The Holocaust on YouTube

Yesterday, in a marathon 4 hour successful attempt at study evasion, I sat and watched almost endless videos on YouTube.

It was Holocaust Day - something I always remember because it's my brother Richard's birthday, and besides, we have a grandparent of Jewish lineage.

After watching God knows how many music videos, and a handful of entertaining home-made ones (I can certainly recommend Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out), I remembered it was Holocaust Day. Unusually there seemed nothing on the TV to commemorate it, so I searched for original footage on YouTube.

I found, without much difficulty, a series of videos called Nazi death camps : Cruel British footage of liberations. These clips each had a huge warning about the shocking nature of the material, how it was completely unedited, and this seemed to be borne out by the comments on the first page.

It's 8:45 long, longer than I'd usually tolerate on YouTube, and I prepared for some seriously shocking stuff. It showed the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen in Spring 1945. The thousands of emaciated corpses that awaited the liberators must have been shocking and unforgettable. However, 62 years on, to anyone who's ever watched a documentary or read about the Holocaust, it's nothing that hasn't been exposed thousands of times before.

[I'm running the risk of sounding jaded here, so I should emphasise that the Holocaust never ever should lose the capacity to shock, and indeed it hasn't. See the powerful novel Fugitive Pieces for further details. ]

So for me, easily the most fascinating material wasn't the video, but in fact the comments. So far, there are 144 comments on the first clip of the series alone. It was surprising how many nazi-sympathetic postings there were. Dare I say how refreshing it is to have uncensored access to these idiots? It's only by exposing this stuff to the oxygen of rationale to comments such as "Sieg HeiL, Sieg HeiL, fuck all jews!!" that these backward ideas will finally die.

But the stuff that shocks me again and again is something rather different. Am I alone in finding mundane responses to events such as (and not excluding) the Holocaust almost intolerably inappropriate? Is "How cruel" a comment more suitable for an incident of playground bullying than for one of the most barbaric episodes of human history? My friend Carolyn and I went to see the excellent film The Pianist a few years ago at the Mac, an arts centre in Birmingham. The scene where nazis throw an old man out of a first floor window in the Warsaw Ghetto was greated by tutting from a number of audience members! I struggle to think of a greater insult to the victims. Tutting is a response I would expect to receive if I dropped litter in the street.

In If this is a man, Primo Levi notes that if the Holocaust had continued, then over time a completely new vocabulary would have had to develop. Because the word "cold" doesn't really come close to describing spending a winter in Poland in the open air wearing only a thin shirt. And hunger is what we feel when we've skipped a meal, and to a concentration camp inhabitant would have been something of an enviable condition.

But enough of diversionary tactics such as genocide and mass suffering. It's time to do my marketing homework.