Young people pose inside a crematorium oven at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, laughing while they give the Nazi salute and take pictures of each other. "In a sense, they're trophies to post on social media for them to boast about — breaking the ultimate taboo," Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, told DW.

"Incidents like this have become more frequent in recent years. We have seen memorial trees planted in honor of concentration camp victims cut down. When something like this happens — and it happens regularly — I find it particularly despicable because, because it ultimately kills these people a second time," added Wagner.

Wagner is part of the curatorial team behind the exhibition "Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime" in Bonn's Bundeskunsthalle, or the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. Wagner says that Holocaust remembrance is under pressure, and the subject of intensifying attacks.

Critics have dismissed remembrance as a "cult of guilt" or "national masochism." With right-wing populism on the rise and historical revisionism becoming more common, Wagner worries about how Germany will remember the victims murdered by the Nazi regime. He is also concerned about the future of democracy. And soon, there will be no Holocaust survivors left to tell the true story of what happened.

The new exhibition tackles this concern head-on with numerous works of art and historical artifacts.

Moralizing doesn't help people learn

"I hope that perhaps even some people who don't already believe it's important to confront Nazi crimes will find their way to the exhibition," Wagner says. Memorial sites also attract visitors who aren't necessarily convinced of the need to confront these parts of history. Many of them are students. "Let's not kid ourselves: When a teacher says 'We're going there,' it's always a mandatory visit."

For today's young people, the Nazi era seems like the distant past, Wagner explains. "When you tell them to remember something that their grandparents didn't even experience, it naturally feels like an emotional burden. They can practically see the finger being wagged at them, and that doesn't exactly encourage learning."

A two-hour lecture won't have much of an impact if pupils aren't even paying attention. Instead, Buchenwald organizes full-day programs that allow students to explore historical sources together and make sense of history for themselves.

The next step, Wagner says, is to show young people that this chapter of history isn't closed. Visitors are encouraged to make connections between the past and current events like migration, for example. "For the longest time, people have been discussing migration almost exclusively in terms of threats to public safety and crime. This broadly marginalizes certain groups — a mechanism that also worked for National Socialism."

Holocaust survivor: 'The number tattooed on my arm was always there'

Eva Umlauf knows firsthand what it means to experience exclusion in its most extreme form. She is a patron of the Bonn exhibition. Now, she's 83.

But in November 1944, she was just two years old when the Nazis deported her, her pregnant mother and her father from the Novaky labor camp in Slovakia to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi concentration and extermination camp. She was saved from the gas chambers by mere days; the Nazis stopped using them as the Red Army advanced, hoping to hide evidence of their crimes.

The camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Three months later, Eva's sister Nora was born. But her father, her mother's siblings and her grandparents were all murdered. Eva barely survived herself. She suffered from tuberculosis, rickets and whooping cough, as well as edema caused by starvation. "Forget about the child. She won't survive," a doctor told her mother. But he was wrong.

Her mother returned to what was then Czechoslovakia with her two daughters, settling in Trencin. Eva Umlauf has no conscious memories of Auschwitz, but she carries her family's trauma deep within her. Her mother never talked about what happened. Even so, Eva knew from an early age that she was a survivor. Her family rarely mentioned the camp by name, but one sentence came up again and again: "They stayed there." Eva knew that meant "they" were dead. And then, there was the number tattooed onto her arm: A26959.

Eva Umlauf: 'I cannot forgive'

Her mother taught her daughters not to draw attention to their Jewish identity — antisemitism was widespread throughout Czechoslovakia at the time. The small family managed to avoid harassment.

Eva wanted to become a pediatrician, so she studied medicine. In the 1960s, she met her future husband, Jakob, who had also survived the Holocaust. He was an architect, active in Munich's Jewish community. They married in 1966, and Eva moved to Germany. She could hardly have imagined that she would one day live in the country of the perpetrators. "I don't hate Germans," she says. "But I cannot forgive. How can you forgive the deaths of 6 million people?"

It was not until much later that she first spoke publicly about the horrors of her early childhood. In 2011, she delivered a commemorative speech in Auschwitz on the anniversary of the camp's liberation. Since 2025, she has served as chair of the International Auschwitz Committee. A heart attack in 2014 motivated her to write her first book. "I was in intensive care. I thought to myself: If I get out of here healthy, I'll write a book."

Her memoir, "The Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes," was first released in 2016. The English translation followed in 2024. Since its publication, hardly a day has passed without someone asking Eva Umlauf to share her story.

She is appalled by the disrespectful behavior of young people at former concentration camps and by growing ignorance about the Holocaust. Sometimes, people even ask if she's too old to have a tattoo. But she also recalls a young man on the Munich subway who noticed the number on her arm and told her: "I want to apologize to you for what my ancestors did to you."

'Take care of your country'

Eva Umlauf never imagined that antisemitism would once again become so widespread in Europe and the United States. Nor did she expect the rise of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. "I go into schools. I'm so overwhelmed by the number of requests asking for my availability. And yet, the AfD is growing faster than I can reach students. It makes me think all this work is for nothing," she told DW.

Germany must never again fall under a right-wing dictatorship, she stresses. "'Never again' sounds nice, but all I can say is: It's happening again! Wouldn't 'Here We Go Again: Never Again' make a good title for the exhibition?"

She also shared her message to young people in the exhibition catalog, "Never Again": "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 background, faith or skin color." She continues: "You don't have to be perfect. You just have to stay alert. Take care of your country."

The exhibition "Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime" in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn runs through May 2, 2027.

This article was originally written in German.