On “Shoahstories,” the Anne Frank Center collects videos about the Holocaust to interest young people in the topic. Does that work? A self-test.
January 27th is the international one Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Anne Frank Center in Berlin-Mitte has a website for this special day shoahstories.video started. There you will find a collection of Tiktok videos from Holocaust survivors, memorial sites or organizations that deal with this topic. The Anne Frank Center says they want children to be more interested in the Holocaust or even know what happened under the Nazis.
As a 7th grade student, I now wonder how children or young people react to such videos and whether they arouse their interest in the topic.
Some of the videos are with Gidon Lev. The 90-year-old Holocaust survivor is with his Tiktok-Account „TheTrueAdventure“ became known. In a video he visits Berlin and says that he finds the city beautiful. In other videos you can see him at conferences, where he tells his story to children and young people.
For example, he says: “One day, when I was very little, I was walking with my grandfather. And there was a playground with a swing and I ran over to it. ‘Swing! Swing!’ And my grandfather said, ‘No, no, don’t go there. It says Jews are forbidden.’” The videos touched me and I would have liked to know more about him.
How do I find there?
There are also videos from memorial sites such as the former Mauthausen concentration camp on “Shoah Stories”, and institutions such as the Johannesburg Holocaust Center and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum have also taken part. The website is officially supported by Tiktok, the Alfred Landecker Foundation, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and other organizations. “Shoah Stories” also offers support for teachers who, for example, teach history or political education.
The Anne Frank Center writes on the website: “For many young people, short videos are the main source of news, educational content and historical knowledge.” This has actually been proven according to studies. But I ask myself: How do young people come to the “Shoah Stories” website? You’re on Tiktok. But there is no account there that refers to the Shoah stories.
Edgar Hickethier is 12 years old, is in the 7th grade and is currently a student intern in the Berlin editorial team of the taz
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