Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Peter Franz

Weimar, Thuringia

Born in 1941 and raised by his grandparents in the Thuringian town of Apolda, the pastor Peter Franz first learned about the Holocaust when he was 16 and discovered a street near his home bearing the name Bernhard Prager. “I asked my grandmother who was this Bernhard Prager, and she told me he was a beloved Jewish man and leather handler whose family was deported during the war to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and other death camps. It was the first time I had heard about Jewish life in Apolda, and I felt a sadness and a desire to know more,” says Franz.

A full 50 years later, Franz was instrumental in founding the Prager Haus Verein, an association that in 2007 bought and restored Bernhard Prager’s dilapidated former residence and business, turning it into a cultural and information center that today stands as a permanent site of remembrance for Apolda’s Jews who were persecuted and murdered under the Nazis. Franz leads the 55-member association, which commemorates Kristallnacht every year at the Prager Haus. The collection features troves of books, photographs and archived material documenting family histories, wartime resistance and the town’s Jewish past—including letters written by Apolda residents from concentration camps, and conversations recorded between Apolda students and the town’s Holocaust survivors, which Franz compiled through painstaking effort.

Franz, who immersed himself in the Old Testament while studying evangelical theology at University of Jena, says he grew passionate to uncover his region’s Jewish history during the 1980s after meeting the renowned cantor of Berlin’s Jewish community, Estrongo Nachama, and participating with the Christian Peace Conference. That experience “inspired me to investigate Jewish life in Apolda—to find out which families had lived there, what they did, who were their children, and what were their fates” says Franz. “I thought, ‘Why doesn’t anyone speak about these people? They all lived and wanted to live— and why didn’t we let them live?’ The Jewish destiny deeply moved me. I was interested in how the Holocaust had affected people in Apolda, and who had been impacted. So I researched: I sat in city archives, I spoke with many older people and asked about the Jews they knew who once lived here, and I wrote down their stories based on more than 100 interviews.”

One of Franz’s chief accomplishments was the thorough, encyclopedic book he completed, which totaled 380 pages, chronicling the history and family stories of Jews from Apolda, who numbered around 120 before the war (copies of the book may be found at Yad Vashem and the Leo Baeck Institute). Combining personal testimonies with information he gleaned from local and federal archives, church and land registries, Franz was also able to craft short books for young people using simple dialogue to tell the stories of Jews deported from Apolda who survived the war. More than a dozen of his published booklets are available at the Prager Haus, including Looked For, Found, Jewish Stories, and other titles that explore family histories of Apolda’s Jews as well as tales about brave Germans who hid their Jewish neighbors during the war.

Additionally, for years Franz has guided visitors on tours past Jewish homes and landmarks in Apolda, reconnected Jewish ancestors of Apolda residents with their family roots, and led efforts to install some 60 Stolpersteine outside former Jewish homes and businesses, with more scheduled to be installed next year. In one instance, Franz worked for a full year with Zeev Raphael, a descendent of Jews from Apolda who perished in the Holocaust, to help write Eine Jüdische Familie in Thüringen (A Jewish Family In Thuringia), a biography of his second cousin, Käthe Raphael, who survived the war and is now 91.

But Franz’s work has also come at a cost. He has faced aggressive resistance from neo-Nazi groups, who destroyed some of the display cabinets he erected at the Prager Haus, and at one point left two pigs’ heads outside the entrance of the building. Undeterred, says Franz, “most of the residents accept us, our mayor supports us, and we continue.” The Prager Haus continues to regularly host exhibitions, presentations and talks, as well as musical and literary performances featuring Jewish artists. Meanwhile, Franz has cooperated with local schools to educate young people about the resurgent threat of right-wing extremism, and involved students in research work at the association.

The threats by neo-Nazis further “show the importance of Peter Franz’s work, [as] he and the association are even more motivated by those provocations to avoid history repeating itself,” says Wolfgang Peller of Berlin, who praises Franz for his “outstanding personal involvement and subordination of personal interests [ensuring] that the Jewish history of Apolda is kept alive.” Franz himself sees direct parallels between the history of the Holocaust and the migrant crisis that is currently shaking Europe. “Now there is discrimination against refugees fleeing from war, whose human rights are not respected. We must always remember how those poor victims were treated so that it is never repeated—so that people are never again thrown out of the country or killed. People must be allowed life and freedom, peace and justice,” says Franz.

Now, he hopes the younger generation can continue the work of Jewish remembrance that he helped start in Apolda. “I will go on with my work until I can’t any longer, but others must carry it on,” says Franz. “The interest in the past must stay alive. People must learn not to do evil but to do good. It’s a very simple ethic: freedom, togetherness, hope. Man mustn’t do wrong. Man must remember, and do better.”