Dan Fleshler

Huffington Post, March 7, 2012

On a bitterly cold day during a recent visit to Berlin, I stood in front of a modest, unfinished, yellow brick wall on the grounds of the Löcknitz-Grundschule, a primary school in the city’s “Bayerische Viertel” (Bavarian Quarter). Children were shouting and scampering around on a nearby playground. Next to me, even though she had visited this wall many times, Gudrun Blankenburg had tears in her eyes.

On each brick, an 11- or 12-year-old had inscribed in black script “Ich denken,” (I remember) and then summed up — in German — a few lines about the beginning and terrible end of a former Jewish resident of the neighborhood, as in “I remember Saul Hochdorf, father of our former pupil, D Warsaw ghetto, 1941.” The wall, near the site of a former synagogue, has been gradually constructed by successive sixth grade classes since 1994. In a few months, it will have a thousand bricks.

Ms. Blankenburg is a local resident who has written a history of the Jews in the neighborhood, once known as the “Jewish Switzerland” because of its nice houses and affluent residents. In the early 1930s, more than 16,000 Jews lived there. By 1945, they were all gone.

As we walked away from the wall, she nodded towards the kids on the playground and announced emphatically, “They will never move to the right!”

The project with the wall is part of a more comprehensive approach to the Holocaust and German Jewish history at the school. Students there have reconstructed the former synagogue with paper mache and wood, created a photo exhibition of neighborhood homes where Jews once lived, pored over old written chronicles of the school to find references to Jews and Nazis. But there is more.

Scattered throughout the neighborhood are 88 signs, each with artwork on one side and actual ordinances from the Nazis on the other, some of them presenting a vocabulary of cruel bureaucratic lunacy, i.e., “Jews are no longer allowed to have household pets. February 14, 1942.” In front of some residences are “stolpersteine,” the “stumbling stones” — now found throughout Germany — that mark the abodes where Jews once lived.

I think the German people deserve much credit for their efforts to ensure that the Nazis’ barbarities are not forgotten and will not recur, and for their commitment to squelching neo-Nazism and racism. But, while mostly inspiring, the approach to remembrance taken by the school and neighborhood — and much of Berlin, where reminders of the Nazi era dot the landscape — also provoked a nagging question: is there a point at which repetition about the Nazi era becomes counter-productive?

67 percent of German surveyed by researchers from Bielefeld University in 2008 found it “annoying that Germans are still held responsible for crimes against the Jews.” In an e-mail, Gert Krell, a retired professor of political science at the University of Frankfurt, told me that he had “a number of good friends who have tried to cope with and work through our German guilt, and whose children have revolted openly or secretly against their parents” for the way they deal with the past. He mentioned a woman in her early thirties, very close to his family, who “openly talked last year about what she called `our obsession’ with the Nazis and the Jews… On the one hand, she admires us for our commitment… On the other hand, she feels almost physically `invaded’ (her word) by the topics which she said had `dominated’ our lives.”

How much remembrance is too much? For that matter, just how much effort should Americans make to commemorate slavery and the extermination of native Americans? Tough questions. But given the difficult challenge of confronting unspeakable horrors once inflicted on the world by their country, one has to admire the tenacity of Germans like Ms. Niclasen and Ms. Blankenberg. It would be easy to opt out of the responsibility to remember. They and others in their neighborhood embrace it. If they are going to err, they would rather err on the side of too much knowledge, because they understand that “never again” must not be an empty pledge.

Some good solid research would be needed in order to gauge the impact of these educational efforts on the school’s alumni. They often return and check out the progress of that poignant memorial wall, says Christa Niclasen, the school’s principal and creator of the wall project.

Earlier this year, in a ceremony at the Berlin Parliament house, Ms. Niclasen accepted on behalf of her students one of five Obermayer German Jewish History Awards. These annual awards, sponsored by retired Boston-area entrepreneur Arthur Obermayer, are given to non-Jewish Germans who work to preserve and commemorate the history and culture of Jews who once lived in Germany.

Like the other Obermayer awardees, she, her school colleagues and neighbors have found an apparently effective way to wrestle with the daunting challenge of German memory: they make a conscious effort in the school and neighborhood to treat Jews who once lived nearby as more than abstract victims. Not far away at a local Rathaus is an exhibit on 142 former Jewish residents of Schöneberg. Children learn to celebrate and honor the Jews who lived there, to develop personal connections with long-dead neighbors as well as survivors who come to visit. And that makes what the Nazis did accessible to them, gives them a visceral sense of the impact of state-sanctioned racism and murder, and to feel personally offended.

Ms. Niclasen told me about a young boy who had researched a Jewish man who once lived in his house, and said, angrily, “it is hard to believe they took away a man who ate lunch on my balcony, my balcony!”

Should there be a statute of limitations on the obligation to remember national crimes? I don’t know. But I live in a country where many people insist on flying and celebrating the Confederate flag, where Michael Savage and other talk radio hosts openly bash gay people and immigrants and spout conspiracy theories about the dire threat of Obama-style “socialism,” where one out of three Americans think Muslims are more sympathetic to terrorists than other Americans. So I think Americans can take a lesson from the Germans I have met who are facing up to their nation’s dark past, and insisting that children learn the right lessons from it.

In 2008, when I visited  the glass-box memorial on the tracks at the  train station in Darmstadt, Germany, I found it to be moving, with the shards of green glass aptly portraying how lives fragmented at this location. This was where my grandparents were deported in the late 1930s.

For me, the most stunning aspect of the memorial was simply seeing my grandparents’ names – Siegmund Westerfeld and Frieda Westerfeld – etched on the glass. I have rarely seen my grandparents’ names written on anything, even documents. Since they were murdered in concentration camp long before I was born, I never met them and my mother rarely spoke of them. It was too painful for her to remember.

When I saw their names, I was  struck by the thought that I was standing in a place they once stood and seeing what they once saw. I tried to take in the entire scene – the sights, the smells, the noises. Since we have no shared experiences, I thought, this is the closest I will ever get to them.

But then, I felt sick. I realized that 60 years earlier, I would have shared their fate. Like them, I would have been marked. My heart hammered as I thought about how afraid they must have felt as they boarded the train. My grandfather, a decorated World War I veteran, must have had a deep sense of betrayal; his country and fellow soldiers had turned against him. I felt what I imagined he felt that last time he was at the Darmstadt train station -- a toxic brew of anger and hurt.

Seeing the names of Siegmund and Frieda (I never knew them so I never called them by an affectionate grandparent name) on that glass in that location made the incomprehensible reality of the Holocaust more real for me. It is difficult for anyone to understand the inhumanity and the scale of this horrific genocide, even someone like me who has had to integrate this history into my identity.

The glass memorial in Darmstadt is another piece of evidence confirming the Holocaust. And, given my experiences last week at a school in a small town in Texas, that is critical.

The librarian at the school where I was giving presentations about my books told me that many in this town of German immigrants are Holocaust deniers. “Yet, they live right next door to neighbors who have their Hitler Youth uniforms stored in their attics,” she said.

Though it has been defaced and damaged in recent years, the memorial at the Darmstadt train station isn't hidden in an attic.

For more information, please visit:

http://highlandlcblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/fern-schumer-chapman-visits-highland.html

From the blog:

http://googlingtheholocaust.wordpress.com/

Many of us know about the Kindertransport in which 10.000 children were sent to Great Britain, but not many know about the One Thousand Children project, and for good reason. It was kept secret in order for it to work.

“An operation, quietly carried out because of fear that a backlash from isolationist and anti-Semitic forces could cause its demise, the “underground railroad” these children traveled to safety spanned three continents and two oceans, was fueled by donations of ordinary people and the work of hundreds of volunteers and ran for almost eleven years.

“Yet, mention of it will not be found in American history books. Museums and memorials do not celebrate the lives of these children and the individuals and organizations who rescued them. There are no movies about it. Its heroes are not heralded and its villains not reproved. Few Americans know of it and only one scholar has studied and written about the subject.

“Most of the 1,000 children themselves are unaware they were part of the organized efforts of a network of cooperation of private American citizens and organizations between 1934 and 1945 to bring to America as many endangered children as possible, nor, that this was accomplished in the face of powerful economic, social, political, religious and governmental constraints that had such a devastating outcome for the eleven million people who perished in the Holocaust.”

To avoid detection, only 10 children were placed on a ship at a time. They traveled as unaccompanied minors and were then sent to live with distant relatives or in foster homes throughout the United States.

Fast forward to 2010. Fern Schumer Chapman wrote a young adult novel, Is it Night or Day?, based on her mother’s journey as part of the One Thousand Children project. While on the ship, her mother Edith befriended another refugee, Gertie. The two grew close during the voyage but once separated upon arrival in New York, they never saw each other again.

Teacher Catie O’Boyle assigned the book to her eighth grade class at Madison Junior High School in Naperville, Ill. Her students enjoyed the book but were  frustrated that the author’s attempt to reunite her mother and Gertie proved futile. But they were also inspired, so much so that they harnessed the power of the Web and found Gertie in two weeks’ time. Seventy-three years after the fact, Edith and Gertie saw each other again.

This goes right to the heart of my book, Googling the Holocaust. If we act fast enough we can still find happy endings for the Holocaust survivors still alive today. It’s an amazing feeling to watch it unfold, like I did with my mother-in-law, Hana Berger Moran. Born in a concentration camp, she found the American soldier who saved her life. Via Google. Sixty years later. It’s a beautiful story. Stay tuned for the book.

About 30 students filed in to Madison Junior High School August 10, even before they knew there was a surprise in store.

Under the guise that they would be filming a re-enactment of their successful effort to re-unite two women separated for decades by the Holocaust, the now-high school students packed the Learning Resource Center of the school for a video shoot at the junior high school.

http://triblocal.com/naperville/2011/08/16/students-get-surprise-from-women-they-helped-reunite/

A group of Naperville students got the surprise of a lifetime last week when two women they reunited earlier this spring showed up at Madison Junior High School.

Edith Westerfeld and Gerda Katz met aboard a ship called the Deutschland more than 73 years ago as they were sent to America by their parents to escape the Nazis.

As young girls traveling alone, they quickly bonded and became best friends during their 10-day ocean voyage. But when they arrived in the U.S. they were separated and never saw each other again — until students from Madison helped reunite them.

To read the full story, please click on this link:

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110816/news/708169661/