Obermayer Award

“Kids don’t want to hear adults say ‘You can’t understand that yet.’”

Roswitha Weber introduces Jewish culture, Nazi crimes, and the importance of empathy to elementary school students

by Toby Axelrod

Educator Roswitha Weber has spent her career helping children recognize and embrace their natural capacity for empathy. At the same time, she has taught them about the worst that can happen if people fail to care for one another.

From 1988 until her retirement in 2015, Weber taught German, French, religion, and other subjects at the elementary school in Kenzingen, a town in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. In the mid-1990s, as part of an effort to promote tolerance and acceptance of diversity, she introduced the subject of the Nazi past to third and fourth graders.

In Germany, it is highly unusual to discuss the fate of Jews in wartime Germany prior to the teen years. But Weber is convinced that the topic can — and should — be brought up in an age-appropriate way.

For the very young, that means introducing them to Jewish culture through songs, holidays, and foods, for example. For older children, it means helping them identify with Jewish children who suffered persecution in Nazi Germany. 

And they are eager to learn. “Kids don’t want to hear adults say ‘You can’t understand that yet’ or ‘let’s leave the topic, we don’t really know’, or ‘it was so long ago, let it go,’” Weber says.

Over the years, she has overcome much resistance, whether from people who think younger children can’t handle this subject or from people who think the topic should be laid to rest and no longer discussed. 

Weber’s answer to skeptics: Don’t underestimate kids. They know more than you might think, and there are ways to introduce even the toughest of subjects. Most important, a child who learns to tap into their natural empathy will be more interested in history and better able to apply the lessons to their own interactions with family, friends, and newcomers.

Through persistence, she has won over those critics. Today, as a retiree, she is still busy writing, mentoring new teachers, and organizing events dedicated to remembrance of the Jewish life of her town and surrounding district.

Among her many activities: She edits the regional history book series “The Gate” (Die Pforte), and has published numerous articles on themes related to Jewish history; she organized an interdisciplinary network of influencers in Holocaust education to help coach new teachers; and she has initiated a regular ecumenical meeting of religion teachers from surrounding towns, as part of her effort to include them in Holocaust education.

Her former colleagues are now digitizing her Holocaust education curriculum for use in the classroom and other educational venues. 

“She described her fear…”

Weber’s activism began with a book. In 1992, she read Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher’s 1986 autobiography, “I am a Star.” Auerbacher was born in Kippenheim, just a 15-minute drive north of Kenzingen. She and her parents were deported to the Nazis’ Theresienstadt concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia in 1942. Auerbacher was seven years old. 

“It was the first book I read on the theme where I was convinced that I absolutely have to introduce it to my fourth graders,” says Weber, who was born in 1952 in the town of Müllheim, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Kenzingen.

Auerbacher “takes a child’s perspective” on history, says Weber. “She described her fear when she heard or saw people with boots — she would get a chill down her spine. She talked about how she celebrated her birthday in the camp — one time her mother made something for her doll out of an old rag” as a gift.

“I ask children how they celebrate their own birthday, and to compare that with how Inge celebrated hers,” says Weber. “I cannot enter the classroom and say, ‘Today we are learning about the Holocaust.’ It would fail. First I have to be sure they can understand and can empathize. And then I give them the impulse to speak about it at home.”

Jumping off from their lessons, the pupils helped develop rules to prevent bullying in their class, Weber says. “Everyone can share their opinion, there’s no name-calling, and we have students who help settle fights amicably. If there is a fight between kids during recess, the ‘Recess Angels’ — pupils themselves — try to help resolve the problem. If that doesn’t work, they have to go to a teacher.

“People often underestimate kids, and they shouldn’t,” Weber adds. “Kids understand. What happened was unjust. These were kids like everyone else, only they were Jewish. Why were they made to suffer so much? Why did people join in?”

Auerbacher has met often with the Kenzingen pupils over the years, especially on the annual Inge Auerbacher Day initiated by Weber some 20 years ago. “You have to bring something familiar to children,” says Auerbacher, who never lost her local accent despite having lived in the United States since 1946. “The children see: No, she doesn’t look any different from us. She dresses like we do and speaks like us.’”

Roswitha Weber “is one in a million,” she adds. “For many years she has been involved in bringing this whole situation, the Jewish situation, to life, and helping children become better people so this wouldn’t happen again.”

“It was not about guilt…”

Growing up in post-war Germany, Weber attended a boarding school with liberal social values, located not far from the German border with France and Switzerland. One of her uncles had been in the SS. “For my grandparents, this son was something shameful,” Weber says. “But he had no choice. He was blond with blue eyes, and he had to join. He served in the east, in Latvia. I did not want to know everything that happened there, and I found in my own family there were people who did not want to know anything.” 

So Weber understood when some parents and grandparents of her pupils were not always keen on this subject being taught. “I met with the grandfathers and invited them to class,” she recalls. She tried to convince them “that it was not about guilt, but that they have the responsibility to discuss their memories and to do this remembrance work.”

Eventually, she says, most people understood and even talked with the pupils about their own wartime experiences. That prompted other children to seek out what happened in their own family.

On a few occasions, parents criticized her methods, such as when she introduced Jewish culture, including dances and baking traditional Jewish treats, to young children. She gave them a homework assignment to talk to their families about it. “Because you now know more than they do,” she told the students. 

“I was attacked for this,” she says. 

Another time, a parent threatened her after she admonished older children for bullying classmates who had a Congolese father. “They did not know any German except guten Tag and danke. They were attacked during the recess and cursed by older kids who came from right-wing families. I made [the bullies] apologize, and we had a discussion. I explained that these were children from France, but they did not care. They didn’t want to understand.

“That afternoon I was threatened by one of their parents, who said that we should keep an eye on our own children. At the time, we had three young children at home. They were trying to intimidate me. There was a long back and forth. But that was the only time it happened, and eventually the tensions fizzled out.”

There were also colleagues who were not so convinced. “They said, ‘Why do you make such a fuss about this?’” says Weber. “That eventually ended, too.” 

She adds, “I had the feeling that my educational work with parents paid off. Eventually, the parents thanked us for handling this theme and for nurturing these values at the school. To this day, I get a lot of support.”

Filmmaker Bodo Alaze saw Roswitha Weber’s commitment up close, when his youngest child was in her class. Alaze, who was then volunteering his videography skills in the school, was asked whether he could film Inge Auerbacher’s visit. “It was the beginning of a wonderful collaboration that continues to this day,” says Alaze, who is now the webmaster for the school’s website.

At first he wondered, “How can we talk about the Holocaust at that age?” Over a few months, the children, including his son, read excerpts from Auerbacher’s books and were urged to put themselves in her shoes. When Auerbacher came from the U.S. to visit, Alaze filmed the encounter. “She was a wonderful bridge, because she wrote from the viewpoint of a child,” he recalls. Another time, Weber “had an old suitcase and opened it with the kids. There was a Star of David inside, and she explained to all the kids what it was.”

 Weber’s passion for the topic didn’t only affect the children, says Alaze. “With her tireless imagination and incredible perseverance, she has been able to realize her vision in this school,” Alaze wrote in recommending Weber for an Obermayer Award. “The school staff has been taken along on this journey. … Parents were involved. So was I.”

Thanks to Weber’s suggestion and persistence, the German federal government invited Auerbacher to address the Bundestag (the national parliament) on annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in January 2022. Afterward, students at the UNESCO School in Emmendingen, near Kenzingen, had the chance to interview Auerbacher. Their conversation was broadcast live to local schools.  

“She speaks in front of [former chancellor] Angela Merkel and other politicians, and it is crazy that Roswitha Weber is able to get her to a small village and talk to us,” says Nina Adolph, age 17, who took part in the interview. 

“You could feel the whole room was so concentrated on what [Auerbacher] said,” says Leo Sillmann, 16. 

“She gave us the feeling that we were there in the moment with her,” says Sophia Fischer, 18.

The teens are now raising money so they can go to New York and record an interview with Auerbacher, says history teacher Benjamin Kleinstück, who manages the Inge Auerbacher Contemporary Witness Project at the school. “If we can talk with children about death and about God, we can talk about the Holocaust with them, in their special language,” says Kleinstück, whose daughter is also a former student of Weber. “They can feel, they can learn, and — this is most important — they can ask. 

“Now we can see in the upper grades that they are still interested,” he adds. “They all want to see Inge Auerbacher next year. Every Monday ten of these teenagers are sitting in the school planning: ‘How can we fly to New York? How can we interview Inge and save her for the future?’ Without Roswitha, there would be nothing.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2023