Obermayer Award

“Did you ever tell this? She said No, no one ever asked.”

Sabeth Schmidthals uses sensitivity and empathy to empower her students to fight hate and anti-Semitism

The auditorium of the Theodor Heuss Community School (Theodor-Heuss-Gemeinschaftschule) rings with the voices of excited pupils. Then, a hush comes over the room. 

On stage, in a series of short scenes, teenagers read documents detailing the fate of a Jewish couple in Nazi Germany. Martin and Helene Meyerowitz lost their rights, their property, their family. In 1943, Helene was deported from the freight train depot right across the street from the high school, and murdered.

 “All I want is to see my children again,” declares Helene Meyerowitz on the eve of her deportation. She is played by Nayera, a tall young woman wearing a hijab and long robes. In the audience is Rosa Marshall, 79, a granddaughter of Helene and Martin Meyerowitz. She has come from England for the performance. After the finale, she embraces Nayera as if reunited with a long lost relative.

 “I thought she played the part beautifully and very meaningfully,” Marshall says later, in an e-mail.

Nayera is one of many students of Arab, Turkish, and other non-German backgrounds on stage today, playing the parts of Jews and Nazis in this presentation. They are doing so with commitment, understanding, and emotion, thanks largely to the efforts of history and German teacher Sabeth Schmidthals. Schmidthals has introduced countless pupils to the history of the persecution of Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany. Her aim is to empower them to combat hate and anti-Semitism using creative teaching methods combined with sensitivity and empathy. 

Not only that, she has brought her students on trips to Israel as well as to sites of Holocaust history in Poland, France, and Spain. The trips have had a huge impact, says school principal Annedore Dierker. 

About 80 percent of the school’s 1,000 pupils have roots in other countries; many come from war-torn areas in the Middle East. Some are not yet German citizens, and others are officially refugees without a promise of a permanent home here, Dierker says. They often know little or nothing about Germany, let alone the history of the Holocaust. Many have experienced discrimination themselves.

Schmidthals has worked on issues dealing with the Nazi era, racism, and anti-Semitism since the 1980s. A key moment came in 2014-15, when her teenage pupils read the autobiography of German Jewish Holocaust survivor Inge Deutschkron, I Wore the Yellow Star (Ich trug den gelben Stern). That’s when Schmidthals started a project called My History, Your History, in which 9th graders tell others where their families came from and share their stories of migration. 

One student of Palestinian background “started to cry when she spoke of her family history. She was asked, ‘Did you ever tell this?’ She said, ‘No, no one ever asked.’ And then I began to understand,” says Schmidthals. “In my opinion, their negative attitude to the theme of Jews and persecution is the flipside of the feeling that no one is interested in their [own] suffering.”

In 2017, she formally launched a working group called Remembrance (AG Erinnern) to raise awareness of history and combat hate and anti-Semitism. She was inspired by her son Maxim, who had spent a year volunteering at the House of the Wannsee Conference archive, a memorial at the site where top-level Nazis mapped out their genocide of European Jewry in January 1942.

At the Remembrance working group, listening is key and so is sharing; participants have learned to empathize with others in part through being welcomed to tell their own stories.

Schmidthals “understood that her students would only develop an empathy for the faith of the victims if they would be treated with appreciation themselves…. With an enormous patience, she would help them with problems in the family, work, etc.,” says Elke Gryglewski, deputy director of the House of the Wannsee Conference.

On the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938, pupils file out of the Theodor Heuss Community School after the theater performance. They cross the street for a ceremony at the site of the former freight train station from which some 30,000 Jews, including Helene Meyerowitz, were deported from 1942 to 1944. Today, a section of track, called Track 69, and a memorial mark the spot. The granddaughter the Meyerowitzes never met, Rosa Marshall, born in London to parents who fled Nazi Germany, is among the many who lay flowers there on this day.

Before working with Schmidthals, “I didn’t know anything about Jewish people” comments Isra, 21, a high school graduate of Palestinian background who also took part in today’s presentation. Her parents once refused to let her join the group’s trip to Israel, but a lot has changed since then. “People say we shouldn’t talk about the past. But we don’t want the past to be repeated,” she says. 

While sharing their stories is essential to developing empathy, it’s “important to me that pupils should avoid comparing their suffering,” said Schmidthals. “For each person, their own suffering is important, and by recognizing this we help them see the suffering of others.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2020