The memorial stone of Margot and Anne Frank at the site of the former prisoner of war and Nazi concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, northern Germany, is pictured on March 28, 2025. On April 15, 1945 the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp was liberated by British forces. Agence France-Presse
DRANCY, France — Holocaust survivor Josef Cipin is haunted by one big fear.
“I hope that they believe that we didn’t make up the stories,” said the 100-year-old Canadian, who worries what will happen when the last living witnesses of what was done by the Nazi are gone.
“We are still here, and they (the Holocaust deniers) are already saying it never happened,” he told AFP.
His fears are not unfounded. A UNESCO study in 2022 found that a fifth of content on Twitter about the Holocaust either denied or distorted it. Tiktok was almost as bad with eight percent of content on Facebook also questionable.
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As anti-Semitism surges across the world, the fear that the genocide of six million Jews will be dismissed or forgotten has become more acute, particular for the survivors themselves.
“Memory can disappear, fade, be lost, or deliberately set aside if regimes find it inconvenient,” said Guy Poirot, one of the few children born in the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany to have survived.
The annual commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by the Red Army has never been more widely covered than it was this year, said the French historian Tal Bruttmann.
Mounting negationism
But the Holocaust specialist is deeply worried about rising revisionism and relativism which he sees “in some political currents now… A wish to move on from the Shoah along the lines of, ‘We have already talked about it enough, there are more important things.’”
Bruttmann is also alarmed that this is happening as “(Donald) Trump spends his time denying reality”, and when gestures like Elon Musk’s fascist-like salute at a rally are dismissed as merely “clumsy”.
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Even in Germany, where “the culture of remembrance is strong”, said Uwe Neumarker, director of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, it is “under strong pressure from the right” with the rise of the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) “but also a part of the left”, he added.
Memorials are regularly vandalised, according to Andrea Despot, head of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation and negationism is mounting.
“Declarations that would have been rejected as extreme a few years ago… are now daily in the media.”
In France, school visits to its six Holocaust memorials went up by a fifth last year, and the teaching of the genocide “goes smoothly in most of them”, said their director Jacques Fredj.
“However, we are also seeing more uninhibited speech” that challenges established shibboleths and “competition over memory”, he said.
Virtual reality survivors
For survivors like Frenchman Poirot, who at 80 is among the very youngest, and Cipin — who is 20 years his senior — all they can do is keep testifying.
“It’s never enough,” Cipin, who survived the Theresienstadt camp near Prague, told AFP.
But with fewer survivors every year the Blue Card organization in the US has found a novel way of keeping the memory alive.
It has created a portal allowing students to interact with an hologram of Sonia Warshawski, a 99-year-old survivor of Auschwitz and Majdanek, who can answer 455 questions about what she went through from “When did you see your mother for the last time?” to “What is your view of forgiveness?”
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Pinchas Gutter, a 92-year-old Canadian survivor of six death camps, was the first to do this type of virtual testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation. And he also takes visitors to Toronto’s Holocaust Museum with him on a 3D tour of the Majdanek camp in the film “The Last Goodbye”.
“Nothing imparts empathy towards a person… than seeing him in front of you,” Gutter told AFP.
While it is clearly “second best” to the real thing, being “able to interact in the future” brings “new dimensions to testimony”, he argued.
Schools make local links
In France, home to the world’s third largest Jewish community, the Holocaust is taught from primary to high school.
“We are one of the rare countries where teaching about the Shoah is obligatory at three different moments in school,” said Fredj, whose Shoah Memorial has trained some 7,000 teachers.
Classes are often anchored in what happened locally during the Holocaust.
Gabriel and his class of 14 and 15-year-olds from the poor northern suburbs of Paris visited the site of the Drancy transit camp near their school, through which most of the 76,000 Jews deported from France were sent to the death camps.
“Right next to the memorial, there is a big area where they have flea markets which I used to go to with my mother,” he told AFP.
“I didn’t know it had a history.”
His history teacher, Laurent Leothier, admitted that some “pupils have no knowledge at all of the Holocaust”.
In front of one of the cattle wagons into which Jews were packed, Laurine Bahloul, one of the memorial’s educators, explained to pupils from nearby Bondy how the camp worked between 1941 and 1944.
“The youngest person to be deported was 14 days old, the oldest 89. Between 70 and 100 people were squeezed into every wagon. All did not survive the journey,” she added, calmly outlining the brutal logic of genocide.
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“I am not telling you this to shock you,” Bahloul said, “but to remind you of the nature of the crime. People were not targeted for what they did, but for who they were.”
