Holocaust victim lives on Facebook

Henio Zytomirski’s Facebook profile picture stands out from most. The grinning 6-year-old is captured in black-and-white and poses in an old-fashioned buttoned-up shirt and shorts.

The photograph, shot in 1939, is probably the last taken of him before he was murdered in the Holocaust.

Henio Zytomirski photo/jta/yossi zamir/flash 90

With nearly 5,000 friends, Henio’s page (http://www.facebook.com/henio.zytomirski) is one of the most striking examples of a new phenomenon in which people are setting up Facebook memorials for the victims of the past century’s greatest tragedies. Another project in Belgium attempts to create Facebook pages for each of the 27,594 Allied soldiers who were killed in Belgium during WWII, and Anne Frank and the Auschwitz memorial site also are on Facebook.

Facebook and MySpace users have long been creating memorial pages for friends and family, but these new projects aim to rekindle lives of the more distant dead who might otherwise be forgotten.

“Henio was an eyewitness and a victim to the Nazis’ actions. Because he was murdered, he could never provide his testimony,” his page says in a post written by Neta Zytomirski Avidar, a cousin of Henio’s who lives in Israel and has helped build the site. “We try to guess what might have been his testimony.”

On Henio’s page, postings made by Henio’s cousin and other administrators shift between third-person descriptions of his life and posts in the voice of the dead boy.

One of Henio’s pictures shows a Hebrew-language book — the kind Henio would have studied if the war hadn’t broken out on what was to have been his first day of school, preventing him from ever attending.

The caption in Polish reads: “It will be September soon. I will go to school. I wonder what’s it like at school. I’m a bit afraid. Daddy says there is no need to be afraid. After all — he is a teacher. Today I saw my textbook.”

Some historians and educators fear the use of social media in war remembrance could trivialize tragedies like the Holocaust, or that postings like those in Henio’s name could blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Adam Kopciowski, a historian at Lublin’s Marie Curie-Sklodowska University who specializes in Jewish studies, believes posts written in the dead boy’s voice raise ethical questions.

“This is an act of pretending to be a person that has died, but we cannot be sure whether he spoke that way, whether he thought that way, whether he acted that way,” Kopciowski said.

Amid the postings for Henio, some mundane, even silly messages can be found on his wall, such as invitations to play the popular Facebook game Mafia Wars. Some send him little virtual gifts: a bouquet of flowers, honey from Israel, dreidels at Chanukah.

Joy Sather-Wagstaff, a cultural anthropologist at North Dakota State University, said the virtual gifts should not necessarily be seen as frivolous.

“I look at this as a virtual version of what they would leave if they actually went to a place where there was a monument to him,” she said. “I bet they would leave little notes and toys — the physical material version of what you see them leaving on Facebook.”

Sather-Wagstaff added that she sees the Henio phenomenon as one way people today grapple with what death means in an era of great tragedies of scale, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Pawel Brozek, a history student who helps administer the site, said that when the project was launched last summer, it initially drew criticism from several Poles who said it insulted Henio’s dignity. But those voices were quickly hushed by an outpouring of positive reaction from around the world.

Technically speaking, Henio’s page goes against Facebook rules: Profile pages are meant primarily for individuals who are still living, to communicate with one another, share photos, play games. For users who have died, it’s possible to set up a “memorialized” account so friends and family can pay tribute.

Pages for businesses, celebrities and other public figures, meanwhile, generally have “fans” instead of “friends”—and that should also be the case for victims of historic tragedies like Henio, said Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker.

A big reason for this is that Facebook limits the number of “friends” individual users can have to 5,000. Fan pages for businesses and public figures have no such limit, so any number of Facebook users could join as fans in tribute to the individual’s life, Barker said.

She added that in “certain cases,” Facebook will work with users to migrate a profile page to a fan page.

In 1941, the Nazis forced Henio and his family to live in Lublin’s ghetto, where many Polish Jews died from a lack of food, diseases or random executions.

At some point in 1942 Henio and his father, Szmuel, were sent to the nearby Majdanek death camp, and it is believed Henio died by early 1943. His father was killed there soon after.

Henio’s Facebook page evolved from earlier commemorative projects launched by the Lublin group Grodzka Gate-NN Theater, which uses theater and other forms of performance to resurrect the memory of the 40,000 Jews — a third of the city’s population — who lived in the eastern Polish city before the war.

Henio was chosen because a trove of family pictures and letters was made available to the group by his cousin.

“Forty thousand names and faces … cannot be memorized,” Henio’s profile says, urging people instead to “remember just one of them.”

In a typical response, an Italian Facebook “friend” of Henio’s wrote this month: “Little Henio, I think about you often. I consider your presence on Facebook a great opportunity to reflect, more real than many friendships granted to real people. Thank you, Henio. I hope you can have many friends.”