This month is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, and, in Jordan Dunbar’s documentary What Happened at Auschwitz, there is a sense of these chances to remember running out. Most obviously that’s true in terms of being able to speak directly to the survivors: Dunbar meets a handful of them, and their clarity and focus are undimmed, yet their numbers are declining.
Dunbar, however, assigns his subject matter another, different urgency. We live, he observes, in an era of disinformation and rising hatred. A terrifying percentage of online content and commentary about the Holocaust questions whether it happened or celebrates that it did. Less than a century since this appalling crime against humanity, the principle of Never Again is wobbling.
