Obermayer Award

“It is the difference between knowing and understanding.”

Dirk Erkelenz helps students create an emotional connection with history

by Toby Axelrod

Imagine the life of one Jewish child in prewar Germany as a colorful, many-layered painting on glass. And then imagine this glass smashed on the ground, trampled, the shards kicked in all directions, buried under trash. Nearly forgotten.

Decades later, a young student finds a shard. And so begins her search for the whole picture. It is the first step in rescuing from oblivion the biographies of former Jewish students at the oldest public high school for girls in Cologne, the 150-year-old Königin Luise Schule (Queen Luise School). 

This is how Dirk Erkelenz, who has been teaching history and Latin at the school since 2003, describes the process of researching and remembering Jews who attended the school and were victims of the Nazis. It’s a process that has had a profound impact on both Erkelenz’s students, who have done a large part of the work, and the descendant families they have contacted.

Names of dozens of Jews have been rediscovered and their stories told. Brass-plated stumbling stone memorials, called Stolpersteine, have been placed outside the school they once attended. 

Student Sarah Stauber researched the biography of Alice Tuteur and eventually met Tuteur’s son, Gunther Heyden. “Meeting him was a truly emotional experience,” she says. “It will be my lifelong commitment never to forget their story, their fate, their lives. I hope to one day tell my children and even my grandchildren.”

Tuteur’s story appears on the school’s memorial website and in a book of biographies published in the summer of 2023 by Erkelenz and a colleague from another Cologne high school, Thomas Kahl of the Deutzer Gymnasium Schaurtestrasse. Students wrote half of the biographies in the book, “Jewish Girls and Boys in Cologne High Schools: Their Histories from Integration to Exclusion and Persecution.” (Jüdische Schülerinnen und Schüler an Kölner Gymnasien – Ihre Geschichte(n) zwischen Integration, Ausgrenzung und Verfolgung)

Jewish pupils were expelled from all non-Jewish schools, public and private, during the Nazi era. Because the Königin Luise School and its archive were destroyed during the war, it was difficult to learn the names of Jewish students, let alone their fates. Today, Erkelenz’s students are piecing together the biographies of Jewish pupils up to the years of expulsion. 

“They are saving someone’s memory, no matter how small the first piece may be,” he says. 

Beginnings

Modern German history was always Erkelenz's biggest interest. Like many Germans of his generation, he sought to learn his own family’s story, particularly that of his father, a Wehrmacht soldier who was sent to Africa during World War II and was captured by the Americans.

His father would not talk about this chapter. “It’s the most frequently uttered sentence of that era,” Erkelenz says: ’We didn't know anything.’ ‘But Dad, that can't be right! What’s that supposed to mean?’”

After he began teaching at the Königin Luise School 20 years ago, Erkelenz started digging into the school’s history. He came across a commemorative text from 1971 marking the school’s 100th anniversary. There was, he says, “only one sentence about the history of the school during the Third Reich; it said the school was destroyed. And I thought to myself, typical!”

Clearly, he adds, “there was still a lot of work to be done then. And there is still a lot to be done today.”

Erkelenz first took students to the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial in Poland in 2011.“In many ways it was a key experience for me,” he recalls. “I already knew the books, the photos, the locations. But when I was standing on the ramp myself and saw the gigantic dimensions of this camp around me, I tried to imagine what the scene was like when the transports arrived.

“One of my students put it so well. She said, ‘It is the difference between knowing and understanding.’”

Erkelenz had done his best to teach them the history. And to convey the emotions he had felt, particularly when he found the published diary of a young Polish girl, Rutka Laskier, in a Krakow bookstore. But now his students, not much older than Rutka was when she was murdered in Auschwitz, were coming to him in tears asking, “How can this happen?” 

He realized that he had to take a new approach, going beyond the enormous, anonymous numbers “which no one can grasp,” he says. He needed to include a personal dimension. 

To that end, he gave his students the task of searching for a family, a child the same age as they were, he says. “Not in the clouds, not in Berlin, but here in our city, in our street, in our school. And that is how I started to move in this direction.” Studying the perpetrators would also be necessary “to gain some insight into how something like this could happen.”

By now, he has been to the Auschwitz memorial five times, with a total of about 120 students. He was the first teacher in his school to undertake these journeys; the trip is now part of the advanced history course, and two other colleagues take part. So many students were interested that the trip was offered to the entire class after graduation.

Finding the Shards

Meanwhile, in Cologne there are major obstacles to local research. First of all, the school and its archive were destroyed in wartime bombings. And in 2009, irreplaceable historical documents were lost when the Cologne city archive building collapsed into an excavation pit dug for a subway construction project. There are virtually no original documents left, so it is difficult to find the names of former students, let alone Jewish ones, says Erkelenz. So far they have been able to identify 80 and have completed 30 biographies. 

Despite these obstacles, in the last 14 years an astonishing amount of material has been found related to local history. Much of it is now available online. Erkelenz’ students dig into many scattered sources for clues, ranging from Cologne’s new documentation center, which was reinaugurated in 2021 after being largely destroyed by fire, to the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Students have constructed family trees using information in ancestry research portals and documents related to the postwar quest for reparations.

The impact on his students quickly became clear. “There’s no better proof of success than when a 17-year-old girl says she’d rather sit at her computer on Saturday night than go out dancing with her friends because she absolutely must solve the mystery” about the fate of a former Jewish student, Erkelenz says. 

That particular student found and contacted the great-niece of a Jewish pupil from 1935, and received many photos from her. “She showed what a dedicated student can accomplish,” says Erkelenz.

Telling Their Stories

Many descendants of former pupils have been touched by this work, in all corners of the world. And some of them, he says, “actually learn something about their families through our program that that they didn't know before.”

For Johnny Cahn, age 77, the first contact from students came several years ago, when 11th grader Carla König reached out to find out more about his mother, Edith Jonas. König had located Cahn through a family tree on an ancestry platform. 

Sadly, his mother died when he was very young, says Cahn, a Maryland resident and professor of economics at a graduate school for US government employees. “She never recovered her health after being in the concentration camp.” 

Edith Jonas was the last Jewish student to graduate from the school, he says. Both of Cahn’s parents had fled from Cologne to Amsterdam, where they married. After Germany occupied Holland, they were deported via the Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz. Both survived. 

Cahn’s plans to visit Germany were interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, but he hopes to make up for that soon. He would like to see the stumbling stone memorials that the students helped place at the school and in front of his grandparents’ houses. “They looked at the whole family tree and took it upon themselves to lay all those stones,” he says.

A new project will involve photos provided by descendants. The idea came from an exhibit of family photos at the Auschwitz memorial. The photos had been confiscated from Jews on arrival at the camp, and the students were moved by the display. “They wanted to have a wall like that in our school,” Erkelenz says. “And that is now in the works.”

For the students, contact with descendants has been life-changing. Sarah Stauber was in 11th grade in 2018 when she chose to get involved. Her first task was to contact the son of a former pupil, Alice Tuteur, who had attended the school during World War I.

“It was very impressive and emotional to talk to Gunter [Heyden] for the first time and get to know him,” Stauber wrote in an email. She was surprised at how open he was.

“Mine is a sad story,” Heyden wrote in his letter recommending Erkelenz for an Obermayer Award. Heyden’s mother “was hidden, denounced and, in desperation, killed herself.” 

When he met Stauber and another student researching his mother, Heyden says, “I spotted in the eyes of my listeners deep interest in how I ‘got through’ the bad times being, according to the Nazi classification system, a half-Jew.”

Stauber recalls, “I will never forget how he beamed at us and gave us a hug. How grateful he was to us, even though we were the ones who should be, and were, grateful to him for everything. I will never forget how openly he spoke with us, how he laughed with us at some stories and cried with us at other memories.

“Through getting to know him, Alice Tuteur became more than just facts on paper. We could see her as a woman who enjoyed life, loved to laugh a lot, loved and protected her children, and had incredible inner strength.”

Says Heyden, “I am amazed that teachers like Mr. Erkelenz exist. Although non-Jewish himself, he demonstrates so much care and compassion for victims of the Nazi regime. Mr. Erkelenz, quiet and reserved, works with determination that these times are not forgotten.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2024