The educator Paula Fürst, born on August 6, 1894, in Glogau, lived with her mother in Berlin from 1906 onwards. She studied history and French and learned about Montessori education at university. She liked the idea of prioritizing the individual development of children and became the head of the first Montessori class in Wilmersdorf (1926).
When the Nazi regime came to power (1933), Montessori was rejected as “Jewish pedagogy.” It did not fit in with their values of uniformity and absolute obedience. Paula Fürst was dismissed from her job as a teacher and took over the management of the private Theodor Herzl School, where Jewish children were sent to escape exclusion in public schools. When private schools were also banned in 1938, she became head of the school department of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. Here she met her last partner, social worker Hannah Karminski.
Together with her, Paula Fürst then organized escape routes for Jewish children by train to London. Over 10,000 children were saved this way. She herself returned to Germany out of a sense of duty to the Jewish children who had been left behind. In June 1942, she was deported to Minsk and presumably murdered there.
Since 2015, a Stolperstein in front of her apartment building on Kaiserdamm has commemorated her courage and her story.
Sources/Literature:
- Manfred Berger: Paula Fürst. Eine in Vergessenheit geratene Montessori-Pädagogin, in: Zeitschrift für Montessori-Pädagogik, 43 (2005), Heft 3, pp. 147ff.
- Martin-Heinz Ehlert: Paula Fürst. Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Pädagogin, Text Verlag, Berlin 2005.
- Paula Fürst und die jüdischen Kinder, Zeitclicks, URL: https://www.zeitklicks.de/nationalsozialismus/verfolgung/die-retter/paula-fuerst-und-die-juedischen-kinder.