Facebook is slowly evolving: from a simple way to share pictures and short messages, to a gaming platform, and now a means to commemorate the lives of heroes and victims. A very good example of this is the Facebook profile of Holocaust victim, Henio Zytomirski.
Henio was born in March 25, 1933 in Lublin. In November of 1942, He and his father, Szmuel, were taken to the Majdanek Extermination Camp. There, Henio was killed by the Nazis in one of their gas chambers. He was only 9 years old.
Although Henio had died more than 50 years ago, he was not forgotten. He even became a national icon and his story is taught as part of Poland’s national curriculum.
The Facebook page was created by residents of Lublin, Poland. For the profile picture, they used probably Henio’s last photo, which was taken in front of Lublin’s PKO bank in 1939. He was just a 6-year old grinning boy then. Aside from photos, Henio’s profile also includes postings made by his cousin and other administrators.
The group who created the profile wanted the world to know this boy who died in the hands of Nazi Germany, and mourn for the millions of lives lost during that period.
Henio, now, has almost 3,000 Facebook friends. Indeed, this shows how effective creating memorials for victims of great tragedies in Facebook are.
Similarly, people in Belgium are attempting to create Facebook pages for each of the Allied soldiers who died there in WWII and are buried there. There are 27,594 of them from. They came from different countries including the US, UK, France, and Australia.
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