| Philosophy | Imagine what would have happened if the Jewish kids who lived during the Holocaust had had a smartphone, social networks and could have documented what was going on? That was the starting point for ‘Eva’s Stories’ – a unique new Instagram series which will for this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, over a period of 24 hours, issue a new story every 30 minutes documenting the life of Eva Haiman, a 13-year-old girl from Hungary who perished in Auschwitz, and left her diary behind. When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, Eva Heiman was a 13-year-old girl living in the town of Nagyvarad. She began to write a diary on her birthday, February 13th 1944 and stopped on May 30th 1944 – just three months later and three days before she was deported by train to Auschwitz, where she perished. 75 years later, her story has been adapted into a special film project produced and created by hi-tech entrepreneur Matti Kohavi and his daughter Maya, who invested millions of dollars in the project. To do that, they adapted Eva's personal diary into a screenplay and together with a team of 400 production people, actors and extras, they reconstructed Eva’s life and filmed it in Lviv Ukraine. "We took the diary and actually translated it into a full 70-minute film," Mati Kochavi explains. "It is one of the biggest projects that Instagram has ever done." We asked ourselves what would happen if Eva, instead of a pen and paper for writing a diary, had a smartphone and Instagram. That’s when we decided to shoot the entire film with a smartphone or a camera that simulates the smartphone, with the girl always holding the camera, and the entire film being shot from her perspective". Kochavi adds that "the idea was to build the environment in which Eva lived and supposedly photographed what she was sending to her friends." Eva’s story will be recounted on the special Instagram page set up in her memory for Holocaust Memorial Day. During 24 hours, her life will be brought to life through still images, text passages and stories that will let the audience bear witness to events that took place during the last months of her life - from getting to know her family and friends, through to the Nazi invasion of her city, the uprooting from the house, move to the ghetto, violence and torture she survived, right up to her boarding the train to Auschwitz. |