Young teenagers stand at the memorial site of the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp, take some pictures of themselves inside the crematorium, and give the Hitler salute while laughing. "These are souvenir photos that they post on social media and show off. They are the ultimate taboo-breaker," Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation, told DW. He added, "Such incidents have been repeated in recent years. We also see the cutting down of trees that were planted in memory of the victims of Nazi concentration camps. When something like this happens - and it happens regularly - I always find it a very malicious act, because in the end it kills the victims again."
Wagner is a member of the curatorial team of the exhibition “Never Again: Against Forgetting the Crimes of Nazism,” at the Federal Kunsthalle in Bonn. He says that the culture of reminders is under pressure and is increasingly targeted by severe attacks. The talk here is about the “culture of guilt” as well as “national masochism.” Given the rise of right-wing populism and the increasing distortions of history, Wagner is concerned about commemoration of the victims of the Nazi regime and for democracy. Soon, there will be no eyewitnesses left who lived through the Holocaust and can tell the true story of the Holocaust. This exhibition seeks to confront this with many artworks and historical documents.
“Moral preaching does not promote learning.”
“I hope that the exhibition will perhaps also be visited by people who do not believe that dealing with Nazi crimes is necessary,” says Wagner. According to Wagner, it is common knowledge at memorial sites that visitors, specifically school students, do not necessarily come convinced of the importance of this debate. He adds: "Let's not kid ourselves. When the teacher says we will go on a visit there, in the end this visit is just an obligatory visit."
The time of Nazism is a long way off for this generation, says Wagner. “When we tell them to remember something that even their grandparents did not experience, of course it feels like an emotional burden that is too much for them. They find it moralizing, and it does not promote learning at all.”
According to Wagner, there is no point in giving a lecture in front of an audience for two hours that many will not listen to at all. Instead, stakeholders in Buchenwald rely on organizing full-day events in which school students discuss historical sources and try to comprehend history on their own. In the next step, it must be made clear to young people that “this is not a finished story,” it must be linked to the current reality. For example, through the issue of immigration. “This topic has been discussed for a long time with the focus solely on the risk of migration for security and crime,” says Wagner. “Here certain groups are excluded en masse – a mechanism that was also used in the Nazi era.”
Holocaust survivor: The number tattooed on her forearm is always present
Among the people who experienced exclusion in its ugliest form was a woman named Eva Umlauf, who is 83 years old today and works as a sponsor of the exhibition held in the city of Bonn. She was transferred in November 1944 at the age of two with her pregnant mother and father from the Novaki labor camp in Slovakia to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. She escaped death in the gas chambers by only a few days, after the Nazis stopped exterminating their victims as the Red Army approached.
The camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Three months later, Eva's sister, Nora, was born. The father, mother's brothers, and grandparents were all killed. Eva's life was also hanging by a thread: she suffered from tuberculosis, rickets, whooping cough, and edemas caused by hunger. So one of the doctors told her mother: “You must forget this child, because she will not live.” But he was wrong.
Thus, the mother returned with her two daughters to the Slovak city of Trenčín, in the former Czechoslovakia. Eva Umlauf cannot consciously remember her time at Auschwitz, but she carries her family's trauma deep within her. Although her mother did not talk about it, Eva knew from an early age that she was a survivor of the extermination camp, which was not mentioned by name, but the phrase was often mentioned: “They stayed there.” Then Eva knew that they had died there. Plus, she always has this number tattooed on her arm: A26959.
Eva Umlauf: “I don't hate Germans and I can't forgive”
The mother taught her two daughters not to reveal their Jewish identity to the general public, because anti-Semitism was widespread at that time even in Czechoslovakia. Thus the little family remained free from harassment.
Eva wanted to become a pediatrician and studied medicine. In the 1960s, she met her future husband, Jakob, who also survived the Holocaust. He worked as an architect and was active in the Jewish community in Munich. They married in 1966 and Eva moved to live with him in Germany. She most likely did not imagine that one day she would live in the country of the perpetrators. Regarding this, Eva says: “I do not hate the Germans, but I cannot forgive. How can I forgive the killing of six million people?”
It was only later that she spoke publicly about the horrors of her early childhood: in 2011, on the anniversary of the liberation of the camp, she gave a speech at Auschwitz; Since 2025, Eva has been President of the International Auschwitz Committee. A heart attack in 2014 was the impetus for writing her first book. Regarding this, she says: “I was in the intensive care unit, and I thought: When I get out of here in good health, I will write a book.”
In 2016, her autobiography was published entitled “The Number on Your Forearm is as Blue as Your Eyes.” Since then, hardly a day goes by without Eva Umlauf being asked to tell her story.
She is horrified by the inappropriate behavior of some young teenagers at Nazi concentration camp sites, as well as by the growing ignorance of the Holocaust - for example when asked, "Don't you think she's too old to have a tattoo on her forearm?" But it also talks about a young man on the Munich subway who spotted the number tattooed on her forearm and told her: “I would like to apologize to you for what my grandparents did to you.”
"Pay attention to your country"
Eva Umlauf never imagined the return of anti-Semitism so strong in Europe and the United States of America. She also did not imagine the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is classified as an extreme right-wing party in some of its wings. Regarding this, Eva told DW: "I go to schools and hardly find time due to the many requests I receive to know when I can attend, but in the end the AfD is rising faster than I do. Here we may think that our work is in vain."
She stresses that the rise to power of a right-wing dictatorship in Germany must never be repeated. She adds, “The phrase ‘Never Again’ sounds beautiful, but all I can say is: ‘It is happening again!’ In your opinion, isn’t the phrase ‘It is happening again: Never again’ a good title for the exhibition?”
Eva Umlauf also included in the catalog for the Never Again exhibition her message to teenagers and young adults, writing: “You are not responsible for the crimes of your grandparents and great-grandparents. But you are responsible for the future... You are the generation that will shape our world. Make it a place where everyone can grow up safely, regardless of their origins, beliefs or skin color.” She added: "You don't have to be perfect. You have to be vigilant. Pay attention to your country."
The exhibition “Never Again: Against Forgetting the Crimes of Nazism” runs at the Federal Kunsthalle Bonn until May 2, 2027.
Prepared by: Raed Al-Bash
