Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Ernst Schäll

Laupheim, Baden-Württemberg

Every day except on Sundays, for more than 20 years, Ernst Schäll, a retired mechanic, would wake up, step out his door and go to the Jewish Cemetery in Laupheim where his workshop, filled with tools and the crumbling parts of tombstones, awaited him. There he would set to work, grinding and drilling, repairing and rebuilding, sculpting each stone with 30 to 70 hours of labor before he replanted it on the grave where it belonged. According to those who watched and sometimes participated with him, Schäll brought more than technical skill and an artist's instinct to his voluntary work restoring graves.

He brought, above all, the will to remember—and to make sure others don't forget—the story of Laupheim's Jews.

"He always inspired younger people to work with him. He understood how to motivate them—not through speaking but through showing, through his work," says Rolf Emmerich, an engineer and long-time associate of Schäll's. "Ernst learned the art and techniques all by himself. He gave his work a professional character, and he helped raise people's consciousness in Laupheim."

It may have been Schäll's own consciousness, haunted by what he'd witnessed as a child during World War II, that drove him in these last decades to preserve Jewish memory. The descendent of tailors from Laupheim, a small city 100 km southeast of Stuttgart, Schäll remembers the close ties his father had with Jewish clients and friends before the war-and also, when he was 14, the day those Jewish families vanished before his eyes. "I can remember the deportation," he recalls. "They brought them to the station. They put them on the trains. Then they took them away. I saw it all. It was a terrible experience. Today, I still see this in my mind."

Schäll started a family and worked as a mechanic for 30 years before he turned his attention to rescuing Laupheim's Jewish past. In the early 1980s, around the same time that he began visiting the dilapidated Jewish cemetery and, through books and practice, taught himself to restore gravestones, Schäll engaged in research and co-authored a 600-page book with genealogist John Bergmann called Der gute Ort. Die Geschichte des Laupheimer jüdischen Friedhofs im Wandel der Zeit (The Good Place: The History of Laupheim's Jewish Cemetery in Changing Times), published in 1983.

Following his retirement, Schäll used funds provided to him by former Laupheim Jewish families in America and elsewhere to buy machinery and continue restoring graves in the 244-year-old cemetery, where he rebuilt on average eight tombstones per year. However, his work didn't stop there. He wrote dozens of articles and ultimately a book, entitled Friedrich Adler: Leben und Werk (Friedrich Adler: Life and Work), about the renowned Laupheim artist and designer who was killed at Auschwitz in 1942.

Schäll also helped found the Museum für Christen und Juden (Museum of Christians and Jews) in 2000 and, volunteering still further energy, mounted a memorial plaque at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery to commemorate the 100 Jews of Laupheim, each one by name, who perished in the Holocaust.

After receiving the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) for outstanding public service in 1988, Schäll won another official honor, the Stauffer Medal, in 2000. But maybe more meaningful to him than the prizes has been the praise from families that Schäll touched directly with his work. "It comes not only from a deep seated sense of justice but also from a heartfelt sense of obligation," says Ann Dorzback, a native of nearby Ulm who now lives in Kentucky. "Ernst Schäll felt our pain, our sorrow, our loss, our hurt and recognized our needs as we had to leave our ancestors behind."

While Schäll acknowledges that Laupheim residents have generally shown approval of his work, he is also aware of the minority that remains opposed to so much sifting through the past. "There are naturally still some people that don't want to know their history and [even some] who still, unfortunately, think in the National Socialist way," he says. His response to them: "Germany needs to remember."

"We can never forget what happened at that time. The pain was so terrible for people that the memory must always stay with us. It's a very important job." 

Schäll stopped fixing tombstones after he suffered a stroke in August of 2004. Then, last May, he lost his wife to cancer. These days he relies heavily on his daughter to help him-and the idea that he will return to the drills and chisels in his workshop is a distant one. But Schäll prepared for this day, having trained an assistant who has already taken over the job of restoring, stone by stone, Laupheim's Jewish graves.

"The cemetery was in a very bad condition when I started on my initiative to repair the stones," Schäll recalls. Now, looking back over his decades of grinding and sanding and remodeling stone, he knows he did more than help recuperate the memory of Jews in Laupheim. He also fulfilled that part in himself that refused, at all costs, to forget.

"I have seen my work through," he says. "The most important thing is that it awakened people's memory."