A Holocaust Story for the Social Media Generation

The teenager’s Instagram posts start out breezily enough. Eva Heyman, who just got her first pair of heels for her 13th birthday, films herself eating ice cream in the park. There’s also a teenage crush.

But everything rapidly turns dark.

Eva’s Instagram account, based on a diary kept by the real Eva Heyman in 1944, will go live Wednesday afternoon for the start of Israel’s annual Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day.

In 70 short episodes, a British actress playing Eva takes followers along on her Holocaust journey: a happy bourgeois prewar existence interrupted by the Nazi invasion of her hometown in what was then Hungary; her family’s forced move into the cramped chaos of the ghetto; and the packed train that ultimately transports her to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp from which she never returns.

A creation of Mati Kochavi, an Israeli tech executive, and his daughter Maya, “Eva Stories” is an innovative, if provocative, effort to engage screen-hooked post-millennials in Holocaust education and remembrance as the last generation of survivors is dying out. The Kochavis said the project cost several million dollars to produce.