TikTok screenshot: "This is a trend that really needs to be stopped."
The short video platform TikTok is primarily known for entertaining videos: young men throwing Mentos into coke bottles for the thousandth time, young women dancing to hip music and pets doing funny things. Now, however, a completely different trend is causing a stir - if it should be: young people who portray themselves as Holocaust victims.
The performers usually put on make-up so that they look emaciated and sick - or at least as they imagine emaciated and sick people to be. To songs by artists such as Twenty One Pilots, Bruno Mars and Billy Eilish, they play Jews murdered by Nazis who, for example, when they arrive in heaven, declare that they died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz concentration camp.
The discussion about these videos was triggered by a Twitter thread in which, according to "Wired", a 19-year-old American woman listed and commented on several of them.
The producers of these videos would jump on a trend "to get likes and to be seen", but they are "poorly informed and regrettably ignorant," said the young woman of "Wired".
The trend in question is POV videos, named after the English term point-of-view. In such videos, the viewer is put into the role of an actor with whom the performer interacts. As a rule, these videos are primarily entertaining. Like Nicole Ciravolo's, for example, who plays a school secretary in her clips and thus has 1.2 million followers behind her. One of their latest videos has been viewed 4.7 million times.
Unlike Nicole Ciravolo, the young people say they don't want to entertain with their Holocaust videos, but rather to educate. At least that's what 15-year-old McKayla says when asked by "Wired". With her video, she wanted to create awareness of the Holocaust, which, like the history of the Second World War, has always interested her. In addition, she herself had ancestors who were interned in concentration camps.
As praiseworthy as the idea of bringing the story of the Holocaust closer to the predominantly young TikTok audience may be, the implementation is not well received - as a short video accompanied by music. In the Israeli daily "Haaretz", for example, the often Jewish actors in the short TikTok films are told that TikTok is "not necessarily the right forum for unpacking your complex and special story."
"And please, delete your videos"
Addressed to the non-Jewish producers of such Holocaust short videos, it is even said that they should delete their videos immediately. Making POV videos from a point of view that does not correspond to their own culture is "pure and simple cultural appropriation".
Diane Saltzman of the Holocaust Museum in Washington sees it similarly, telling Insider magazine: "Imitating Holocaust experiences dishonors the memory of the victims, insults the survivors and belittles history."
The "Haaretz" finally asked the young people: "Find out more about the history of the Holocaust and how deeply it is rooted in today's Jewish life. And please, delete your videos and apologize to your viewers. This is a Trend that really needs to be stopped. "
At least one TikTok user, @thatsnadia, took this call to heart. Like many of the other short films criticized on Twitter, hers can no longer be found on TikTok. Instead, she has now published another in which she not only apologizes and explains that she wanted to point out the history of the Holocaust with her video. Above all, however, she hopes that the many insulting comments that she received on TikTok as a result of reporting on the alleged Holocaust challenge are finally over.
Icon: The mirror
