Introduction

Antisemitism is metastasizing in ways that many Jews, especially in America, hoped had long disappeared, or at least retreated into the margins. Instead, this ancient hatred seems to have a received a shot in the arm in the twenty-first century. As antisemitism emerges from the shadows on both the far right and the

far left, many Jews understandably fear that less and less daylight remains for them in public life. In these conditions, the specter of the Holocaust feels more and more proximate, not just as a recent past but a possible future.

This resurgence of antisemitism comes at an especially precarious moment for Holocaust remembrance. The number of Holocaust survivors still living is dwindling rapidly, depriving us of firsthand witnesses just as their veracity and courage is needed most. What will the future of Holocaust memory be as we reluctantly envision a post-survivor era? Some aspects are clearer than others. The personal burden of transmission will shift to second, third, and fourth generations who heard the experiences of survivors firsthand, or felt the weight of intergenerational trauma in their own lives, emotionally or even epigenetically. Official structures of memory are already in place at institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as at numerous smaller institutions around the world, including the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.

Yet they too will face new challenges as they seek to educate generations with vastly different habits and expectations for consuming information and building meaningful experiences. Creative responses to the Holocaust in art, film, music, and many other modes of expression will continue to germinate in the minds of those who did not experience the Shoah nor even know anyone who did, presenting new risks and fresh possibilities along the way. The links in these chains of transmission will be tested in novel ways, especially in an online ecosystem of rampant disinformation, deepfakes, and other emergent dangers.

Looking at this uncertain terrain ahead, the Soul Survivors project provides some compelling ways forward. These survivors’ narratives accompanying their portraits focus not just on the catastrophe of the Shoah, but on the wider arc of survivors’ lives, before and after the events of the Holocaust. They draw attention to the astonishing resilience with which survivors navigated the changed and devastated worlds into which they emerged. Their relaxed yet unflinching gazes in these photographs draw out this quality of quiet determination. While the focus of the project remains squarely on preserving Holocaust memory, the resilience shown in these photographs has the potential to communicate across generations, speaking to multiple contexts. For young people, inundated with bleak projections for a climate-changed world, the defiant fortitude of survivors may sow seeds of resilience in their own lives, cultivating the kind of hope needed to create new worlds.

Aaron Rosen, PhD
Searsport, Maine, 2024