Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Inge Franken

Berlin

After working for six years on a book about Jewish orphans in World War II, Inge Franken can explain what motivated her in a single breath.

"I did it for the survivors who gave me their life stories," she says.

The daughter of a Nazi officer she never knew, Franken also suffered the consequences of the Holocaust. Her grandfather and her father, who was killed at the siege of Leningrad when she was two, were both "big Nazi believers"—though it took Franken many years, and reading many of her father's wartime letters, to find this out. Instead, she recalls, she grew up with her mother and sister in a painful, stifled atmosphere of silence. "Nobody [in my family] talked about the time before," she says. "But I knew we belonged to them—to the people who did terrible things."

Now, since retiring as a Berlin school teacher 15 years ago, Franken devotes herself to helping fellow Germans—from both the older and younger generations—speak about, learn about and investigate their own pasts. 

"You have a big stone on your back and when you can say 'Yes, my parents were the perpetrators,' it becomes so much easier," says Franken, who in 1996 started arranging monthly discussions at One by One, an organization in Berlin that invites the relatives of Holocaust victims and perpetrators together to share experiences and stories. "When we can cry together, we can laugh together. It's the best connection you can have, when you talk about the deepest thing you both belong to. If I didn't talk about this, it would be my guilt. But when I talk about it, the feelings of sadness and guilt belong to my parents."

It was the same community center, in fact, where Franken organized those meetings that she discovered had once been a children's home from which dozens of Jewish orphans were deported, in 1942, to their deaths. Diving into research about the building's past, Franken tracked down rare Nazi-era pictures of the home's orphans taken by the Jewish photographer Abraham Pisarek; plumbed Jewish archives throughout the Berlin and Brandenburg regions; and corresponded with Holocaust survivors in Israel to piece together the stories of dozens of lives—and deaths—connected with the Kinderheim. In 2005, she published her findings in the book, Gegen das Vergessen: Erinnerungen an das Jüdische Kinderheim Fehrbelliner Strasse 92, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg (Against Forgetting: Memories of the Jewish Children's Home, Fehrbelliner Strasse 92 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg).

Franken, though, is making a stronger impression on children these days not from writing but from the energetic, One by One presentations she takes to dozens of schools around the country, mostly in the former East. Accompanied by one of a number of Jewish friends who play her counterpart in the victim-perpetrator dialogue, Franken has reached out to hundreds of German youths in a way that nobody ever did before.

"She talks to students about choices," says Carole Vogel, a descendent of Holocaust survivors who has participated in many of Franken's school presentations. "[She tells them] to be wary of strong leaders, to be sceptical of popular viewpoints. She challenges children to make their own choices about what is right and wrong-she makes kids think."

Along the way-in the eastern state of Brandenburg, for example-some students and even teachers have shown resistance to Franken's work, accusing her of betraying her family's and her country's past. And those are the people, Franken says, she needs to reach the most.

"I like to go to the right-wing students because they need it. Maybe in one class, one child will become more open," she says. "I try to make individual connections with the students, encouraging each one to speak. Our kids must know what happened in their families. If the crimes remain without anyone talking about them, that isn't a good ground to start their lives on."

Franken began engaging publicly with questions about the Holocaust in 1986, when a Berlin local history museum asked her and her students to research the Jewish history of their neighborhood. Her class published an award-winning booklet called "Traces," which identified buildings around the school that had been seized from Jewish owners and described where and how certain Jews hid to survive the war. "Those stories shocked me and brought [the history] so much closer for me," recalls Franken who, in the 20 years since, hasn't slowed down. 

"I admire Inge's courage," says Alexa Dvorson, an American journalist living in Berlin and a member of One by One, "not only for having the perseverance to follow through her projects, but the inner courage it takes to delve into the feelings and prejudices that people who lived during the Nazi period grew up with, and often never consciously dealt with."

More recently, Franken has been working with teenagers to install a series of Stolpersteine-the brass-plated cobblestone memorials known as Stumbling Stones—in the streets around the former Prenzlauer Berg children's home, which will commemorate Jewish individuals and families who once lived there and perished in the camps.

Her priority, though, seems clear: to keep visiting schools and delivering her message to as many kids in Germany as possible.

"The most important thing I tell them is: Ask questions. Ask about your background. What did your parents do, your grandparents, what is your family's story? Most of them say, 'I don't know.' So, I ask them, 'You have a grandfather? Try to talk with him. Try to find out.'"