possible that as history of the Holocaust becomes more and more abstract
to the youth, their digital literacy stands in for their historical sensitivity.

Circling back to the problem of censorship, the Museum’s attitude towards social media users
(especially Instagram users) provides a poignant counterpoint to the Museum’s stand on
augmented reality game discussed in this article. As the ‘selfies from Auschwitz’ example reveals,
the Museum has given Instagram users a green light to express themselves visually during or after
their visits to the Museum while at the same time actively monitoring Auschwitz-related social
media discursive practices. This new form of engagement results in the Museum becoming an
increasingly significant actor in the transnational online Holocaust discourse. Playing Pokémon
Go! in Auschwitz is, however, different from laughing in Auschwitz or taking selfies in Auschwitz.
In the past, visitors recorded their trips to the Museum, documented their emotions, sometimes
took smiling selfies in front of the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei Gate’. Now, using AR technologies, visitors
literally produce the space within the perimeters of the Memorial Site enabling Pokémon creatures
to pop up on the Birkenau train tracks or inside of the crematoria buildings. Additionally, the
ephemeral nature of AR games and apps like Snapchat make it impossible for institutions like the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to valorize, react, and engage with this ephemeral media content.
The only way in which institutions can become active participants in this process is by creating
their own augmented reality applications, like the one launched in August 2018 by the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

As there are no laws that organize augmented reality games and apps vis-a-vis space/place
relations, this case study highlights the fact that technology tends to outpace law and regulation.
137
Pokémon Go! prompts us to ask whether it is in the hands of institutions (like the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Museum) to demand that private corporations tweak their product or perhaps whether
responsibility for monitoring our behavior in public places lies on us. Drawing from the above-
mentioned examples, we should also be asking about places of memory that do not have the
backing of a state-sponsored institution like a state museum. Here, examples of murals in Bed-
Stuy come to mind. In other words, the social capital of an official and established place of
commemoration and its institutional power protects some places, while others are more prone to
casual spatial abuse by users and tool providers alike. Are we entering the world in which some
public places will be treated like private spaces, while others will have no legal protection or status
recognized by AR makers and users?

In a forthcoming article on law, virtual reality, and augmented reality, Mark A. Lemley and Eugene
V olokh argue that VR and AR “like many big technological advances, (…) will in some ways
challenge legal doctrine.”
224
They state that among the upcoming challenges that law makers will
face, we should be considering “street crimes” in VR and AR: “behaviors such as disturbing peace,
indecent exposure, deliberately harmful visuals (…), and ‘virtual groping’.” Time will tell whether
new regulations of the AR and VR will extend to places of commemoration. Now, we can ask
whether taking a certain place out of the game (disabling the possibility to catch Pokémon in
Auschwitz-Birkenau and other places of commemoration) and shifting the responsibility of
making decisions which public spaces should and should not be included in the game onto a private
corporation with - potentially - lack of historical and cultural knowledge is the right course of
action. If we relegate the responsibility to creators of the tools that could be used in inappropriate

224
Mark A. Lemley and Eugene Volokh, “Law, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality,” University of Pennsylvania
Law Review, Vol. 166, 2018, forthcoming.
138
ways, we are expecting them to prove their cultural and historical literacy and discern between
complaints made by institutions, unhappy individual citizens, and/or pranksters. We are, in a sense,
expecting them to draw lines between ethically, aesthetically, and morally acceptable behavior in
public spaces. There is, perhaps, a better way to emphasize individual agency within the context
of AR.

The Future Is Augmented

Augmented reality apps and games change the way we view problems of curatorship of
increasingly technologized spaces of memory. Consequently, as users of AR games transgress
rules of decorum by augmenting places of commemoration, both scholars and traditionally
recognized curators of these spaces must respond with new theoretical and practical measures on
how to adapt to these new media age challenges. The case study of Pokémon GO! in Auschwitz
reveals tensions between three levels of agency within the world of augmented reality: institutional
(places of memory); company (producer of the tools and content), and the individual
(player/user/spatial content producer). While the relationship between places of commemoration
and spaces of memory is constantly evolving, new media is challenging the notion of authority
and agency in the context of material and spatial aspects of memory preservation. Eschewing a
prescriptive tone, I argue that Pokémon Go! should at least be viewed as a cultural phenomenon
that allows us to access a plethora of social, cultural, political, historical, ethical, and
epistemological questions. It prompts us to ask about the future of history and memory mediation,
as well as the future of the memory of the Holocaust in the age of augmentation and virtualization
of the environments around us. Indeed, it is only a matter of time before more Holocaust-related
educational institutions collectively turn towards augmented reality and virtual reality technologies
for new educational tools. The new augmented reality application launched by USHMM or the
139
first immersive virtual reality film The Last Goodbye discussed in Chapter 1 of this dissertation
speak to the fact that the future (of memory) will be augmented.

140
Chapter 3: Landscapes of Memory: post-1989 National and Transnational Modes of
Memorialization

“Some historians have expressed their discomfort with the surfeit of memory in contemporary culture,
raising serious questions about the depth and the effects of our obsessions with memory. Others very
explicitly lament what they see as the present being held hostage to the past. After all, the desire to forget
always seems to grow in proportion to the desire to remember, especially when problematic aspects of a
nation’s past are at stake. Memory and amnesia always exist side by side and remain part of a political
struggle”.

-- Andreas Huyssen (“Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory”)
225

The death of the survivors and witnesses and the technological mediation of memory in the era of
digital revolution are the connecting themes of the two previous chapters of this dissertation. The
third through line of this research materializes as a series of scaffolded questions and discussions
on the relationship between space and place in the context of the future of Holocaust memory in
Poland. This chapter emphasizes the unique relationship between the abstract space of Holocaust
memory rendered in cinema and television and the physical place of the Polish countryside where
most of the Nazi camps were built. By focusing on how the triangular relationship of victims,
witnesses, and persecutors defined the post-WWII self-imagination of Polish filmmakers, it
analyzes the way the space of historical memory is filled, organized, and produced by the people
who currently inhabit this “contaminated landscape” (Kontaminierte Landschaften).
226
Moreover,
it illustrates how an already existing homogenizing habit of transnational commentators and
journalists, as well as a self-reflex of Polish domestic actors, to underscore the collective “Polish”
response to the Holocaust and its memory has continued to come through in the Polish media.

225
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2003, p. 95.
226
Here, I am using the expression coined by Martin Pollack. See: Martin Pollack. Kontaminierte Landschaften:
Unruhe bewahren. Residenz Verlag: 2014.
141
While new media and technologies play an increasingly prominent role in the way Eastern
Europeans mediate their collective past, it is cinema and television that continue to impact the
depth, focus, and attention of the popular historical discourse in the most significant way. This
chapter illuminates the political stakes of Polish filmmakers’ renewed interest in the complicated
history of the Holocaust by unpacking the ways in which post-1989 cinematic and televisual
representations of the Shoah address the previously silenced topic of Polish antisemitism. By
thinking alongside and with our Chapter 1 and 2 discussion of virtualization of memory, this
section circles back to the problem of materiality of memory. It puts the physicality of places of
memory scattered all over Eastern Europe in dialogue with cinematic and televisual
representations of those same landscapes of memory. Finally, it answers the main question
motivating this research: does physical space still matter in the digital age?

Continuity and Contingency: Mapping History after the Cold War
In one of his earlier poems, Czesław Miłosz - Polish Nobel Literature Prize laureate - describes
the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as witnesses by the Polish Christians. Midway through the
piece, Miłosz evokes the image of a literal and metaphorical wall that surrounded the ghetto and
divided the WWII experience and memory of the Warsaw Jews and Christians. He compares the
cheerful opulence of a Roman plaza where an Italian Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burnt
alive in 1600 for heresy to Varsovians’ carefree carousel riding among the sounds and smells of
the dying ghetto brutally pacified by the Nazis:

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
142
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
227

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started on April 19, 1943 on the eve of Passover. The carousels
described by Miłosz were set up bu the Polish Catholics to celebrate the upcoming Easter Sunday
that fell on April 25, 1943. Past the self-accusatory tone, the poem establishes spatial and symbolic
foundations of the triangular relationship between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders that have
underwritten memory processes emblematic of Polish and other Central and Eastern European
post-WWII national identity (re)building. Highlighting the complexity of wartime allegiances and
reactions to Nazi Germany’s rise to power in Europe, as well as over five decades of the Soviet
political regional hegemony, European countries’ domestic efforts to transform their post-Cold
War historical narrative and their responses to the memory of the Holocaust emphasize a lack of
coherent European transnational project of Holocaust remembrance. Instead, what emerged is a
complex network of regional workings of memory that include public discourse, literature, media
representations of history, museum narratives, and public space memorials that often stand in
conflicting attitudinal relations to each other. The lines between perpetrators and bystanders are
often questioned; the nuances of Eastern Europeans’ trauma under the Nazi and, subsequently,
Soviet rule become lost to international audiences. In other words, there is no European memory
of the Holocaust. Instead, there are national memories that have evolved through a pendular
swaying process of remembering and forgetting.

227
Miłosz, Czesław. Campo dei Fiori. April, 1943.
143
In media studies, it has become somewhat of a truism to discuss the origins and significance of
nationalism in terms of an imagined community. Indeed, in the recent decades many film scholars
have shifted their attention to the study of economic, political, and socio-cultural transnational
activities in film production and distribution. While capitalist economies escape rigid nationalistic
demarcations within film studies more easily (due to their well-established focus on global
marketplace among other factors), recent studies of socialism and post-socialism have also focused
on problematizing the notion of fully formed fixed national identities and national cinemas within
the Eastern Bloc, as well as the firm West-East binary. Dina Iordanova encourages scholars to
reevaluate continuities and discontinuities between East and West and integrate Eastern European
cinema into the European film tradition.
228
Anikó Imre’s work, on the other hand, is exemplary in
focusing on the reexamination of Western media theories and their approaches to Eastern Europe,
while “acknowledging the region’s shifting boundaries, internal differences, and constructed
identities.”
229
Imre points to two tendencies that have underwritten film histories of Eastern
European cinemas: perpetuation of the national cinema framework “grounded in the assumption
of an essentialist national character, and the erasure of the common regional histories associated
with the term Eastern Europe.”
230
Moreover, in her most recent book TV Socialism, Imre present
a compelling case for taking a regional perspective to identify comparable economic flows,
aesthetic patters, and political exchanges facilitated by TV within Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union and within Europe as a whole.

228
See: Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film (New
York: Wallflower Press, 2003).
229
Anikó Imre, ed. East European Cinemas (New York: Routledge, 2005), xvii. Similarly, in her most recent work on
television and socialism, Imre illustrates transnational connections between East and West (as well as connections
within the Eastern Bloc that stretched beyond national borders) that predated 1989. See: Anikó Imre, TV Socialism.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
230
ibid.
144
Indeed, in many ways the Polish and other case studies references in this chapter seem to escape
neat nation-based delineations. And yet, the problem of Eastern European Holocaust
remembrance, WWII national and regional traumas, and their representations and suppressions in
collective politically-censored discourses point to the fact that the ‘construction of difference’
firmly established by the post-WWII political order was a real and deeply embedded process on
both sides of the Berlin Wall. The German example serves as a particularly nuanced illustration
of this point: if there was a pre-WWII German national character, the Potsdam Conference sliced
it into two separate entities.
231
The Cold War Federal Republic of Germany re-established and
strengthened its transnational coproduction network with the West, while (perhaps
counterintuitively) the German Democratic Republic’s cinema culture was genuinely international
with the “total number of Western imports […] representing approximately 25 percent of imports
overall”
232
and a significant number of trans-Eastern European relationships
233
; the German
language, kinship structures, and history stretched across the Berlin Wall, whose 1961 erection did
not erase the interaction between FRG and the GDR. In the words of Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph
Laucht, and Andrew Plowman, “the border itself was never a wholly fixed value”
234
. Germany
was “divided but not disconnected.”
235
Therefore, the externally imposed, post-WWII construction
of difference between the GDR and FRG became a substitute for a German self-imagination. I
agree with Hochscherf who urges scholars to avoid the “temptation to look at the German history
backwards from the telos of unification in a fashion that turns Germany’s dual history into a single

231
I should note that initially there were four military occupation zones (French, British, American, and Soviet).
However, the Potsdam Conference initiated the West-East divide within the German borders.
232
Hochscherf, Tobias; Christoph Laucht; Andrew Plowman. Divided, But Not Disconnected: German Experiences
of the Cold War. Berghahn Books, 2013, p. 164.
233
This convergence became more prominent in 1980s.
234
Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman, Divided, But Not Disconnected: German Experiences
of the Cold War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 1.
235
Ibid, 2.
145
one in disguise.”
236
There were two Germanys with distinct ideologies, economic and political
agendas, and different types of filmic productions that partook in a construction of ideological
meanings.

Moreover, as the construction of difference between the GDR and FRG remained enmeshed in a
broader geopolitical and ideological division, Andrew Higson’s summary of two conceptual means
of identifying the imaginary (national) coherence becomes pertinent. On the one hand, “a national
cinema seems to look inward, reflecting on the nation itself, on its past, present and future, its
cultural heritage, its indigenous traditions, its sense of common identity and continuity. On the
other hand, a national cinema seems to look out across its borders, asserting its difference from
other national cinemas, proclaiming its sense of otherness.”
237
Film was one of the crucial ways in
which two German governments promoted separate national cultures. I argue that a close study of
cinematic and televisual representations of the Holocaust in Eastern European countries
illuminates the different ways in which these political entities imagined themselves, as well as
their participation and moral, ethical, legal co-responsibility for the Shoah against each other
within the new post-Holocaust European order.

In post-WWII Germany, therefore, the triangulation of history focused on the two Germanys’
respective approaches to their Nazi past. In his consideration of the role of remembering and
forgetting in national narratives constructed in postwar Europe, Richard Esbenshade points to the
paradox of the collective memory in pre-unification Germany. As the Federal Republic of

236
Ibid, 3.
237
Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, ed.
Elizabeth Ezra et al. (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 18. See also: Andrew Higson, “The Concepts of National
Cinema,” Screen 30.4 (1989): 36-46.
146
Germany (FRG) oscillated between its desire for “normalization of German national
consciousness” and its obsession with the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
constructed a separate national identity, “that of the workers and peasants […], officially divorced
from the legacy of Nazism.” That is why the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the German
unification became a “vehicle for re-remembering and forgetting perhaps best symbolized by its
characterization as ‘reunification’” and its goal of creating new singular identity.
238
A process that
came to its symbolic fruition with the 2004 completion of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe designed by Peter Eisenman.
239

Berliners emphasized the symbolic location of the monument: the 4.7-acre memorial is situated
right at the Brandenburg Gate – the symbol of the united Germany, in the place where Goebbels'
villa and bunker once stood; Hitler's chancellery was just a few blocks away. The vast grid of the
monument consists of 2,711 gray cement pillars of different heights, which visitors can walk

238
While the problem of post-unification German cinematic representations of WWII and the Holocaust remains
beyond the scope of this chapter, I would like to gesture towards one of the ways in which they can be categorized.
First, there are movies that focus on the German heroic defeat. They either draw a distinct line between Hitler (and
his madness) and the rest of the (innocent) German society (as in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 box-office hit Downfall
or in 2013 TV miniseries Generation War directed by Philipp Kadelbach) or portray the suffering of the German
ordinary people (as in Joseph Vilsmaier’ 2008 Die Gustloff that portrays the sinking of a German ship full of women
and children fleeing east Prussia in January 1945). In both cases, the Holocaust or the causes of WWII are not
discussed. Second, there are films that address previously silenced topics like the rape of the German women by the
soldiers of the Soviet Red Army, which followed the liberation of Germany in 1945. Max Färberböck’s A Woman in
Berlin (2008) presents the Soviet victory over Germany as an animalistic act of physical domination over the most
vulnerable part of the German society – women and girls. The plot, based on the anonymously published memoir Eine
Frau In Berlin, follows the story of a young woman and her struggle to endure the cruelty of the Red Army soldiers
in the days preceding the end of WWII. Third, there are also movies that build upon the thesis that resistance to the
Nazi regime constituted an act of heroism. Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl: the Final Days (2005) illustrates the
paradoxical conclusion that these movies evoke. If Sophie Scholl’s opposition to the Third Reich totalitarianism was
good, then she becomes the hero. However, heroism is a quality many aspire to, but only few achieve. In other words,
heroism belongs to the domain of exquisite individuals – not ordinary people. Therefore, it is not surprising that
Germans did not rebel en masse against Hitler. In other words, while presenting a narrative of an extraordinary young
hero, the movie offers an absolution to the German collective, to the ordinary German volk of non-heroes.
Additionally, there are also comedies that pertain to WWII, like the 2015 box-office hit Look Who’s Back, a satire
directed by David Wnendt that imagines the führer as a YouTube star.
239
For a thorough discussion of this topic, see: James E. Young. “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem – and
Mine,” The Public Historian. Vol. 24, No. 4 (Fall 2002), p.65-80.
147
among. As one enters the area of the monument the peripheral pillars are only few inches high.
However, as one progresses towards the sunken center of the memorial, the impressive 15 feet tall
pillars tower over one’s head. Subsequently, as concrete pillars grow higher, the outer world, its
noise and sounds are muffled and almost cease to matter. As one moves forward, in between the
pillars that are arranged into narrow tunnels, the solitary and isolated contemplation of the
monument become inevitable. One can embrace the cold surface of concrete pillars towering on
both sides by stretching out one’s arms. The construction amazes and confuses scattered visitors,
who try to find their way deeper into the maze where the ground is sloped. They let themselves be
submerged in this disorienting and complex construction, which evokes the notion of the
oppressive Third Reich system. Finally, sixty years after the liberation of Europe from the Nazi
occupation, the reminder of the genocide of six million exterminated Jews finally stood in the heart
of Berlin.

Alternatively, in Hungary, the political alliance with Nazi Germany systematized and legitimized
the persecution of the Hungarian Jews that commenced soon after the Anschluss in March 1938
and climaxed in the summer of 1944 when over 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, mainly
to Auschwitz, where most were killed on arrival. Therefore, the domestic efforts to understand the
triangulation of WWII Hungarian history have been defined by the tension between attempted
discussions of the historical, moral, and legal responsibility of the Hungarian government for the
willing deportation and killing of 600,000 Hungarian Jews and an increasingly pronounced
tendency to whitewash the history Hungarian antisemitism. The former gained prominence in 2005
when Can Togay, a Hungarian film director, with a help of a sculptor Gyula Pauercreated, created
a memorial in the heart of Budapest called The Shoes on the Danube Bank. Empty bronze shoes
148
lining the bank of the river honor the Hungarian Jews who were killed by a Hungarian fascist
militia led by Ferenc Szálasi. In December 1944 and January 1945, the Arrow Cross Party police
shot over 20,000 Jews into the river Danube.

The revisionist post-Cold War Hungarian narrative about the Holocaust came to the international
attention in early 2014 when Prime Minister Viktor Orban proclaimed 2014 the “Holocaust
Memorial Year” in Hungary. On January 27, 2014 marking the International Holocaust
Remembrance Day, Orban said that “The Holocaust is a tragedy of the entire Hungarian nation.”
Going one step further, during his January 2014 speech at the opening ceremony of „A
Remembrance of the Holocaust in Hungary – 70th Anniversary Exhibition” at the UN New York
Headquarters, Tamas Fellegi, a former Minister in Viktor Orban’s conservative right-wing
government and current president and CEO of the Viktor Orban-supported The Hungary Initiatives
Foundation acknowledged “the alarming rise of racism and anti-Semitism in Europe, including
[his] home country.” He stated that Hungary has witnessed “growing brutality and hatred towards
minorities (...), including the Roma minority, Jews, and people with different sexual orientation.”
Despite these and other official efforts of the Orban’s government to present a united front in
discussing Hungary’s problematic Holocaust past, many politicians of the opposition, historians,
and intellectuals have rejected Prime Minister’s rhetoric that fell short of a nuanced discussion of
Hungary’s collaboration with the Nazis.
240
In 2017, the international suspicions raised towards

240
Notably, On January 26, 2014, Randolph Louis Braham - A World-Famous Holocaust Scholar, Historian Of 20th-
Century Hungarian History, And One of The Founding Board Members of The Academic Committee Of The United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, D.C. Who Had Been Honored by Both The Holocaust
Memorial Center In Budapest And The Orbán Government- Wrote An Open Letter To Professor György Haraszti,
Chairman Of The Board And Dr. Szabolcs Szita, Director Of The Holokauszt Emlékközpont (Holocaust Memorial
Center) In Budapest, Returning The Medium Cross Of The Order Of The Republic Of Hungary Bestowed Upon His
By The Government In 2011 (The Highest Decoration That A Hungarian Government Can Grant). In His Letter,
Braham Stated That He “reached this decision with a heavy heart, having followed the recent developments in hungary
with great concern. The history-cleansing campaign of the past few years calculated to whitewash the historical record
149
Orban’s government strengthened as the statue of Miklós Horthy, a Hungarian Nazi collaborator,
was erected in a small town of Perkáta and as the statue of György Lukács was removed from
Szent István Park in Budapest. Some have discussed a possibility of removing a statue of a
Holocaust victim poet Miklos Radnoti from city center.

In Poland, the image of a carousel placed next to the burning Warsaw Ghetto became one of many
visual and discursive symbols that evoke associations with the Polish witnessing of the Shoah.
Andrzej Wajda used it in his 1955 movie “A Generation”. Similarly, the act of Polish Christian
passive witnessing of the 1943 Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto led by the German SS
commander Jürgen Stroop, returned in another poem by Czesław Miłosz: Biedny chrześcijanin
patrzy na ghetto (Eng. “A Poor Christian is Looking at the Ghetto”) and in Jan Błoński’s seminal
1987 essay Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Eng. “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto
”
)
241
that heralded
a shift in the way Poles remembered the Holocaust after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
242

of the horthy era, including the changes in the constitution that “legalized” the sinister measures that were subsequently
taken to absolve hungary from the active role it had played in the destruction of close to 600,000 of its citizens of the
jewish faith, have left me,” he continued, “and i assume many others, stunned. The straw that broke the camel’s back
in my decision was the government’s resolve to erect a national statue relating to the german occupation – a cowardly
attempt to detract attention from the horthy regime’s involvement in the destruction of the jews and to homogenize
the holocaust with the “suffering” of the hungarians – a german occupation, as the record clearly shows, that was not
only unopposed but generally applauded.” See: http://hungarianspectrum.org/2014/01/26/randolph-l-brahams-open-
letter/
241
Błoński, Jan. “Biedni Polacy Patrza Na Getto” In Tygodnik Powrzechny, 2/1987.
242
As the Only Pre-1989 Text Openly Discussing The Notion Of Christian Poles’ Moral Responsibility For The Fate
Of Their Jewish Neighbors And Postulating A Collective Examination Of A National Polish Conscience, Błoński’s
Article Triggered A Rather Narrow Self-Examination Among Small Circles Of Polish Intellectuals And Politicians.
It Did, However, Foreshadowed Public Discourse Changes That Took Place After 1989.
150
Image 24. Still from Andrzej Wajda’s 1955 film, A Generation.

Source: modernismmodernity.org

Yet, the dominant representations of the Polish post-WWII collective memory revealed an
altogether different kind of discourse – one that focused on the Polish non-Jewish martyrdom and
the tragic experience of the biggest anti-Nazi uprising: the 1944 Warsaw Uprising that resulted in
a near-to-complete annihilation of Warsaw. The trope of the suffering Polish city extended to the
history of the whole country that lost almost 6 million of its citizens between 1939 and 1945.
Consequently, during the Cold War, the ‘Poles vs. Nazis’ historical narrative replaced the
triangular Holocaust relationship between the Germans (perpetrators), Poles (witnesses), and Jews
(victims) and obstructed the memory of the Polish trauma and guilt of passively witnessing the
Holocaust or, in other cases, actively persecuting Polish Jews. The spatial figure of the ghetto wall
became temporarily obsolete as both the Soviet Union and satellite states were engaged in
falsification and manipulation of cultural memory productions. For almost fifty years, the WWII
history of the Polish Jews remained at the margin of the Polish collective consciousness. Polish
national cinema of the Cold War reflected this tendency with few notable exceptions.
151
Though the developments of Polish post-war cinema resulted in a series of historical film
productions, they did not result in a nuanced portrayal of the Holocaust and the problem of Polish
anti-Semitism. Like in the GDR, Poland’s historiophoty became dominated by the analysis of the
Nazi terror. Almost all of the WWII movies made in the period between 1945 and 1989 focused
on two main themes: the destruction of the Polish land and society by the Germans and the
psychological implications of the war.
243
Additionally, the inability to address the problem of the
trauma inflicted by the Red Army’s take-over of Poland and its passivity during the Warsaw
Uprising
244
marked one of many post-war paradoxes of the silenced past: a collective
schizophrenia of remembering and being forced to forget and forgetting what should have been
remembered.
245
Movies about WWII became symbolic of the new regime’s tactics, which was

243
This is a recurring theme in the following cinematic productions of the period: Unvanquished City (1950, dir. Jerzy
Zarzycki); Samson (1961, dir. Andrzej Wajda); How To Be Loved (1962, Dir. Wojciech Has); Passenger (1963, dir.
Andrzej Munk); How Far, How Near (1972, dir. Tadeusz Konwicki).
244
Most of the pre-war elites, aristocracy, generals, intellectuals, politicians, and other people of power were killed
during the Nazi occupation. However, majority of the Warsaw youth was killed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944.
After the Katyn massacre (a series of mass executions of Polish officers and intelligentsia carried out by the NKVD
in 1940), the Warsaw uprising came as another blow to the crème-de-le-crème of the Polish politically-involved youth.
As Norman Davies notes “at a time when the second front in Western Europe had not yet been opened, and when the
Soviet army was carrying the main burden of the fighting against Germany, Churchill and Roosevelt were in no
position to risk a breach with Stalin over the Polish issue. (…) This implied that Poland would fall under Soviet
occupation and control. (…) The crucial issue of the definition of Polish territory affected every subsequent event,
including the liberation itself.” (65-66). Therefore, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) – Poland’s only force of
resistance, which stood behind the decision to fight the Germans in august 1944, was deemed dangerous by Stalin.
The patriotic and determined Warsaw youth, which could potentially make the Soviet invasion difficult, was
denounced by Stalin as “a handful of power-seeking criminals”. (68) The Soviet Army withheld its initially promised
assistance and for sixty-three days of the Warsaw uprising, when “the fighting raged with unprecedented savagery,
(…) the Soviet army, one mile away across the river, looked on in virtual passivity. A quarter of a million civilians
died, from shelling, from dive-bombing, or from wholesale massacres (…). block by block, street by street, sewer by
sewer, the AK [Home Army] was being squeezed with appalling losses into a tiny enclave in the city center. (…) The
surviving inhabitants were evacuated. Hitler ordered that Warsaw be ‘razed without a trace’. it was the end of the old
order in Poland. After that, the Home Army was broken, and no one was left to challenge the communists effectively.
The Nazis had done the Soviets’ work for them.”(68) For a detailed discussion of these events see: Davies, Norman.
Heart of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
245
Norman Davies argues that the post-war years and the politics of amnesia imposed by the soviet government
originated something that might be called ‘collective schizophrenia’: “the effect of this massive depravation on polish
consciousness was one of prolonged trauma. not only were poles condemned to bear the deaths of their ‘lost
generation’ in silence, and to overcome their separation from the ‘lost provinces’; they were even expected to sever
their ties with their friends and relations abroad; to renounce their friendships with wartime allies in the west; to
suppress their admiration for the wartime resistance movement, to pay extravagant tribute, in words and in kind, to
the soviet liberators; to blame their misfortunes on themselves; and, in the cruelest cut of all, to pretend that their
tragedy could somehow be counted a victory. this, for the polish nation, was equivalent to the destitution of a tortured
152
violently settling matters with Polish war heroes and thus tightening its political grip. Therefore,
from the beginning, the communization of Poland reflected the dual Soviet policy: to free the
Eastern European countries from the Nazi occupation (and therefore to secure Russian borders)
and to do it by annihilating any kind of opposition.

While all the exogenous factors discussed so far impacted Polish cinematic portrayals of WWII,
its focus on the Polish Christian trauma, and the evils committed by the Nazis, this discussion
would be remiss not to mention two cinematic productions that addressed the plight of the Polish
Jews and the problem of Polish anti-Semitism and Polish Christian moral responsibility for not
helping their Jewish neighbors during WWII. Produced in the immediate after-war period and
before the Polish Communist party monopolized its power over the film industry, The Last Stage
(1947, dir. Wanda Jakubowska) and Border Street (1948, dir. Aleksander Ford) problematized the
notion of Polish passivity during the Holocaust. The Last Stage offers a semi-documentary
portrayal of the martyrdom of female prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is based on
Jakubowska’s war experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The movie, which received Stalin’s
personal blessing,
246
follows the story of Marta, a Polish Jew, who exclaims in the last moments
before her death: “Don’t let Auschwitz ever happen again!” Going one step further and evoking a
familiar tableau of a big city tenement house used in Honore de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot and other
examples of literary realism like Boleslaw Prus’s Lalka, Border Street delves into a cross-sectional
analysis of a Polish society during WWII. Culling from a microcosm of one tenement house in

prisoner who is forced to watch as his tormentors destroy his children, his property, his companions, and eventually
his own memory and his self-respect”, 93.
246
Marek Haltoff, conference presentation, “The Most Important Polish Film? - ‘The Last Stage’ (Ostatni Etap, 1948);
presented on 10.19.2018 at USC, “Screening Memories” Polish film conference.

153
Warsaw, the movie draws a bitter critique of a Polish society at large and its apathy during the
Holocaust. Most of the Poles portrayed in Border Street are anti-Semites. While some of them
openly support the Nazis, the others remain indifferent. There are also a few noble exceptions:
Poles who risk their lives to help the Warsaw ghetto prisoners. Lastly, the immediate after-war
period witnesses a production of two documentaries about the camps: Majdanek – Europe
Cemetery (1944, dir. Aleksander Ford) and Swastika and Gallows (1944, dir. Kazimierz Czyński).
Pointedly, Our Children (1948, dir. Natan Gross and Shaul Goskind), which was the first postwar
narrative film about the Holocaust, was also the last Polish film made in Yiddish.

Image 25. A still from Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage on the cover of the 4
th
issue of Film, the oldest Polish
magazine about cinema.

Source: fr.wikipedia.org
154
The question of artists’ and intellectuals’ role in the process of (re)building Poland defined
historiosophical efforts of Polish filmmakers of the Cold War era.
247
Indeed, the period of Soviet
domination brought a remarkable artistic growth to the Polish film school. The artistry of movies
by Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Wojciech Has, Kazimierz Kutz, Tadeusz
Konwicki, and Stanisław Różewicz constituted their conscious choice to oppose the totalitarian
system. The dynamic relationship between the oppressive state and the individual became the
focus of Poland’s greatest directors. For many, aesthetic choices made under the pressures of a
mono-party state and omnipresent ideology became ideological ones. In a monopolized
environment, in which state subsidies dogmatically elevated the status of the cinematic arts and
the state censorship set the limits to introspection of politics of memory, l’art pour l’art and a
domain of autonomous aesthetics and poetics were limited. Art could no longer be divorced from
its didactic, moral, or utilitarian function. In effect, as many of the historical topics could not be
freely discussed on film until after the Cold War,
248
artistic and ideological expression
significantly shifted to the realm of aesthetic choices.
249
Formal choices, therefore, became the
main sphere of a possible rebellion -- aesthetic choices became ideological ones.

247
For particularly pertinent reading, See: Bren, Frank, World Cinema 1: Poland (London: Flicks Books 1986);
Coates, Paul, The Red and The White. The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower Press 2005) [Esp. Chapter
1 On “Ashes and Diamonds” And Chapter 6 On Kieślowski]; Falkowska, Janina, Haltof, Marek (Eds.): The New
Polish Cinema. Industry, Genres, Amateurs (London: Flicks Books 2002); Ford, Charles And Robert Hammond,
Polish Film. A Twentieth Century History (London: Mcfarland & Company 2005) [Esp. Chapter 8 on postwar directors
and chapters 11 and 12 on Zanussi, Polański And Wajda]; Haltof, Marek, Polish National Cinema (New York; Oxford:
Berghahn Books 2002) [Esp. Chapter 5 On “The Polish School Revisited” And Chapter 7 “The Cinema of Distrust”];
Mazierska, Ewa, Polish Postcommunist Cinema. From Pavement Level (Bern Etc.: Peter Lang 2007) [Esp.
Introduction, Part 1 On “The Film Industry” And Part 2, Chapter 6 On “The New Cinema of Moral Concern”];
Michałek, Bolesław And Frank Turaj (Eds.), The Modern Cinema Of Poland (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana
Univ. Press 1986) [Esp. The Chapter On Andrzej Wajda].
248
It Was Not Until 2007 That Andrzej Wajda Directed Katyn, Which Addressed The Problem Of 5,000 Polish
Intellectuals Killed By The NKVD During WWII.
249
As an example, one could analyze films of Wojciech Has, one of the most famous Polish filmmakers of the period,
who never openly addressed political or historical problems faced by Poland. he did not even place his stories within
the contemporary Polish reality. He did, however, introduce a complex, chaotic, and torn world that escaped the
obvious Marxist dichotomies. Has’ cinema shows the world full of mystery, complicated relationships, and almost
magical realism; it is full of sensuality and artistic creationism. His camera remains close to the object, which reflects
his infatuation with the body and the costume. His films have an oneiric quality, therefore, they are not materialistic;
155

It is hard to definitively state whether it was the prioritization of the Polish Christian trauma
endured under the Nazi terror, pre-war antisemitism that continued to influence Polish cultural
interests, or the Soviet pressure to mold Eastern European identities as first and foremost anti-
fascist that was the reason that only a small number of films dealt with the problem of Polish-
Jewish relations. Alternatively, a limited interest in discussing the complexities of Polish-Jewish
pre-war and war relations could have been rooted the new post-war order in which the social
advancement of hundreds of thousands of Poles was propelled by the societal void and
demographic changes created by the war.

The war decimated Poland leaving millions of people homeless and hundreds of cities, towns, and
villages destroyed; it claimed the lives of six million Jews, most of whom were killed in the Nazi
concentration camps; it also destroyed the whole Jewish community with its artists, as well as
cultural and economic capital. As Andrzej Leder argues, the period between 1939-1956 should be
viewed as a social revolution that plowed through the fabric of the Polish society, thus creating
conditions for the post-war expansion of the middle class and a symbolic and literal departure from
the rural to urban way of life.
250
In the immediate post-war period, the problem of Polish anti-
Semitism became temporarily present in the public discourse thanks to such cinematic productions
as The Last Stage and Border Street. However, the problem rapidly became one of the silenced
topics of Polish cinematography.
251
While Poles chose not to discuss the inconvenient truth about

they are spiritual, mysterious. They were also rejected by the Communist Polish regime. His subtle and aesthetically
pleasing cinema was not accepted by the officials as it rejected the official diagnosis of the human condition (which
cinema was supposed to register). Pointedly, an oppressive state does not tolerate any kind of artistic avant-garde.
250
See: Leder, Andrzej. Prześniona Rewolucja. Ćwiczenia Z Logiki Historycznej. Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2015.
251
One should note a few notable exceptions made in 1950s and 1960s: A Generation (1954, dir. Andrzej Wajda);
Biały niedźwiedź (1959, dir. Jerzy Zarzycki); Samson (1961, dir. Andrzej Wajda); Świadectwo urodzenia (1963, dir
Stanisław Różewicz); Naganiacz (1964, dir. Ewa and Czesław Petelscy); Długa noc (1967, premiered in 1989, dir.
Janusz Nasfetera); and Wniebowstąpienie (1968, dir. Jan Rybkowski).
156
the pogroms and Polish Nazi collaborators, the Moscow-influenced anti-Jewish public discourse
further prolonged the silence. The lack of cinematic interest in the process of taking ethical
responsibility for the Polish sin of apathy, separated Poland from the West where atoning for
countries’ historical mistakes and past crimes became a slow, yet more pronounced process. It was
not until the end of the 20
th
century that Poles faced the history of their complex and tragic Polish-
Jewish past.

Indeed, it was only fifty-five years after the end of World War II and twelve years after the end of
communism in Poland, that Agnieszka Arnold’s documentary film Neighbors – produced and aired
on public television (TVP) - sent shockwaves through Polish intelligentsia circles and sparked a
national debate on the question of Polish responsibility for crimes committed on Polish Jews in
Nazi-occupied Poland. This publicly-funded movie
252
inspired Polish-born American historian Jan
T. Gross to write a book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,
Poland
253
, which unveiled one of the silenced topics of the post-WWII national discourse -- that
of Polish anti-Semitic pogroms.
254
As Warsaw’s intellectuals, writers, and historians discussed
their respective political stands on the problem, the 2001 release of Arnold’s documentary

252
Sasiedzi (Eng. Neighbors) was produced by the Polish broadcasting television, TVP.
253
Gross, Jan Tomasz. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University, 2001. The Polish edition of the book came out one year prior to the American release. The book
was coldly received by Polish and British historians’ circles, who accused it of being demagogic and lacking the
thoroughness of a narrative that provides one with a proper historical context. In various interviews and lectures at the
University of Oxford, Norman Davies described Gross’s publication as “deeply unfair to the Poles” and “lacking
historical context”. See, Davies, Norman. “‘Strach to nie analiza, lecz publicystyka”, Gazeta Wyborcza , (January 21,
2008). Compare with Prof. Norman Davies’s Lecture, Wolfson College, Oxford, April 13, 2001
(http://www.naszawitryna.pl/jedwabne_en_17.html). Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz critiqued Gross’s research methods
and lack of objectivity. See, “Interview with Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz”, Rzeczpospolita, 31 March 2001. One should
note that the American reception of Jan T. Gross’s book was much warmer. See, Wasserstein, Bernard, "Neighbors:
The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland." The English Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 469.
254
For more information on the Jedwabne pogrom, see: Institute of National Remembrance. Manslaughter of Jewish
Inhabitants of Jedwabne. Warsaw, 2003; Polonsky, Antony. The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy Over the
Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton University Press, 2004.
157
unofficially heralded a significant shift in Poland’s political, historical, and popular post-1989
discourse on WWII and the Polish-Jewish relations.

How did the end of the Cold War affect the workings of cultural memory in Poland and how did
domestic efforts to transform and rebuild national identity shape the WWII narrative? What exactly
is the relationship between the centripetal economy and geography of the Polish Holocaust
memory productions and the centrifugal motif of the journey (from the city to the periphery)
present in recent Polish cinematic productions pertaining to the theme of Polish anti-semitism? Do
all memory productions display the same tendencies in their representation of the Holocaust and
if so what do they tell us about the broader discourse shift in Poland? These questions lie at the
heart of the next part of this chapter that explores the relationship between the space of the Polish
Holocaust memory and concrete places of its commemoration that become anchor points for our
study of the Polish-Jewish history. It argues that these workings of memory not only operationalize
the process of remembering and identity-building in a newly democratic state but also embody the
paradox of shifting memory introduced by Andreas Huyssen.

Memory Through the Screen: Cinema and Television After 1989

One factor that appears to have a tremendous influence on one’s understanding of cinematic and
televisual representations of history in Polish media is the high status of Polish public broadcasting
and its relationship to public funding, as well as its ‘educational mission’.
255
Indeed, through the

255
While this paper does not attempt to analyze the educational task of public TV, it should be noted that Polish public
broadcasting has an officially defined ‘mission’ to educate. This seems to be a variation and – to some extent -
continuation of the socialist era objective to educate citizens and instill in them a sense of citizenship. While the
socialist-era audiences rejected public TV’s blatant political propaganda48, the post-1989 audiences have remained
faithful to the TVP1 and TVP2 programs
158
national film institute (the Polish Film Institute, PISF)
256
and public television
257
, the Polish
government has directly or indirectly subsidized almost all the films and TV series analyzed on
the next few pages. In other words, public funding serves as a common denominator for our
discussion of post-1989 memory works. Similarly, central to this section is a consideration of the
relationship of culturally and industrially charged televisual and cinematic historical narratives to
both history and public discourse at large. What is at stake in my argument is TV and cinema’s
symptomatic qualities that enable students of media, culture, and history to treat cinematic and
televisual narratives as specific barometers of changing tastes, breaking taboos, and shifting public
discourses. Moreover, as I illustrate on the following pages both cinematic and televisual narratives
have the power to shift that exact same discourse, hence becoming more than a mere indicator of
external changes: their primal cause.

This argument rests on four presumptions, all of which apply to both televisual and cinematic
historical narratives. The first assumption is that art is always intentional
258
, and as such it reflects
changes in opinions and/or circumstances of its creation. Following this logic, this section probes
the interaction between the televisual (historical) narrative and its socio-political, historical, and
cultural context. It is therefore less interested in asking questions about the ontology of the
televisual artifact and more in examining its potential to reveal information about the moment
when it was produced and changes it propelled. Secondly, this part of the chapter approaches TV
and cinema as open-ended realities that bear witness to cultural processes and exhibit the potential

256
The Minister of Culture nominates the director of PISF (the Polish Film Institute). The Institute has an independent
budget; its income consists of taxes paid by private film institutions, as well as production and distribution companies.
For more information, see the official website of the Polish Film Institute, http://www.pisf.pl/en/.
257
TVP is under the Ministry of Treasury; it is governed by a separate legal body called the National Broadcasting
Council. For more information, see the official website of TVP, http://www.tvp.pl/.
258
It is deliberate, purposeful. I am not using the word ‘intentional’ in a metaphysical sense, as in ‘pertaining to an
appearance, phenomenon, or representation in the mind’.
159
to reconstruct or shape history. I insert this chapter’s focus on the Polish post-1989 historical
productions and their sociohistorical context into the overall frame of Hayden White’s premise
that film provides us with an alternative (yet, always valid) form of a historical narrative that
should be studied with the same thoroughness and seriousness as other forms of historical
accounts. White states that “the historical monograph is no less ‘shaped’ or constructed than the
historical film or historical novel”.
259
In other words, historical film and TV series (as an example
of a historical narrative) reveal both: a subjective interpretation of events and information about
the socio-historical moment in which they are created.
260
In the words of Erin Bell and Ann Gray,
who focus their research on the relationship between history and television, “White’s work
encourages us to think of historiography, whether traditional or televisual, as being about arranging
and telling stories, not about delivering objective truth.”
261
The question, therefore, that this study
shall be asking is: how do Polish post-1989 film and TV tell history?

The third assumption is that due to their traceable and tangible connection to state funding, Polish
cinematic and televisual historical productions render themselves open to the same critical
perspective. To demonstrate that historical televisual and filmic productions reveal more about the
historical moment when they were created than of the historical moment they are depicting, my

259
White, Hayden, "Historiography and Historiophoty", The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 1988),
pp. 1196.
260
Similarly, Joshua Hirsch discusses the relationship between trauma and the context of its cinematic depiction. He
states that “the way a cultural work narrates a trauma is a function not only of the nature of the event and its initial
impact on the victims, but also of the conditions of the work’s production and reception. Films respond not only to
the past but also to the present, with its own ideological conditions through which the trauma is reinterpreted. These
ideological conditions determine to what extent a film denies trauma and to what extent it repeats trauma, and they
direct that posttraumatic response - explicitly, implicitly, or symptomatically - toward political processes that may
have little to do with the Holocaust itself” (11). See: Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust.
Temple University Press: 2004.
261
Bell, Erin and Ann Gray, “History on Television; Charisma, Narrative and Knowledge”, European Journal of
Cultural Studies, 10, 1 (2007), pp. 113-133.
160
close study of post-1989 WWII narrative focuses on three aspects of TV and cinematic
phenomena, which examined together provide us with a contextual landscape for further study of
politics of identity, politics of memory, and the public discourse. These are: pre-production
(including the intention of the creative personnel and the source of film/TV program funding,
which becomes especially pertinent in the case of state-funded historical films and series); post
postproduction (critical response and the cultural impact of the film/TV series); and film/TV form
(the bridge between the filmmaker’s intent and the patrons’ reaction). Lastly, this paper argues,
after John Hartley, that television teaches citizenship. Hartley points to TV’s ability to ignore
differences among its audiences, as it “gathers populations which may otherwise display few
connections among themselves and positions them as its audience ‘indifferently’, according to all
viewers the same ‘rights’ and promoting among them a sense of common identity as television
audiences. At one and the same time, then, people can experience political differences based on
territory, ethnicity, law and heritage between one another, but also, simultaneously and conversely,
they can enjoy undifferentiated ‘identity’ with others based on television audiencehood.”
262
While
tracing the progression of citizenship models from civil to political to social to cultural, Hartley
asserts that in a long run this new form of televisual citizenship “may be seen not as a competitor
with traditional ‘political’ forms, but a successor, covering and further embedding previous forms
certainly, but cumulatively, not supplanting them.”
263
In the context of Eastern European socialist
TV’s didactic and educational mission, this proves to be an interesting argument that will be further
developed in this part of the chapter. In short, there have been four main currents in Polish
historiophoty regarding the Holocaust and the problem of Polish-Jewish relations, as well as Polish
antisemitism.

262
Hartley, John. Uses of Television. Routledge: 1999, p. 158.
263
Ibid.
161

First, a brief analysis of an arbitrary selection of the years from 1990s shows that historical movies
of the first post-1989 decade (and especially films discussing the Holocaust) constituted a
minority: in 1989 thirty-three films premiered in Poland and only two discussed the Holocaust
(Wosiewicz’s Kornblumenblau, Rogowski’s Dluga Noc); in 1990, out of sixteen films one
discussed the Holocaust (Wajda’s Korczak); in 1991, out of twenty-two films two related to WWII
(Zanussi’s Zycie Za Zycie and Kolski’s Pogrzeb Kartofla); in 1993, thirty-one films premiered and
only one discussed the issue (Glinski’s Wszystko, Co Najwazniejsze). Pointedly, early 1990s
pushed cinema to the margin of Polish cultural life, as the relationship between the artist, the state,
and the audience dramatically changed.
264
Thematic and aesthetic concerns (which proved to be
ideologically motivated throughout the communist era) of the Polish Film School (as represented
by Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk) and the Cinema of Moral Concern (represented by
Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Zanussi) became obsolete. The political censorship was
replaced by the economic objectives of capitalism.
265
Moreover, state’s subsidies for filmmaking
decreased. As a result, most of the filmic productions of the first ten years after the fall of the Iron
Curtain concerned themselves with topics of capitalism and cultural pluralism and explored genre
films that drew inspiration from American cinema. Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990) and The Holy
Week (1995) are two of the few exceptions to this rule.

The second tendency revealed by my research demonstrates that mid 1990s to late 2000s witnessed
a rapid rise of TV and PISF-financed documentary films pertaining to the problem of Polish-Jewish

264
See, Haltof, Marek, ‘Everything for Sale: Polish National Cinema After 1989’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1997,
Vol. 39, No. 1-2, p. 140.
265
See, Haltof, Marek, ‘A Fistful of Dollars: Polish Cinema after the 1989 Freedom Shock’ , Film Quarterly, Vol.
48, No. 3 (Spring, 1995), p. 15.
162
history. Both Dariusz Jabłoński’s Fotoamator (1997) and Jolanta Dylewska’s Po-Lin. Okruchy
Pamieci (2008) document the past world of the Polish Jews. Consistent with the premise that Po-
lin
266
shows the forever-lost world of Polish Jews, Jolanta Dylewska’s film documents the pre-
WWII world of small Polish towns where Jewish families constituted a majority by using the
original footage shot by American Jews who visited Poland in the 1930s and filmed their relatives.
Consistent with the premise that Po-lin shows the forever-lost world of Polish Jews, Dylewska
creates a poetic narrative full of nostalgia. Its construction combines three level of a historical
narrative: the original film footage, the narration taken from the Sifrei Zikaron (Yizkor, Memorial
Books), which documents the life and religious traditions of the Jewish community, and a series
of interviews with the Poles who remember their Jewish neighbors (Dylewska went to all nineteen
villages from which the original footage came from). The first interviewed Pole remembers that,
“when the Germans took the Jews, it became so empty. It was very sad”
267
. Thus, Dylewska
provides the audience with an image of a Polish-Jewish, almost entirely peaceful
268
, cohabitation,
which was interrupted by WWII.

These old witnesses of the lost Jewish world provide the audience with every-day life details about
their neighbors. They remember doctors, shop-owners, musicians, watchmakers, and Rabbis.
Childhood memories of generous Jewish girls who shared their delicious challah and bagels at
school and women who prepared cooked fish, cholent, herrings, chicken broth, chopped liver
mixed with eggs, and kugel on Fridays mingles with stories of idiosyncratic characters: the old

266
The title of the movie, Po-lin , refers to the XIII-century legend about the move of the German Jews to Poland.
Upon their arrival, they exclaimed in Hebrew “PO-LIN” – “here, we will live” – thus, giving Poland its Jewish name.
267
Po-Lin. Okruchy Pamieci, dir. Jolanta Dylewska, 2008.
268
There is only one mention in the documentary of the Polish anti-Semitism. The narrator states that there were
nationalistic militia groups that would come to the farmers’ market, destroy Jewish stalls, and beat the Jews.
163
man, whose job was to wake up members of the community every morning by knocking on their
windows; the beautiful 19-year-old blind girl, who walked through the village while
philosophizing about life and death; crazy Miriam, who was scared of putting any white fabric
underneath her black garment, for it made her fear death.

Image 26. Movie poster for Jolanta Dylewska’s Po-Lin. Okruchy Pamieci (2008).

Source: culture.pl

164
However, it is not simply the presentation of a series of narrative tableaux that informs the purpose
of the documentary. The creation of the lyrical memoir from the pre-WWII era serves also a clearly
educational purpose. In between presenting frank interviews with old Poles, and the exhibition of
black and white footage, Dylewska provides the audience with detailed information on Jewish
tradition, religious practices, as well as traditions and Chassidic customs, thus emphasizing the
four hundred years of common history that preceded the Holocaust. Senior members of the Jewish
community care about the religious training of the youngest boys; they are also in charge of the
local ritual slaughter-house, libraries and newspapers. They mitigate disputes and open
orphanages; pious Hassid walks quietly to the synagogue or prays in the orchard; an old Klezmer
makes his violin weep. The contrast between Judaism and Christianity becomes symbolically
bridged when the camera captures an old Polish man recounting his memories about the
celebration of Jewish holidays in the intimate setting of his modest apartment where the only
picture hanging on the wall is the framed photograph of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. As one
learns about Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, and Purim, old Poles reminisce that pre-
WWII Poland “was a different world”
269
. It was a space that survives only in their collective
memory. When the camera looms over the playground filled with Jewish kids dancing, the
omniscient narrator predicts: “they only have ten years left”
270
. It is the early 1930s and within the
next decade almost all the portrayed in Po-lin Jews will have been crowded in city ghettos and
murdered in numerous extermination camps. What is missing from the documentary is a 4
th

narrative layer: interviews with the Jewish survivors.

269
Po-Lin. Okruchy Pamieci, dir. Jolanta Dylewska, 2008.
270
Ibid.
165
On a more abstract, yet still decisively spatial level, the case study of Po-lin prompted me to
investigate how national imaginings of Polish history and its countryside stand in relation to
memories recorded as part of the transnational project of memory of the USC Shoah Foundation.
The digitization of historical, visual, and other archives has often been praised as the road towards
democratization. I engaged with this notion by comparing the memory of the pre-WWII space
where two cultures, Polish and Jewish intertwined as recorded in the interviews that constitute the
repository of the Holocaust memory at the USC Shoah Foundation with its more linear and
cinematically narrativized counterparts from Po-lin.
271
By juxtaposing the archival testimonies
with Jolanta Dylewska’s Po-Lin. Okruchy Pamieci (2008), I investigated different levels of spatial
imaginings and collective encounters with memory. In other words, I investigated the way the pre-
Holocaust landscapes were first imagined, experienced and co-produced by their Jewish
inhabitants and then reimagined by the Polish inhabitants. I asked, how is the artistically rendered
memory of pre-Holocaust space different from the one we know from survivors’ testimonies? How
has contemporary Poland cinematically negotiated its own geography and history of indifference,
apathy and – often – anger directed at their Jewish neighbors? Are the two memories of the pre-
Holocaust space in stark contrast to one another?
To narrow my research, I specifically looked at the eighteen villages and towns scattered
throughout the Polish countryside that are portrayed Po-Lin. Central to my research was a
consideration of the relationship between witness and survivors’ testimonies to culturally and
industrially charged cinematic historical narratives that are indicative of a public discourse at large.

271
As a Graduate Summer Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC Shoah Foundation,
I conducted a summer-long archival research project: “Digital Topography of Memory: Reimagining Landscapes of
pre-Holocaust Poland.”
166
Anchoring my research in the notion of landscapes of memory, I investigated whether Jewish
survivors felt at home in their pre-Holocaust villages, landscapes, and towns. However,
determining how to research and index the way people remember space and place proved to be
challenging. The USC Shoah Foundation’s indexing system, while impressive, prioritizes concrete
keywords or phrases (pre-war life; ghetto; antisemitism; family; Nazis; Auschwitz; etc.) instead of
abstract concepts, such as belonging; alienation; safety. The latter are often conveyed in testimony
through phrases intentionally left unsaid. Therefore, after identifying the names of all the towns
features in the original black and white footage
272
used by Dylewska in her documentary, I decided
to use geographic locations as my entry points to USC Shoah Foundation’s archive of
testimonies.
273
The goal was to add a 4
th
layer of narrative to Dylewska’s documentary: interviews
with the Jewish survivors.

272
All the original footage used in Po-lin is part of the Yad-Vashem archive. The names of the towns depicted by
Dylewska are as follows: Boryslaw, 1933; Lodz-Baluty, 1935; Zareby Koscielne, 1930; Sedziszow, 1935; Tyszowce,
1933; Grodek K. Molodeczna, 1933; Kaluszyn, 1936; Kurow, 1932; Nowogrodek, 1931; Slonim, 1929; Gabin, 1937;
Skidel, 1930 (Skidzyel’, Belarus); Galicja, 1930; Sokołów Małopolski, 1930; Kolbuszowa, 1930; Raniżów, 1930;
Bolechow, 1935; Krakow - Kazimierz. 1935
273
A note on methodology: the task of identifying correct towns on a contemporary map of Poland proved to be a
challenge. There are many towns and villages in Poland that have the same name. Additionally, borders moved since
the pre-war period. Parts of pre-war Poland are now Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of contemporary Western Poland
were the German Reich. In other words, borders shifted west after WWII. Therefore, I could not only use towns and
villages from contemporary Poland but I had to also look at shtetls in what today is Western Ukraine and Western
Belarus. First, I turned to Google search to identify the total number of towns that share the same name. Then, I found
these towns on the map of Eastern Europe which allowed me to get a spatial sense of where the town I am researching
could have been located during WWII. For example, I found two entries for BOLECHOW: 1. Bolechów is a village
in the administrative district of Gmina Oława, within Oława County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western
Poland. Prior to 1945 it was in Germany and 2. Bolekhov/Bolekhiv, Ukraine Bolekhiv is a regional city in Ivano
Frankivsk Oblast of Ukraine. Similarly: there are three towns of Nowogrodek: one close to Bydgoszcz, the other one
closer to Lublin, and the third one which was a large Shtetl is East of Minsk. In each case, I thought I should be looking
at towns located in the East of Poland but I had to prove to my hypothesis by find historical evidence. A Polish online
archive www.shtetl.com became a crucial research tool that allowed me to correctly identify all the towns portrayed
by Dylewska. For example, when I researched “Nowogrodek”, I found a description: “It was once home to a large
Jewish community, very few of whom survived World War II.” That allowed me to narrow it down to one town. At
that point, I was ready to engage directly with the testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation.
167
Map 1. Towns and shtetls depicted by Joanna Dylewska in Po-lin (2008).

Source: Google Map; compiled by author.

My sample size consisted of testimonies recorded in English and Polish which amounted to 75-
80% available testimonies about eighteen Jewish communities depicted by Dylewska in Po-lin.
While an in-depth discussion of my methodology and research lies beyond the scope of this
chapter, a summary of my findings pertains to a larger discussion at hand. Testimonies reveal a
more nuanced story of Polish-Jewish pre-war relations that Dylewska’s documentary lets the
audience believe. In pre-war Poland, the most tension between non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews
existed in the liminal space of a walk from home to school and within a hierarchical structure of a
school. As Jack Greene testifies “you experienced [antisemitism] in town (…). On the street. You
could feel it. You were a second-class citizen. (...) When we moved into a new neighborhood, they
would call me a ‘dirty Jew’ and I would call them a ‘dirty Pollack’ and they said I could not say
that because I lived in a Polish state.” Similarly, Gusta Rubinfeld recalls a feeling of prejudice
168
shared by members of her community right before WWII: “it happened all the time, you felt it,
you felt it.”
274
Helen Birnbaum, on the other hand, remembers that “life was great at home, not so
good at school.”
275
While cases of deliberate, repeated, and targeted persecution of the Jewish
Poles by non-Jewish Poles are well documented and remembered by survivors, most of them recall
life in pre-war Poland as good. Pointedly, 1933 and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor impacted
domestic politics in Poland which trickled down to towns and small towns of Poland. The rise to
power of National Socialism triggered a wave of unrest and antisemitism of an unknown scale
both in Germany and, as my research reveals, Poland.
Stepping back again to our discussion of post-1989 tendencies in the Polish cinematography,
Dariusz Jabłoński’s doicumentary Fotoamator contrasts with the semi-idyllic, pre-WWII world
presented in Po-lin. It takes the audience inside of the Łódź Ghetto, which became infamous for
its very high levels of productivity until its liquidation in 1944. Jabłoński juxtaposes factual and
cold-blooded accounts provided by the Nazi ghetto overseers and officials with the memories of
Arnold Mostowisz who introduces himself in the beginning of the documentary: “I was a doctor
in the Łódź Ghetto”.
276
His cinematic perspective establishes a gruesome image of a macabre,
efficient, and industrious killing system, which claimed 11,000 Jewish lives each year.
277

While Dylewska presents the pre-WWII world of small Polish towns where Jewish families
constituted most the community,
278
Jabłoński reveals the unseen photographs from the Łódź

274
Jack Greene and Gusta Rubinfeld’s testimonies. USC Shoah Foundation’s Archive.
275
Helen Birnbaum, testimony. USC Shoah Foundation’s Archive.
276
Fotoamator, dir. Dariusz Jabłoński, 1997.
277
The documentary provides data regarding the mortality rate in 1941: “TB 2,552 persons; heart disease 3,221
persons; malnutrition 2,134; total deaths including other causes 11,437”.
278
In 1939, there were over 3.5 million Jews living in Poland, which amounted to 10% of the overall Polish population.
169
Ghetto
279
which was the last ghetto to be liquidated by the Nazis in August 1944. Both
documentaries produced by TVP showcase a variety of historical artifacts and modes of
documenting memory to create complex narratives of Jewish life and death in Poland. Importantly,
different manners of recollecting and interpretation of the past are given an equal footing. These
documentaries fall under the category of post-1989 films and TV programs that have focused on
propagating Polish education about Jewish history. Their production paralleled an important social
change that took place in mostly big Polish cities where Jewish culture, film, and music festivals
became popular. They followed the renaissance of Klezmer music in Warsaw and the 1988
creation of the Jewish Culture Festival in Cracow which over the years became one of the biggest
festivals of Jewish culture in the world. They also aligned with intensified efforts to preserve the
memory of the Shoah in Poland through the preservation of the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Memorial and Museum and other former Nazi concentration camps
280
built in Poland, as well as
conservation of the memory of the Polish-Jewish history through education. One of the most
popular and well-funded projects, The Museum of History of Polish Jews, opened in Warsaw in
2014. Slowly, but consistently, the interest and understanding of the nuanced Polish-Jewish
relations grew. And yet, not much was being said in terms of Polish anti-Semitism.

Everything changed in 2001 with Agnieszka Arnold’s TVP-produced documentary Sasiedzi. Her
film shifted Polish public’s focus from the study of Jewish culture and tradition to the inquiry of
the nature of Polish-Jewish relations before and during the Nazi occupation. Both the film and
Gross’s book threw a glaring light on the disjuncture between the popular discourse, which had

279
Łódź (an industrial city located 100 km from Warsaw) had the second largest ghetto after the Warsaw ghetto in
the Nazi-occupied Poland.
280
See: Miles, William F. S., ‘Post-communist Holocaust Commemoration in Poland and Germany’ , The Journal of
Holocaust Education, Vol.9, No.1, Summer 2000, pp.33-50.
170
largely ignored the topic of Polish anti-Semitism, and the historical evidence of the anti-Jewish
pogroms in Polish towns and villages. Therefore, when in 2001 the documentary aired on Polish
national television, the difficult past became one of the most widely discussed topics by public
intellectuals, historians, and politicians.
281
Furthermore, as more historical information became
available, it became clear that the tragic events that took place in Jedwabne were not localized but
represented a larger problem of Polish anti-Jewish behavior. Many films produced by the Polish
Film Institute (PISF) and TVP after 2001 exemplify this shift in the Polish portrayal of the
Holocaust. Revisiting topics previously silences became, therefore, the third tendency in the Polish
cinematic and televisual portrayal of WWII. Stepping back again to the trope of the triangular
relationship of victims, witnesses, and persecutors, it remains pertinent to analyze the spatial self-
imagination that bolstered the post-2001 works of the Polish filmmakers.

The process of reworking through the guilt and traumatic experience of witnessing the Holocaust
initiated in Poland around 2001, follows the logic of the events presented in Agnieszka Arnold’s
seminal documentary about the Jedwabne pogrom. Viewing the problem of Polish memory of the
Holocaust in terms of landscapes of memory, a spatial trope of center-periphery becomes a useful
device. Keeping in mind the spatial metaphors evoked throughout in this chapter, we can draw a
line between Warsaw (the capital; the place where national memory is written; the source of
cinematic and cultural subsidies; and the place of undeniable historical importance and symbolic
value to the Polish WWII history) and the peripheral landscapes (uncivilized, anti-Semitic,
mysterious, silent and permissive). As the center initiates the pursuit of memory and remembrance,

281
In a speech of symbolic and historical significance, delivered on the 60th anniversary of the Jedwabne pogrom
Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized for the massacre and asked the Jewish community for
forgiveness on behalf of the Poles.
171
it traces the histories of Polish anti-Semitism far away from its own urban setting. It simultaneously
atones for its moral sins by funding movies about Polish anti-Semitism but does so by placing the
culprits well beyond the Warsaw ghetto wall evoked by Miłosz in his 1943 poem and pointing to
the rural landscape and its inhabitants.

Image 27. A still from Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath. Józef Kalina (Maciej Stuhr) erects old Jewish
tombstones within a ‘contaminated landscape’ of the Polish countryside.

Source: nytimes.com

Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012), co-produced by PISF, exemplifies this shift in the
Polish cinematic portrayal of the Holocaust. Set in a small town in Eastern Poland - clearly
modeled after Jedwabne- the movie tells a story of a young man Józef Kalina, whose attempts to
commemorate the memory of local Jews who perished during WWII trigger a violent response
from his neighbors. Joined by his brother Franciszek, who visits Poland from Chicago, Kalina
discovers that members of his grandparents’ community took part in the killing of the Jewish
population. In a desperate act of atonement for his family’s sins – an act that becomes one of civil
172
disobedience - Kalina recovers old Jewish tombstones that had been desecrated by the Nazis and
used to pave local roads. He erects them on his field, thus reestablishing a material presence of the
past within the landscape that had stood as a silent witness to war atrocities. In a self-accusatory
fashion, Pasikowski concludes his movie with a brutal death of Józef who gets crucified by his
own community. While Aftermath confuses some of the historical facts (e.g. Jewish populations
could only own land in the territories annexed from Poland) did not own land in the Polish
countryside), it is the first unapologetic cinematic portrayal of Polish pre-WWII anti-Semitism.
Moreover, by focusing solely on the survivors (non-Jewish Poles), the film artistically renders the
physical, emotional, and moral emptiness that Polish Jews left behind. In other words, it
emphasizes the fact that the memory of the Polish Jews has remained defenseless for the past fifty
years.

Image 28. A road movie; Ida (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski).

Source: filmweb.pl
173
The 2014 film Ida (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski) continues the trend of dissecting the problem of Polish
anti-Semitism by evoking the motive of a trip to the countryside. Set in Poland in 1962, Ida reveals
a post-WWII world of oblivion and silence. A young Catholic postulant finds out from her aunt
Wanda, who was a ruthless communist judge in the immediate after war period, that she is Jewish.
Two women embark on a road trip to a small village where Ida’s parents had lived before the war.
They uncover that Ida’s parents had been murdered by their Polish neighbors. The movie was well-
received by international audiences and received A. O. Scott of the New York Times praised the
movie for containing “a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain.” “Its intimate drama,” he continues
“unfolds at the crossroads where the Catholic, Jewish and Communist strains of Poland’s endlessly
and bitterly contested national identity intersect.”
282
At the 87
th
Academy Awards, the movie won
the award for the Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Cinematography. In
Poland, the reactions to Ida were mixed. While the more conservative right-wing audiences
perceived the movie as historically selective in its ‘anti-Polish bias’ and even called it a sequel to
Pasikowski’s Aftermath, the left critiqued the simplified portrayal of Jewish women as either
assimilated Catholics or members of the so-called Żydokomuna (eng. Judeo-Communists) that had
been stereotypically seen as aiding the Soviets in importing communism into Poland.
283

Both Aftermath and Ida emphasize the material connection between the Polish landscapes and the
traumatic WWII past. However, they choose not to evoke the notion of Nazi concentration camps

282
Scott, A. O. “An Innocent Awakened; ‘Ida’, About an Excavation of Truth in Postwar Poland”, The New York
Times, 1 May 2014.
283
For examples of this discussion, see: Jakub Majmurek, Ida, „Kino”, 10, 2013, p. 71; Łukasz Maciejewski, Struktura
kryształu. RECENZJA filmu "Ida", „Dziennik”, 25 October 2013; Tadusz Płużański: Nowe „Pokłosie”. Niezależna.pl,
7.01.2015; karslro: 'Ida' dzieli Polaków. Prawica: 'To film antypolski'. Lewica: 'Utrwala stereotyp złej Żydówki i
dobrej zakonnicy'. Gazeta.pl, 24.12.2014; Zofia Rojek: „Ida” pełna antysemickich stereotypów? Krytyka najnowszego
filmu Pawlikowskiego. NaTemat.pl; Agnieszka Graff. Ida – subtelność i polityka. „Krytyka Polityczna”, 1 November
2013.
174
scattered throughout the Polish landscape (keeping both their distance to big cities and proximity
to major railway nodes) or the question of Polish knowledge or ignorance of the atrocities
perpetrated by the Germans (something that Claude Lanzmann, among others, extensively
discusses in his documentary Shoah). Instead, they address a previously silenced topic: that of
Polish anti-semitism. As Ida and Franciszek venture into the unknown lands of Eastern Europe,
their trip echoes testimonies of many cryptic internally exchanged warnings within the Warsaw
and other ghettos during WWII: ‘travel East means death’. While these clandestine messages
warned of train journeys to one of the Nazi death camps hidden under the umbrella of German
Nazi terror and pre-WWII conviction that Eastern Europe was a periphery of modernity, Ida and
Franciszek travel East to learn more about that exact space of the unknown and uncivilized places.
What they find is a history of Polish neighbors kill their Jewish friends, burying them in the forest,
and stealing their farms. It is not until the representative of the center (filmmaker and the film
protagonist) embarks on the metaphorical journey to the periphery, that the historical sphere of
Polish antisemitism becomes real.

Pointedly, both movies were co-funded by the Polish Film Institute. Therefore, they evoke the
notion of the centripetal economy and geography of the Polish Holocaust memory productions and
the centrifugal motif of the journey. First, state taxes power the multiple centrally-designed
memory projects. These, in return, present the audiences with the notion of a difficult Polish. This
mechanism implies that Warsaw has not discussed these difficult pasts before, since it did not
partake in them. [It should also be noted that Ida evokes additional metaphorical notions of
ideological spaces. The movie engages with the difficult post-WWII history when a significant
percentage of the Jewish survivors joined the Communist party. This, however, remains beyond
175
the scope of this analysis.] The examples of Aftermath and Ida implies that the post-1989
Holocaust discourse re-orients itself spatially and invites people to visit the literal and metaphorical
margins of its country’s past. Whether the motif of center-periphery will permanently relativize
the role of Polish city dwellers as Holocaust witnesses or whether it merely marks the beginning
of a long (centripetal) process of working through the national trauma is yet to be seen.

Analogously, Agnieszka Arnold’s TVP-funded film Neighbors seems to have impacted the themes
of public TV series produced in Poland after 2001. A close study of 769 television series, serialized
documentaries, and TV mini-series produced between 1989 and 2014, reveals that in the first
decade since 1989, Poland produced 12 television series about WWII and only 2 about the
Holocaust (see figure 1). In the years leading up to 2001, three TV series dealt with the problem
of Polish-Jewish relations including: a 7-episode documentary series Warszawa - pejzaż z
Singerem (eng. Warsaw - Landscape with Singer, 1999) that discussed the pre-WWII coexistence
of Poles and Jews, as well as the essence of mutual prejudices and conflicts; and Wszystkie
pieniądze świata (eng. All the Money in the World, 1999) - a 4-episode war mini-series that
discusses a romantic relationship between a Polish young man and his Jewish girlfriend.

176

Since 2006, Polish TV has produced at least one TV series per year (or renewed an already existing
TV series) that directly addressed the problem of Polish anti-Semitism. While numbers of shows
per year might not seem especially impressive, the cumulative number of TV shows produced
post-1989 reveals a steady growth of the public discourse concerning Polish-Jewish relations in
Polish TV series (see Figure 2). This visual representation of televisual trends seems especially
pertinent to the notion of collective memory and discourse, which continuously build up and
should not merely be studied on a year-to-year basis. By 2014, the cumulative number of all war
series produced after 1989 increased 3.5 times to 42, while the number of Holocaust-related series
increased to the total cumulative number of 14 series produced after 1989. I argue that Arnold’s
documentary, as well as a favorable policy of the Civic Platform’s government
284
, prompted a two-
fold increase in TV’s focus on the Holocaust.

284
Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) is one of the two biggest political parties in Poland. Its ideological core is
Christian democratic, pro-EU, and liberal conservative. In 2007, Civic Platform formed a coalition with the Polish
People’s Party. Similarly, in 2011, failing to win the outright majority, Civic Platform formed a coalition with the
Polish People’s Party.
177

Figure 2. Number of TV Shows by Topic per Year, 1989-2014

In years 2008-2014, one of the TV series that generated critical interest
285
and attracted wide
audiences
286
was the historical drama Czas Honoru (“The Days of Honor”) produced for Channel
2 of the Polish public broadcasting (TVP2). Season one, two, and three take places in 1941, season
four and five focus on 1944 and 1945 respectively, and seasons six and seven zoom in on the post-
war years. The main plot revolves around the lives of four young Polish Home Army soldiers.
While none of the four main male characters are Jewish, the problem of Polish-Jewish relations
permeates the whole narrative and problematizes the traditional way of portraying Polish war
history. Out of the plethora of complex characters, the story of Leon Sajkowski and his family
provides the audience with a more complex and subtle approach to the problem of Polish-Jewish
relations than witnessed before on Polish TV. Leon, a Catholic professor of the University of
Warsaw, whose father’s Jewish roots lead to the Sajkowski’s family imprisonment in the Warsaw

285
It has received multiple awards in Poland and the United States.
286
The average audience in 2008: 2,861,265; 2009: 2,595,919; 2010: 2,444,128; 2011: 2,176,058. Source:
http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/czas-honoru-podniosl-widownie-dwojki Total population of Poland: 38,5
million.
178
Ghetto, faces Polish prejudice against the Jews even from his Catholic wife, Sabina. The
ambivalence of his identity simultaneously crosses, blurs, and reasserts lines between non-Jewish
Poles and Polish Jews. While in some sense, Days of Honor continues the pre-1989 tendency to
show the Holocaust from either the Polish (gentile) perspective or from the position of “Non-
Jewish Jews” (mostly assimilated, non-religious Jews, whose identity is as much Polish as it is
Jewish)”
287
, Polish anti-Semitism is displayed in almost all episodes of the first two seasons of the
series. Most pointedly, even Sajkowski’s wife, Sabina, exclaims in the first episode to her children:
“[your father] cannot do anything the way he should. He gives everything away to some Jewish
beggars. (…) It’s not my fault that we are stuck in this hell. It’s not my father who was Jewish –
but yours.” The Sajkowski family encounters all kinds of Poles: evil blackmailers who live off
selling information about Jews hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw, apathetic neighbors, as well
as sympathetic but ignorant Catholics who help Sajkowski’s daughter, Lena, while asking her:
“Did you have anything to eat back there in the Ghetto?” The TV series uncovers the most
uncomfortable truths about the Polish-Jewish Warsaw life under the Nazi occupation.

Image 29. A still from Days of Honor. Sabina Sajkowska (Anna Romantowska), a Polish Catholic, is sent to the
Warsaw Ghetto with her husband and children.

Source: filmweb.pl

287
Mazierska, Ewa, ‘Non-Jewish Jews, Good Poles and Historical Truth in the Films of Andrzej Wajda’, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2000, p. 214.

179
It would be impossible to interpret this ideological shift of the Polish filmmakers towards a more
nuanced representation of the memory of WWII without considering it part of an overall Polish
effort to assert itself firmly as a unique voice within the global dialogue on the memory of the
Shoah. By speaking more openly about the rich, difficult, and–often-tragic history of the Polish-
Jewish relations, Polish artists emphasize their unique and familiar perspective on what happened
in Eastern Europe under the occupation of the Nazis. In the past decade, the urgency to discuss the
truth about Poles’ pre-war neighbors has become even more pressing as the last witnesses of that
time are dying. Simultaneously, the 2015 majority win of the conservative Christian democratic
party Law and Justice introduced a more assertive policy that pushes back against blaming the
Poles for the crimes committed by the Nazis on the Polish soil. The 2018 Polish-Israeli Crisis that
lasted from January until July provides an interesting case study on how history, trauma, and
politics of cultural memory continue to impact Polish policy decisions.

2015-?
In early 2018, Polish-Israeli relations were at the lowest point since the 1968 outburst of an anti-
semitic campaign waged by the Polish communist party
288
and the ousting of many Polish Jews
from Poland. On Friday, January 26, the lower house of the Polish parliament passed the bill that
made it illegal to suggest that the Polish nation bears responsibility or co-responsibility for the
crimes of the Holocaust committed by the German Nazis on the Polish soil. The controversial part
of the bill, which is an amendment to an existing Polish law
289
, stated that (emphasis added):

“Article 55a. 1. Whoever claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the
Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich
(...) or for other felonies that constitute crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war

288
Polish United Worker’s Party.
289
Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance.
180
crimes, or whoever otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said
crimes – shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.
(...)
Article 55b. Irrespective of the regulations in force at the location of committing the criminal act,
this Act shall apply to Polish and foreign citizens in the event of committing the offences referred
to in Articles 55 and 55a.”

Disregarding Israel’s strongly voiced concern about the pending legislation and Prime Minister
Netanyahu’s invitation to bilateral talks, the Polish Senate approved the controversial legislation
on February 1, criminalizing public claims that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. At the time
of this writing, the bill awaits President Andrzej Duda’s signature.

The 2018 crisis did not occur spontaneously. It reflected Poland’s ongoing struggle with its Cold
War baggage of collective amnesia about the persecution of the Jews by their Polish neighbors. It
also revealed Poland’s frustration with being implicated in systemic, systematic, and industrialized
crimes of the Holocaust committed by the Nazis on the Polish soil. Lying at the nexus of post-
1989 national identity and politics of memory, the crisis was entangled in individual, collective,
and institutional ways of processing the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust.

Defenders of the bill viewed it as a way of legally curbing the use of the misleading phrase “Polish
Concentration Camps” in the international media. Even though the phrase does not feature in the
text of the bill, “Polish Concentration Camps” has been at the crux of the debate in Poland since
the moment the bill was drafted and introduced to a wider audience. What some have dismissed
as a discussion of semantics that has little bearing on the global WWII discourse, Poles view as a
matter of national interest, identity, and dignity.
181
Many journalists and politicians outside of Poland have used this shortcut to denote German Nazi
concentration camps that were built in Poland but overseen from Berlin
290
. Poles, however, view
it as an expression of historical ignorance, conflation of the Holocaust with Polish antisemitism,
as well as insensitivity to the approximately 3 million non-Jewish Poles who died during WWII
(hundreds of thousands of whom were murdered in Nazi camps)
291
. The problem of strengthening
Polish national identity through historical narratives of Polish WWII martyrdom became a central
issue for the ultraconservative right-wing party, ‘Law and Justice’. The proposed bill was part of
their domestic agenda.

A few main issues were brought to light by the 2018 crisis. The bill was drafted and voted for by
the conservatives, yet it is not only the ultra-right that opposes the usage of the term “Polish Death
Camps” in international media. Across the domestic political divide that sharpened in 2015 when
‘Law and Justice’ won an outright majority, the Polish public strongly rejects this phrase as
historically incorrect. On February 3, abstaining from commenting on the new Polish legislation,
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel issued a statement that the use of the phrase “Polish
Death Camps” was wrong: “There is not the slightest doubt as to who was responsible for the
extermination camps, operated them and murdered millions of European Jews there: namely
Germans.”
292

290
Including President Obama in 2012. See: Mark Memmott, “White House Offers Regrets for President Referring to
‘Polish Death Camp,” NPR, May 30, 2012, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/05/30/153982099/white-
house-offers-regrets-for-president-referring-to-polish-death-camp
291
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5M Polish citizens were
deported to German territory for forced labor; hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration
camps. (…) It is estimated that Germans killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during WWII. In
addition, the Germans murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland.” Source:
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005473
292
See: Noa Landau and Ofer Aderet, “German FM Weighs in on Polish Holocaust Bill: Germany Alone Was
Responsible for the Holocaust ‘And No One Else,” Haaretz, February 03, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/world-
news/europe/german-fm-calling-auschwitz-a-polish-death-camp-is-incorrect-1.5786931
182
While historically sympathetic to Poland’s contestation of the term “Polish Death Camps”, Israel
strongly opposes the ambiguous wording of the new bill that leaves too much to interpretation.
Israelis fear that the new bill will lead to whitewashing of the history of Polish antisemitism and
crimes committed by the Poles on their Jewish neighbors before, during, and after WWII. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that the Israeli government “will under no circumstance
accept any attempt to rewrite history.”
293
Indeed, many historians, political commentators, and
Holocaust scholars in Poland and Israel alike view the new legislation as a type of preventive
censorship that evokes the worst type of Cold War connotations.

To many, the bill registered as an attempt to negate the fundamental and unquestionable value of
individual and subjective witness and survivor testimonies. This struck a particularly painful chord
in Israel and among the Diaspora alike. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center,
opposed the new legislation as

“liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish
population during the Holocaust. There is no doubt that the term ‘Polish death camps’ is a historical
misrepresentation! The extermination camps were set up in Nazi-occupied Poland in order to
murder the Jewish people within the framework of the "Final Solution." However, restrictions on
statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with
the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion. (...)”
294

The proposed law was met with a strong wave of criticism inside of Poland. On February 5, anti-
bill protesters gathered outside of the Chancellery of the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda

293
See: Jeffrey Heller and Marcin Goettig, “Israel and Poland Clash Over Proposed Holocaust Law,” Reuters, January
28, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-poland/israel-and-poland-clash-over-proposed-holocaust-law-
idUSKBN1FH0S3
294
See: Press Release, “Yad Vashem Response to the Law Passed in Poland Yesterday,” January 27, 2018,
https://www.yadvashem.org/press-release/27-january-2018-18-43.html
183
voicing their opposition. Professor Paweł Śpiewak, Director of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish
Historical Institute in Warsaw, said in an official statement that: “In our opinion, the wording of
the proposed amendments is highly imprecise and leaves a large margin for confusion. (...) In our
opinion, the amendment (...) is a regress in terms of freedom of research, freedom of speech and
popularization of knowledge.”
295
Similarly, Professor Dariusz Stola, Director of POLIN Museum
of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, stated that: “Passing a law that may exert a negative
influence on historical research, that is on searching for the truth about the past, is not a good
solution.”
296

While Poland as a state did not exist under the Nazi occupation and had no puppet regime
collaborating with the Nazis, a law that forbids discussions of the involvement of both “the Polish
Nation or the Republic of Poland” prevents any type of meaningful dialogue about the history of
Polish antisemitism and the violence Jewish communities experienced at the hands of their non-
Jewish Polish neighbors. It also limits discussion of such traumatic events as the 1941 Jedwabne
pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, and other cases of deliberate, repeated, and targeted persecution
of the Jewish Poles by non-Jewish Poles.

The controversial bill marked a turning point in the process of post-Cold War Polish-Jewish
reconciliation. Between 1945 and 1989, the relationship between the official Polish discourse and
the memory of the Shoah was problematic. For both geopolitical and ideological reasons, Soviet
propaganda exploited forms of popular anti-Semitism in periodic swings throughout the Cold War.
This trickled down into public and political discourses of Eastern European satellite states and

295
Original translation.
296
Original translation.
184
added to their already hostile attitudes towards the Jews. Structurally, the Iron Curtain prevented
Poland and other Eastern European states from participating in the process of working through
shared WWII trauma for almost 50 years.

This collective amnesia of the Holocaust lasted in Poland until the 1989. The end of the Cold War
gave voice to a previously silenced topic of Polish anti-semitism, significantly enriching Holocaust
discourse over the past twenty-nine years. As both Poland and other Soviet satellite states were
previously engaged in falsification of memory and manipulation of cultural productions, the post-
1989 period became a fertile ground for the celebration of counter-memory.

In 2001, such efforts became pronounced when Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors: The Destruction
of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland was published. The text sparked a national debate
on the Polish responsibility for crimes committed on Polish Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Simultaneously, many champions of the Polish-Jewish reconciliation continued to verbalize their
disapproval of the phrase “Polish Death Camps”: Professor Bronisław Geremek, Władysław
Bartoszewski, Radek Sikorski, and others. While there was no national consensus on the issue of
Polish involvement in the persecution of the Polish Jews, the painful dialogue existed.

The 2018 crisis came to its conclusion in June 2018 when the Polish and Israeli governments came
to an agreement and collectively redrafted the problematic bill. However, it revealed the fragility
of Polish-Jewish reconciliation and a disturbing, albeit not unexpected, turn to nationalism and
isolationism in Poland. It also heralded a potential reversal of a short-lived post-2001 tendency to
discuss the complicated triangular relationship between victims, witnesses, and perpetrators.
185
While phrases like “Polish Concentration Camps” expunge nuance from Polish-Jewish history,
they also confirm Polish bias about the lack of international recognition for Poland’s own WWII
trauma. As a result, seeds of fear and suspicion find fertile ground in notions of Polish martyrdom
and nationalism that constituted the core of Polish identity throughout the decades of Nazi and
Soviet oppression and political subjugation. Paradoxically, Israel’s strong response to the proposed
bill might have strengthened its defenders, as many in Poland interpreted Israel’s objections as an
attack on Polish sovereign right to draft its own regulations. While the 2018 controversy might
have further retarded the maturity and subtlety necessary for continued progress in Polish-Jewish
reconciliation, it is too early to definitively state how it will impact the cinematic and televisual
representations of the Polish-Jewish relations.

186
Conclusion
The Future of Memory: Empathy, Immersion, and Interactivity

“Technologies designed to foster empathy presume to acknowledge the experience of another, but
inherently cannot. The user of these technologies, instead of acknowledging another’s experience,
hastily absorbs the other’s experience into their own experience. This leads to a position where
your experience cannot be acknowledged as the basis for any political or ethical claim until it can
be expressed in a form that I can directly experience, without clear mediation.”

- Grant Bollmer
297

In 2018, a call for empathy, immersion, and interactivity governed the unfolding of transnational
commemorative projects devoted to the memory of the Shoah. Between the new smartphone
augmented reality application launched by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington D.C. and the success of The Last Goodbye
298
, we have witnessed a rapid growth in
the scope and educational ambition of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)
technologies. Similarly, the emergence of mixed reality (MR) games, like Pokémon Go!, and most
recently the introduction of iPhone X with augmented reality capability are already impacting the
way media-generated virtualities fill places of commemoration and remembrance. In other words,
we have entered a stage in memory production that comprises of constant exchanges between
virtual and material contexts, as well as online and offline archival regimes. What is at stake is
turning places of memory into spaces of play.

Simultaneously, the discrepancy and perhaps incommensurability between the centralized, old-
media-based memory-control exerted by Auschwitz-Birkenau and other institutions and the
individualized memory dissemination enabled by social media is more pronounced than ever

297
Grant Bollmer, “Empathy Machines,” Media International Australia 165.1 (2017): 64.
298
In February 2018, The Last Goodbye won The Creative Arts Award, VR-Documentary Jury Prize at 2018 Lumiere
Awards. In April 2018, The Last Goodbye won two Webby awards: for the best branded 360 video and for the best
narrative experience in the online film and video category.
187
before. The friction between the two has pushed Holocaust-focused museums and organizations
to employ the perceived potentials of augmented and virtual reality, thus equating immersion with
empathy. Building on the trend of virtual reality discussed in Chapter 1 of this study, the Anne
Frank House museum partnered with Force Field VR to develop an interactive experience Anne
Frank House VR that “recreates Amsterdam’s secret annex and preserves a piece of Holocaust
history.”
299
The virtual reality film is currently available in English, Dutch, German, French,
Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew on Oculus Go, Gear VR, and Rift. The rooms in the Amsterdam
museum have remained devoid of furniture, as per Otto Frank’s wish. However, the VR experience
takes viewers on a tour of a fully furnished annex “in the style of the times to better approximate
what it would have been like for Anne Frank and her family.”
300
Here, the spatial and temporal
entanglements of The Last Goodbye become even more complicated as the indexical traits of the
past mix with an imagination of a 21
st
-century content creator.

Image 30. Virtualization of Anne Frank’s secret annex.

Source: https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-anne-frank-house-vr-an-immersive-experience-that-recreates-
amsterdams-secret-annex-and-preserves-a-piece-of-holocaust-history/

299
https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-anne-frank-house-vr-an-immersive-experience-that-recreates-
amsterdams-secret-annex-and-preserves-a-piece-of-holocaust-history/ For more information, see:
https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/secret-annex/
300
ibid.
188
The Anne Frank House VR example is not dissimilar to the 2018 Italian indie virtual reality project
Witness: Auschwitz developed as a “completely immersive experience that allows users to (…)
become ‘witnesses’ to one of the most tragic events in the history of humanity.”
301
Daniele Azara,
the creative director of Witness: Auschwitz, explains that users can “participate in the daily horror
of the extermination camp, although no scenes of explicit violence are included. The context,
generated in VR, increases the emotional engagement and the experience is imprinted in the mind
in a completely innovative way compared to traditional media.”
302
Beyond simply the educational
value of the experience, creators look to the emotional potential of the medium, prophesizing its
ability to immerse users in witnesses’ point of view.
303

Yet, the explosion of technological developments and mainstream appeal of AR and VR are not
the only ways in which empathy is being evoked in the target audience of digital natives. Recently,
the long-standing fascination with photo colorizing has made its way into Holocaust education
thanks to the project “Faces of Auschwitz” created by Marina Amaral. Amaral, who is a self-taught
Brazilian colorist, represents a growing community of history educators who take full advantage
of social media affordances to participate in online communities of, among other topics, Holocaust
memory curation. In January 2017, Amaral chose an original photograph of a 14-year old Polish
girl named Czesława Kwoka (camp no. 26947) to be the first installment of her colorized
Auschwitz-Birkenau registration photos series. She carefully colorized the black and white
triptych of Czesława’s Auschwitz registration portraits and shared it via Twitter to an
overwhelmingly positive reception. However, it was not until March 2018, when the Auschwitz-

301
Kirk McKeans, “Videogames’ portrayal of the Holocaust does a disservice to both players and victims,” PCGames,
https://www.pcgamesn.com/jewish-opinions-on-nazis-in-videogames
302
ibid.
303
For more information on this project, see: http://witnessauschwitz.com
189
Birkenau Museum shared Marina’s work on Museum’s Twitter and Facebook accounts that the
colorized image of Czesława became viral on social media and the project “Faces of Auschwitz”
was officially born.

Image 31. Black and white photo of Czesława Kwoka.

Source: www.facesofauschwitz.org

Emphasizing its educational and didactic mission, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum accompanied
Amaral’s colorized image with a brief description of Czesława Kwoka’s life and information on
the young girl’s haunting registration images. The Museum’s Twitter and Facebook followers
learned that Czesława was one of the 230,000 children and youth deported by the Nazis to
Auschwitz-Birkenau; that she arrived in Auschwitz on December 13, 1942 in a transport of 318
women; and that three months later, she was murdered with a phenol injection to the heart.
304

304
What is left of Czesława’s short and tragic life are snippets of information that allow us to establish traces of
individualized memory. We know that Czesława was born on August 15, 1928 in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in
the Polish Zamość region that fell victim to Hitler’s Lebensraum (living space) – the ideological policy of territorial
expansion into Eastern Europe. We also know that she was arrested alongside her mother, Katarzyna, who received
number 26949 and perished in the camp on 18 February 1943. The three images that Marina Amaral colorized in her
studio in Brazil are last indexical evidence of Czesława’s life, arrest, and brutal death.
190

Image 32. Colorized photo of Czesława Kwoka.

Source: www.facesofauschwitz.org

Inspired by the positive reception of Czesława Kwoka’s colorized registration photo, Amaral
committed herself to colorize more photos of Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners and initiated an
official creative collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: “Faces of
Auschwitz”. The goal of the project is to tell stories of individual Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners
who were photographed during the registration process. Each week, Marina colorizes one of the
original black and white prisoners’ photos ensuring historical accuracy of the colors she uses. The
“Faces of Auschwitz” project engages with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s collection of
38,916 registration photographs that were taken between February 1941 and January 1945 in the
laboratory of Erkennungsdienst in Auschwitz I. The preserved photos, 31,969 of men and 6,947
of women, constitute only a fraction of a vast Nazi photo archive destroyed during the camp
evacuation in January 1945. While we do not know the total number of registration photographs
taken during the operation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we do know that only prisoners who survived
191
the initial selection and incorporation into the Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner population had their
photos taken. Those condemned to extermination at the onset were not photographed.
305

As she was preparing for the launch of her debut book The Color of Time: A New History of the
World, 1850-1960, Amaral emphasized that "color has the power to bring life back to the most
important moments."
306
When asked specifically about her Holocaust project, she affirms that
“color makes us understand that these [photographed] people were human beings, not mere
statistics.” So far, her work has received more praise than criticism. Since the visual aspect of
“Faces of Auschwitz” lends itself well to online sharing, the affordances of social media have
become central to online proliferation of Amaral’s work. She has taken to Twitter to release her
work and, consequently, educate her followers about the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marina
explains the popularity of her work and high number of her Twitter followers
307
in terms of
empathy-evoking color that “has the power to bring life back to the most important moments."
308

Unsurprisingly, the project “Faces of Auschwitz” has contributed to the virality of already

305
Initially, the Nazis planned to photograph each of approximately 400,000 prisoners registered at Auschwitz-
Birkenau, half of whom were Jewish. The motivation was to create a visual aid to identify runaway prisoners or those
whose identity had to be confirmed during their stay in the camp. However, the system proved to be ineffective. The
cruel and inhuman conditions of the camp life made prisoners’ emaciated physique and facial features unrecognizable
shortly after they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Prisoners were photographed soon after their arrival in Auschwitz-
Birkenau by fellow inmates who were forced to work in the camp photo laboratory in Block 26. Prisoner faces and
heads were shaven and their uniforms embroidered with camp numbers, triangles corresponding to different prisoner
categories, and letters identifying prisoners’ countries of origin. While most of the photographed prisoners wore camp
uniforms, a few of the registration photographs feature prisoners wearing civilian clothes. In January 1945, Nazis
ordered prisoners Wilhelm Brasse and Bronisław Jureczek to burn the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau photo
archive. To preserve photographic evidence of the camp registration system, Wilhelm and Bronisław retrieved
undestroyed photographs from the furnace and boarded the lab door to prevent unauthorized access after the
evacuation of the camp. The two saved 38,916 photographs, 38,916 of which constitute the current archival collection
of the Museum. For more information about the project and for a full version of my article on Marina Amaral and
“Faces of Auschwitz”, see: Maria Zalewska, “Faces of Auschwitz: Learning History in Color,” Memoria No. 10 (July
2018).
306
Marina Amaral, interviewed by the author, May 2018.
307
In March 2019, Marina is followed by more than 132,000 people.
308
Marina Amaral, interviewed by the author, May 2018.
192
popular social media content curated and disseminated by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum – a
fact that supports claims made in Chapter 2.

Initially, it wasn’t clear whether it was the heartbreaking story of Czesława Kwoka’s short tragic
life or the color used to bring her history closer to the online audiences that made the post viral.
An overwhelming outpouring of comments and follow-up questions directed at the Museum and
Marina suggest that both factors played a role. Learning that a 14-year old Czesława was brutally
beat with a leather whip moments before the camp photographer released the camera shutter
individualized her story. While Marina and her social media followers focus of color being an
empathy building element, there is another less obvious reason why colorizing might become
relevant to Holocaust scholars in the 21
st
century. Color allows the audiences to notice stains of
barely coagulated blood on Czesława’s swollen bruised lips. The previously unseen index reveals
itself through the process of colorizing akin to the diagnostic articulating paper that highlights the
materiality that is present yet hidden. We, therefore, learn and remember more about a young girl
who posed for three distinct shots standard in prison photography: a profile shot, an en face shot,
and a head-covering shot with a headscarf. The popularity of “Faces of Auschwitz” seems to prove
that color makes visual testimony and record more relevant and compelling to social media and
digital natives. It also has a potential to strengthen researcher’s understanding of historical facts
that were previously overlooked.

In a more surprising and perhaps bizarre twist, the question of “what does the ‘digital’ do to
forgetting and remembering?” has gained a new alt-right dimension during and since the 2016
presidential election. Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog first appeared in a 2005 online cartoon Boy’s
193
Club with the catchphrase “feels good, man”. Originally, the character was commonly used in non-
bigoted imagery. By April 2015, “Rare Pepes” began appearing on Tumblr.
309
However, 2016 saw
a shift in the usage of the Pepe meme. In online communities like 4chan and Reddit, “alt right’
internet users increasingly began putting Pepe into Holocaust related scenarios. By the end of the
year, the meme was added to the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database. To this day,
the meme has continued to be used in white nationalist and political ways. This case study speaks
volumes not only to the proliferation of an increasingly superficial common historical knowledge
of the Nazis but also to the new ways in which the Holocaust becomes noticeably abstracted from
its primary context.

Image 33. Anti-Defamation League, Hate Symbols Database

Source: https://www.adl.org/education-and-resources/resource-knowledge-base/hate-symbols; accessed on March 29,
2018

Similarly, some of the World War II video games divorce Nazis from their history and portray
them as archetypal villains. From the 1981 Castle Wolfenstein to the highly controversial 2018
Ukrainian Auschwitz-themed video game The Cost of Freedom, which allows players to be SS
guards and decide which Jewish inmates are sent to gas chambers, Holocaust-themed video games

309
Abby Ohlheiser, Caitlin Dewey, and Julia Carpenter, “Every Tumblr meme from 2015, in one insane timeline,”
Washington Post, December 18, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/18/an-
insane-timeline-of-2015-in-tumblr-memes/?utm_term=.b52f73d68e72.
194
evoke many of the ethical questions raised in this dissertation.
310
They also (re)shape attitudes
towards physical, real-world environments of memorialization.

The intent of this dissertation was to show how new media practices are forcing us to rethink the
relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration. By looking at specific
examples of the changing landscape of contemporary Holocaust memory mediation, I argued that
we are living in a moment through which the rules of Holocaust education and memory curation
can be re-theorized and historicized. Additionally, by employing a spatial metaphor of landscapes
of memory, I oriented all existing and emerging archival regimes and technologies of memory vis-
a-vis the ground zero of all Holocaust remembrance: Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a place of
commemoration, as well as a global metaphor for all Holocaust discourse, Auschwitz-Birkenau is
the final frontier against which the ethics and ethical nuances embedded in old and new media use
can be tested.

By situating this dissertation’s intervention in the global study of media memory and Holocaust
remembrance, I zoomed in on three major takeaways that such an intervention yield. First, the
evolution of Holocaust witness testimonies from video to virtual reality illustrates how
virtualization of places of memory unambiguously minimizes the status of real-world places of
memory, as well as the importance of visiting the actual places of commemoration scattered
throughout the Eastern European landscape. Second, social media’s and digital technologies’
interventions in spaces of cultural sacrum are turning places of memory into spaces of play.

310
It should be noted that the Ukrainian Auschwitz-themed video game, whose release was planned for 2019, was
scrapped after an international outcry. For more information about this highly controversial project, see:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-developers-forced-to-scrap-auschwitz-themed-video-game-after-outcry/
195
Consequently, as technology progresses, the institutional power over how the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum is represented and how Holocaust memory is curated has eroded. Lastly, rather than
problematizing the homogenizing habit of discussing national attitudes towards the memory of the
Shoah, the self-reflex of Eastern European countries to discuss their national responses to the
Holocaust continues to come through in their respective media. In other words, the tension between
the national and transnational lens of remembrance continues to inform how spaces of historical
memory are filled, organized, and produced by the people who currently inhabit the “contaminated
landscape” (Kontaminierte Landschaften)
311
of post-WWII Eastern Europe. It becomes crucial to
consider both Poland’s contribution to the global project of Holocaust remembrance and Poles’
struggle to come to terms with what their memories of the Shoah entail. In that sense, the physical
space where Nazis built their camps continues to matter as a both tangible and socially constructed
entity. Finally, while this dissertation remains anchored in a close investigation of different media’s
relationship to memory of the Holocaust, all the case studies discussed in this research allow us to
further engage with a larger problem pertinent to media and memory studies: how are our
collective and individual pasts mediated through visual culture in the digital age?

311
Here, I am using the expression coined by Martin Pollack. See: Martin Pollack. Kontaminierte Landschaften:
Unruhe bewahren. Residenz Verlag: 2014.
196
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Each year fewer survivors arrive in Auschwitz to commemorate the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 2005, almost 1500 survivors attended the anniversary

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zalewska, Maria (author)

Core Title #Holocaust: rethinking the relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration in the digital age

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 05/02/2021

Defense Date 03/21/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema and Media Studies,holocaust,memory studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,place and space,politics of memory

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Imre, Aniko (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email marysiazalewska@gmail.com,zalewska@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-164725

Unique identifier UC11662701

Identifier etd-ZalewskaMa-7395.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-164725 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ZalewskaMa-7395.pdf

Dmrecord 164725

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Zalewska, Maria

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA