Looking for Lotte S. (Grimmelshausen Gymnasium / Germany)

11.10.24 First excursion to the Jewish Museum in  Frankfurt

We had a guided tour through the exhibition focused on jewish life in history and today, the stories of 3 families from Frankfurt (Senger, Frank and Rothschild), jewish identity and religion.

• 28.10.24 STUMBELINGSTONES - 24 individual jewish biographies
• 24 Stumbeling Stones – 24 individual Jewish biographies in our hometown
• Students showed the first results of their individual research. 24 biographies based on the stumbeling stones. We worked on connections and the routes of deportation.
• Working with an expert
• Christine Raedler (Zentrum für Regionalgeschichte) worked with us. We studied historical sources („Nachweisung jüdischer Bewohner Gelnhausens vom 9.11.1933“) and tried to read „Sütterlin”.
• Place based learning in the former synagogue
• Guided tour with Christine Raedler
• 11.11.24 Guided tour to the stumbling stones
• Our students will be standing for 2 hours beside “their” stumbeling stones and will give information to other students and people that walk by.
• (3 courses grade 11 participated: Andrea Diallo, Fabian Beß und Lukas Walz)

27.11.24 Getting focussed (Working with Arglosen Archives)

The students presented the biographies and sources, they have been working with,  to Marlene and Lilja (Arolsen Archives). Marlene an Lilja explained, how the archives work and in which ways the students can use the online archive for their individual research. We all discussed, how to focus and finally  have choosen the life of Lotte Sondheimer and her family to get in the center of the project "Facts not fiction". The Arolsen archives contain some search querys.

28.11.24 Meet a rabbi

We invited Rabbi Julien Soussan from Frankfurt to talk with the project's participants and students from Q3 about jewish religion and life today. We also talked about the actual situation in Israel and Gaza. Later Rabbi Soussan also talked with a group of teachers.

26.11.24 Talking with survivors

We participated at an event organiszed by ZDF and the Jewish Claim Conference in the National Library in Frankfurt. Students from 5 schools had the possibility to talk to survivers of the holocaust.

Workshop with Arglosen Archives

Lilja Girgensohn und Marlene Jansch from Arolsen Archives worked with the sudents: the work of Arolsen Archives / KnowHow of working with historical documents / workimg in Teams: history of family Sondheimer / Timline / finding main topics

16.1.25 Exhibition: Children's drawings of KZ Buchenwald

Anyone who closes their eyes to the past becomes blind to the present ​​-  These were the words of the district administrator Thorsten Stolz on Thursday, January 16, 2025; who quoted the former Federal President of Germany Richard von Weizsäcker to open the exhibition “Es gibt hier keine Kinder” (There are no children here) in the presence of students from the Grimmelshausen-Gymnasium Gelnhausen (a secondary school). The exhibition shows 80 drawings of the Holocaust survivor Thomas Geve in the Main-Kinzig-Forum in Gelnhausen. Werner Fromm of Langenselbold was very involved in this exhibition and reported on the personal experiences of his grandfather, who was also imprisoned in the concentration camp of Buchenwald from 1938-44, as a trade unionist and communist. Thomas Geve was a teenager when the National Socialists captured him, and his drawings document his stays in the concentration camps of Birkenau, Auschwitz, Groß-Rosen and Buchenwald. The cruel conditions of his everyday life described in detail on small pieces of paper. The arrival at the ramp at the age of 13, the selection, the disinfection and the tattooing of his prisoner number (Pic. 1), the meager food, hard forced work, hunger (Pic. 2) and illness, camp life, harassment, a gas chamber such as the plans of the various camps in which Geve was interned, the young man kept everything with extreme precision.

Furthermore, the memories of a past school time, are reflected in the “Auschwitz-ABC” (Pic.3). According to Geve it starts with “Appel, block and capo and ends with washing room and fence (Zaun in German, as z is the last letter). For me wearing a blue-white striped prisoner uniform these words were my life for 22 months- in Birkenau, Auschwitz, Groß-Rosen and Buchenwald. I was always alone in the camp, without any family members and just a small number of friends, who one by one disappeared.”

Geve started drawing during his stay in Auschwitz and continued to capture everything on paper right after he was liberated in Buchenwald 1945. But due to his critical state of health, he was forced to stay in the camp. Not being able to move somewhere else, the boy used this time to continue his documentation of his cruel experiences in the system of the national socialists. Originally Geve’s plan was to show the drawings to his father as a report, who managed to successfully flee from Germany to Great Britain, that is why the boy took his drawings with him when he was brought to a children’s home in Switzerland. Finally, the drawings got into Israel and were brought to the museum Yad Vashem. Such a contemporary testimony from a young person’s perspective is of incredible value. And even though these drawings are not as famous as the diary of Anne Frank, they are just as important. These individual fates illustrate the inhuman brutality of the Holocaust.

The project “Facts not Fiction” which is led by Christine Bischoff and Lukas Walz at the Grimmelshausen-Gymnasium in Gelnhausen deals with the life of Lotte Sondheimer, a Jew from Gelnhausen who was murdered in Auschwitz 1942 at the age of 35 years. Students of the project group were particularly impressed by the exhibition and felt encouraged in their own research. They too do not want to close their eyes to the past and find new, unknown facts. Additionally, the group is supported by the leader of the center for regional history in Gelnhausen, Christine Raedler, the “Arolsen Archives”, the international archive for victims and survivors of the holocaust as well as the European Union. The research group aims to produce a fact- based “Graphic Novel” about the life of Lotte Sondheimer.

The Buchenwald Memorial Foundation’s traveling exhibition with children’s drawings by Thomas Geve can be seen until the end of January during the opening hours of the district office.

Yvonne Opalla and Kathleen Heinz

6.2.25 Film "Nacht und Nebel" (By Resnais)

24.2.25 Zoom workshop - How to develop Grafic Novels (with Hannah Brinkmann)

Looking for Lotte S. - On the way to the graphic novel - How can puzzle pieces of a life be translated into the visual language of a graphic novel? How can feelings be depicted graphically? How to fill in gaps and gaps in memory or research? How can we portray ourselves as part of the story? Pupils from the ‘Facts not fiction’ project group explored questions like these in a Zoom meeting with Berlin artist Hannah Brinkmann on 24 February 2025, with Arolsen Archives staff Marlene Jatsch and Lilija Girgensohn, educational partner of the Grimmels also present in the background.

After the students had given a brief insight into the results of their research, Hannah Brinkmann used selected examples of graphic novel literature to demonstrate design and presentation elements as well as artistic approaches to history.

Art Spiegelmann's series ‘MAUS.Geschichte eines Überlebenden’ (1986) is a first example. By depicting people as animals, the racial thinking of the Nazis is taken to the extreme here. As a creative motif, Hannah refers to the exercise bike on which the father sits while he talks about Auschwitz - a pictorial form of representation of stagnation in relation to memory.

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ (2017), illustrated and narrated by Ari Folman and David Polonski, impressively depicts how Jews lost more and more freedom of movement in the 1930s and how the Frank family - as an example for many - had to live in hiding for years. The depiction of the inhabitants of the house as wind-up dolls - always the same lyre.....

Nora Krug chose a different, collage-like narrative form in her biographical graphic novel ‘Heimat’ (2018), in which she depicts her very individual confrontation with her family history, guilt, belonging and identity.

What do people who experienced and survived the Holocaust as children remember? This is the starting point of Emmie Arbel's life story, which Barbara Yelin tells in the graphic novels ‘Aber ich lebe’ (2022) and ‘Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory’ (2023). What is exciting about her approach is the interweaving of present and past. For example, a sugar spoon, the only figurative memento of the protagonist's mother, leads back into the history of memory. The artist's encounter with the Holocaust survivors is also narrated as part of the story.

Hadya picks up on this idea in the subsequent conversation: ‘I think it would be exciting if we could also have ourselves drawn and thus become part of the story.’ Anna had the idea of playing with colours and their symbolic power: ‘In the course of Lotte's story, the colours may increasingly fade. But I believe that when she plays theatre, the colours are bright and vibrant again, because theatre was perhaps a momentary escape from hopelessness for her.’ How do we depict what we don't know? was a question that occupied Felix and Maike. Perhaps a hole or a dark spot is suitable for showing gaps in memory or what has been lost.

In the second part of the workshop, Hannah Brinkmann presented her own work and impressed the audience with a reading from ‘Zeit heilt keine Wunden. The life of Ernst Grube’ (2024). As a child, Grube survived Theresienstadt and later joined the communist movement in West Germany, where he was convicted and imprisoned. In addition to dealing with anti-Semitism during the Nazi era, Brinkmann's work also critically examines anti-communism in the young FRG. What is impressive for those listening and watching the reading via Zoom is how Hannah Brinkmann succeeds in visualising emotions through forms and plant metaphors.

The artist's expressive visual language and her reflective approach to history as well as her sensitive focus on the human made the project participants curious about the joint workshop on 13 and 14 March, in which Hannah Brinkmann will work with the pupils at the Grimmels.

Christine Bischoff and Lukas Walz

13.-14. 3.25 The construction of the storyboard

13.3.25 Exhibition "Solen Memory"

31.3.25 Zoom meeting with the historical Caroline Hebrling

3.-4.4.25 Excursion to "80 years of liberation of KZ Ohrdruf"

3.4.-6.4.25 Conference in Bratislava