Obermayer Award

“I wanted to know about living Jews.”

Marion Welsch believes in the power of personal stories to bring people together

by Toby Axelrod

For Marion Welsch, a 2018 vacation in Israel opened a door to history practically in her own backyard. She had long been working on issues related to local Jewish history, and the ripple effects of her work have been felt far and wide. Now, far from home, she was hardly expecting another project to come her way.

A retired educator, Welsch lives with her husband in Kleinmachnow, southwest of Berlin. For years, she has been involved – both professionally and as a volunteer – with researching local Jewish history, and bringing Jews and non-Jews together to share life stories and build relationships. The goal: creating a future based on understanding the past. “You have to keep bringing people together to tell their stories,” she says. 

The latest chapter unfolded at a vineyard in Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert of southern Israel. She and her husband, Hubertus, stayed in a little cabin. “There was another one next to us. The woman staying there heard us speaking German,” says Welsch.

The woman was Maya Yuval, who told Welsch she had grown up in a German-speaking family in Haifa, Welsch recalls. “When we asked where her family came from, Maya said, ‘A small town in the middle of nowhere: Schenklengsfeld,’” in the state of Hesse. Welsch thought: “That is impossible. My mother comes from there!”

It was like a meeting between long-lost friends; they had a lot to catch up on. Yuval eventually asked if Welsch might help decipher some family letters, written in old-fashioned German script. These letters would become the core of Welsch’s second book: “A Washing Machine in Haifa” (Eine Waschmaschine in Haifa). It chronicles a Jewish family’s escape from Germany, and their complicated relationship to their former neighbors after the war.

For Yuval, the meeting opened a window onto her own family history. “I learned a lot from [Marion] because she read the letters that I couldn’t read,” says Yuval, who is hoping to have the book translated into Hebrew. 

It happened in part because Welsch already had become interested in local Jewish history after working on a biography of her father, who had turned 19 at the end of World War II.

“What did people have against their neighbors?”

Back in 2001, when Welsch was helping care for her father in a senior home in eastern Germany, she started asking him what he remembered about the war. The resulting book, “Talk to Me” (Sprich mit mir) came out in 2005.

After that, Welsch became increasingly interested in German-Jewish history before and after World War II. “I thought, ‘What did people have against their neighbors, the Jews?’” In her search for answers, she started to learn about Judaism. She also began visiting the Sukkat Schalom synagogue in Berlin, led by the historian and Rabbi Andreas Nachama. They became friends.

"I had to go where the Jews were because they did not come to me," she quips. “I wanted to know about living Jews, not dead Jews. Everyone talked about the Holocaust, and one could not look over this wall.”

In 2004, she joined the group "Stolpersteine in Kleinmachnow,” under the leadership of Martin Bindemann, then deacon of the town’s Protestant church. In 2008, together with the Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig, a 2005 Obermayer Award winner, the group installed about 20 of the small brass-plated memorials (called Stolpersteine) in front of the homes of Jews who had once lived in their town.

By the time locals became interested in the idea of placing Stolpersteine, Welsch had already been working on the topic, says Bindemann. “She had done preliminary work and presented the first research results,” he says, enriching the group with her knowledge and ultimately gaining support from the local community.

It wasn’t easy at first, Welsch recalls. It took years to get the list of Jewish residents from the census of 1936 from the community archive, probably because residents didn’t want to be associated with the Nazi past, she surmises.

“There was no active resistance, but one thing still bothers me today,” she says. “The local residents said the stones may not be [placed] in the middle of a sand pathway. They have to be right up against the fence. And then people put things over them — sand and leaves.”

She adds that some of the people who live in those houses are descendants of the people who moved in when the Jews were evicted. “They have the feeling that people think they were Nazis. That is not right; they are another generation.”

“There wasn’t a dry eye…”

 In 2009 she began working as managing director for the newly established Gollwitz Castle Meeting Center (Begegnungsstätte Schloss Gollwitz) — a place of encounters for Jews and non-Jews located in the former East German state of Brandenburg. It was in this capacity that she made many visits to Israel, reconnecting with former visitors to Gollwitz and meeting their children and grandchildren. 

In 2013, working with the AMCHA Jerusalem Foundation, which provides psycho-social support for Holocaust survivors, she organized grandparents-grandchildren encounter week at Gollwitz for German non-Jews and Israelis with roots in Germany. This encounter was repeated in 2019.

The participants spent time together at the Gollwitz center, went on excursions, and held eyewitness discussions with students at a local high school. Some grandchildren said this was the first time they had heard their grandparent’s stories. Welsch said that she was surprised to learn that, like the German families she knew, Israeli grandparents also did not always share their history with their own children and grandchildren. 

The initial challenge for the gathering was helping people to relax. One grandparent from Israel, George Shefi, described the atmosphere at the first meeting as “correct but rather stiff.”

“I personally was rather apprehensive as I was still having problems meeting Germans that were more or less grown-ups during the war,” noted Shefi, who was born in Berlin in 1931 and escaped via the Kindertransport to England in 1938. 

But things changed eventually, Shefi wrote in a letter recommending Welsch for an Obermayer Award: “The tasks that Marion gave us slowly put us together… When we parted, there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere. As a matter of fact, I am still in contact with some of the folks I met.” Shefi later helped Welsch organize roundtable witness talks in Brandenburg schools, together with Rudi Pahnke, board chair of the Institute for New Impulses association.

After focusing on the history of her own backyard and organizing encounters in Gollwitz, Welsch found herself back in the town of her roots, so to speak. It started with that accidental and fortuitous meeting in 2018 with Maya Yuval and her husband, Yehuda, in Israel.

During that encounter, Welsch got in touch with Karl Honikel, head of the Judaica Museum in Schenklengsfeld. “He knew all the details about my family,” Maya recalls. “He knew the family tree and where everyone had lived and when people went to Israel. He knew everything.”

Welsch came back to Israel a few months later to visit the Yuvals. This time, she brought her niece, Luise Reinhard, who still lived in Schenklengsfeld and who assisted with the book. “Marion opened the desk in my parents’ house and saw all the old letters. She started to read them and got the idea to research about my family,” Maya says.

The Jewish Katz/Gutmann family had fled Nazi Germany in the fall of 1936, after having to sell their business and property for less than they were worth in order to finance the trip and to start a new home. They settled in Haifa, in what was then British-run Palestine. 

The 14 letters, from October 1946 to December 1949, provide a glimpse into the difficulties of postwar restitution. 

The book’s title stems from the first letter in the series: Maya’s uncle wrote to the new owner of the family’s department store, asking if the store had spare parts for a washing machine he had brought with him when the family fled. The man said he was broke and could not help. But he did ask for an official letter of recommendation, without which the American armed forces would not allow him to reopen the department store. Maya’s uncle refused to write such a letter. 

“When Marion told this story to the people of the village in September 2022, when we were there, they were all laughing about the man’s being broke,” says Yehuda Yuval. “They knew it was not true.”

“It was a tough situation for him and for our family,” adds Maya. “Everyone did what they could to survive. I am glad that this man bought the house and my grandmother could take the whole family to Israel. We survived and our family continued.”

Telling the story of one family, the book – “a memorial on paper” – sheds light “on the immediate post-war period with its sad reality of so-called reparations and denazification,” wrote Andreas Nachama in his letter recommending Welsch for an Obermayer Award. “It shows that the actors in Germany were not interested in the injustices committed.

“The book’s success is no surprise,” Nachama wrote. “Rather, it fits into the author’s continuous commitment to German-Jewish relations and personal encounters.”

“I wanted to know more about how people think who are on the other side of our history,” says Welsch. “Everyone has their own story: There is no such thing as ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Germans.’ My father always said, when we encountered prejudice, ‘Yes, oh yes, all red cars come from Düsseldorf.’”

Clearly, even in her retirement Welsch cannot resist a new project. After all, this one practically fell in her lap. And she continues her interest in telling the stories of German Jews. “I don’t know what I will do now,” she says. “But something will come my way.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2023