As a child of Holocaust survivors whose parents spent much time imparting their experiences to rapt audiences of all ages, religions, and races, I found your article, “Millennials Altering Landscape of Holocaust Remembrance,” (April 25) profoundly disturbing.
The article described several edgy attempts at contemporary Holocaust commemoration and interviewees lauding various vehicles of “creative explosion.“ German professor Gerd Bayer was quoted as writing, “The third generation of Holocaust cinema … assumes the audience already knows films that belong to the first two generations and therefore approaches memory from a different perspective, one that is less geared to the past.”
How unfortunate and misguided is this perspective of replacing historical fact with artistic inventiveness, given the new Anti-Defamation League global survey that found 66 percent of respondents had either not heard of the Holocaust or didn’t believe the historical accounts, with only 48 percent under age 35 even aware of it.
Only seven decades after Europe was transformed into a human slaughterhouse and the world shriveled in silence as 6 million precious souls were murdered only because they happened to be Jewish, we must not press the delete button on the facts to make history more entertaining to future generations.
But artist Jane Korman’s YouTube video of her family line dancing at Auschwitz and other concentration camps does precisely that. It was chilling to watch smiling people dancing on the very ground that is soaked with the blood of those who perished — the cemetery of millions, including my relatives.
Newton, Mass.
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