I don’t need to remind anyone that 2020 was a strange year. Some of the stuck-at-home taught themselves to bake sourdough. Others took up knitting. Many spent an extra hour per week waiting in socially-distanced queues outside grocery stores.
Me? I wrote a 159-page audio drama script about Holocaust victims rising from mass graves as zombies, whose trailer we released this week.
Before you get offended, let me explain.
One month after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, The Canadian Jewish News—at least for a time—closed up shop. But it wasn’t long after the old familiar weekly newspaper shut down that a core group of former employees, myself included, began discussions about reviving The CJN in a newer, bolder, digital-first format, focusing on deep research and innovative storytelling.
I was charged with spearheading the nascent podcast department. And since The CJN would take a few months to get back on its feet, and the pandemic ensured I had ample spare time, I did something I hadn’t tried in a decade: creative writing.
I began with a concept that felt fittingly eyebrow-raising for The New CJN: Holocaust victims rising as zombies. (No, I don’t know where the idea came from, or why nobody had come up with it before, really.) The plot, which takes place in the near future, centres on a young Canadian woman, Kat, undergoing a quarter-life crisis; she drops out of university to travel to Germany and meet her late Jewish father’s estranged family. There, she accompanies her cousins to visit a nearby concentration camp, where news reports have alleged graverobbing vandals were digging up the mass graves of Holocaust victims. Kat and her cousins are among the first to learn the truth: it isn’t graverobbers disturbing these burial sites, but zombies emerging out of them. After one of the undead seems inexplicably drawn 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 bad-faith outsiders trying to manipulate the situation for their own advantage.
All this was less inspired by George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead than by the online world I witnessed during the pandemic: the slow devolution of civil discourse throughout the social media age.
We live in an era in which confidence is rewarded over accuracy, and the most confident personalities are often the most sanctimonious. Social media is transfixing, but it’s not just doomscrolling and viral videos that hook people: as the neuroscientist Molly Crockett has observed, reinforcement of moral outrage—feeling angry at perceived injustice, then having a digital mob back you up—unleashes dopamine in our brains. Social media has transformed outrage into an addiction. When people are fed up with being treated unfairly in their offline lives, they feel compelled to vent this frustration at any online target that fits their ideology: corporations, antifa, COVID, refugees, Jews.
To self-described mavericks bent on tearing down ivory-tower institutions—governments, universities, newspapers—the Holocaust, which exists in a space of reverence, can easily be denigrated as just another monument the public is never supposed to question. And as anyone who’s raised a toddler knows, if you tell someone they shouldn’t question something, they are going to question the hell out of it.
In the early days of 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 Sea that was accidentally torpedoed by Israel during the Six-Day War. I watched a video on the Russian news station RT of a very angry tattooed man who fully believed the incident was evidence of “Jewish supremacist Talmudic ideology” that somehow coalesced with Holocaust fabrications and tied in with direct Mossad involvement in 9/11. It helped me imagine my way into how, say, a burgeoning zombie crisis centered around Jews might be spun by righteous lunatics who clung to any rumour they hear online.
The Holocaust is not nearly as ambiguous as the USS Liberty, but they’re both old. And the older things get, the more flippantly people tend to treat them. A lengthy passage of time may not be a strict prerequisite for historical revisionism, but it certainly helps. Combined with rising 21st century nationalism, digital echo chambers, and the proliferation of fake news, it’s no coincidence we’re seeing Poland enact laws criminalizing accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and anti-vaccine nutcases wearing yellow stars.
The problem is not that so many people are outright denying the Holocaust happened; rather, the established facts are now being distorted by ideological zealots, knee-jerk contrarian influencers, and straight-up antisemites.
All this sows doubt among a generation growing up online, where reputable facts blend with propagandistic fiction. I don’t need to inform the readers of this particular publication that “a third of students think the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated” (CBC News, January 2022), or that “one in five Canadian youths are not sure what happened in the Holocaust” (CTV News, January 2019).
In response to these trends, over the last few years, Canadian provinces have begun mandating Holocaust education in grade schools. It’s a good step, but I don’t believe it’s enough. Textbooks are fine; zombies are cooler.
I view my work, essentially, as a sneaky piece of Holocaust education geared specifically to younger audiences. It falls within a recent tradition of postmodern digital Holocaust content. That growing body of work includes @eva.stories, an Instagram account with 1.1 million followers which imagines that the real-life 13-year-old Eva Heyman, who died in Auschwitz, would have been posting had Instagram existed in the 1940s. Then there is Inge Ginsberg, a nonagenarian survivor who has channeled her trauma into death metal music videos, or the VR headsets at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which transport visitors to Auschwitz in 1944.
What began as an idea about Holocaust zombies soon transformed into a script more about warring narratives and historical revisionism. A theme emerged: in the absence of victims who cannot speak for themselves, we often hear obnoxious people claiming to fight on their behalf. A zombie attacks one innocent young woman early in the plot, hospitalizing her and galvanizing neo-Nazis across Europe. A government agent tracks the zombie by any means necessary. Religious leaders claim the zombies mark the apocalypse; a right-wing activist insists on protecting the sanctity of the Holocaust victims; even Kat only gets involved because of an ulterior motive we learn midway through the series. Yet, crucially, nobody asks what the zombies themselves want.
After years of script revisions, we recorded this audio drama, Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story, in April, and will release the full series on Aug. 31 at the Ashkenaz Festival. (I’m beyond grateful to our partners who helped get us here, including our co-producers at the Ashkenaz Foundation.)
In a post-Oct. 7 world, the Holocaust is being co-opted even more than it had been in recent years: by antisemitic conspiracy theorists who claim to be “just asking questions”; by anti-Israel activists gleefully comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany; even by pro-Israel activists invoking “Never Again” to justify particularly brutal actions taken by the Israeli government and military. These types of propagandistic manipulations only reinforce the message I wanted to get across in this script.
The six million dead can’t speak for themselves. But if they could, I do wonder what they’d say.
Subscribe to Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story at thecjn.ca/zombies
Daniel Ehrenworth’s first book, Holocaust Dream, photographed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was published by the MacLaren Art Centre in conjunction with his 2005 solo exhibition. Daniel also works as a commercial photographer and director, find his work at danielehrenworth.com.
