German chancellor Angela Merkel has opened a major exhibition in Berlin featuring works by Jewish concentration camp prisoners, as she pledged to combat a feared rise in anti-Semitism in Germany linked to a record influx of refugees, the Guardian reports.
The show, Art from the Holocaust, brings together 100 works on loan from Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial. They were created in secret by 50 artists between 1939 and 1945 while they were confined to the camps or ghettos.
Twenty-four of the artists did not survive the second world war.
The drawings and paintings on display at the German Historical Museum depict the suffering, drudgery and terror endured by the detainees.
Merkel, looking ahead to Wednesday’s commemorations of the 71st anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation in her weekly video podcast, said such exhibitions served as a crucial tool for educating younger generations.
She cited in particular the fears of German Jewish leaders that the need to impart the lessons of the Holocaust has grown more urgent with the influx of a record 1.1 million asylum seekers to Germany in 2015, many from the Middle East.
“We must focus our efforts particularly among young people from countries where hatred of Israel and Jews is widespread,” she said.
