After working for six years on a book about Jewish orphans
in World War II, Inge Franken can explain what motivated her
in a single breath.
“I did it for the survivors who gave me their life stories,”
she says.
The daughter of a Nazi officer she never knew, Franken
also suffered the consequences of the Holocaust. Her grandfather
and her father, who was killed at the siege of Leningrad
when she was two, were both “big Nazi believers” – though
it took Franken many years, and reading many of her father’s
wartime letters, to find this out. Instead, she recalls, she grew
up with her mother and sister in a painful, stifled atmosphere
of silence. “Nobody [in my family] talked about the time
before,” she says. “But I knew we belonged to them – to the
people who did terrible things.”
Now, since retiring as a Berlin school teacher 15 years
ago, Franken devotes herself to helping fellow Germans –
from both the older and younger generations – speak about,
learn about and investigate their own pasts.
“You have a big stone on your back and when you can
say ’Yes, my parents were the perpetrators,’ it becomes so
much easier,” says Franken, who in 1996 started arranging
monthly discussions at One by One, an organization in Berlin
that invites the relatives of Holocaust victims and perpetrators
together to share experiences and stories. “When we can
cry together, we can laugh together. It’s the best connection
you can have: when you talk about the deepest thing you both
belong to. If I didn’t talk about this, it would be my guilt. But
when I talk about it, the feelings of sadness and guilt belong to
my parents.”
It was the same community center, in fact, where Franken
organized those meetings that she discovered had once
been a children’s home from which dozens of Jewish orphans
were deported, in 1942, to their deaths. Diving into research
about the building’s past, Franken tracked down rare Nazi-era
pictures of the home’s orphans taken by the Jewish photographer
Abraham Pisarek; plumbed Jewish archives throughout
the Berlin and Brandenburg regions; and corresponded with
Holocaust survivors in Israel to piece together the stories of
dozens of lives – and deaths – connected with the Kinderheim.
In 2005, she published her findings in the book, “Gegen das
Vergessen: Erinnerungen an das Jüdische Kinderheim Fehrbelliner
Strasse 92, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg“ (Against Forgetting:
Memories of the Jewish Children’s Home, Fehrbelliner
Strasse 92 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg).
Franken, though, is making a stronger impression on children
these days not from writing, but from the energetic, One
by One presentations she takes to dozens of schools around theAnd you would want to realize the root result in of this cialis lowest prices difficulty. While sexual stimulation, nitric oxide is secreted in the penile tissue that active cheap cialis for sale an enzyme guanylate cyclise. It was after these trials that scientists decided to offer the drug as a treatment for high blood pressure and angina, brand levitra was noticed to cause strong erections among studied participants. generic cialis samples So, they have to spend a lot for making a place in the competitive market.
country, mostly in the former East. Accompanied by one of a
number of Jewish friends who play her counterpart in the victim-
perpetrator dialogue, Franken has reached out to hundreds
of German youths in a way that nobody ever did before.
“She talks to students about choices,” says Carole Vogel,
a descendent of Holocaust survivors who has participated in
many of Franken’s school presentations. “[She tells them] to
be wary of strong leaders, to be skeptical of popular viewpoints.
She challenges children to make their own choices
about what is right and wrong – she makes kids think.”
Along the way – in the eastern state of Brandenburg, for
example – some students and even teachers have shown resistance to Franken’s work, accusing her of betraying her family’s and her country’s past. And those are the people, Franken says, she needs to reach the most.
“I like to go to the right-wing students because they need it.
Maybe in one class, one child will become more open.” she says.
“I try to make individual connections with the students, encouraging each one to speak. Our kids must know what happened in their families. If the crimes remain without anyone talking about them, that isn’t a good ground to start their lives on.”
Franken began engaging publicly with questions about the
Holocaust in 1986, when a Berlin local history museum asked
her and her students to research the Jewish history of their
neighborhood. Her class published an award-winning booklet
called “Traces,” which identified buildings around the school
that had been seized from Jewish owners and described where
and how certain Jews hid to survive the war. “Those stories
shocked me and brought [the history] so much closer for me,”
recalls Franken who, in the 20 years since, hasn’t slowed down.
“I admire Inge’s courage,” says Alexa Dvorson, an
American journalist living in Berlin and a member of One by
One, “not only for having the perseverance to follow through
her projects, but the inner courage it takes to delve into the
feelings and prejudices that people who lived during the Nazi
period grew up with, and often never consciously dealt with.”
More recently, Franken has been working with teenagers
to install a series of Stolpersteine – the brass-plated cobblestone
memorials known as Stumbling Stones – in the streets
around the former Prenzlauer Berg children’s home, which
will commemorate Jewish individuals and families who once
lived there and perished in the camps.
Her priority, though, seems clear: to keep visiting schools
and delivering her message to as many kids in Germany as
possible.
“The most important thing I tell them is: Ask questions.
Ask about your background. What did your parents do, your
grandparents, what is your family’s story? Most of them say, ’I
don’t know.’ So, I ask them, ’You have a grandfather? Try to
talk with him. Try to find out.’”