Obermayer Award

“The most painful rejection…would be in the continued refusal to remember.” 

Friederike Fechner bought a building, brought a family together, and reminded a city about its forgotten history

Eighty years after a German Jewish family threatened by Nazi persecution fled its home and shuttered its business, more than a dozen descendants of the Blach family gathered at the German embassy in London. For many, it was the first time they had ever met.

The emotion-packed occasion that brought them there at the end of April, 2018—from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States—was as unlikely as their reunification: a riveting presentation by Friederike Fechner, a German cellist and cultural advocate who has spent years unearthing the story of the Blach family and their lives in Stralsund, a medieval port city on Germany's Baltic coast. Other descendants live in Israel and the Netherlands.

For generations, the Blachs lived in and operated a successful leatherware business in Stralsund. The warehouse and shop was housed in a stunning 17th century gabled roof building where the family also lived in a residence above street level. While the city's Jewish community was relatively small, it played a vital role in the city's economic life until it was devastated under the rise of Nazi rule.

Now, as a result of Fechner's extraordinary devotion to recovering their story, the far-flung descendants of the Blach family have been connected with each other, thrilled to discover that they had living relatives they never were aware of. A much anticipated worldwide reunion that was scheduled to take place in Stralsund in the summer of 2020 has been postponed to 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the women who helped initiate the program at the embassy was Gaby Glassman-Simons, a London psychologist whose mother was one of the few Blach family Holocaust survivors. Peter Weishut, from The Netherlands, is the oldest living Holocaust survivor of the Blach family. 

Fechner's unlikely journey to restore the knowledge about the Blachs and the city's other Jewish citizens began about eight years ago, when she and her husband, Martin, bought the neglected property and undertook an ambitious renovation.

The Fechners had moved to the city in the former East Germany from Hamburg in 1994, eager to contribute to the city's revitalization after it suffered devastation during Nazi rule and decades of economic decline under communism. Fechner became active in the city's civic and cultural life, performing concerts, teaching, and managing a chamber concert series.

But in ways that Fechner could never have imagined, the keys to her new building opened a path of historical discovery about the Blachs and the city's Jewish community that has had a profound impact on Stralsund and beyond, and on the lives of people from across the globe.

A Renovation, and a Restoration

In the years since the Blachs occupied the building, it had fallen into disrepair. With its bare bricks and boarded up windows, it was like a ruin, Fechner recalled. But the couple recognized an opportunity to restore the building's grace and stature. In 2014, when the Fechner's masterful renovation won a civic prize for historic preservation, Fechner began to research the building's history for a presentation at the awards ceremony. 

With the help of the city's archives, she learned that the Blachs owned the building from 1880 until 1934, when they lost their property under Nazi rule. The proprietors and owners were Selma and Julius Blach and their son, Friedrich, a highly decorated Prussian officer wounded during WWI. He was able to emigrate to the U.S. in 1937. 

All of Friedrich Blach's siblings, as well as many other relatives, perished in the Holocaust. 

The more Fechner uncovered about the Blachs, the deeper she was drawn in, determined to trace the family's story and know whether there were living descendants. In countless hours of her own time and resources, Fechner amassed a treasure trove of archival documents: birth and death certificates, business records, photographs, and more. She created a detailed portrait of the German Jewish family's lineage, their roots in the Jewish community dating back 300 years, their burial sites, the family's tragic losses during the Holocaust, and clues about living Blach family descendants.

A touchpoint came five years ago, when Fechner sent an email to Casey Blake, an American studies professor at Columbia University. By chance, a genealogical expert Fechner met socially made the connection to the Blach family.

“By any chance, are you the grandson of Friedrich Blach?” she asked Blake. 

“Yes,” and the great grandson of Julius Blach, he replied. “My grandfather Friedrich and grandmother Kate managed to escape Germany during the Nazi period, eventually settling in New York with their children,” he wrote.

The two began a correspondence that extended to Blake's sister, Christina Blake Oliver, and eventually to other members of the extended Blach family Fechner had discovered.

“This began a remarkable process of discovery or rediscovery for my family,” Blake recalls.

“There was this feeling of this hand reaching across the Atlantic ocean and reaching across a century, of war and suffering and loss. This had an extraordinary emotional impact on me, on my sister, on all of us,” Blake says.

For Fechner, finding Blake was thrilling. “I was so moved because I thought right away that this is going to be something really special, to have found a descendant of the family who has lived here,” in her building.

When they met a few months later in New York City, Fechner shared some of the archival material she had gathered. Seeing and touching these documents was deeply moving for Blake. “It's important to understand, the Nazi genocide was not only an erasure of human beings, but of memory and culture as well,” he says.

Blake visited Fechner in Stralsund on a trip with his daughters that he says left a lasting impression. When he was growing up in New York, his grandfather and his father were very connected with German culture but spoke little about the family's life before the Holocaust. Seeing his family's home and Fechner's work to commemorate his family and the Jewish community dispelled some of the mystery of his childhood. 

For the 59-year-old Fechner, whose grandfather was a general in the Second World War, her youth was similarly marked by a lack of openness about the war. Growing up, she heard little about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. “They didn't talk about it,” she recalled about her parents in an interview. 

But as she pursued her music studies in Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S., she had more personal contact with Jewish musicians. “When I came to study in Bloomington [at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music], I went to every Jewish museum and was fascinated by Jewish literature and the Jewish faith,” she said in an interview. 

The extraordinary toll of the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust weighed on her emotionally.

Over the past seven years, and continuing to today, Fechner has transformed that compassion into a broader vision, recognizing that there is tremendous value in sharing the history of Stralsund's Jewish residents with the public. In only a few years, Fechner has initiated scores of remembrance programs and other public displays to raise awareness of Stralsund's Jewish history and culture in a city where almost no Jews survived the Holocaust and where today few, if any, Jews live.

Residents and visitors now see signs of Jewish life that existed before the Holocaust, as well as Stolpersteine – brass “stumbling stone” memorial markers noting Jews who died during the Holocaust. 

In a stirring ceremony last February, Glassman-Simons traveled from London to take part in the March of the Living to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first deportations of Jews from Stralsund. 

Notably, Fechner has woven her artistic life as a cellist into programs of remembrance in Stralsund and abroad, featuring works by Jewish composers including those who perished in the Holocaust. She brings these and other programs to schools as well as to public and civic performances.

She is founder  of the Initiative for the Memory of Jewish Life in Stralsund, an organization that advances remembrance of Jewish history through programs that counter anti-Semitism and racial intolerance, making that history relevant for today's generation.

Working with schools gives Fechner a sense of hope for the future. One of her music students who is a teacher developed a program with her students scheduled for 2021 that will feature Jewish music and poetry written by Holocaust survivors. 

Among other plans is an online memorial book that will include Stralsund's Jews who perished in the Holocaust. 

Today, under the Fechners' meticulous guardianship, the renovated building, with its peach colored façade, attracts notice from passersby. It sits on a lively street with cafes, a pizza bistro, and a toy shop. In a nod to the building's past, the front proudly displays the name “Lederhandel Gebr. Blach,” with lettering painted in the original style. Working with the city, Fechner arranged for the placement of stolpersteine—the brass memorial stones—to mark the names of the family residents who died in the Holocaust.  

At the end of her remarks in London, Fechner said many people ask her why she does this work. She has been profoundly moved by the fate of the former residents of her home in Stralsund, she said. But beyond that, “I wanted to give understanding and friendship a chance and convey a different impression of Stralsund, Germany, and the Germans.” There is a “dark heavy cloud that hovers over our country and the German people,” she acknowledged. 

“The most painful rejection of these innocent and individual victims would be in the continued refusal to remember—in forgetting.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2021