March 16th, 2011

VW honours Christoph Heubner

For over twenty years the current Executive Vice-President of the International Auschwitz Committee, Christoph Heubner, has been looking after trainees from Volkswagen Coaching and their Polish colleagues, and more recently management trainees and master craftsmen from the Volkswagen Company, during their seminar and work stays at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. Now Mr Heubner's dedicated commitment is being honoured at the general meeting of VW employees on March 16 in Wolfsburg:

For twenty years, Volkswagen trainees have been travelling to the International Youth Meeting Centre (IYMC) in Auschwitz, which the Volkswagen Company has helped to develop with financial support starting in 1986. During their 14-day stay at the Auschwitz Memorial, the young people work together with young Polish people in efforts to help preserve this extremely important memorial.

Christoph Heubner has accompanied the young people from the very beginning. At first he was head of the Polish section with the Evangelical organisation Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. Later, the Auschwitz survivors voted for him to become the executive vice-president of the International Auschwitz Committee.

Mr Heubner's predecessor at Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, Volker von Törne, had developed the idea of an international youth meeting centre together with former Auschwitz prisoners, at a time when such a proposal seemed like a crazy pipe dream: In 1977 Willy Brandt purchased the first symbolic stone for the building. Following the untimely death of Volker von Törne in 1980, it was Christoph Heubner who continued dreaming this utopian dream and held onto the idea of an international youth meeting centre, specifically in Oswiecim/Auschwitz. The present director of the IYMC, Leszek Szuster, recalls the beginning of his work: "Of course, the history of the centre in the context of Polish-German relations was important to me. Building this house for the future in the darkest place of our mutual history – it was Christoph Heubner who never gave up tirelessly propagating this idea. The former prisoners had handed over the baton to him."
And Marian Turski, Auschwitz survivor and today a well-known journalist in Poland and Europe, adds: "Mr Heubner's steadfast work has built up the considerable prestige of the International Youth Meeting Centre and the International Auschwitz Committee, not only in Germany but also with the United Nations. So, viewed in this context, working together with the young people from Volkswagen is one part of the collaboration that has acquired exemplary, international significance. This alone is remarkable. But above all, we sense the warmth that he shows towards us former prisoners. We feel the way he cares for us. And this is equally important."

When Christoph Heubner guides the Volkswagen trainees and their young Polish colleagues through the Memorial, the focus is not only on the past: Mr Heubner tells the young people the stories and relates the accounts that he himself has heard from former prisoners. But the questions he asks the young people are questions addressed to the future. What will result from what they have heard? It is questions like this, that the young people ask of themselves, because they are unavoidably stimulated by Christoph Heubner's narratives.

Ines Doberanzke, Mr Heubner's colleague who prepares the contents, organises and accompanies the Auschwitz projects at Volkswagen Coaching, describes the days in Auschwitz: "Christoph Heubner moves the young people with a mixture of head, heart and humour. He has enormous insights into human nature. The young people listen to him. They trust him, and they want to confide in him and us in this situation. That's what's so special."

And Bernd Wehlauer, deputy chairman of the VW AG works council who also represents Volkswagen on the Board of the IYMC Foundation, adds: "Mr Heubner always manages to create an important bridge between the life stories of the victims and the political circumstances, a bridge that links history, the present and the future. Mr Heubner's work with the trainees also led to the project sponsored by the works council for Volkswagen management trainees and master craftsmen: facing up to the realities of Auschwitz also means making yourself more sensitive to your own history and to the world you live in. The work in Auschwitz has now become an integral part of Volkswagen's corporate culture."

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