On Holocaust Remembrance Day today, class 10b commemorated the victims of National Socialism in their history lessons. This day of remembrance commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 by the Red Army and stands for the remembrance of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Shoah and all other victims of the National Socialists.
Together with their teacher Ms. Kammermeier, the pupils went to the stumbling stones in Ackerstraße. There they laid roses for Irma Petzold and Grete Blum. The sisters lived in our immediate neighborhood until 1941 and 1944 respectively and were both victims of National Socialist persecution.
Throughout Europe, Stolpersteine bear the names of people who were deprived of their rights, deported and murdered. They bring their fates back into our everyday lives. Pausing in front of these stones makes history concrete and tangible for us:
Irma Petzold was born in Berlin on October 28, 1880. She moved to Ackerstraße 83 in the mid-1920s, where she lived with her husband Adolf and her family. After her husband's death, her sister Grete Blum moved in with her. Grete was born on 21.06.1891 in Berlin and was previously married to Leo Blum. She was deported to Kaunas/Kowno in Lithuania on 17.11.1941 and murdered in mass shootings. Irma Petzold was deported to Theresienstadt on 10.01.1944 and died there on 15.05.1944. Like many other Berlin Jews, they were victims of exclusion, deportation and murder by the National Socialists. Their biographies represent millions of individual fates that often remain invisible.
The roses laid down are a sign of our respect and responsibility. Especially here in our immediate surroundings, it is clear that the crimes began in the midst of life, in the everyday life of normal streets and houses.

We commemorate all the dead and talk to Margot Friedländer, who was with us just a year and a half ago:
"We are all the same - there is no Christian, Muslim, Jewish blood. There is only human blood. You all have the same. (...) Be human!"
(Margot Friedländer)