‘Could we possibly see your tattoo? If not that’s totally fine!’ Holocaust survivors’ playful activism on TikTok

Abstract

Over the past few years, digitalisation has led to the development of new forms of Holocaust memory, with advances in digital technology reshaping and introducing alternative ways of remembering, understanding and representing the Holocaust. The purpose of this study is to examine how three Holocaust survivors – Lily Ebert (100), Gidon Lev (88) and Tova Friedman (85) – share their firsthand experiences on TikTok by segmenting traumatic memories using the platforms’ audio–visual aesthetic and adapting their testimonies for the attention spans of young users. Based on 1-year content production and detailed analysis of 84 videos across the three profiles, a mixed-methods approach was applied to identify how each survivor interacts with their ‘fans’ using a unique communication style and with distinct goals. The results of the multimodal analysis show that the three survivors are engaged in meaningful acts of playful online activism on the memory of the Holocaust by bringing testimony and daily life together, in order to protect historical facts and combat antisemitism and Holocaust distortion.