Individual stories tell the most
Judith van Dam-Blok was born on 24 January 1901 in Amsterdam. The surviving photograph shows her beautiful, large eyes and full lips. A bright tippet rests on her shoulder, and an elegant necklace complements her entire look. Judith died at the age of 41. On 11 October 1942, she arrived at Auschwitz in a transport of 1,703 Jews deported from Westerbork. Her siblings also died in the camp: Dora, Sara, Lena and Rachel. Her sister Marianna, brother Abraham and their mother Johanna were murdered in the Sobibor death camp.
Their memory could have vanished. They could have become of anonymous victims. However, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which is the Auschwitz Museum’s full name, is fighting to prevent this from happening by restoring the victims’ faces. For over a year, it has been systematically telling the stories of the prisoners of the German Nazi camp born on a given day. The camp, where more than 1.1 million people were annihilated from 1940 until its liberation in January 1945.
Consequently, the site and symbol became an example of how to tell a dramatic story on social media to avoid infantilisation, the evocation of violence and pay due respect to the victims’ memory.
And it is, after all, imperative. In the text “How to talk about the Holocaust? Holocaust as a personal experience of Polish Jews”, published in 2017 in Wiadomosci Historyczne, Kinga Czechowska from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń writes: - What one academic study cannot accommodate, we often find in one surviving testimony. The aim of our efforts in writing about the Holocaust is to understand that single memory, the experience of one individual.
The administrators of the Auschwitz Museum’s social profiles share a similar assumption.