Vice President J.D. Vance arrived at the Dachau concentration camp under low, gray clouds. He climbed out of his armored Suburban SUV and approached the stucco and cement gatehouse, gravel crunching underfoot. Waiting for Vance beneath a low arch, in front of a gate that had the words arbeit macht frei set into its ironwork, was Abba Naor, a survivor of the camp.
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Over the course of the next 80 minutes, Vance, 40, toured the site with Naor, 97, at his side. In the first room of the memorial’s main exhibition building, a large map displayed the network of Nazi concentration camps that existed at the height of World War II. Gesturing to the map, Naor showed Vance his hometown of Kaunas, Lithuania, and described the route by which he arrived at Dachau in 1944, via the Stutthof concentration camp. On the way, he was separated from his mother and younger brother, who were sent to Auschwitz. “The moment I saw my mother and brother heading toward the train, I realized that was it,” Naor told Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial. “I could say ‘goodbye’ forever.” At Auschwitz, and at other death camps like Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, 6 million Jews—2 of every 3 in Europe—were killed.
In the next room, where arriving prisoners were processed, Naor showed Vance the identity card he had been given when he came to Dachau. Naor was dispatched to perform slave labor in the network of Dachau’s 140 subcamps. Dachau wasn’t created to exterminate Jews: the Nazis opened it in 1933, soon after Hitler took power, and among the first held there were Communists, Social Democrats, and other political opponents. Of the more than 200,000 people who passed through Dachau, more than 40,000 died. “The subcamps, this was our problem,” Naor tells TIME the day after his visit with Vance. “The people couldn’t stay long alive.” But Naor did, surviving a death march until he was finally liberated by American troops after his captors fled. “This is something you never forget,” Naor says. “I told [Vance] it was Japanese Americans who liberated us. He was happy to hear this.”
Read More: TIME’s 1945 Report on the Horrors of Dachau.
Vance emerged from the camp’s museum with his wife Usha and made his way toward a memorial. A wreath of ever-green branches, accented with white roses, lay propped nearby, with a red, white, and blue ribbon reading “We remember” on one end and “United States of America” on the other. Vance and his wife picked up the wreath and placed it in front of the memorial. Vance prayed briefly and crossed himself. He adjusted the end of the wreath reading we remember so that it was visible.
Then he walked to a large wall nearby, which bore the words “Never Again” in several languages. Vance thanked Naor for sharing his story. “I really am really moved by this site,” Vance said to the assembled media and officials of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. “While it is, of course, a place of unspeakable atrocity and terror and evil, it’s very important that it’s here, and it’s very important that those of us who are lucky enough to be alive can walk around, can know what happened here, and commit ourselves to prevent it from happening again.”
Vance’s visit to Dachau on Feb. 13 came at a fraught moment for the U.S., for Europe, and for the effort to sustain awareness of the Nazi genocide. As the last survivors die and power passes to leaders who were born decades after the German attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe, the way we talk about the Holocaust is changing.
Until recently, there was near consensus that the systematic extermination of 6 million lives was above politics. Now, leaders on the right argue that nationalist parties with neo-Nazi ties are being unfairly excluded from the democratic process. Pro-Palestinian activists have adopted “Never Again” as part of their campaign to hold Israel responsible for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Left and right accuse one another of fueling a rise in antisemitism, incidents of which have doubled in the past year, according to recent studies.
Vance’s visit to Germany on the eve of that country’s Feb. 23 elections spotlighted the politicization. The day after he met Abba Naor at Dachau, the Vice President spoke at the Munich Security Conference, delivering an attack on Europe’s postwar approach to fighting a return of Nazism, including limits on free speech and the exclusion of far-right parties from power in a tacit agreement between mainstream parties called the “firewall.”
“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” Vance told the heads of state, foreign ministers, and intelligence chiefs packed into an ornate hall at the Bayerische Hof hotel. “There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.” Later, the Vice President met with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s nationalist AfD party, some of whose officials have downplayed the Holocaust and embraced Nazi rhetoric, and which has run second in pre-election polling.
Read More: The Memory of the Holocaust Is Still Up For Debate.
The U.S. has refrained from attacking the German approach, and the speech shocked European leaders. The next day, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz began his speech to the conference with a retort to Vance. “A mere 20 km separates this conference venue from the National Socialist concentration camp in Dachau,” Scholz said, “where the most unimaginable crimes against humanity were perpetrated by Germans and in Germany’s name.” Preventing it from happening again, as Vance pledged to do at Dachau, Scholz said, cannot be reconciled with support for the AfD.
More is at stake than German politics. For 80 years, the democracies that lived through the war shared a commitment to ostracizing extremists. That consensus has been beneficial on both sides of the Atlantic. Economic and political interests are fickle, but shared values like democracy and humanism endure, and they have provided decades of prosperity and peace. “Like the fish swimming in the water, we may no longer be really aware of how important that environment is for us,” says Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who co-led with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham a delegation of American lawmakers to the conference. “But any efforts by the U.S. to degrade that comes with real national-security peril.”
While some European diplomats in Munich feared a rising international alliance of far-right parties led by Trump, others say that behind the scenes they received reassurances of continuing American commitment to shared values from Vance. “Every Administration brings new things to the table,” says Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s top diplomat. “You’re not seeing a fundamental shift in the way America sees its vision for Europe or its relationship with Europe.”
Yet Vance is at the vanguard of a movement that views itself as turning the page on the establishment consensus on everything from the U.S. Constitution to international trade to foreign policy. That includes the postwar alliance forged in the fight against Nazism. “The foreign policy establishment is obsessed with World War II historical analogies,” Vance told TIME last spring. “Everything is some fairy tale they tell themselves from the 1930s and 1940s.”
The diplomats left Munich. Vance flew back to Washington, where his political ally Elon Musk, an AfD supporter who recently made a gesture during a speech that looked a lot like a Nazi salute, was at work dismantling U.S. aid programs around the world. Naor returned to Dachau. In a room just off the main exhibition space where he and Vance had been four days earlier, he spoke to some 80 students, a laptop open in front of him on a desk. The camp receives around 40 groups a day, and close to 1 million visitors a year. Naor wants to ensure they learn the truth about the Holocaust. “I come almost every day, meet children, and they listen to my story,” he says.
Naor is not particularly emotional about the inevitable passing of the generation of survivors. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site itself will endure, he says: “They will have a place in Dachau where everyone will be able to find my story.” As for the meaning of that story for a new generation of leaders, he says, the Holocaust transcends politics. Says Naor: “Dachau is the truth.” —With reporting by Melissa August/Washington