John Dobai has just celebrated his 92nd birthday. He lives a couple of streets down from me in Kew, but was born in Hungary in 1934 and remembers when Eichmann arrived in Budapest with orders to murder its Jews. He often tells me about his remarkable life over pints in our local. I know from his reminiscences that his family, despite being forced to wear the yellow star, managed narrowly to escape the mass deportations to Auschwitz. They survived the war by hiding out in an abandoned, freezing flat, on the edge of starvation.
“There must have been about 10 flats and there were 600 people,” he tells me. “And the situation looked so bad that a number of old people climbed up onto the roof and jumped off.”
When not chewing the fat with me in the pub, John spends his time speaking in schools for the Holocaust Memorial Trust. Lest we forget.
Of the remaining 200,000 or so Holocaust survivors, most are in their late eighties, which means that these vanishing witnesses to Nazi evil may all be gone within a decade. That is why, a few years back, John took part in Testimony 360, an innovative project to create a digital record of his experience. Thanks to some sophisticated AI and virtual-reality technology, future students will be able to interact with a virtual John, ask him questions, and learn from his testimony.
But the use of AI in Holocaust remembrance is becoming increasingly controversial as fake images circulate around the internet. Such is the level of alarm that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has issued a warning to schools, concerned that memes are being used “for political or ideological purposes, including denial and distortion”. Holocaust memory, they say, is under attack and false narratives are on the rise at a time of significant jeopardy for the Jewish community.
For the time being, those with a keen eye and some knowledge of historical events can still tell the difference between fake images and real ones. There were only a handful of real photos taken within Auschwitz, and so images of children hiding under floorboards or playing violins ought to be treated with great caution. Fake ones are all too obvious, clearly designed to tug at the heartstrings, and often contain small mistakes. But as AI improves such giveaways will be ironed out. Inevitably, it will become harder to tell the difference.
For some, the fictionalisation of the Holocaust — in literature for example — is a useful way of introducing the young to the reality of the horrors of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis — take The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for example. It offers an accessible way into a historical reality that is too dreadful for children to absorb in its entirety. But even this can be controversial. As Imre Kertész, another Budapest-born Holocaust survivor, said in Who owns Auschwitz?: fictionalisation can mean that “survivors watch helplessly as their only real possessions are done away with: authentic experiences”.
Whatever we conclude on this tricky question, bot-promoted deepfakes are different; it’s not clear that these images are a fiction at all. And so, as fabricated content floods social media, the truth becomes harder to recognise and easier to dismiss. Suddenly, a whole new world of Holocaust suspicion opens up. The fear is that certain forms of Holocaust remembrance could even be conscripted into Holocaust denial.
In church, we know how technology can complicate memory. Wedding videographers promise to preserve a perfect record of that special day. Yet many couples find that, over time, this vivid recording crowds out any organic memories of the day, leaving only what the videographer saw. Ten years on, wedding couples admit they can’t actually remember those little details that made the day so real to them. Recorded “memories” can easily supplant real ones.
“Technology can complicate memory.”
In handing over responsibility to the videographer, you also relinquish control over how the day is curated and, potentially, remembered. AI imagery can do the same with history: creatively and powerfully interpreting historical events through particular perspectives, until interpretation muscles out the truth.
Memory is the lifeblood of Jewish togetherness. Jews speak of the deceased as being “of blessed memory”. Passover is an act of collective liturgical memory, remembering the liberation from Egyptian bondage. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” exhorts the book of Exodus. The Hebrew Bible is full of instructions to remember what God has done. In the UK, we mark Holocaust Memorial Day today, the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In Israel, remembrance takes place on Yom HaShoah in April or May (27th Nissan, to be precise), the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The different dates register different emphases: one the liberation of passive Jews by others, the other the heroism of Jews who resisted the Nazi regime. But memory is the common thread. And threats to it are rightly regarded as existential.
This is particularly salient today, amid the continued fallout from the October 7 massacre. Even though the Holocaust is the only historical event that is compulsory within the KS3 history curriculum, schools are becoming increasingly nervous about commemorating it. Only this month, a visit by a Jewish MP to a school in Bristol was cancelled following protests by local pro-Palestinian groups. And over the past few years, the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has halved.
There are some, Simon Jenkins for example, who argue that we should do less remembering and more forgetting. It is an unusual take for a historian. He warns us not to “drink from the rancid well of grievance”, and that “almost all the conflicts in the world are caused by too much remembering: refreshing religious divisions, tribal feuds, border conflicts, humiliations and expulsions”. I take the point but I don’t agree. Memory makes us who and what we are. It creates shared identity. That’s why so many of us fear dementia. To lose our memory is to forget who we are.
There used to be graffiti on the towpath near our pub. Six million lies, it read. The graffiti has been washed away. But the lie has not. Memory, then, is both a reminder and a warning of what we are capable. Memory is what renews our conviction: never again.
