Eva Stories, an Instagram educational and commemorative project about a Hungarian Jewish teenager who perished in the Holocaust, has become nothing short of an online sensation. Released on the Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2019, the project is an adaptation of the diary of 13-year-old Eva Heyman, one of the 568,000 Hungarian Jews murdered in the concentration camps.

Over the 48 hours during which it was rolled out, Eva Stories amassed 300 million visits and a massive following from the younger audiences. At the moment, this Instagram account has 1.2 million followers, a major portion of which are young people between 13 and 30 years old. It has received two Webbys, popularly dubbed as the Oscars of the Internet, and captured the attention of dozens of major global news outlets.

So what is the secret to this major success?

Eva Stories is the brainchild of tech entrepreneur Mati Kochavi and his daughter Maya. Together, they wanted to recount the horrors of the Holocaust to the younger people using modern tools. The result was the project that speaks clearly and authentically about these tragic events, as seen through the eyes of a teenager. 

Credit: Unsplash.com

Running under the “what if” narrative, the project depicts Eva as a modern-day teenager that has a smartphone and records life around her as she goes about her day. She uploads the videos as stories on Instagram, adds captions and emojis – all the things a girl her age would do today.

The project consists of a series of stories running for about 60 minutes in total. It opens with Eva being a typical teenager, talking about her crush and dreams of becoming a famous news photographer. It then takes a dark turn as she records soldiers on tanks and her cousin being taken away, with a feeling of a disaster unraveling. 

To prepare the Israeli public for such a novel concept, the campaign was preceded by announcements on billboards and online. 

Despite its massive success, not everyone was open to this method of retelling the largest crime on European soil in modern history. The authors were accused of trivializing the atrocities with “a display of bad taste”, due to the widely perceived frivolousness and shallowness of social media. Others praised its successful use of the modern instrument to commemorate the Nazi victims and deliver the story in the way that most of today’s youth identify with.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, there’s one thing you can’t deny. Eva Stories has managed to capture the public’s attention and preserve the memory of the Holocaust from fading for future generations.