Youthful Platform Commemoration: TikTok  as a Frontier for Holocaust Education and Memory

On February 9, 2021, shortly after his great-grandmother Lily Ebert, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, recovered from COVID-19, 17-year-old Dov Forman shared a simple message on his Twitter account: “To relate more to of my generation, my great-Grandmother (Lily Ebert—Auschwitz survivor) and I, have created a @tiktok_uk account. We hope to keep sharing her testimony [...].”1 By June 2021, Ebert and her great-grandson emerged as prominent influencers in Holocaust remembrance and education amassing a million followers on TikTok. Surpassing the online presence of established Holocaust institutions, Ebert, leveraging the popular video-sharing platform, recounts her experiences from Hungary, Auschwitz, forced labor, and death marches through engaging short clips, designed to capture the attention and spark the curiosity of the platform’s youthful audience. Utilizing TikTok’s unique features and audio-visual appeal, Ebert’s videos engage with a range of inquiries from users, blending insights into her personal family life and messages of tolerance and solidarity. In this article, we delve into the platform-specific relationship to Holocaust commemoration and education, against the backdrop of rising antisemitism and hate speech on the platform. We critically examine both the obstacles and the opportunities TikTok presents for fostering access to and engagement with historical awareness among its youthful cohorts.