“I’m sure you youngsters will make the world a better place. We need to repair this lovely, fragile planet of ours.” Max Walter Weg, Holocaust survivor, former Leipziger.
On Tuesday 10th November 2025, Max Walter Weg, 97 years old, spoke to a group of Grade 10 students over Google Meets from the bed of his nursing home in London. For 45 minutes, we were kept spell bound by his stories of growing up as a Jewish boy in 1930s Leipzig, in Kantstrasse, to be precise. From carefree days of skating on the frozen tennis courts near the Fockerberg, learning Suetterlin script in primary school, playing with his cousins in their garden in Steinstrasse, to the increasing restrictions imposed on Jewish families – no swimming, no going to the cinema, no sitting on park benches, no access to the bunkers during air raid practices – Mr Weg connected a place that is familiar to us as Leipzigers to a time that feels terrifyingly, unimaginably alien. He and his family were lucky: they escaped to London just before the outbreak of World War Two; his cousins, uncle and aunt from Steinstrasse were not: despite an escape to Leiden, they all ultimately perished in Auschwitz.
For someone whose family had suffered so much, Mr Weg carries no bitterness. Instead, he apologised for his own generation’s failure to protect ‘this lovely, fragile planet of ours’, for having made ‘such a mess’ of it all. In his positivity and belief in ‘the wonderful youngsters’ he was talking to, what endured from Mr Weg’s story was an overall sense of our duty as custodians, of the planet but also of the lessons of the past.
One way we, at LIS, try to enact that duty is by cleaning Stolpersteine – the small brass plaques with the names of former inhabitants who were victims of the Holocaust – around Leipzig, including the two sponsored by LIS.
Usually, this is something we do on Holocaust Memorial Day (Tuesday 27th January) with all of Grade 6 and Grade 8 in I&S lessons. This year, the snow made it impossible to take over 100 students up to Karl-Heine-Strasse. However, LIS teachers, Justin Sands and Angel Antoranz, and I did manage to clear three Stolpersteine groups of snow, light a candle and lay flowers. It may only be three small spots in Leipzig, it may only be noticed by passers by for a second or two, this article may be the extent of its media coverage. But it is a small, quiet gesture, a fulfilment of a promise to Walter Weg and his family to ensure that present, and hopefully future, Leipzigers remain custodians of the lessons of the past in our small corner of this planet.
