Preparation day for memorial trip to Buchenwald with special guest

Preparation day for memorial trip to Buchenwald with special guest

As in previous years, a group of Schalke fans will embark on a memorial trip on 18 November. After the club’s supporters visited the concentration camp in Oswieczim (Auschwitz, Poland) for the fourth time in 2021, this year they will once again head for Weimar – to what was once the largest concentration camp on German soil.

The trip to the Buchenwald memorial is being organised by the fan affairs department in cooperation with the Schalke fan project and with the support of Schalke hilft! and the Institute for Urban History of the City of Gelsenkirchen.

In order to prepare the participants for the trip in the best possible way, the obligatory preparation day took place on 1 November. In addition to getting to know each other, the group also went on the trail of Jewish Schalkers and visited some relevant places of remembrance in Gelsenkirchen – including the New Synagogue in Georgstraße. There, the participants were received by the 1st Chairperson of the Jewish Community in Gelsenkirchen, Judith Neuwald-Tasbach, who with impressive words appealed to everyone’s responsibility to oppose the threat of steadily increasing anti-Semitism in our society with civil courage.

Afterwards, the group visited the South Cemetery in Gelsenkirchen-Horst. There, a memorial plaque commemorates the attack by the British Air Force on the grounds of the Gelsenberg factory, in the immediate vicinity of which a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp was located in 1944. A total of 144 Jewish forced labourers died in the air raid on 11 September 1944. In one of the 129 planes that dropped the bombs on the Gelsenberg was David Woodrow – a 22-year-old Australian and navigator of the plane with the registration number C. His son Graeme Woodrow was present as a guest on the preparation day and told the participants about his father’s personal story in an impressive speech, which showed how important it is both to remember the cruel events and to exchange about the most diverse fates of those who suffered under the regime of the National Socialists.

In his words to the group, Woodrow described his father as a quiet, kind and honourable man who hated violence and suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder since the 1970s after the war ended due to lifelong guilt. According to Woodrow, the installation of the memorial plaque in the South Cemetery would be both a release and a comfort for his father.

“If he could read this memorial, this address, […] he would know that the Gelsenkirchen community has long understood that the […] cause of those innocent deaths was Hitlerism, not British bombs.”

Greame Woordrow, son of David Woordrow

Lastly, Woodrow paid tribute to the work of FC Schalke 04 against discrimination and against nationalism. The memorial trip to Buchenwald from 18 to 20 November is a Schalke contribution to the culture of remembrance.