right-wing activist insists on protecting the sanctity of the Holocaust victims; even Kat only gets involved because of an ulterior motive we learn midway through the series. Yet, crucially, nobody asks what the zom- bies themselves want. After years of script revisions, we record- ed this audio drama in April, with plans to release the full series later this summer. (I’m grateful to our partners who helped get us here, including our co-producers at the Ashkenaz Foundation.) In a post-Oct. 7 world, the Holocaust is being co-opted even more than it had been in recent years: by antisemitic conspiracy theorists who claim to be “just asking ques- tions”; by anti-Israel activists gleefully com- paring the Jewish state to Nazi Germany; even by pro-Israel activists invoking “Never Again” to justify particularly brutal actions taken by the Israeli government and military. These types of propagandistic manipula- tions only reinforce the message I wanted to get across in this script. The six million dead can’t speak for themselves. But if they could, I do wonder what they’d say. n
laws criminalizing accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and anti-vac- cine nutcases wearing yellow stars. The problem is not that so many people are outright denying the Holocaust hap- pened; rather, the established facts are now being distorted by ideological zeal- ots, knee-jerk contrarian influencers, and straight-up antisemites. All this sows doubt among a generation growing up online, where reputable facts blend with propagandistic fiction. I don’t need to inform the readers of this particular publication that “a third of students think the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabri- cated” (CBC News, January 2022), or that “one in five Canadian youths are not sure what happened in the Holocaust” (CTV News, January 2019). In response to these trends, over the last few years, Canadian provinces have begun mandating Holocaust education in grade schools. It’s a good step, but I don’t believe it’s enough. Textbooks are fine; zombies are cooler. I view my work, essentially, as a sneaky piece of Holocaust education geared spe-
cifically to younger audiences. It falls within a recent tradition of postmodern digital Holocaust content. That growing body of work includes @eva.stories, an Instagram account with 1.1 million followers which imagines that the real-life 13-year-old Eva Heyman, who died in Auschwitz, would have been posting had Instagram existed in the 1940s. Then there is Inge Ginsberg, a nonagenarian survivor who has channeled her trauma into death metal music videos, or the VR headsets at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which transport visitors to Ausch- witz in 1944. What began as an idea about Holo- caust zombies soon transformed into a script more about warring narratives and historical revisionism. A theme emerged: in the absence of victims who cannot speak for themselves, we often hear obnoxious people claiming to fight on their behalf. A zombie attacks one innocent young woman early in the plot, hospitalizing her and galvanizing neo-Nazis across Europe. A government agent tracks the zombie by any means necessary. Religious leaders claim the zombies mark the apocalypse; a
Daniel Ehrenworth's first book Holocaust Dream , photographed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was published by the MacLaren Art Centre in conjunction with his 2005 solo exhibition. Daniel also works as a commercial photographer and director, find his work at danielehrenworth.com.
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