Meeting Lore Robinson - the cheesecake-project

When she left Cologne on the Kindertransport in June 1939, Lore Robinson took her family's traditional cheesecake recipe with her. She had written it on a piece of paper and put it in a book. Later she often made that cheesecake for her family, passed the recipe on and today, her daughter and her granddaughter make it. Many stories and memories are connected with that cake. For her granddaughter, it's a family tradition and a connection to the past and their roots.

Lore Robinson told us about this family tradition when my class and me met her in Cologne, this autumn. We didn't meet her unprepared, of course. In the days before, we had read about her on the Jawne-homepage (www.jawne.de) and worked out questions that the students wanted to ask her. This actually took up much more time, than we had expected, not because the children didn't have any questions. For them, it was really important to discuss whether certain questions were not too private, too painful. They were very considerate and full of empathy. For them meeting Lore Robinson was not just another history lesson, this was life.

Mrs Robinson turned out to be a small and fragile 90 year old lady with a very sharp mind. She was very direct, matter-of-factly, dry humored and she took the children seriously. They were deeply impressed. They dared to ask difficult questions about Mrs Robinson's parents. They were stunned to hear that she had a nice childhood, silent when she talked about the gradual changes after 1933, smiling, when she simply stated that she was not really a role-model-student. They were and are very, very glad to have met her.

Meeting Lore Robinson was not the end but the beginning of our project.

"What would I take with me, if I had to leave?" This is what I asked my students, when we prepared our meeting with Lore Robinson and what I asked them afterwards. Quite a difficult question, when your mobile phone is not an option. So the children started to ask themselves and their parents, they discussed it with their friends and me, their teacher. For some the answer was easy, some had to rack their brains. But all of them found their answer to the question "What would I take with me, if I had to leave the country?"

Memories and traditions have many faces, that you can see in the students' answers: events and rituals, smells and sounds, objects and recipes. All of them came up with carefully composed texts, which were illustrated with pictures or accompanied by boxes containing smells, things to touch, objects.

We were offered to present these products in the rooms of the Jawne. The exhibition was opened on November 9th. Zoe and Daniel spoke the opening words for the class and it was simply glorious to see their excited, serious and proud faces.