Obermayer Award

“The things that happened to…others are happening today.”

Christof Pies and Friends of the Laufersweiler Synagogue focus on education

by Toby Axelrod 

Like many of his generation, Christof Pies grew up with parents who suppressed their personal history in the Nazi period. He was born in 1948 and raised in the hilly Eifel region of western Germany, near the border with Luxembourg and Belgium.

Try as he would, Pies, a retired teacher, never learned much about his own parents’ wartime experiences. But he himself eventually broke free of that silence, and has helped countless people—Jews and non-Jews—learn about what happened so close to home in their rural corner in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Over the decades, since he moved about 95 miles southwest to Kastellaun and began teaching there in 1977, Pies has helped build connections between today’s residents and Jews who themselves fled the Nazi regime, and with the younger generations on both sides.

As co-founder in 1989 of the Friends of the Laufersweiler Synagogue (Förderkreis Synagoge Laufersweiler e.V.) and in his role as an educator, Pies has helped ensure that the unique regional story of rural Jews, Landjuden, not be forgotten. Laufersweiler is about 17 miles from Kastellaun; the towns were connected in part through several extended Jewish families.

More than three decades after Pies founded the citizens’ group with then-mayor Fritz Ochs and many others, the impact is clear, on the communal and personal levels. The association has helped preserve local Jewish history and hosted countless lectures, exhibitions, and concerts. Its Forst-Mayer Study and Meeting Center for Rural Judaism, named for local survivors Hans Simon Forst and Shimon (Rolf) Mayer, was inaugurated in 2014 and does significant work with local students. And former Jewish citizens have come back to visit, sharing memories and sparking new connections. 

Pies has also introduced local German youth to Israel, and he has provided youth and adults alike with the skills and tools to stand up to antisemitism and other forms of prejudice.

Together, these efforts have changed many lives. The work was often not easy, although persistence has paid off over the years. “A lot of taboos in Germany have broken,” says Pies.

Learning and Teaching

Christof Pies was born in 1948, “the same year the state of Israel was founded and the Deutschmark was introduced.” That’s what he tells his students if they ask whether he “experienced the Ice Age or World War II.” The fact that they link those two shows how distant the Nazi period is for today’s younger generation. But the impact of the war reverberated in Pies’ life. 

“My parents had lived between the fighting Americans and the German Wehrmacht,” says Pies. A then 2-year-old brother was deeply traumatized by missiles going through the family home. “He was unable to speak and walk when we were able to leave the bunker. My parents lost everything, and my father came home traumatized from the Russian front and imprisonment in a British camp. He never talked about the war or about the victims, and always said ‘That was all so terrible; I cannot talk about it.’”

In his high school, “most of the teachers had served in the Wehrmacht and did not talk about anything they had done. They only boasted about their fighting… and about their comrades. Some of them even hit us during our lessons. It was really sad.” 

He might never have become interested in the history of Jews in Germany, the Holocaust, and the war had it not been for a new teacher of history and social studies named Heinrich Studentkowski, whose father had been a high-level local Nazi official. “He introduced us to many things that had happened” during World War II and was the first teacher who actually dealt with the Nazi period at school, says Pies. “He later became a friend of mine.” Studentkowski ultimately confronted the older generation by going into politics himself, as a Social Democrat.

This experience influenced Pies when, as a young teacher in 1977, he was assigned to the small school in Kastellaun where he would teach until 2000. He then took a position in nearby Emmelshausen, retiring in 2012. Pies and his wife still live in Kastellaun today, between the Rhine and Mosel valleys. They have three adult daughters. 

It was in this rural region that Pies started learning about local Jewish history, a history marked by its connection to farming. Kastellaun today has about 5,500 inhabitants. During the Third Reich it had at most 1,800, about 88 of whom were Jewish. “At that time it was the highest Jewish proportion in the area,” says Pies. “Nearly all local Jewish families were cattle dealers, shoemakers, or dealt in painting materials. A few were butchers. Most of the cattle dealers had small plots of land and gardens.” 

Nearly every Jewish household in Kastellaun and Laufersweiler was somehow involved in cattle breeding, dealing, and selling, Pies says. “Even Nazi officials complained about the lack of…experts in this trade after 1933.”

After the war, the important role Jews played locally seemed to have been forgotten. But in 1979, survivor Hans Simon Forst, an expert in rural Jewish history, came from Israel to visit his home town, Laufersweiler, sparking new interest. It was around this time that Pies and members of the association started reaching out to people around the world who had roots in the area. 

Pies offered his first workshop on local Jewish history at his school during the 1981-82 academic year. Several residents showed up. But there was still ignorance that needed to be countered. One local politician said the Jews “had all been rich and were able to escape Germany,” recalls Pies. “We knew he was wrong.”  

Today, a memorial erected at the site of the Laufersweiler synagogue lists the names of all 25 Jews from the area who were deported and killed during the Third Reich. And their life stories are preserved for future generations. 

“It’s Just Like 1933”

Pies says his main purpose is to warn about what can happen when a regime based on hate comes to power. 

“The [person] who influenced me the most was Hans Simon Forst,” he says. Forst introduced him to the stories of the Landjuden (rural Jews), and by the time they first met in 1983, Forst and Pies had exchanged many letters. 

The first thing Forst and his wife, Lea, who was also born in the area, did when they arrived in Laufersweiler was go to the Jewish cemetery. “I found them afterward in a café,” says Pies, “They were sitting there and crying.” It turned out that the cemetery had just been vandalized a few days before. The scene reminded them of the start of the Nazi era. “Lea said, ‘It’s just like 1933.’”

Pies recalls, “It was very difficult to give them a counter argument because, of course, it reminded them of their past. Both had lost about 60 to 70 relatives in the Holocaust.” But Pies and his colleagues conveyed such compassion and empathy that the Forsts came back many times, bringing their children and grandchildren with them. 

Eventually, Pies and his neighbors built connections with about 30 families of former Jewish citizens.

In 1989, the year that the Laufersweiler association was founded, Pies’ school became one of the first in Germany to invite survivors and their descendants for a weeklong visit. Together, the school organized more than 50 projects, from history workshops to matzo baking. The visitors, says Pies, spoke to the students and expanded their knowledge.

Kastellaun’s first memorial to the former Jewish community had already been erected in 1986 through the initiative of a school class, “but it was placed in the cemetery because many members of the town council did not want this in the middle of the town,” Pies says. There was very strong resistance to the attention given to this history, and Pies’ home was vandalized. “Many things happened, but we did not give up,” he says. 

The association published a book about their encounters with survivors, “Shared Memories” (Gemeinsame Erinnerung), with the subtitle “Jewish Survivors of [Nazism] Meet Today’s Citizens and Pupils in Their Home Town. A Project Week by Kastellaun High School.”

Many publications and projects have followed, as well as countless guided visits for local teens to Israel, where Pies has organized encounters with people from Israel and Palestine. He also has taken German youth to the memorial at the former Auschwitz concentration camp and to the nearby city of Krakow, Poland.

On one memorable visit to Buchenwald with a group of refugees who had been brought to the Laufersweiler area, they stopped at the cell of Paul Schneider, a local pastor who was killed there for his opposition to the Nazi regime. Carolin Manns, who directs educational outreach at the Forst-Mayer study center, recalls, “We were standing in front of the cell… and one of the young people started to tell about his own flight from Syria. He took this as an opportunity to actually reflect and tell his own story for the first time. That was truly a special moment for all of us,” she says.

“He…told us of his imprisonment and how he was tortured,” says Pies. “And that’s where you see why you’re doing this, that the things that happened to Paul Schneider and to others are happening today.” It was a moment, says Pies, that he will never forget. 

Young People Get Involved

Helene Becker has been on several trips to Israel with Pies, who has become a mentor. The 18-year-old from Kastellaun already knew Israel because her father had lived on a kibbutz as a young man, and her older brother had been there with Pies as well. 

But when she went with her family, she didn’t meet other youth. “Through Christof I made new friends and had new experiences,” says Becker, who is pursuing a medical degree through the German armed forces.

One memory that stands out is her visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial outside Jerusalem, where Pies showed the group the walls engraved with the names of towns where Jews had lived. “Christof showed us that our town was there,” she says. And seeing this meant more to her because Pies had already shown her and her peers the places where Jews had lived and worked in Kastellaun.

Back home, Becker and some school friends formed a history association. This past November Pies joined their project, cleaning the stumbling stone memorials (Stolpersteine)—brass-plated cobblestones that recount the fate of Jews who once lived in a particular building. 

“My friends and I think, well, many older people already are working on remembering the past,” Becker says. “But at some point the younger people have to take over.”

Ayelet Mayer-Drach, who lives in Israel where her grandfather, Shimon Mayer, and his family settled after fleeing Laufersweiler in 1939, is one of those descendants who has become very close to Christof Pies and his pupils. “Our family has a lot of documents and information about our roots in Germany”—including postcards her great-grandfather sent home from the front during World War II—“but we don’t know German,” she says. “We got a lot of help from Mr. Pies and his team in translating and understanding historical events and processes.”

She adds, “It was hard sometimes to read what those letters said because some [people] didn’t find a way to get out of Germany, and they lost their lives. My grandfather and his family were lucky to leave in March of 1939. A friend from the village, Gertrude Joseph, packed all their things and sent them to Palestine.” Gertrude Joseph was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in April 1942 and did not survive.

 “Other people should know the important work [Pies and the association] are doing,” she says.  

Attitudes have changed, says Pies. Back in 1989, when the association was founded, Mayor Ochs called it “a kind of reparation for our small village,” Pies recalls. “He was attacked really fiercely” by citizens who opposed spending money to refurbish the synagogue.

“Students today are very much interested in this history. The younger generation in German society is very much aware of what had been done to the Jews, and they are trying to draw conclusions for the present,” he says.

For her part, Becker has mixed feelings about the future. On one hand, she is upset to see how many people support extreme right-wing movements and political parties. 

“But when I see how many people came to our memorial event on the 9th of November [marking the anniversary of the 1938 pogrom against the Jews, known as Kristallnacht], then I have more hope. Because I can believe that most people think correctly, and that maybe there is a chance to change people’s minds if you do what Christof has done: bringing people closer, and showing them the right way.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2022