A champion of history
German man's preservation of Jewish history earsn national award nomination

By Gina Carbone
gcarbone@seacoastonline.com

   This is a day to remember - in Germany.
    Jan. 27 is national German Holocaust Memorial Day and the 58th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945.
   Local descendants of the Marum family - including Peter Stern, of Hampton - will also remember this day, as they are nominating one of seven German citizens to be honored this evening with the Obermayer German Jewish History Award for contributions to the preservation of Jewish history.
   Often, anti-Semitism is the main focus when it comes to commemorating the Holocaust in Europe, especially Germany. The Obermayer Awards, sponsored by the German Jewish Community History Council, the president of the Berlin Parliament and the German Jewish special interest group of JewishGen, hope to shift perspectives to the good works ordinary, non-Jewish, German citizens have done to protect Jewish culture.
   Peter Stern, 70, is the eldest of the Marum cousins, originally from Bad Sobernheim, near Frankfurt, Germany. Stern emigrated to the United States as a child in 1938 and returned to Bad Sobernheim after the war to work for about 30 years. While he and his immediate family were spared the horrors of the Holocaust, his cousin, Kathrin Krakaeur, of Clinton, Mass., says their great-uncle stayed in Bad Sobernheim and was deported in 1942.
   After reading about the Obermayer Awards last year in a New York Times article, Krakauer, Stern and a dozen members of their family from Massachusetts to Germany decided to nominate 59-year-old elementary school teacher Hans-Eberhard Berkemann for his selfless work to preserve Jewish history in the Bad Sobernheim region.
   Berkemann has rescued two synagogues from destruction, documented every gravestone in nine cemeteries, conducted memorial services and lectures and published research articles, all related to former Jewish communities in his region.
   "We’ve been in touch with him over the years," Krakaeur says. "He has done a lot of history on our families - the Jewish families of Bad Sobernheim. He wrote an article on all the gravestones and translated them from Hebrew. He wanted to know the connection to everyone."
   Berkemann’s grandfather opposed the Nazis and was beaten for it in 1933. His father, a minister, preached against them and narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo.
   When Berkemann found out that general reconstruction in Bad Sobernheim meant to claim a former synagogue, his reaction was swift.
   "It was absolutely against the values I was taught that a house of God - whether it was being used or not - would be torn down," Berkemann says in a press release from the Obermayer Awards.
   Often an army of one, Berkemann used all manner of strategies, from arm-twisting to butting heads with community leaders to pestering officials to take legal action. And Bad Sobernheim’s synagogue is not the only one Berkemann saved. In 1993, he helped rescue another synagogue in neighboring Staudernheim.
   "He gets furious when he thinks things are not right," says Margrit Schneeweiss, a member of the Marum family now living in Vilsbiburg, Germany. "He doesn’t have long discussions; he acts."
   Schneeweiss and about six other family members plan to attend the Obermayer Awards ceremony, beginning at 5 p.m., today, at the Berlin Parliament House. Krakauer and several Massachusetts-based relatives flew out late last week from the United States to show their support for Berkemann’s ongoing work.
   "He really feels it’s right," Krakauer says. "He does it out of dedication, not any need for recognition."
   While the Neo-Nazi movement is still alive in Germany and elsewhere, Krakaeur has not had any negative experiences when returning to Bad Sobernheim. To her, the tide seems to be shifting with each generation, and Germans either very young during World War II - like Berkemann - or born after the war are leading the way to try and better understand Jewish heritage.
   "We feel very welcome when we come back to the town," Krakaeur says. "They’re very interested and very positive about reconnecting with our family and are not negative at all - at least we haven’t seen anything negative. Everybody’s warm and very interested."
   Krakauer says it’s "amazing" to discover how many Germans are looking into Jewish history.
   "It's also amazing to look at how many Jews were deported," she adds.
   Here in the late-20th and early-21st century, a great surge of interest in the Holocaust and Jewish history seems to be spanning the globe, from Steven Spielberg’s "Schindler’s List" and Shoah Foundation in 1994 to the genesis of the Obermayer Awards in 2000 to Roman Polanski’s film "The Pianist," and two Hitler-centered films, "Max" and documentary "Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary,"all released in 2002.
   To the descendants of the Marum family, the larger global picture is summed up nicely in the work of one soft-spoken preacher’s son.
   "We really believe very strongly that, if anybody deserves this award, (Berkemann) does," Krakauer says. "He just does this out of the generosity of his heart because he believes everything should be fair. We were really honored to have done this for him."