Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Heidemarie Kugler-Weiemann

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

For nearly two decades, Heidemarie Kugler-Weiemann has been wrestling with her city’s Holocaust history through research, teaching, tours, exhibitions, forums, memorials, articles and books. Not only has she made an impact on her community, but she has developed very strong personal relationships with survivors as well.

When she thinks how it all began, her memory returns to her grandmother’s nervous eye. Born in Lübeck in 1951, Kugler-Weiemann recalls that “the war was very present for me as a child” because of the strong memories lingering in her family, and one in particular: the day the Gestapo came and arrested her grandfather for listening to the BBC. Though her grandfather was eventually released, her grandmother’s eye never stopped twitching after that.

“My father told me that my grandfather was a broken man from this moment on. He was changed,” she says. “Maybe this brought me to be interested in the history, to know more about what happened. They say many families didn’t talk about that time—but in my family we talked about it, and I think the trauma continued in me.”

In 1992, Kugler-Weiemann, a high school teacher, took a job at Lübeck’s first, newly opened “comprehensive” school (which emphasized small working groups and personalized teaching) because she “wasn’t satisfied with the way traditional schools worked.” The school still lacked a name, and while researching the history of Lübeck’s education system in the Nazi period, Kugler-Weiemann and colleagues came across the stirring story of three young siblings—Margot, Martin and Max Prenski—who had been deported to their deaths. This was her start.

Kugler-Weiemann advertised in the local press, inviting residents who knew the Prenski family to share what they remembered. She assembled interviews, photographs and documents in an exhibition, Spuren der Geschwister Prenski (Tracing the Brothers and Sisters Prenski). Then, in 1993, she traveled to Israel where she spoke with the oldest and only surviving Prenski sibling, Sophie, who told Kugler-Weiemann, “It would be good if you named the school for them. They were so small.” And thus, after a suspicious fire in the Lübeck synagogue generated additional public support, Kugler-Weiemann saw Die Geschwister Prenski Schule (The Brothers and Sisters Prenski School) get its name.

Since then, Kugler-Weiemann has been passionately educating and inspiring her city in the northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein to reexamine its past. One way was at school, where she started a program in Jewish and Holocaust studies, and created writing and artist workshops to allow “every child, every student, to look for his or her own way to get involved” in the history. Several of her students went to London for research and returned to produce, with her help, an acclaimed exhibition about the Exodus—the ship carrying Jews to Palestine in 1947, which was turned back by the British with some of the passengers temporarily interned in Lübeck. 

A former classmate of Margot Prenski, Marion Gumprecht Portman of Las Vegas said, “Led by dedicated teachers like Heidemarie, the younger generation of Germans are willing to confront and acknowledge the sins of their grandfathers, and to warn the world of the dangers of anti-Semitism and all forms of ethnic and religious hatred.”

Kugler-Weiemann later compiled the letters that two sisters, unable to escape from Lübeck before being deported to their deaths, mailed to their sister who had emigrated with her husband to Shanghai, and published them in the volume Hoffentlich klappt alles zum Guten (Hopefully Everything Works out for the Best). Another book, “Poppendorf,” documented the history of a former concentration camp in the region, and was researched and written by her students with her assistance.

But perhaps Kugler-Weiemann’s most deeply personal work grew out of the relationship she developed with a former Lübeck Jew and Holocaust survivor, the American Richard Yashek, whose memoir, The Story of My Life, Kugler-Weiemann first helped evoke from him, then later translated it into German.

According to Yashek’s wife, Rosalye, Kugler-Weiemann’s empathy, understanding and deep desire to have Richard communicate his experience transformed his life. Heidemarie “has been like an angel. She made Richard’s life so much more meaningful,” says Rosalye. “Nothing I could do could match what she has done for my husband, my family, for so many people in the community where he grew up, and what she continues to do for the future.”

Indeed, Kugler-Weiemann’s work has had an emotional impact on people that is profound and lasting. “How did Heidemarie do it? How did she open so many eyes? Inspire so many people? Forge so many bonds?” asks Claudia Strauss, a descendant of Holocaust survivors and a former friend of Yashek’s from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. “If there is a formula, Heidemarie found it—persistence, genuineness, partnering with others, opening doors people could walk through, helping people relate to one person at a time, one day at a time, one place at a time, one story at a time, one encounter at a time.”

Riva Lexandrowitz-Oron of Israel commends Heidemarie’s “vast knowledge, her dedication, identification with the cause, depth of research and various publications, combined with her warm, intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful personality.” Shortly after her 50th birthday, Kugler-Weiemann began to suffer bouts of dizziness and was forced to leave her job. Living in the old town of Lübeck and married for the second time, she keeps on with her research but has had to curtail her activities. Nonetheless, her deep emotional connection to her work—and to others—continue to leave an impact. “Meeting people like Richard and his family is a wonder,” she says. “Richard was one of the best friends I ever had in life.”

“I’m like a snail. Very slow—and now even slower than before. But even snails arrive at their aims.”