Watch "Memento", a short animated film prepared by the ENRS and House of the Wannsee Conference to commemorate the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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 prepared in 2016 a short animated film entitled “Memento”, directed by the Hungarian author Zoltán Szilágyi Varga.
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.
- We are living in a period when the generation of witnesses to the Holocaust is slowly decreasing. It is of particular importance to pass the knowledge and memory of those events on to next generations, says Rafał Rogulski, director of the Institute of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. We hope that with its emotional message the film “Memento” will inspire our societies to reflect on history and its consequences.
Directed by: Zoltán Szilágyi Varga
Produced by: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, House of the Wannsee Conference
Executive producer: Rózus Film
Funded by: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Poland), Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (Germany), Nord-Ost Institut
Partners: Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site and Museum, Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe