Holocaust generation a narrowing 'bridge' to past horrors 80 years on

By AFP/Ruth Eglash

Eight decades after the Holocaust, its memory is at a "crossroads" as survivors who can offer first-hand accounts of the horrors of Nazi-era Europe dwindle, said the head of an Israeli memorial centre.

Dani Dayan, chairman of Jerusalem's Yad Vashem institution, told AFP that nothing can truly replace the "authentic voices" of survivors of the systematic murder of Jewish people in retelling that painful chapter of history.

But as they grow older and their number declines, "we are essentially at a crossroads of generations," Dayan said in an interview ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.

"Listening to a Holocaust survivor tell their story will not be possible in a few years. It's unfortunate, but it is inevitable."

A study conducted last year found that around 245,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust remained alive.

Their median age was 86, with some well over 100 years old, according to the study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

"Holocaust survivors were a kind of bridge," said Dayan.

"On one side of the bridge, we are looking into their eyes, hearing their voices, and on the other side of that bridge is Auschwitz. That will not exist anymore."

The Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.

The camp, which has become a symbol of the genocide of six million European Jews, was built by Nazi Germany after it invaded Poland in the early days of World War II.

One million Jews as well as more than 100,000 other victims of the Nazi regime were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945.

Dayan, who was made Yad Vashem's director in 2022 after serving as Israel's consul general in New York, said that even as the day nears when no survivors are left to share their stories, the memorial centre will keep reminding the world of the atrocities that took place at Auschwitz and across Europe.

Search for archives

Dayan said the memorial centre will "continue to educate and spread the story of the terrible events that occurred in the midst of civilised Europe in the 20th century".

"We will have to find different ways," he said.

"We will have to be innovative but without compromising authenticity."

Yad Vashem has more than 227.6 million pages of documentation, 2.8 million pages of testimonies, 541,500 Holocaust-era photographs and thousands more artefacts and works of art.

Dayan said the institution was considering ideas like creating holograms of survivors telling their stories, or opening "satellite centres" across Israel and the world.

In recent months, Yad Vashem, a sprawling campus on the western edge of Jerusalem, inaugurated a theatre to tell Holocaust-era stories in new ways, and a wing dedicated to preserving decades-old artefacts donated by survivors and their families.

During a recent visit to the centre, an AFP journalist saw a trained conservationist diligently cleaning and repairing a tiny Jewish prayer book purchased in 1944.

It contained a handwritten note suggesting it somehow survived the atrocities of Auschwitz.

Dayan said that such objects, along with data and testimonies from survivors "still alive and lucid and old enough to remember what happened to them", are still being collected from across the globe.

With the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling, the task has become more urgent and essential than ever, he said.

"We continue to search archives all over the world, despite the fact that we have the largest archive in the world for Holocaust documentation," Dayan said.

With Jewish communities reporting a sharp rise in anti-Semitism worldwide over the past year, coinciding with the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the need to "spread the word" about Nazi persecution of Jews remained as great as ever, Dayan added.