Building bridges that link the old and the new takes patience that comes with experience and a touch of bold creativity associated with the youth. In 2022, Eva.Stories, a pet project of Mati Kochavi and his daughter Maya, still serves as an artistic balancing act that brings together seemingly disparate worlds of transgenerational communication, modern technology, and stories in need of repeated retelling in our confusing times.
Instagram in Auschwitz?
Mati Kochavi is an Israeli tech & media entrepreneur, straddled a generational rift by taking a harrowing story of the Holocaust from the world of stuffy books to the glossy world of social media.
Lauded by two Webbys, the “Oscars” of the Internet in 2020, his Eva.Stories project is still a resounding success whose echoes are felt across the virtual and real worlds.
It’s only fitting since the project has its roots on Instagram, a digital vanity fair platform for many. It’s for this reason that the project initially garnered much controversy, as Instagram was seen as unfitting and degrading for the story Mati and Maya wanted to tell – one of the final days of Eva Heyman, a Jewish Hungarian teen girl who was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
Now, why would a historic account of a real-life person who went through a terrible ordeal cause so much controversy and, equally, praise?
It’s simple: her story was presented as a series of Instagram posts and videos in which Eva’s last days were presented through a modern-day lens of a smartphone. All the viewers had to do was to suspend their disbelief at the fact that Eva owned an Instagram profile and a phone back in the 1940s. Yet, this simple request for a modicum of mental flexibility was too much for some, and the project received backlash for supposedly disrespecting the memory of the Holocaust victims from the outset.
Updating a Story for Eternity
Yet, the Kochavis went on unfazed by the criticism, bringing an entourage of promising young actors who portrayed Eva and the people from her social circle, and pairing this with a Hollywood-level of production quality. Yet, It was not all about the razzle-dazzle of technology, as Mati and Maya combed through countless pages of diaries of various young Holocaust victims, only to decide to focus their artistic lens on Eva, a 13-year old at the time we start following her story.
Speaking of stories, the project’s Webby awards were given for the Best Use of Stories and the Best Campaigns on Social Media. They were told through a series of installments in which we first get first-hand insights into Eva’s prewar life. Yes, the life marked by many concerns and joys Eva shared with her viewers, despite the temporal gap. This ability to connect with the younger generation served as an excellent entry point for the viewers from this demographic – they got to relate to Eva on a personal level, to feel her story as their own, amidst the view count metrics and “like” buttons that constitute their daily routine.
Yet, due to the nature and the immediacy of Eva’s story, identifying with it was more intellectually and emotionally challenging than absorbing one’s new outfit or a funny cat video. But, Mati’s creation struck the nerve of the young and the number of followers of Eva’s fictional profile soon went over the magic one million mark. Eva was finally accepted and enshrined in collective memory, not only in Israel but across the globe, with millions of viewers learning about this part of history with renewed enthusiasm and freshness.
Ironically, the very platform deemed unsuitable to tell this story served only to propel it to the global renown the project now enjoys. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Mati’s journey, it’s the one that confirms that it’s the human spirit that powers the technology, not vice versa.
