The High Schoolers Of Buende

DuBow Digest ([email protected])A story of German high schoolers who are doing a wonderful job in Holocaust Remembrance. The High Schoolers of Buende The article below was sent to me by Audrey Friedman Marcus, a dedicated Jewish educator and author. Audrey has co-written a book covering the diaries that her late husband, Fred Marcus, wrote as a German Jewish refugee in Shanghai during World War II. It is referenced at the end of the article. The article relates a heart warming story of a group of German high school students who have undertaken a project to help insure remembrance of the Holocaust. The Netzwerk Gruppe in Bünde,

Audrey Friedman Marcus

Lest readers get a totally negative impression of German teenagers (DuBow Digest, April 1, 2009), here’s an uplifting and hopeful report of the activities of a group of gymnasium (high school) students in a small town outside of Hanover. In September, an after-school club called Netzwerk Gruppe (Network Group) in Bünde, Germany, will observe its tenth anniversary. Founded by Christina Whitelaw, an English teacher at the local gymnasium, the group has been studying the Holocaust with great diligence, and has documented the history of nearly all of the former Bünde Jews, most of whom perished in the Holocaust. In the last several years, they were the main organizer of the local ceremony to commemorate Kristallnacht. At the site of the old Jewish cemetery where a monument was erected in 1986, they read out the names of the 54 Bünde Jews who perished, thus encouraging current residents never to forget the Jewish citizens of their town. Students also make frequent presentations before church groups and other organizations about their work, and every year document their accomplishments. Additionally, after successfully lobbying the city council for permission and raising the money from private citizens, they commissioned Stolpersteine (stumbling stones). These four-inch brass blocks, designed by Gunter Demnig, an artist from Cologne, display the name, date, and place of death of an individual murdered by the Nazis, and are embedded in the pavement in front of the person’s last residence. Thirty-seven blocks have been installed; in time there will be 54. The Netzwerk group has been the recipient of two awards, one from the Shoah Foundation for their research, presentations, and post-Holocaust dialogues. While they lay claim to many accomplishments, the road has not always been smooth. Some townspeople were not initially enthusiastic about digging up the past. There have been death threats against Whitelaw and she has been called vicious names. But she brushes these incidents off and continues to encourage her students to pursue their remarkable and significant work. It appears that the attitudes of the townspeople are beginning to change, and some elderly bystanders have now come forward to be interviewed on videotape. A productive educational exchange has developed between Netzwerk and Jewish teenagers from Temple Sinai in Denver, Colorado. The German students have traveled on two separate occasions in Denver, and their Jewish counterparts have been hosted twice by Netzwerk in Bünde. As a result of these exchanges, lifelong friendships have been forged and intercultural understanding fostered between the descendants of perpetrators and victims. ## Audrey Friedman Marcus, a co-founder and Executive Vice President of A.R.E. Publishing, Inc., earned a masters degree in Jewish education from the Rhea Hirsch

School of Education of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in L.A. Her book Survival in Shanghai: The Journals of Fred Marcus 1939-49, written with Rena Krasno, which was published by Pacific View Press in December 2008.