Understanding @eva.stories Holocaust Memory in the Instagram Era

The Instagram account @eva.stories went online on May 1, 2019, during the official Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. It attracted millions of people to watch a digital adaptation of Eva Heyman’s diary, written by a thirteen-year-old Jewish Hungarian girl who died in Auschwitz. The project was much debated, and critics claimed that an Instagram account of a girl murdered in the Holocaust is a downgraded way to commemorate the Holocaust. However, @eva.stories, like other mediated techniques with which people commemorate Holocaust-related stories, is shaping contemporary Holocaust memory. As such, understanding @ eva.stories can help uncover new elements of Holocaust memory in the “Instagram era.” In this short report, @eva.stories is further contextualized using a few of Andrew Hoskins’s core assumptions regarding the “memory of the multitude.” This review reveals how new mediated practices of Holocaust remembrance change how we engage with and remember Holocaust-related narratives.