Lessons from Germany

How an Obermayer Award winner works to make amends for the legacy of the Holocaust, and what Americans can take from it

by Andrew Straus

This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle

In 1938, only days after Kristallnacht, a night when the Nazis destroyed synagogues and stores and murdered Jews, my mother and grandfather fled Germany for the safety of the United States. Other family members and friends were not so lucky. My mother already had U.S. visas in place that made her escape possible. Those who didn’t have permission to travel stayed behind — and were killed in the Holocaust.

Thursday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time that prompts many Jews to feel grief and anger about how the Nazis slaughtered 6 million of us. I share those feelings on many levels. And yet as somber as I find Holocaust Remembrance Day, I also feel hopeful. That’s because I know that in Germany, more than a few people insist that their fellow citizens learn about what happened during the horrific Nazi era — and are willing do the work to make sure it never ever happens again.

America can take a lesson from them.

Indeed, those in the U.S. who are trying to stop schools from examining the ongoing legacy of America’s racist history could learn a lot from a German friend of our family, Josef Wisskirchen.

Since the 1980s, Wisskirchen has been collecting and telling the stories of Jews in small towns in the Rhineland that were decimated by the Nazis, including towns where my mother’s extended family once lived. A schoolteacher and prolific writer, he tells his students and neighbors about the lives of Jews who once lived down the street and around the corner — and what the Nazis did to them.

He also tries to make amends for his country’s history by helping descendants of German Jews find their roots. In 2014, out of the blue, Wisskirchen wrote to my mother with detailed information about our family. He included stories we’d never heard before.

A few years later, he acted as our personal guide when I accompanied my mother and three generations of the Straus family on a tour of our ancestral hometowns. Wisskirchen also helped to initiate a memorial that commemorates local Jews who perished in the Holocaust and led efforts to restore a synagogue.

In contrast, here in America, too many oppose the efforts to prompt people in this country — especially young people — to face up to our own history of brutal racism, slavery and segregation.

Video: Three generations of the Straus family talk about the impact of Josef Wisskirchen’s work >>

The recent furor over teaching “critical race theory” in schools doesn’t stem from disagreements over how best to guide students through this history and its continued impact on contemporary American life. Rather, at the heart of the matter is a refusal to face the wrongs of the past and a desire to suppress discussion of whether Americans today have any obligation to rectify those wrongs.

Even in liberal California, new curriculum guidelines adopted by some school districts ban courses that teach critical race theory. These guidelines explicitly prevent teaching that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” But just as Germans bear responsibility to rectify the wrongs committed against my ancestors, it is white Americans who should bear responsibility to rectify the wrongs of slavery and the racist systems from which we have benefited — and continue to benefit.

When announcing support of a statewide ban against teaching critical race theory in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he found it “unthinkable that there are other people in positions of leadership ... who believe that we should teach kids to hate our country.” In the same spirit, the Texas Senate recently passed a law that says public schools would no longer be required to teach students about the Ku Klux Klan or learn that the group is “morally wrong.”

This see-no-evil-hear-no evil approach to America’s past is not just wrong; it is dangerous.

Wisskirchen and others in Germany’s remembrance community are not teaching kids to hate their country. But they insist that young Germans learn about the acts of their grandparents and great grandparents to ensure that “Never Again” is not just an empty promise.

That was why, during our visit to the town of Stommeln — where there are no Jews left — we heard a bell ringing in the town square to announce the start of the three traditional daily Jewish prayer services. This bell is rung 365 days a year to remind people that there was once a vibrant Jewish community there that was wiped out under the Nazi regime.

On Tuesday, my family and I watched a livestream of a ceremony in the Berlin Parliament, where Wisskirchen and five other German individuals and organizations received Obermayer Awards. For the past 22 years, those awards — administered by the U.S.-based Widen the Circle organization — have been given to Germans who have fought against antisemitism and kept alive the memory of once-thriving Jewish communities.

I wish those who don’t want our kids to learn and think hard about the history of American racism would have watched this ceremony. Perhaps instead of being fearful over how their children will internalize the true history of this country, they could find in Wisskirchen and his fellow awardees heroes and role models fit for young Americans to emulate.

Andrew Straus is president of the Northern California Board of Rabbis and Northwest regional director of J Street.