I don’t need to remind anyone that 2020 has been a strange year. Some of those stuck at home taught themselves to bake sourdough. Others took up knitting. Many spent an extra hour a week waiting in socially distanced lines outside grocery stores.
Me? I wrote a 159-page radio play script about Holocaust victims who rise from mass graves as zombies. We released the trailer for this radio play this week.
Before you get offended, let me explain.
A month after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, The Canadian Jewish News was forced to close—at least temporarily. But soon after the long-standing weekly newspaper closed, a core group of former staffers, myself included, began conversations about reviving The CJN in a newer, bolder, digital-first format focused on in-depth research and innovative storytelling.
I was given the task of running the podcast department, and since The CJN needed a few months to get back on its feet and I had plenty of free time due to the pandemic, I did something I hadn’t tried in ten years: creative writing.
I started with a concept that aptly raised eyebrows for The New CJN: Holocaust victims resurrected as zombies. (No, I don’t know where the idea came from or why no one really thought of it before.) The plot, set in the near future, centers on a young Canadian woman, Kat, going through a quarter-life crisis; she drops out of college to travel to Germany and meet the estranged family of her deceased Jewish father. There, she accompanies her cousins to a nearby concentration camp where, according to news reports, grave robbers are digging up the mass graves of Holocaust victims. Kat and her cousins are among the first to learn the truth: it’s not grave robbers disturbing these burial sites, but zombies emerging from them. After one of the undead becomes inexplicably attracted to Kat and her family, they realize he’s docile and curious. The group decides to uncover the truth behind the phenomenon and fend off attempts by malicious outsiders who want to manipulate the situation for their own benefit.
All this was less inspired by George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead than through the online world I have experienced during the pandemic: the slow decline of civilized discussion in the age of social media.
We live in an age where confidence is rewarded more than accuracy, and the most confident personalities are often the most hypocritical. Social media is engaging, but it’s not just doomscrolling and viral videos that keep people hooked: As neuroscientist Molly Crockett has observed, the amplification of moral outrage—being angry about perceived injustice and then having a digital mob at your back—releases dopamine in our brains. Social media has turned outrage into an addiction. When people get fed up with being treated unfairly in their offline lives, they feel compelled to take out that frustration on any online target that fits their ideology: corporations, Antifa, COVID, refugees, Jews.
Self-proclaimed outsiders bent on tearing down ivory tower institutions—governments, universities, newspapers—can easily denigrate the Holocaust, which exists in a space of reverence, as just another monument that the public should never question. And as anyone who has raised a toddler knows, if you tell someone not to question something, they will question it no matter what.
When I was writing this zombie script, I happened to be working on a freelance project about conspiracy theories surrounding the USS Liberty, an American ship in the Mediterranean that was accidentally torpedoed by Israel during the Six-Day War. I saw a video on Russian news channel RT of a very angry tattooed man who was adamant that the incident was evidence of “Jewish supremacist Talmudic ideology” that was somehow related to Holocaust fabrications and tied to the Mossad’s direct involvement in 9/11. It helped me imagine how, for example, a burgeoning zombie crisis surrounding Jews could be spun by self-righteous lunatics who clung to every rumor they heard online.
The Holocaust isn’t nearly as ambiguous as the USS Liberty, but both are old. And the older things get, the more flippant people tend to be about them. A long passage of time may not be a necessary prerequisite for historical revisionism, but it certainly helps. Combined with the rise of 21st-century nationalism, digital echo chambers, and the proliferation of fake news, it’s no coincidence that Poland is passing laws criminalizing accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and yellow-star anti-vaxxers.
The problem is not that so many people categorically deny the Holocaust, but rather that the known facts are today distorted by ideological zealots, hasty troublemakers and outright anti-Semites.
All of this sows seeds of doubt in a generation growing up online, where serious facts merge with propagandistic fiction. I do not need to inform readers of this publication that “a third of students believe the Holocaust was exaggerated or invented” (CBC News, January 2022) or that “one in five Canadian youth are not sure what happened in the Holocaust” (CTV News, January 2019).
In response to these trends, Canadian provinces have in recent years begun mandating classes on the Holocaust in elementary schools. It’s a good step, but I don’t think it’s enough. Textbooks are fine, zombies are cooler.
I see my work as essentially a kind of stealth Holocaust education aimed specifically at younger audiences. It is part of a recent tradition of postmodern digital Holocaust content. This growing body of work includes @eva.stories, an Instagram account with 1.1 million followers that imagines the real 13-year-old Eva Heyman, who died in Auschwitz, would have posted if Instagram had existed in the 1940s. Then there’s Inge Ginsberg, a ninety-year-old survivor who has processed her trauma in death metal music videos, or the VR headsets at the Illinois Holocaust Museum that transport visitors to Auschwitz in 1944.
What started as an idea about Holocaust zombies soon evolved into a script more concerned with warlike narratives and historical revisionism. A theme emerged: in the absence of victims who cannot speak for themselves, we often hear vile people claiming to fight for them. As the plot opens, a zombie attacks an innocent young woman, sending her to the hospital and mobilizing neo-Nazis across Europe. A government agent pursues the zombie by any means necessary. Religious leaders claim the zombies are a sign of the apocalypse; a right-wing activist insists on protecting the sanctity of Holocaust victims; even Kat only gets involved for an ulterior motive, as we learn halfway through the series. Yet crucially, no one asks what the zombies themselves want.
After years of revising the script, we recorded this radio play, Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Storyin April, and the complete series will be released at the Ashkenaz Festival on August 31. (I am eternally grateful to our partners who brought us here, including our co-producers at the Ashkenaz Foundation.)
In a post-October 7 world, the Holocaust is being co-opted even more than in recent years: by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists who claim they are “just asking questions”; by anti-Israel activists who gleefully compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany; even by pro-Israel activists who chant “Never again” to justify particularly brutal actions by the Israeli government and military. These kinds of propagandistic manipulations only reinforce the message I was trying to convey in this script.
The six million dead cannot speak for themselves. But if they could, I wonder what they would say.
Subscribe Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story at thecjn.ca/zombies
Daniel Ehrenworth’s first book, Holocaust Dreamphotographed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, was published by the MacLaren Art Centre in conjunction with his solo exhibition in 2005. Daniel also works as a commercial photographer and director, his work can be found at danielehrenworth.com.
