On 27 January, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi concentration camp, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated. For this occasion, the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and the House of the Wannsee Conference have prepared a short animated film entitled “Memento”, directed by the Hungarian auteur Zoltán Szilágyi Varga. The film is available on the organisers’ websites and it will also be shown across European TV channels.
The half-a-minute-long spot based on charcoal drawings recalls one of the most tragic events in human history. As its director Zoltán Szilágyi Varga says, when trying to grapple with the Holocaust “we stand in front of human nature’s distortion without any answer despite all the research we know, the number of victims counted, the exact description of the events.” The film evokes symbolism which is easily recognised by Europeans: cattle railway cars, railway tracks, paper snippets or abandoned flats, yet it shows them from a child’s perspective, thereby posing the question whether it is possible to comprehend that tragedy and stressing the need to uphold the memory of those days.
Continue reading on the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity’s website.