Obermayer Award

“Everyone who listens to a witness will become a witness.”

Zweitzeugen captures the stories of survivors and uses them to teach the significance of history and the importance of empathy

by Toby Axelrod

The last witnesses to World War II and the Holocaust are still with us. But what happens when they are gone? Zweitzeugen (Secondary Witnesses), a nonprofit educational organization, has introduced more than 16,000 students and adults to the stories of survivors.

As its name suggests, Zweitzeugen (tsvite-tsoy-gen) is about creating secondary witnesses to history, particularly among children, in an age-appropriate way. It’s not about pretending to be someone else. Rather, it is about applying the stories of Holocaust survivors to problems in one’s own life, community, and world; and it is about standing up to antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and extremism today. It is about activating the heart, through survivor stories; the head, through knowledge and understanding; and the hand, by encouraging people to become active themselves, say co-founders Ruth-Anne Damm and Sarah Hüttenberend.

In the 12 years since Zweitzeugen got its start as a study project, volunteers (currently more than 130) and staff have documented 37 life stories of German-speaking Holocaust survivors. Since contemporary witnesses will not be able to speak for much longer, the survivors empower members of younger generations, who use exhibitions, educational projects, digital storytelling, podcasts, magazines and books, as well as events and lectures to preserve and share their biographies.

A key element of Zweitzeugen’s work is its school-based education program. Students take part in a multi-phase curriculum that includes understanding anti-Jewish laws and the persecution of Jews, getting to know the life story of the contemporary witness, writing letters to survivors and their families, and understanding how this history relates to the world and to refugees today. 

Most recently, in September 2022, Zweitzeugen launched a digital learning platform featuring three survivors, called Become a Secondary Witness (Werde Zweitzeug*in). It is available free to anyone over the age of 12, and can be used by teachers to build their own curriculum. It is funded by the Welfare Care Foundation (Stiftung Wohlfahrtspflege) of North Rhine–Westphalia.

Accessibility is a major goal: Zweitzeugen also offers materials in easy-to-understand German and sign language, as well as providing audio description and subtitling that break down communication barriers. They host a podcast focusing on witness perspectives and curated an open-air exhibition in Dortmund that encouraged passers-by to stop, to reflect. 

And be transformed, says Zweitzeugen managing director Ruth-Anne Damm, 34. “Everyone who listens to a witness will become a witness,” she says, echoing Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who said:

“I believe firmly and profoundly that whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness, so those who hear us, those who read us must continue to bear witness for us. Until now, they're doing it with us. At a certain point in time, they will do it for all of us.”

“This … must never be forgotten”

Zweitzeugen got its start in 2010 after Damm’s sister-in-law, Anna Damm, and her university friend Sarah Hüttenberend saw a documentary on Holocaust survivors. “It said there were 200,000 still living in Israel, and more than one-third of them were living below the poverty level. It shocked them so much to see how many survivors had so many difficulties in coping. But the most shocking part was that we had never really thought about it before. And they were ashamed about that,” says Damm. 

“This gave the start of the idea to find answers themselves and to meet and talk to survivors,” she adds. “It also appealed to me when they told me about it.”

In their early school years, they had learned that “the war ended and antisemitism was over. Just like that. Which we all know is not true at all,” recalls Damm.

They found themselves wondering: Who are these people who survived, and how were they able to cope? Could they learn to trust again?

Damm transcribed the interview that Anna and Sarah had conducted with Eliezer Ayalon in Israel. “I had his voice on my earphones — that was my first real introduction to a survivor,” she recalls. “It touched me to the bottom of my heart. I thought, this is big and powerful and must never be forgotten.” 

Damm later traveled to Israel herself and met with survivors as well. “But meeting Eliezer via my earphones made me a secondary witness [Zweitzeugin] for the first time.”

She started networking with educators, and began working with children in 2012.

The youngest participants are aged ten, says her colleague Nina Taubenreuther. “This is an age when you soak up things your parents say about people, groups, religions. This is when you start building attitudes. And in my view, you need guidelines and help in dealing with this information. [Children] need an anchor, and these personal histories can do that and help change perspectives.

“We talk about the childhood of survivors, their daily lives, on their way to school, and the anti-Jewish laws that were implemented,” she says. “You can ask the kids: What would you do if you were not allowed to have a pet anymore, or play sports?”

Children ask whatever is on their minds, says Dutch-born survivor Eva Weyl, age 87, who has shared her life story with Zweitzeugen. Weyl and her family were liberated in 1945 from the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands.

“Sometimes they ask questions like ‘Did you see a gas chamber?’” says Weyl, who tries to keep her message simple: “I want to emphasize to children at that age: See how lucky you are? And think of the refugees now, who suffer.”

“And then it snowballed”

Weyl met Ruth-Anne Damm and Sarah Hüttenberend about ten years ago, following a program at a school in Haldern, Germany, where her ancestors were born. Weyl’s hosts told her, “A couple of young ladies want to talk with you.”

“Sarah told me that as a young woman she had realized there was so little written down about the few Holocaust survivors still living, and that she had decided to start something with two other student friends. And I was so impressed,” says Weyl.

The two women visited Weyl in Amsterdam and ultimately created a booklet about her life. “I saw how they developed from a small group of volunteers with no income… and then it snowballed,” Weyl recalls.

They trained half a dozen volunteers, she says, “to tell our stories for schools. The volunteers go into the classroom with pictures of me and my story and make workshops with children. They ask questions: What do you think Eva did in the camp? What kind of meals did they have there?’”

Sometimes children write to her. “It is the most touching for me when they realize how privileged they are,” she says. “And when they write, ‘I will keep this story alive,’ I am sure they will always remember my talk.

“I need the Zweitzeugen [secondary witnesses], and they need me,” she adds.

The link between stories of survival yesterday and today is concrete for Taubenreuther, who in 2016 left her media job to help Syrian refugees arriving in Germany. She eventually became director of the Life Back Home project, in which 30 young refugees met with pupils in German schools. “My fear was, to be honest, that all the personal stories would be too touching, and I would be sad all the time,” she recalls. “But I also knew I could deal with it. 

“They were very brave, standing in front of their peers and sharing their stories of flight and survival,” she recalls. Life Back Home won an award, and it was at the ceremony in the German chancellery that Taubenreuther met previous winners, including Zweitzeugen. 

That fortuitous meeting, says Damm, “was so meaningful and impactful.” Together, they organized a joint event “where we told the story of a survivor and Nina invited a Syrian woman who told her story,” she says. “I had goosebumps the whole time.”

While the circumstances and history were vastly different, Taubenreuther remembers, “there were so many similar places they had been, and there were 70 years between them. That was the first moment where we worked together quite closely. And when an opportunity came to join the team, I decided within a heartbeat that I wanted to apply.”

Says Damm, “People say about the Holocaust, ‘This is an old topic, put it aside — what does it have to do with the present?’ Well, it has lots to do with the present.”

“Not even I knew this”

In 2016, Zweitzeugen produced a short film, To Good Neighbors! (Auf gute Nachbarschaft), where Frankfurt nursing home residents Siegmund Pluznik, a Jew from Poland, and Carlo (Karl-Heinz) Lietz, a former Wehrmacht soldier, sat together and talked about their very different lives.  

“If they had met by fate 70 years earlier, they would not have had a very pleasant meeting,” says Pluznik’s son, Michael Jung. “My father was very actively fleeing from the SS and Gestapo and so on. But now that they were living in a senior home, they developed a cordial, amicable, neighborly relationship, and looked back at their lives from today’s perspective.”

Over the years Pluznik, who escaped his shtetl as a teenager and ended up in the resistance, spoke in many classrooms and shared his life story with Zweitzeugen, which published it online and in a magazine. “I have never seen him as lucid, as happy, as fulfilled as when he was having these discussions,” Jung says.

Speaking with teenagers, Pluznik would tell them how he had enjoyed school and soccer in his hometown as a youth.

Once, a pupil asked him if he ever had time to be in love.

“He said if it had not been for his love interest in a young girl, he would not have joined a group that managed to flee,” Jung says. “He would have perished if he joined the group his parents wanted him to join. Not even I knew this back story. And now it is important to my own back story.”

“He felt an obligation not just to share his own family’s story and experience,” says Jung, “but also to maintain the memory of those who ultimately did perish.”

Now, “Zweitzeugen is repeating his story to younger generations all over Germany while he is no longer able to tell it himself.”  

— Obermayer Award recipient 2023