The Auschwitz Memorial’s social media following has dropped. The Holocaust memory keeper is now facing its toughest ethical test: how to continue its ‘Never Again’ motto on genocide and not display empathy toward Gaza deaths.
It posted a statement supporting the Israeli bombardment of Gaza on 20 November. In December alone it lost 7,000 followers on X. When the Auschwitz Memorial account asked people for continued “engagement”, it got served a volley of tweets instead, and a lesson on how to practise what you preach.
The memorial’s priorities almost sound like a teenager throwing tantrums. A war might be raging outside but dare my social media clout be gone. And many are now asking the most obvious question: Are followers more important than real human beings?
The Auschwitz Memorial opened in 1947 with a singular theme—never again, as a universal message of peace.
According to the museum’s website, its goals are to mourn victims, educate about history, and conserve the actual site. It posts homage to people who died in the camp on their birthdays every day. Over the decades, the memorial has acknowledged the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. More recently it condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine— “the free and democratic world must show if it has learned its lesson from the passivity of the 1930,” it said on X. However, it has yet to post a word about those killed in Gaza.
So, the tweet asking for followers, at best, sounds like a cry for attention. At its worst, they are tone-deaf.
The responses to the tweet show what has gone wrong. Acknowledgement would perhaps lend them more credibility than repeated tweets asking people to follow them.
Also Read: Israel war on Gaza has gone beyond ‘right to self-defence’ to ‘responsibility to protect’
Image problem
The Auschwitz council statement defending Israel came just a few days after over 40 UN experts chastised the world’s nations for the “failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide” by Israel in Gaza.
The memorial existed on social media to help prevent another such event. The double standards were not lost to the internet.
And the internet does not forget. On every such tweet, the memorial is reminded of its job– as a humanitarian organisation with a sizable reach, to call for a ceasefire.
And now, the organisation seems to have an image problem in this polarised world where individuals and organisations are being called to denounce Hamas or Israel as a display of their moral stance. The ongoing war has shown up on global campuses, in corporations and on the social media feeds of politicians. In the brave new ‘call-out and cancel’ world, a deft, tactful, nuanced balancing act is no longer tenable in public conversations.
The Auschwitz Memorial’s statement extended ‘unwavering solidarity’ but only with ‘Israelis’ and ‘Jews’. The victims of the ongoing conflict, according to them, are only the Israelis.
As many on the internet pointed out, ‘never again’ stands for everyone, and not just for one group of people.
While on one hand, it condemns an Israeli mayor’s call for ‘depopulating the Gaza Strip and turning it into an open-air memorial’ like Auschwitz, on the other, it chooses not to condemn Israeli military atrocities.
The death toll in Gaza has crossed 22,000. The region has lost more humans than online followers lost by the memorial. As an X user said, “It isn’t about one person or one religion, it is about all of humanity.”
Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)