How best to portray the evil of Stutthof camp witnessed by my grandfather? The Zone of Interest and Twin Peaks could have the answer

When I was nine years old, my grandfather took me to the museum at the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, in northern Poland. Established by the Nazis in the German-annexed territory of the Free City of Danzig, he had been imprisoned there as a teenager. It was his first visit since the second world war. When we went through the gate, he began to cry, to shout, to reconstruct scenes. The past returned all at once and he fell into a state of trauma. During his imprisonment he had been responsible, among other things, for carrying bodies from the camp infirmary.

Most of the most infamous Nazi death camps have been turned into memorials like Stutthof, in the hope that they can teach something to future generations and avert a repeat of this darkest of chapters in Europe’s history. But it is a fact that few visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau or Stutthof are shaken like my grandfather was. Sites of memory increasingly fail to reach new generations. Visitors learn facts, dates, perpetrators. But knowledge of past crimes does not automatically prevent future ones. Many institutions still teach a reassuring lesson: there were evil people once, they were defeated, we are different. Evil is placed safely in the past. The visitor leaves morally intact.

Exclusive: Hundreds of works by the artist and poet Peter Kien have new home in UK after campaign by Judy King

They survived the Nazis, were confiscated by the communists, and for the last three decades they have been jealously guarded, bound in red tape, by a museum in the Czech Republic. Due to the attentions of an overzealous Czech customs guard and the vagaries of the British weather, a happy conclusion had been in doubt to the very end.

But last Thursday a small suitcase filled with 681 drawings, love letters, poems and manuscripts created by the Jewish artist and poet Peter Kien in the Theresienstadt ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia between 1941 and 1944 finally made a blustery landing at Heathrow.