Gidon Lev in Berlin: How a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor uses TikTok for education

Berlin. Sentences appear on the blue monitor wall. "These were real people who had to go through all this. Not stories from a textbook," one reads, for example. Or: "We must stick together and take action against the hate in society." And, interspersed with: "#We love Gidon."

These are the reactions after a good three hours of history lessons by three school classes from two Berlin high schools, who met with Gidon Lev in the digital debate space "Basecamp" near Friedrichstraße station in early June 2025. Lev, 90, survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp with his mother. Almost the entire family, 26 members in total, was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

He shows the approximately 70 teenagers photos of his family: his parents, him in his mother's womb, his beloved grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Lev recounts how, as a five-year-old in his hometown of Karlovy Vary, now Karoly Vary in the Czech Republic, he couldn't understand why, as a Jew, he was suddenly no longer allowed on the playground or in the park. The slight man, who now lives in Israel and has just survived a life-threatening lung disease, primarily talks to the students about how it all began: with lies, exclusion, verbal violence, and deportations.

Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev (90) from Israel on the podium at an event organized by the “WAKE UP!” initiative at Basecamp Berlin.

Source: RND

Gidon Lev recently published the book "Let's Make Things Better" with his partner Julie Gray. The title is his life's work. For him, it's not just about remembering the past; Lev urges us to learn from it. He asks his students what needs to be improved. And when they list things, he replies: "I'm here because I want to make the world a better place. You can, too. Ask, ask, ask—and don't take anything for granted."

The young people react with laughter, amazement, shock, and, in any case, with great attention to the reports and advice of the Holocaust survivor, who primarily wants to talk about dealing with misinformation on social media platforms and online hostility. The 90-year-old has more than 463,000 followers on TikTok and 84,400 on Instagram.

Mathilda (right, 17) and Emily (16) are students at the private Europa-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

Source: RND

Fabian Behm, a history teacher at the private Europa-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg, is grateful that people like Lev are answering young people's questions. "The emotional impact of a direct encounter with contemporary witnesses is more memorable than all the data and facts about the Holocaust." Sixteen-year-old student Emily speaks of a privilege to meet survivors like Gidon Lev in person. "In a few years, that will probably hardly be possible anymore." Her friend Mathilda (17) says: "That's why we have to pass on what we heard today – starting with our siblings."

When the well-known Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer died on May 9, 2025, at the age of 103, many became aware once again that the time of witnesses to the Nazi terror regime in Germany and Europe was inevitably running out. Until the very end – on May 7, she spoke at the Red City Hall on Liberation Day – the Berliner had sensitively told the story of her life to schoolchildren, students, politicians, and business leaders. She appealed not to overlook the beginnings of totalitarianism. But never with a raised finger, but with conviction.

Of course, Friedländer wasn't the only one—thankfully! Many Holocaust survivors have contributed books or interviews with contemporary witnesses to databases or have appeared in documentaries. Others, like the 100-year-old Albrecht Weinberg from Leer (East Frisia) or Gidon Lev from Israel, spare no effort to allow contemporary generations to question them about the Shoah, to warn against dictatorships—and to become politically active themselves. "Until the end," both promise.

Weinberg, who survived the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps , returned his Federal Cross of Merit in protest in January following the CDU/CSU's joint vote with the AfD in the Bundestag. In recent years, Gidon Lev has repeatedly taken to the streets in Israel against the Netanyahu government to protest the damage to democracy in his country.

In February, Holocaust survivor Albrecht Weinberg sits in front of the stage in his hometown of Leer and listens to the speeches at the demonstration against right-wing extremism and for democracy.

Source: Lars Penning/dpa

The active Holocaust survivors are therefore far more than storytellers from a distant time. They are at least as much role models for the future because they have taken on the responsibility to speak for their murdered fellow sufferers and to ensure that contempt for humanity cannot again become as widespread as it was more than eight decades ago. The words of the liberated Auschwitz prisoner Primo Levi hold true: "It happened, and therefore it can happen again."

But what actually happens when the last Holocaust survivors have left this world? Knowledge about the Holocaust is already declining rapidly and likely permanently. In a recent survey by the Jewish Claims Conference, approximately 40 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in Germany stated that they did not know that approximately six million Jews were murdered during the Nazi era. 12 percent stated that they had never heard of the Holocaust.

The Körber Foundation discovered years ago that four out of ten schoolchildren don't know what the Holocaust is. Yet, as a study by the Arolsen Archives three years ago revealed, interest is enormous. The key message: Young people are significantly more interested in the Nazi era than their parents' generation (75 percent versus 66 percent) and connect the discussion with acute social problems such as racism and discrimination.

So: what to do?

There are various strategies to make Holocaust education more accessible to Generation Z beyond personal encounters with survivors. Concentration camp memorials have long struggled to use media platforms like TikTok or Instagram to convey their messages. Now they're doing so with increasing success. Despite legitimate reservations, they know that more than a billion people worldwide are there. Many, if not most, are between 16 and 25 years old. Anyone who wants to reach them—with whatever means—is in the right place until the next big thing comes along.

But Holocaust survivors themselves also make their presence felt there. Gidon Lev dances against Holocaust deniers on TikTok or satirizes trolls who make jokes about Jews. His stats show more than 9.4 million likes. "We can't sit back and complain about the hate mongers, anti-Semites, or Holocaust deniers," he says. "We have to fight against them. I will do that as long as I live."

Abba Naor, now 97, is part of the virtual memory project "Learning with Digital Certificates," which is primarily intended for educational use. It was developed in collaboration between Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

For this experiment, Naor answered around 1,000 questions in a special studio in England and was stereoscopically filmed by two cameras. The recordings can be visualized in three dimensions. The scientists involved then trained the resulting "hologram" of Naor using speech recognition software.

Holocaust survivor Abba Naor as a virtual contemporary witness who can be interviewed.

Source: LMU

The result is astonishing; quite a few students describe it as cool: The virtual Naor can answer almost all of the questions they posed. The artificial intelligence has already found 40,000 possible answers to the 1,000 questions. If the virtual contemporary witness cannot answer because he doesn't recognize or understand the question, he remains silent – ​​and tugs at his sleeve, appearing embarrassed. An even more data-intensive volumetric process is being conducted in Potsdam-Babelsberg with survivors, including Margot Friedländer and Gidon Lev. It is intended to open up even more possibilities in educational work using virtual reality in the future.

Anja Ballis, who heads the Department of German Language and Literature Education in Munich, reports that students primarily want to learn about family life and how to deal with loss from contemporary witnesses like Abba Naor. "Probably," the professor suspects, "this reflects their own experiences." Ballis has also observed that many students approach the virtual contemporary witness interview with an open mind. "They hardly expect it to touch them so emotionally."

Noa Mkayton, Director of Education at Yad Vashem, calls this an encouraging development. "The survivors want to be active, to leave their voice behind. And precisely the voice they want to leave behind—unmanipulated and uncolored by other perspectives." Third- or fourth-generation people are often not interested in listening to an hour-long eyewitness account. "But they'll watch a TikTok video."

In light of growing anti-Semitism in Germany and gaps in knowledge about the Holocaust, the old demand for mandatory visits to concentration camp memorials has recently been making a comeback in politics. Jens-Christian Wagner, Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, countered similar proposals by Federal Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU).

Berlin high school students Emily and Mathilda had previously assumed that such visits were mandatory for students in Germany. "But they're useless if schools don't have enough time for preparation," says Emily. "They can even have the opposite effect."

Gidon Lev has no doubt that his cause will continue after he's gone. "The kids here," he points to the group of young people around him, "will do it."