My children are 10 and 11 years old. Last week, one of them came to me having watched a TikTok video about the Holocaust. It was 60 seconds long. It had music underneath it. It had text flying across the screen. And my child looked at me, their mother, someone who has spent six years researching and writing about one of the most catastrophic events in human history - and said “I learned about the Holocaust today.”
I put down what I was doing.
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
Which, if you know me, is quite something.
While researching for my book, I came across a testimony. A Hungarian woman. Four months pregnant and hiding it, in Auschwitz, sent to Germany for work. She and others in her block were made to stand in freezing snow for over eight hours. Someone stole a carrot. She described, in her recording, this scene - that runs to just over 20 minutes - what was going through her mind during those eight hours. Who she thought about. The last decent thing she ate. Her favourite teacher in school, her neighbour’s cat. These thoughts - to help control every muscle in her body. How she made sure she didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t allow a single flicker of discomfort to show on her face, because showing it would mean more.
She was newly married. She was 24 years old. Everything taken from her. Except for what was nesting in her belly.
I put that testimony down after the first time I heard it. I came back to it the next day. Spent most of the day, the day after, thinking about her. On the third day I was able to sit with it long enough to do something with it.
One morning. Twenty minutes of testimony. Three days.
It’s not unusual to promote one’s book on TikTok. My book which contains her story, my grandparents’ stories, among others, on TikTok.
We’ll come back to that.
I am not someone who is afraid of social media. I want to be clear about that because it matters to what I am about to say. I am a marketer. Algorithms, engagement, reach, content strategy - this is my professional world. These platforms are very familiar to me. I have spent years helping my companies use them well. I am not writing this from a position of naivety or technophobia or the vague discomfort of someone who still prints out their emails.
So, when I was advised, by people who know the publishing industry well, that I should be creating TikTok content to launch my book, I didn’t dismiss it. I sat with it. In fact, I agreed with them. Yet, I turned it over. I tried to find the version of it that felt honest.
I am still looking.
In 2020, the Holocaust Claims Conference conducted a comprehensive survey of Holocaust knowledge among younger Americans. They found that 63% of millennials and Gen Z did not know that six million Jews were killed. 48% could not name a single concentration camp. In New York State, one of the most educated states in the country, 25% of millennials believed the Holocaust was a myth or had been exaggerated.
11% believed Jews caused the Holocaust.
I’ll leave that there.
There is real Holocaust content on TikTok. Testimony. Archive footage. Survivor stories. Someone, several someones, presumably well intentioned, believed this is the right place for it. That meeting young people where they are is better than not reaching them at all.
As a marketer, I have made versions of that argument myself. It is not a stupid argument.
It is not, however, the whole argument.
I have also seen Holocaust testimony on Instagram. And something about it feels different there. More considered. More still. I have tried to understand why, and I am not entirely sure I can articulate it cleanly - which is an uncomfortable position for someone who has just written a book. Perhaps it is the culture of the platform. Perhaps it is the audience. Perhaps it is simply that Instagram does not feel quite so much like a place where everything - history, comedy, grief, someone’s lunch - is travelling at exactly the same velocity, demanding exactly the same quality of attention, which is to say almost none at all.
But I have been sitting with a different question. Whether my discomfort is really about TikTok specifically, or about something that goes deeper than any single platform.
A 60 second TikTok video and a 60 second article in a newspaper or online are not so different in terms of time. So, is it the screen? The colour? The music? The fact that it lives between a cooking tutorial and a dance challenge and three advertisements and a cat? The fact that it can be gone, truly, completely gone, displaced from your attention as if it never existed, with the movement of a single finger?
The flick of a finger.
I have just taken my mind elsewhere - six years researching a man who stood on a ramp at Auschwitz and with the flick of a finger - left or right, this person or that one, live or die - processed human beings at a rate the mind can’t comfortably hold. A gesture so small. So quick. So casual. So absolute.
I am not drawing an equivalence. I want to be completely clear about that. Nothing is equivalent to what happened on that train ramp.
But I keep coming back to the finger. To the gesture that has become so habitual we no longer notice we are making it. The flick that says not this, next, not this, next. And what it means that this is now the primary way millions of people, including children, encounter the heaviest history in the modern world.
I find I can’t think about it without feeling something I don’t entirely have a word for.
Somewhere between grief and fury, if you want to know.
My children, the same ones who seem to find a way to watch TikTok even though I’ve banned it, told me without hesitation that they don’t believe what they see on the platform is true. They are ten and eleven. They have grown up fluent in AI, fluent in filters, fluent in the gap between what a screen shows and what is real. This is, in many ways, a remarkable thing. My generation did not have that literacy at their age.
And then I thought about what it means for Holocaust testimony specifically and I felt considerably less impressed with us all.
Because the Holocaust is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a story with two sides. It is documented. Evidenced. Legally established. And it sits on TikTok in the same feed, in the same format, dressed in the same visual language, as content that questions whether it happened at all.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate has documented TikTok’s algorithm serving Holocaust denial content to teenagers who had previously engaged with Jewish cultural content. Not because they searched for it. Because an algorithm connected dots in the dark and decided, in its own cold and stupid way, that it was relevant.
TikTok has been called before lawmakers to answer for this. It has promised to do better.
The content keeps appearing.
At some point promising to do better and continuing not to becomes its own kind of answer.
None of this will ever go away, so the marketer in me however keeps thinking about what an honest hybrid might look like. A physical book maybe - weight, pages, spine, the smell of it - that contains QR codes placed not as shortcuts but as expansions. A reader sits with a testimony on page 47. Beside it, a small code. They scan it and suddenly they are watching archive footage, or hearing a voice, or seeing something the page alone can’t hold. The screen becomes a door into the deeper story rather than a replacement for it. Technology that asks something of you. Technology that says there is more, go further rather than that’s enough, here’s the next thing.
The USC Shoah Foundation has recorded over 55,000 testimonies across 65 countries. Hours long. Unedited. They have also built interactive AI testimony, a young person sits in a room and holds a real conversation with a holographic projection of a survivor, powered by thousands of hours of recorded answers. It is extraordinary. It is also, notably, not 60 seconds long and does not have a trending soundtrack.
These things exist. We are capable of them. Which makes the decision to default to the algorithm feel less like inevitability and more like a choice.
My book took six years. It is 350 pages long. Every page was earned.
Many have recommended TikTok, they themselves have had all the success.
The marketer in me knows exactly what that could do for sales. The person who spent three days processing one woman’s account of one morning, the woman who might have known my grandmother in the camp, who was standing pregnant in the snow trying not to flinch, that person might be harder to convince.
I haven’t decided yet. I am still sitting with it.
Some things deserve to be sat with. This history, above almost all others, is one of them.
And if that makes me a difficult client, I can live with that.