The Blogs: Who Owns Memory?

In 2022, I sat down to interview Holocaust survivor David Schaecter.

David had not slept the night before.

The thought of revisiting the memories he had carried for more than eight decades was almost unbearable. The moment I crossed the threshold of his apartment, he broke down in tears.

For the next eight hours, David took me back to Auschwitz.

He described arriving at the camp as a young boy. He told me how his mother and two little sisters were murdered before his eyes. He recalled hearing machine-gun fire and watching bodies fall into a pit. He remembered realizing, in an instant, that the people he loved most in the world were gone.

Again and again, we stopped filming. There were tears, long silences, and moments when the weight of memory became almost too much to bear. Yet David continued.

What struck me most was not only the horror of what he endured, but the determination that brought him to tell the story anyway.

He did not want the world to look away.

When the interview was finally over, David embraced me. He took my hands in his, looked me straight in the eyes, and made me promise that I would become his voice when he was no longer here.

Months before his death, that promise became one of the most sacred commitments of my life.

Today, I think often about David’s request. Because his question was not simply whether his story would survive. It was who would carry it forward.

And that raises a profound question—one that extends far beyond archives, museums, or family histories.

Who becomes the steward of Holocaust testimony when the witnesses themselves are no longer here?

For decades, the answer was simple. Survivors owned their stories. They decided when to speak, what to share, and how their experiences would be remembered. Their presence gave testimony an unquestionable moral authority. They were not merely narrators of history; they were history.

But we are now entering a new era.

Soon, there will be no living survivors left to answer students’ questions, correct inaccuracies, challenge deniers, or remind us that the Holocaust was not an abstract event but a human catastrophe experienced by real people.

When that day arrives, responsibility for memory will shift entirely to others: children and grandchildren, historians, educators, filmmakers, museums, archives, foundations, governments, and increasingly, digital platforms.

And that raises difficult questions.

Who has the right to determine how survivor testimony is used?

Who decides whether a testimony belongs in a classroom, a museum exhibit, a documentary, a social media campaign, or an artificial intelligence project?

Can testimony be restricted? Licensed? Monetized? Removed from public view?

Should the descendants of survivors have the authority to control access to stories that have become part of humanity’s historical record?

Or do these testimonies ultimately belong to all of us?

The answers are not simple.

Survivor testimony is deeply personal. These stories emerged from unimaginable suffering. Families often feel a profound obligation to protect them from misuse, distortion, or exploitation. That instinct is understandable and often admirable.

Yet Holocaust testimony also serves a public purpose.

It is not merely family history. It is evidence.

It is evidence of genocide, of antisemitism, of the consequences of indifference, and of the fragility of democratic societies. It is one of the most important educational resources of the modern era.

As antisemitism rises around the world and Holocaust denial finds new audiences online, restricting access to survivor testimony carries its own risks.

The challenge, then, is not ownership but stewardship.

Ownership suggests control.

Stewardship suggests responsibility.

A steward’s role is not to possess memory but to preserve it, protect it, and ensure it remains accessible to future generations.

That responsibility becomes even more urgent in the digital age.

Never before has humanity possessed the technological ability to preserve testimony on such a scale. Thousands of survivor interviews now exist in digital archives. Millions of students encounter Holocaust stories through videos, social media, podcasts, virtual reality experiences, and educational platforms.

These technologies create extraordinary opportunities.

But they also create new ethical dilemmas.

What happens when testimony is altered, selectively edited, removed, or placed behind institutional barriers? Who determines what is educationally appropriate? Who decides which stories are amplified and which disappear?

The danger is not only forgetting.

The danger is gatekeeping memory.

When access to testimony becomes concentrated in the hands of a few institutions or individuals, we risk replacing living memory with managed memory. We risk narrowing the historical record rather than expanding it.

The Holocaust teaches us many lessons, but among the most important is the danger of silence.

Survivors spent decades urging the world to listen.

Their testimonies were not recorded so they could sit unseen on a hard drive, locked behind bureaucracy, legal disputes, or competing claims of authority. They were recorded because survivors understood something fundamental: memory only survives when it is shared.

After interviewing nearly 100 Holocaust survivors through The Last Ones, I have noticed something striking. Regardless of where they came from, what they endured, or how they rebuilt their lives, their greatest fear was rarely death itself.

It was being forgotten.

Again and again, survivors told me some version of the same thing: “Promise me people will remember.”

Not remember them as individuals, but remember what happened. Remember the dangers of hatred. Remember the consequences of indifference. Remember the lives that were destroyed and the worlds that vanished.

That promise now belongs to all of us.

The question facing our generation is not who owns these stories.

The question is whether we will honor the trust that survivors placed in us.

Because the last witnesses are leaving us. The responsibility is not.

And history will judge us not by what we inherited, but by what we chose to preserve.