Abstract: The past is never past, wrote William Faulkner. The great American writer had in mind his native Mississippi, but he might as well have written those words about Poland. Indeed, among history-conscious Poles, the findings of historians have had far-reaching social and political consequences that transcend the esoteric discussions of scholars. This was corroborated in recent times by the emergence of a discourse in Poland over what some have called polityka historyczna (Geschichtspolitik, or history policy), which focuses on the question of whether historians who write of the less glorious episodes in Polish history are actually acting against the interests of the nation. Many Polish historians, including the best-known scholars among them, have protested against this suggestion, which poses a clear danger to the fidelity of their discipline. The dissolution of the Communist regime in Poland at the end of the 1980s made possible the deconstruction of every aspect of contemporary history. The process of reconstruction, begun in earnest, proved to be complex and painful. This was particularly the case when dealing with the bitterest chapters in the millennial story of Polish-Jewish relations, which were, and continue to be, the subject of popular and intellectual discussion as well as serious scholarly research. Out of this process emerged a new understanding of history, one that renders much of the earlier canon on the topic virtually obsolete. It had, in fact, been under way for some years even before the collapse of Communism – especially in the pages of Poland’s extraordinarily vibrant underground press and also, to an impressive extent given the prevailing censorship, in those of Poland’s legally operated independent Catholic press. Polish émigré journals were also regularly smuggled into Poland and had significant influence. Nevertheless, it was only with the collapse of the old regime and the birth of Poland’s Third Republic that this activity could be carried out without interference and Poland could finally undergo its own Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). This chapter discusses the evolution of Poland’s confrontation with the destruction of Polish Jewry.
Abstract: The terrain of the past remains a battleground in Ukraine, where policymakers, interest groups, and individuals continue to use and abuse history for contemporary gains. The recent escalation of Russian violence has only exacerbated these processes. Apart from discussions of Ukraine and Russia’s historical relations and the Holodomor, nothing looms larger than the Holocaust in Ukraine’s ongoing memory wars, whether in discussions and denials of local collaboration and complicity in anti-Jewish violence or exercises in comparative and/or competitive suffering. This article examines the Holocaust as it played out in Ukraine and the evolving memoryscapes that emerged in its wake, homing in on two major massacres, Babyn Yar and Bohdanivka, and their memorial afterlives in Soviet Ukraine (ca. 1945–91) and independent Ukraine (1991–today). While this project briefly engages the well-trod topics of local collaboration and competitive suffering, as evidenced in competing monuments on the site of Babyn Yar itself and the larger commemorative landscape of Kyiv, it draws attention to understudied sites like Bohdanivka, which fell within the Romanian occupation zone during the war.
Abstract: Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 reached more people than ever before, with millions engaging across the UK through national moments of remembrance, education and community activity. From Light the Darkness to events in schools, workplaces and public spaces, this year showed the growing impact of coming together to remember, learn and stand against all prejudice today.
Central to this was the Light the Darkness campaign, which saw 230 buildings and landmarks illuminated in purple at 8pm as part of a nationwide act of remembrance – an increase from 200 in 2025. Delivered in partnership with Ocean Outdoor and supported by JCDecaux, Global and Bauer Media, the campaign appeared on 3,000 billboards across the UK, generating over 10 million impacts\*. HMDT’s radio advert aired more than 900 times across Global’s network, reaching a further 14 million impacts.
Engagement also grew at community level, with 3,800 organisations marking HMD – up from 3,500 the previous year. This was mirrored by a surge in digital participation on the day, with social media interactions across HMDT’s Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn rising by 140%, from 10,000 in 2025 to 24,000 in 2026.
Crucially, the 2026 impact data highlights the reversal of a decline over the past two years in secondary school participation, which had previously attracted national concern. More than 1,000 secondary schools marked Holocaust Memorial Day this year – 17% of the total number of secondary schools nationwide, which increased from just 9% last year. This was further bolstered by the reach of the charity’s educational film, *It began with words*, which was viewed by over 130,000 pupils, helping ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust remain central to younger generations.
To take a deeper look at the key moments behind this year’s commemoration, read our Impact Report for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026. From a special event hosted by Their Majesties The King and Queen to acts of remembrance in communities across the UK, the report captures the scale and significance of HMD 2026.
Topics: Antisemitism: Far right, Antisemitism: Muslim, Attitudes to Jews, Attitudes to Israel, Islamophobia, Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism, Holocaust Commemoration, Authoritarianism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Populism, Political Parties, Politics
Abstract: In the early 2020s, two seemingly unrelated political developments came to a head in the Netherlands. First, in January 2020, then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the center-right VVD party issued an official apology on behalf of the Dutch government for its complicity in the deaths of more than 100,000 Dutch Jews in the Holocaust. Second, in the November 2023 national elections, Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim, pro-Israel PVV party won the highest percentage of votes, leading to the formation of a far-right cabinet under Prime Minister Dick Schoof in July 2024. In this article, we argue that this double consolidation of the historical legacy of the Holocaust and of racist, right-wing politics has put Dutch Jews in a dangerous bind. On the one hand, the memory of the Holocaust and the contemporary safety of Dutch Jews have been elevated as a paramount concern in Dutch institutional, legal, and political life. On the other hand, Dutch Jews have been positioned as the perennial would-be victims of violent antisemitism—virtually always, it is falsely imagined, at the hands of Dutch Muslims. The historical persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust is now used to underwrite a “proprietary” form of Jewish victimhood in the present: non-Jewish white Dutch people position themselves as the saviors of Jews, and thereby claim ownership over their past, their collective fate, and the political means to secure their safety.
Abstract: Introduction. This study addresses the representation of ethnic minority cultures in online museum collections, which often reflect diverse viewpoints. We propose a data-driven methodology to construct a large-scale multi-viewpoint knowledge graph, using Jewish cultural heritage as a case study.
Method. We developed an LLM-based pipeline that combines object typing, named entity recognition, relation extraction, enrichment, and clustering.
Results. An analysis of 647,951 records and 178,444 extracted subjects from the collections of Jewish museums across the globe revealed diverse thematic emphases: Israel and the Netherlands prioritised religious themes, while others highlighted everyday life. Surprisingly, only Australia emphasised the Holocaust.
Conclusion(s). The central contribution of this study is the development of a knowledge organisation system capable of tracing major trends and identifying patterns in the polyvocality of perspectives. The methodology provides quantifiable, scalable analysis of multi-viewpoint cultural heritage, extendable to other minorities.
Abstract: In 2009, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum took the experimental initiative of creating a Facebook page; since then, it has established accounts on other social media platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter, and is now followed by more than one million users across these networks. This chapter investigates the ways in which the Museum utilises social media, particularly with regard to its authority as an institution and site of Holocaust education and remembrance. On one hand, the Museum has fostered an online virtual community where Auschwitz victims are commemorated, the ethics of remembrance are discussed, and users’ feedback is sought and acknowledged. On the other hand, the institution uses social media to fact-check and criticise certain representations of Auschwitz, suggesting only those explicitly approved by the Museum are acceptable. This demonstrates a wider Museum dichotomy between retaining traditional, didactic practices and establishing contemporary, participatory ones.
Abstract: In this chapter, we investigate how four Italian and five German Holocaust memorials and museums, as well as three major internationally relevant Holocaust organizations, employed Facebook for Holocaust remembrance purposes during the period of pandemic lockdown. A comparison was made of the quantity and variety of activity on their Facebook pages during the months of April and May 2020, as compared with the same time span in 2019 and 2021. Although the study revealed major changes and adjustments in Holocaust institutions’ Facebook activities, both in terms of volume and type of content and regarding interaction strategies, the results show that the COVID-19 lockdown did not appear to trigger a radical change in Holocaust remembrance institutions’ use of social media. Despite the changes found in many Holocaust remembrance practices on Facebook and their growing use of digital media, the memorials and museums considered in this study appear to adopt a conservative stance in terms of the topics and themes addressed via social media and a general little change in the framework of commemoration policies. Also, despite a drive toward internationalization, as demonstrated by the Holocaust institutions’ increased use of English, there still appears to be a certain tension between local and global memories of the Holocaust.
Abstract: The severe restrictions on public life following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic affected Holocaust memorials and museums worldwide, especially in Europe, Israel, and the United States. These measures posed significant challenges to contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration, which were based on collaborative practices of remembering, particularly related to the experience of presence at the memorial sites. In our chapter, we ask in which ways the pandemic had an accelerating effect on global Holocaust memory by tracing, analyzing, and identifying the institutionalized use of online platforms and digital formats on social media. We present results from an online survey conducted with 32 key institutions in the field of Holocaust commemoration in the Spring and Summer of 2020 and discuss them in the context of various forms of digital activities initiated by Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. For that purpose, we have created a comprehensive database of 45 digital projects, which were released in the first months of the pandemic, and conducted a multimodal analysis of selected projects. We identified a significant increase in social media use and digital tools, in particular video formats, helping institutions to communicate virtually with potential audiences. Memorials utilized various social media features like live streams, stories, and hashtags to implement elements of participatory memory culture that offer users the possibility to participate in new collaborative forms of mediated commemoration. In doing so, they helped to establish like-minded and co-creative commemoration communities.
Abstract: In our chapter, we investigate how the Covid-19 restrictions affected the translation of in-person commemorative ceremonies into online-only events. Whilst the majority of existing research has a relatively small scale, we have turned to the larger scope of social media data to examine wider online memory culture. To do so, we conduct comparative analysis of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram data from institutions organising commemorative events for the liberation of Neuengamme, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the liberation of Beau Bassin together with non-institutional posts using the hashtags from these institutions. Through this analysis, we aim to answer our main research questions: how do the online discourses by institutions and the wider public compare in relation to posts using shared hashtags during major commemoration periods during Covid-19 lockdowns? To what extent did the move to remote engagement during the pandemic reconfigure the so-called bifurcation of memory culture, between institutional and popular memory discourse (Hoskins, 2014) in any way that might suggest that the lockdowns evidence a change in commemoration practices? Our findings demonstrate that despite the major anniversaries marked in 2020, related memory institutions had little impact on social media, and their commemorative approaches in these spheres were not transformed by the pandemic.
Abstract: Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences play an increasingly significant role in Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies into visitor and user experience. There is a rapidly expanding list of projects experimenting with cinematic virtual reality, photogrammetry, digital mapping, 3D modelling, 360-degree on-location survivor testimony as well as a growing portfolio of augmented and mixed reality mobile and tablet applications.
Principally being implemented as spatial technologies, several memorial sites and museums are exploring the possibilities of creating 3D graphic reconstructions of former sites of Nazi persecution in AR/VR such as the digital reconstruction of Falstad Concentration Camp, the Here: Spaces for Memory App at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site, the Sobibor AR exhibit, the project Auschwitz VR as well as the 360-degrees-walks at Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Going further, some digital initiatives are using VR/AR/MR technologies to zoom in on historical documents, testimonies and artefacts, notable projects include the ARt AR App at the Dachau Memorial Site and Museum which revivifies historical and contemporary drawings and paintings in-situ at the present-day site, the Anne Frank House VR which invites visitors to navigate the annex through a series of digital objects, and The Last Goodbye VR experience which foregrounds survivor testimony within Majdanek, the similarly survivor-driven Walk with Me at The Melbourne Holocaust Museum and numerous films that shape the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s The Journey Back exhibition space.
While it is important to note that VR technology is not new and has existed for more than 30 years, it is only recently that the technology has become more widely accessible in the heritage and museum sectors (in part, due to the affordability of headsets and devices in the domestic market). The proliferation of VR and AR projects within the sector, then, raises critical questions regards the opportunities for digital Holocaust memory practice and education while also bringing to the fore issues of curation, contextualisation, visitor experience and accessibility.
This report serves as an important first step in this work. It was created as part of the research project ‘Participatory Workshops – Co-Designing Standards for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education’, which is one thread of the larger Digital Holocaust Memory Project at the University of Sussex. The participatory workshops project have focused on six themes, each of which brought together a different range of expertise to discuss current challenges and consider possible recommendations for the future.
The themes were:
AI and machine learning
Digitising material evidence
Recording, recirculating and remixing testimony
Social media
Virtual memoryscapes
Computer games
Abstract: The social media landscape is ever-changing as is its relationship to Holocaust memory and education. In the earlier days of Facebook and Twitter’s dominance, there was a clear divide of opinions in the Holocaust sector. On one hand, some institutions were early adopters (notably the Auschwitz State Museum) and others experimented with the affordances of these platforms such as the team at Grodzka Gate, Lublin extending the analogue practice of school pupils sending letters to child Holocaust victim Henio Zytomirski onto Facebook and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ‘tweet-up’ hybrid architecture tour. On the other hand, expressions of hesitance about these participatory spaces informed the need for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Education Working Group to establish guidelines for using social media in this context (2014).
As practice grew, it also became somewhat formalised with most organisations predominantly focusing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for public engagement work, and most content presenting traditional curation of historical sources with additional narrative, promoting the organisation’s offline (or elsewhere online) work, or behind the scenes access to curator and educator experiences. Whilst, one of the
celebrated potentials about social media is their ability to help organisations to reach wider (global) audiences, little has changed online since Eva Pfanzelter’s (2014) claim that the Holocaust institutions that dominated previously offline, also dominate on social media platforms. Few others attract much engagement with their posts.
TikTok has brought both new opportunities and challenges for the Holocaust sector – organisations and individuals who have taken to creating content on the platform are seeing far greater engagement than they had on previous ones. Yet, TikTok is also one of the most data-invasive and opaque platforms regarding researcher access. Many also encounter far more Holocaust denial, distortion and trivialisation on this platform. However, the social media landscape is also far larger than the Holocaust sector has really acknowledged and much of the coded hate content that appears on mainstream platforms has been cultivated at scale on others, from 8Chan to Telegram, and gaming and VR social spaces. It is imperative therefore that we bring together a wide range of stakeholders and experts to discuss what the sector needs to move forward with its work on social media. If Holocaust memory and education is to remain visible in the ever-expanding digital world, then it must be visible across a variety of digital spaces.
This report serves as an important first step in this work. It was created as part of the research project ‘Participatory Workshops – Co-Designing Standards for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education’, which is one thread of the larger Digital Holocaust Memory Project at the University of Sussex.
The participatory workshops project have focused on six themes, each of which brought together a different range of expertise to discuss current challenges and consider possible recommendations for the future. The themes were:
AI and machine learning
Digitising material evidence
Recording, recirculating and remixing testimony
Social media
Virtual memoryscapes
Computer games
Abstract: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) commissioned Schoen Cooperman Research to conduct a comprehensive national study of Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in the Netherlands.
Schoen Cooperman Research conducted 2,000 interviews across the Netherlands. The margin of error for the study is 2 percent. This memo presents our key research findings and compares these findings with prior Claims Conference studies, which were conducted in five other countries.
Our latest study finds significant gaps in Holocaust knowledge and awareness in the Netherlands, as well as widespread concern that Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion are problems in the Netherlands today.
We found that 23 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth, or that it occurred but the number of Jews who died has been greatly exaggerated – the highest percentage among Millennials and Gen Z respondents in all six countries the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany has previously studied.
Further, 29 percent of Dutch respondents, including 37 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z respondents believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Moreover, despite the fact that more than 70 percent of the Netherlands’ Jewish population perished during the Holocaust, a majority of Dutch respondents (53
percent), including 60 percent of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, do not cite the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust took place. Finally, 53 percent of Dutch respondents believe that something like the Holocaust
could happen again today.
Topics: Antisemitism, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Law, Policy, European Union, Antisemitism: Education against, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Education, Hate crime, Jewish Heritage, Jewish Culture
Abstract: The pro-Gaza demonstrations that marked the summer of 2014 were trailed by a concern over the intensity of anti-Semitism among European Muslims and accusations of ‘double standards’ with regard to anti-Muslim racism. In the Netherlands, the debate featured a nexus between the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, freedom of speech and the limits of tolerance, which beckons a closer analysis. I argue that it indicates the place of the Holocaust in the European imaginary as one of a haunting, which is marked by a structure of dis/avowal. Prescriptive multicultural tolerance, which builds on Europe’s debt to the Holocaust and represents the culturalized response to racial inequalities, reiterates this structure of dis/avowal. It ensures that its normative framework of identity politics and equivalences, and the Holocaust, Jews and anti-Semitism which occupy a seminal place within it, supplies the dominant (and in the case of anti-Semitism, displaced) terms for the contestation of (disavowed) racialized structures of inequality. The dominance of the framework of identity politics as a channel for minority populations to express a sense of marginalization and disaffection with mainstream politics, however, risks culturalizing both the origins and the solutions to that marginalization. Especially when that sense of marginalization is filtered and expressed through the contestation of the primacy of the Holocaust memory, it enables the state, which embeds Jews retrogressively in the European project, to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities (including anti-Semitism, now externalized from the memory of Europe proper and attributed uniquely to the Other); to erase its historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary securitization. Moreover, it contributes to the obfuscation of the political, social and economic dynamics through which neo-liberal capitalism effects the hollowing out of the social contract and the resultant fragmentation of society (which the state then can attribute to ‘deficient’ minority cultures and values).
