Tag Archives: Never Again

Simulated Horror: AI and the Holocaust

29 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in Culture and Politics, Photography and Visual Culture, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Images In Spite of All, or Images in Spite of the Facts?

Above: Mendel Grossman (1913-1945) takes a self-portrait. He chronicled the Lodz Ghetto until his deportation to Auschwitz; he is reported to have died on a death march. Many of the negatives of his images were held in Israel and lost in the 1967 war. (Image from Wikipedia)

The ubiquity of the Holocaust in popular culture has always had costs. The saccharine American version of Anne Frank in the 1959 film; and the blockbuster Schindler’s List both received criticism for their simplification of a complex reality. In an age in which we are forced to surrender more and more of our creative and intellectual autonomy to AI, they are a starting-point for reflection.

Anne was a complicated, contradictory personality whose development into a woman was (among other things) chronicled in what her father determined would be The Diary of a Young Girl. Her reflections on adolescence, religion, sexuality and identity were excised, and her control of our understanding of what happened in the Secret Annexe has made it difficult to actually think through the challenges for all concerned in her predicament: being in close confinement under threat of death with a teenager must have been a challenge. (The BBC adaptation of the diary, starring Ellie Kendrick as Anne, does a particularly good job of bringing out this aspect.) The 1959 film turned Anne (ironically played by an actress in her twenties just six years Anne’s junior) into a simpering and rather pathetic figure, with (as many have observed) her Jewishness pushed into the background.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg turned an untrustworthy and feckless chancer (who did a lot of good) into a tragic hero in opposition to a bottomlessly corrupt and evil opposite: the commandant of KL Plaszow, Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes. It prompted widespread calls for Holocaust education and coincided with the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. But many people have pointed out the film’s flaws. Fundamentally, it is still a Spielberg movie, with a clear moral arc (focused on a man who initially saw Jews as a resource to be exploited) and a redemptive ending. It popularised the Talmudic adage that “He who saves a life, it is as if he saved the world entire”, but the film is actually quite uncurious about what those lives meant. “The list is good; the list is life”, but how was it made? And who was not included? The arresting image of Schindler addressing the factory makes clear the relative status of rescuer and rescued. 

Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler announces the forthcoming liberation in Spielberg’s 1993 film (IMDB)

The 1990s also saw instrumental use of the Holocaust as a rhetorical weapon for unlikely causes. Perhaps most egregiously, the claim by the NRA that the Jews should have had guns to defend themselves. This not only reduced the tragedy of European Jewry to the Gunfight at the OK Corral, it also implied that gun owners were a persecuted minority on a par with the victims of genocide. The consequences of such disingenous faux-victimhood is visible in every news item from the contemporary United States.

But at least these claims were rooted in an agreement about what was real. In the last few days, my social media has been subjected to a slew of AI-generated “images of the Holocaust” by the “90s History” feed: not my choice, but a result of the algorithms’ ability to present the virtual world without discussion. 

These images are disturbing. Based on stories which even I (with thirty years of reading on the subject) can’t easily identify as fact or fiction. The accompanying images take elements of the Holocaust and build a parallel universe of images which could not have been. 

Another 90s blockbuster, The Matrix, is useful to consider here. Amid the hysterical, cartoonish violence, a serious point is raised. In a simulation, how can we know what, if anything, is real? The movie says the trick is to know “that there is no spoon”: thus, Neo (Keanu Reeves) can make the world behave as he sees fit. 

The philosophical depth of The Matrix is a matter for debate. But at one point a glimpse is given of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981; English 1983). Baudrillard argued that simulacra – copies for which there are no originals – were a burgeoning feature of the postmodern condition. Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, which reproduces his father’s Auschwitz testimony in graphic novel form, with Jews ”played” by mice, poses something of this challenge. But so too does Schindler’s List, in that it is arguably more faithful to Thomas Keneally’s novelisation of the story than to the facts themselves. But in each case, we can find solid ground under our feet. Plaszow existed, so did Goeth. Władek Spiegelman existed, as did Art’s brother Rysio, murdered by the person hiding him. It is essential to remember that these were real.

But the woman holding a child as she walks through a simulated “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate? The woman delivering a baby in what appears to be a wooden barracks allegedly in the Lodz Ghetto? The women proceeding through “Auschwitz” in identical woollen overcoats rather than the rags such prisoners were given? The nonexistent memorial tablet in a part of the Auschwitz camp that does not exist? 

It might be argued that these are uses of technology to fill in gaps. But the historical record is evidence and gaps, in the same way that music is sound and silence. Both are needed: one for aesthetic purposes and the other for epistemological and ontological reasons. A Holocaust in which everything was saved, all is known, is much less of a Holocaust. It is the implied gap in the vast Book of Names held at Auschwitz – for which two million names will never be known – that provides the impact. 

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The smooth glossy surfaces of AI are infinitely easier than the real thing. The gritty, hastily taken “images in spite of all” (Didi Hubermann) taken by the Sonderkommando in summer 1944, as prototype gas chambers and burning pits had to be used to cope with the endless stream of deportations, are blurry, badly framed, at odd angles. But this is testimony to the reality of the situation: taken with a camera stolen from luggage brought by the victims, fearful of discovery. The author John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal begin their fascinating The Lifespan of a Fact with two epigrams from Lao Tze: “True words are not beautiful” and “Beautiful words are not true.” The flaw in the lens, the smudge in the record, the gap in the tape: this is the texture of evidence.

Above: the photographs taken by the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Summer 1944 (Metropolitan Museum of Art digital copy)

It is possible that critics of this view might call me a Luddite. I wrote in 2017 of the risks I believed were posed by the efforts to create interactive holograms of survivors. I feared what they might be able to say in the future, uncanny purveyors of algorithmic “wisdom“. In the age of deepfakes I’m only surprised (and dismayed) that the world has changed so fast. But this confusion will only favour those who continue to deny, distort and denigrate the memory of the Holocaust: against such duplicitous and mendacious fakery, the best historian will flounder. We do not need to make their jobs easier in the quest for clicks: to do so is to cheapen the event we sigh wistfully over before scrolling onward.

And what to do? The director of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, once said that if he encountered film of the gas chambers he would be compelled to destroy it. While I am unsure whether I could watch such a film, my instinct as a historian is that preservation is generally preferable. As a record of the insanities of the 2020s, these images may be valuable in the future. But these images are also, in my opinion, the historical equivalent of littering. So for now, I suggest two established technologies are most useful: the delete key, and the off switch. 

For the follow up piece on reactions: click here.

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Never Again, Again (Warning: distressing content)

09 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by in Culture and Politics

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“It happened, therefore it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen anywhere.” – Primo Levi

The events unfolding in Myanmar at present have all the worst ingredients of a tragedy after which we will solemnly intone “Never Again”. A complex history, a world distracted by other things, and, worst of all, geographical distance – which is a tactful way of saying that since neither the victims nor the perpetrators are European, the violence will probably be allowed to burn itself out, leaving only a gaping hole where the Rohingya should be.

Though its government disputes this, the Rohingya have lived in the area of western Myanmar called Arakan for centuries. The first mention of them in western sources was by the East India Company in 1799. Rohingya were central to the administration of Myanmar (or Burma, as it then was) until 1982, when the military dictatorship removed them from the list of “official” nationality groups. Since then their conditions have steadily deteriorated. As the organisation Global Citizen puts it, they are “unable to claim citizenship in a country that refuses to recognise them.” Forced Migration Review explains how forcing statelessness on people violates both the 1956 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the reduction of Statelessness. But we have known what statelessness means far longer than that. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, statelessness means that people are consigned either to the law of exception or complete lawlessness. “Since [the stateless person] was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for [him] to become an anomaly for which it did provide: that of the criminal.”

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have both called for action amid growing concern since October, though some sources highlight that there has been violence since at least 2012. A United Nations report from February did not pull any punches. Based on interviews with more than 200 of the approximately 66,000 refugees to Bangladesh, the evidence they collected was clear.

“According to the testimonies gathered, the following types of violations were reported and experienced frequently in that area: Extrajudicial executions or other killings, including by random shooting; enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention; rape, including gang rape, and other forms of sexual violence; physical assault including beatings; torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; looting and occupation of property; destruction of property; and ethnic and religious discrimination and persecution.” (p. 40) 

What this means on a human level is, as always, perhaps beyond description if not beyond words. Even the bald breakdown of the testimonies makes for hard reading:

Extracts from a few of the testimonies follow. Please be warned, they are not subtle, though these are some of the least graphic. Page references are to the OHCHR Report.

“The day the army attacked my village, my father and I had just come out of prayers, when we heard sounds of shooting. We had just walked to a farm, where we were sitting and talking to the owner of the farm. While the firing was still going on, my father stood up, which is when a grenade came and exploded close to us, killing my father, the farm owner’s son, and severely injuring me and the farm owner.” (p.14)

 “I was in front of [my grandmother’s] house, playing with some other boys when the helicopter came. I was shot from the helicopter, other boys were too. Six or seven of us were hit by bullets from the helicopter.”

 “When my two sisters, 8 and 10 years old, were running away from the house, having seen the military come, they were killed. They were not shot dead, but slaughtered with knives.”

The report is equally blunt about the possibility that the statistics derived from these testimonies are just the tip of the iceberg. They emphasise not just that they are only reporting what they have testimony to support, but also that the sexual nature of the crimes means many victims are too traumatised or ashamed to speak of what has happened to them.

In terms of perpetrators, the report is clear that they include members of the Myanmar armed forces, border guards and police, along with ‘irregular’ units of armed locals, sometimes wearing borrowed uniforms. As is depressingly standard in such cases, witnesses knew some of these to be civilians because they were their neighbours.

The response from Aung San Suu Kyi, the former dissident, Nobel laureate and human rights activist who now de facto leads the civilian administration, has been disappointing, to say the least. In a conversation with Turkish President Erdogan, she blamed “fake news” and in a press conference she claimed the government was still trying to decide “how to differentiate terrorists from innocents.” A place to start might be asking them their age.

The UN report stops short of terming the persecution genocide, though it makes clear that the events constitute “[what] has been described in other contexts as ethnic cleansing.” (p. 42)

Definitions are both problematic and essential. For us to respond, we must name what is happening, thus fully bringing it into reality. By naming a crime, we identify it and can prosecute it. Genocide and ethnic cleansing, because they are definitions devised partly in order to suspend the normal rules of sovereignty, are likely to be applied too late: we only know for sure with the dreadful clarity of hindsight. Though one should always remember the macabre evasions of the Clinton White House during the Rwandan Genocide of 2004. A particular exchange between Press Secretary Christine Shelley and reporter Alan Elsner has acquired almost iconic status (some readers may recognise the dialogue from an episode of The West Wing). There is video of the exchange on YouTube.

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In fact, a State Department document very clearly stated “Be careful … Genocide finding could commit U.S.G. to actually ‘do something.'” As we know now, the cost of the ‘formulations’ was between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths in just under three months: a rate of killing which outstripped that of the Nazi death camps. At that rate of slaughter, all of the 2,000,000 Rohingya could be dead in six months. In Rwanda, the bodies of men, women and children clogged rivers as the world debated definitions. As a survivor who spoke to the playwright J.T. Rogers for his play The Overwhelming prophesied, the cycle of violence has not stopped: “Now it is two hundred percent safe here. But until when, I don’t know. Rwanda is like a fire underground: the killings will come again.”

There are always (frequently craven) reasons not to intervene. There are always (weak) arguments for waiting. There is no defence, however, for saying nothing. The preoccupation of British politics with the EU withdrawal process is crowding out any other discussion. This must stop. Sign the petition. Demand action. When the petitions committee reconvenes this month to start a new session, I’m going to start a parliamentary petition (if an NGO doesn’t get there first) to demand that our elected representatives are at least forced to consider what they refuse to act upon. For now, there is a change.org petition gathering signatures and a letter from the All-Parliamentary Group for Democracy in Burma. We know more than enough, about both genocide in general and this crisis in particular, to expect more than the silence the Prime Minister has so far responded with.

I want to finish with some words from the Nobel Lecture by Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012. Remember her acceptance of the prize in 1991 was made by her son: her lecture was made possible by the pressure from governments and thousands of individuals to free her from house arrest:

“To be forgotten. The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out: “Don’t forget us!” They meant: “don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.” When the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to me they were recognizing that the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognizing the oneness of humanity. So for me receiving the Nobel Peace Prize means personally extending my concerns for democracy and human rights beyond national borders. The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.” 

A door in the heart should not wait for definitions to be confirmed before opening once again. Words will never be enough. But they may be a start.

Postscript: like many of us, I’m guilty at times of the delusion that things only happen when I’m looking. A friend of mine, a passionate advocate of and activist for peace, wrote this and I thought it should be attached to this piece: a reminder that terrible things are happening all the time and that the work of trying to stop them is constant.