Workshop with Muslim Youth

Toby Axelrod describes a workshop for Muslim youth in Berlin:

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Onur looks intently at the photomontage. From all the famous news images, he picks one: New York’s World Trade Center aflame.

“Did you know that the Jews were warned before to get out?” he whispers. “I read it on the Internet.”

Onur, 15, and his classmates are participating in a weeklong educational program at the Wannsee House Memorial and Educational Centre in Berlin, the site where Nazi leaders in 1942 worked out their genocidal plan for the Jews.

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Teachers across Germany say they face a special challenge from those of immigrant backgrounds, most of whom are Muslims. Disenfranchised from the mainstream, many of these students echo anti-Semitic attitudes heard at home, trade schoolyard insults about Jews or express Holocaust denial, testing German taboos.

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To be sure, Germany’s problems with far-right groups are bigger than those with Muslim youths, few of whom are criminals or extremists.

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But it is likely that most of Onur’s Berlin classmates had never knowingly met a Jew when they began their weeklong program at the Wannsee House. At the outset of their visit there, the teens from Onur’s school fidgeted and whispered while educator Elke Gryglewski asked them to pick a photo of a historical event that impressed them. Finally, Gryglewski told them what had happened in the very building where they were sitting.

“Was Hitler ever here?” one student asked.

“No,” Gryglewski answered. “It was in this house that Nazi leaders decided how to kill millions of people.”

Gradually the yawning and fidgeting stopped. Gryglewski introduced the teens to Nazi racial pseudoscience, asking them if they could tell who was Jewish in a series of old photos. The students seemed surprised to discover they could not.

The Jews “were just like you children with their own families and identity,” Gryglewski told them. “And then came the Nazis.”

Eventually, Jews could not go to the movies, she went on. They could not have pets. They could not go for a walk in the park. They could not use public transport.

“Verboten, verboten, verboten,” she said.

Some Jews managed to get out of Germany, but many did not, she explained. In the end, “this is all that was left of many of them,” Gryglewski said, showing them a large photo of victims’ shoes from Auschwitz. The students leaned in for a better look.

“I used to curse the Jews, and I won’t do it anymore,” one student, Yasemin, 15, said during a break. “I used to say Jews are s—t because they hate Muslims. But now I understand better. And now I hate the Nazis.”"

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