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"Virtual memorials are nothing new \u2014 people have been paying their respects to departed loved ones on Facebook and Myspace for years. But a Facebook page set up for Henio Zytomirski, a 6-year-old Polish boy who was killed during the Holocaust, is truly revolutionizing the way we recount history and remember the dead. His profile is, in essence, a virtual museum.Last summer, a group of people in Lublin, Poland, and Israel \u2014 including Henio's cousin Neta Zytomirski Avidar \u2014 created a Facebook profile for the boy, who was sent to the Majdanek death camp in 1942. According to the AP, the idea grew out of a group called Grodzka Gate-NN Teater, which uses the arts to remember victims of the Holocaust. Henio was chosen because there were so many photos and letters available to draw from, which makes his profile a truly rich reading experience. \nThe profile functions as kind of a piecemeal storybook, with Polish status updates in Henio's voice as well as photos and other updates in the third person that tell his tale. Henio's own voice is simple and touching, as you can see in the selection below. (Rough Translation: \"I am seven years old. I have a mom and dad. I have a favorite place. Not everyone has a mom and dad, but everyone has their favorite place. Today I decided that I will never leave Lublin. I will stay here forever. In my favorite place. With Mom and Dad. In Lublin.\")\n\nAccording to the AP, not everyone is happy with the project \u2014 the news company cites Adam Kopciowski, a historian at Lublin's Marie Curie-Sklodowska University who specializes in Jewish studies, who thinks that writing in the dead boy's voice is ethically unsound and amounts to \"abuse toward a child that has been dead for the past 70 years.\" Others have also raised the fact that the page \u2014 much like Doppelganger Week \u2014 violates Facebook's TOS. \nStill, Henio's cousin makes very clear in a note on the profile that the young boy's voice is meant to be purely speculative, and that he is to function as a symbol:\n\n\"We try to reconstruct his life in the ghetto from survivors' testimonies, from documents, from knowing the history of Lublin during the Nazi occupation. From all of these we try to guess what might have been his testimony.\nHenio is also a representing figure, a symbolic figure, an icon. His figure represents the destruction of the ancient Jewish community of Lublin.\nHis figure brings to Facebook the story of the Jewish community under the Nazi occupation regime and of its ruin.\"\n\nAnd judging by his 3,000+ fans, scores of thankful wall posts and avalanche of virtual gifts, people have become enamored of the long-lost boy.\n\nAside from being a touching memorial to a tragically departed boy, Henio's profile is also a fascinating use of social media as an educational tool. Some of us have probably visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Upon entering, you receive a passport depicting someone who experienced the Holocaust, and throughout your tour through the museum, you learn his or her fate. Henio's page brings this experience to another level, allowing you to interact with the boy, and to learn about his life in a way that integrates fully into your own social media experience. \nThis profile only goes to show how sites like Facebook are no longer silly time wasters or places to troll for your next collegiate hookup, they provide us with news, entertainment, advertisements and, now \u2014 as more and more people are seeing it as both a news portal and source \u2014 education. I recently became a friend of Henio's, will you?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/02/04/facebook-profile-holocaust-victim/>