Yolocaust: Shahak Shapira's satirical project confronts Holocaust selfies

In 2017, Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira launched Yolocaust, a website that superimposes Holocaust imagery onto selfies taken at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial, designed by architect Peter Eisenman, consists of 2,711 concrete slabs in the Mitte district. Shapira scraped photos from Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, and Grindr showing visitors posing playfully—juggling, doing yoga, jumping between slabs—among the stelae. Hovering a mouse over each image reveals the same pose transposed onto scenes of Nazi concentration camps: piles of corpses, skeletal prisoners, mass graves. The project's name combines "YOLO" (you only live once) and "Holocaust." Shapira offered subjects the option to have their images removed by email; many complied, though the photos persist online. Yolocaust critiques the trivialization of sacred spaces through social media spectacle and raises questions about public art, memory, and the ethics of image appropriation. The work functions as a digital detournement, blending satire with moral pedagogy.