Update: Follow Eva Stories on Snapchat too. (@eva stories)
It all starts with a young girl having fun, playing with her best friends, and talking about her crush. A normal, happy kid with aspirations of becoming a news photographer. "One day," Eva says, unbeknownst to the horrors and atrocities that she would suffer.
Eva Stories is a breathtaking look at the Holocaust through the eyes of a young girl in Germany, as it might be if Instagram had existed in the 1930s. Eva wrote in her diary, accounting everything from her relocation to a ghetto, to her eventual transportation to a concentration camp. Be forewarned, the stunning juxtaposition between her life before and after can be extremely difficult to take in.
When Eva is rushed into the ghetto, she records the anarchy and conditions that the Jewish people had to endure. She captures the story of an old man warning about the trains to Poland and his haunting prediction that "they will miss this wretched ghetto". The hopeless conditions are shown perfectly when Eva and her best friend find a jar of jam hidden in a chimney and react with such excitement and relief that they finally get to eat something. Finally, Eva is escorted to a train car where she waits in the darkness, with the shuffling sounds of thousands of other Jews being corraled onto neighboring trains happening outside. Eve boarded without her parents, she would lose her grandparents as she arrived and would lose her best friend soon after.
Eva Stories is a new, interesting but ultimately sobering reminder of the sorrow, pain, and misery that was endured during the Holocaust. With such dark moments in our history, it is important to hold onto the hope of a better future and remember what happens when we let hate outshine the love that humanity is capable of. In the end, we are reminded that Eva never stopped fighting, always held onto that hope of "one day".
