Merkel to open Holocaust art expo with anti-Semitism warning

Chancellor Angela Merkel will today open the exhibition "The Art of the Holocaust", featuring works created by concentration camp prisoners, as the German leader pledged to combat the threat of rising anti-Semitism.
The show brings together 100 works on loan from Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial by 50 Jewish artists created in secret between 1939 and 1945 while they were confined to the camps or ghettos.
Twenty-four of the artists did not survive the Nazi period, even as their works endured.
The drawings and paintings on display at Berlin's German Historical Museum depict the suffering, drudgery and terror endured by the detainees.

But about a third of the collection shows artists' attempts to escape their plight with their imaginations, putting to paper treasured memories and dreams of freedom beyond the barbed wire.
Merkel, looking ahead to the opening and Wednesday's commemorations of the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz 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 had grown more urgent with the influx of a record 1.1 million asylum seekers to Germany last year.

"We must focus our efforts particularly among young people from countries where hatred of Israel and Jews is widespread," she said.
The head of Yad Vashem, Avner Shalev, called the works on loan irreplaceable "treasures", many of which were hidden by their creators and only discovered after the war.
They are "the expression of human beings under these unique circumstances to try and prevail... Above the atrocities and deaths," he told reporters at a press preview of the exhibition.
"After thinking and rethinking, we thought it might be the right time, the right place, to bring this collection to Germany."

The only surviving artist, Nelly Toll, travelled to Berlin from the United States to take part in the opening, saying she was "very, very excited" to meet Merkel.
Her two pencil-and-watercolour works were created when she was six years old and in hiding with her mother in a small room in the home of a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.