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.