WEIMAR, Germany - Tourists visiting the city of Goethe and Schiller are bombarded with busts, key chains and other trinkets bearing the likeness of Weimar's two biggest celebrities in nearly every shop.

Just a few miles away, on a swath of wooded hilltop that is the site of the city's most somber tourist attraction, a gift shop offers little more than a wide assortment of books and postcards. For years, the Buchenwald Memorial has preferred to keep it that way.

But in a move that aims to confront the challenge of passing the solemn lessons of the Holocaust on to future generations, the memorial began working with design students at Bauhaus University in Weimar last spring to create what until now had been taboo: concentration camp souvenirs. A sampling of the results, ranging from small plaques to stationery embedded with tiny pebbles and twigs from the site, are to go on sale at the memorial's gift shop in time for the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation in April.

"This generation has grown up in a different culture, with different mediums," said Volkhard Knigge, a Holocaust scholar who directs the Buchenwald Memorial. "We need to attempt new ways of communicating with them, and give them the chance to formulate their own way of accessing" the history here. "Otherwise we're speaking a language they don't understand."