For me, these videos did exactly what they were intended to do. Neither of my great-grandparents were able to share their stories with me directly. Through the videos, I can hear their voices, see their expressions, sense their pauses, and, in some small way, feel their presence. And as they did for many survivors, the interviews provided a medium for my great-grandparents to speak openly about their experiences in a way they rarely did otherwise.
For those of us invested in Holocaust remembrance, particularly young Jews, video testimonies help answer a mounting question: how do we remember the Holocaust as we grow further removed in time from it, and as the number of living witnesses dwindles? They also raise deeper questions about how we might approach something that resists comprehension without turning it into abstraction or spectacle. What does it teach us for what we are experiencing now?
I have learned about the Holocaust at school, at youth camps, at community events and, most recently, at university. Much of this education has focused on understanding the Holocaust as a historical event: timelines, policies, numbers, mechanisms. Like most people, I have also encountered the Holocaust through films, books and other media, both fictional and documentary. These often frame the Holocaust as extraordinary and mythic in scale, emphasising either its horror or its incomprehensibility.
Survivor interviews offer something different. They do not dramatise. They do not attempt to explain everything. They simply ask the viewer to sit with a human being and listen. For me, this way of engaging, bearing witness rather than trying to master the story, is the most meaningful.
The first time I watched my great-grandparents’ testimonies, I was 12. Watching them this time, I was struck by how deeply the world has changed. Back then, the Holocaust felt firmly in the past. Anti-Semitism existed, and I experienced it even as a child, but it was marginal. Most of us believed mainstream society had outgrown it, particularly here in New Zealand, and the idea that history could repeat itself felt implausible. Today, far fewer Jews are confident of that.
At synagogues, Shabbat tables and Jewish gatherings of every kind, conversations about rising anti-Semitism inevitably arise. Comparisons to early Nazi Germany are common: “It feels like 1933”, “Do you have a plan if things get worse?” and “Who would hide you if you needed it?”
Headlines are commented on, and personal stories are recounted. Every young Jew has at least one antisemitic experience to share – recently for me it is the story of a (former) friend telling me it was a pity I had grown up in the Jewish community because it had turned me into a Nazi Zionist.
These conversations intensified after the Bondi shooting, but they did not begin there. They are a response to a pattern: sporadic acts of violence alongside a stream of comments, slogans and online rhetoric that hover between legitimate political critique and outright anti-Semitism, far too often slipping across that line. Young Jews bear the brunt of this. The digital spaces we inhabit are saturated with Jew-hating conspiracy theories from the far right and far left. University campuses, in particular, can feel isolating. Most of us have lost friendships. Many feel pressure to downplay or conceal our Jewishness.
It is in this context that many young Jews have turned to Holocaust remembrance as a way of grounding ourselves in history, articulating our fears, and explaining to others why this moment feels so threatening. For some, it is also a source of resilience: we survived that, and we will survive this.
There is a tension here. The experiences of my generation are not comparable to the suffering of Holocaust victims. To collapse the distinction is to diminish the enormity of what they endured. At the same time, framing the Holocaust as the only “real” antisemitism risks trivialising what Jews face today. The Holocaust did not begin with mass murder; it began with the normalisation of Jew-hatred. And fear, exclusion and isolation are worthy of concern even if they never culminate in catastrophe.
This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, those who care about Holocaust remembrance and about confronting contemporary anti-Semitism must grapple with this balance. How do we honour the Holocaust as a singular historical crime while still allowing its lessons to illuminate the present? How do we make comparisons that are careful, useful and empowering, without exaggeration or dismissal? For my generation, these are not abstract questions. They shape how we remember the past and how we face the present.
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Commemorations are held January 25-27 in Auckland, Wellington (Parliament), Hamilton, Blenheim, and Christchurch.
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