People Who Inspire Us: Christiane Simon

“At the beginning, I didn’t really care about history,” says activist Christiane Simone. “To me it was just reading books and numbers and then [taking] a test.”

That all changed when her high school teacher, 2020 Obermayer Award winner Sabeth Schmidthals, assigned a project: Research the lives of Jewish people who lived in the neighborhood of their Berlin school and were killed during the Holocaust, then find the stumbling stone memorials that had been placed in front of the homes where they lived. 

In the process of looking for the stumbling stones, says Christiane, she met people in the neighborhood who would tell her “I knew that person; I knew that family.”

It was a transformational moment, she says. “That’s the first time that it got to me that these were real people. There were millions of real people just like me who had to go through that, and that was the beginning of wanting to know more about the history of this country and of Jewish people, Jewish life.”

Since then, Christiane has been active in remembrance work in Berlin, and in helping people see how the lessons of history are important to efforts to combat antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia today. With Schmidthals’ Remembrance AG organization for young people, she worked on building a memorial at a deportation site across the street from their school, participated in history plays depicting the lives of Jews who were sent to death camps, and engaged in many public education projects.

Currently, she is a university student majoring in social work. 

More: Christiane’s description of looking out the window of her high school classroom toward what was once one of the largest deportation sites in Germany, where 35,000 people were shipped to Auschwitz and other camps, was one of the most powerful moments of Widen the Circle’s virtual event “A New Generation Confronts Racism’s Legacy.” Watch a short video of that description here.