Ours is a Story of Reconcilation
Max Schindler, with his wife, Rose and family, including, Moriah, Ben, Jeff, and Steven
(and Nicole Nocon and her children) signing the Golden Book at Cottbus City Hall, 2015.
Founded on the idea that the future of our global community rests in the hands of youth, generationE was created to inspire today’s generation of schoolchildren to stand up for one another and confront hate of all kinds. Created by an unexpected bond between descendants of Holocaust survivors and Nazi Party members, generationE provides teachers easy access to a range of Holocaust education programs designed to make history real and bring memories of victims and survivors to life. By connecting with stories relevant to their communities, students are transported in time and place and are better equipped to translate difficult history into tangible and emotional association using vivid experiences of the time. generationE was launched following an outpouring of interest form Germany’s first Butterfly Project initiative at the Bewegte Grundschule in Cottbus in January 2019, an initiative that Nicole and Steven agreed to pilot several years after they first met in 2011. They brought the Butterfly Project to Bewegte Grundschule to remember and honor Steven’s father Max and his family, heretofore Cottbus residents expelled on October 28, 1938 duringPolanAktion (a declaration to remove Jewish Poles living in Germany). The Schindlers weresubsequently forced into slave labor and concentration camps in 1942. Max‘s parents and sister Cäcilie were killed. Max and his brother Alfred survived and were liberated in Theresienstadt. There are millions of Holocaust victims, like Max’s family, whose memories and voices have all but been forgotten. For those of us connected to the past by family or faith or those inspired by the universality of our human experience, we have a responsibility to activate today’s student generation to reject hate, antisemitism, white supremacy and racist propaganda. generatione provides the tools to inspire students to repair our world – Tikkun Olam.
Meet our Founders
We are so blessed to have benefited from the involvement of journalists, teachers, curriculum and genocide education experts, and their organizations, from the very beginning.
Co-Founder and Executive Director (U.S.A.)
Steven Schindler
Steven is the son of orphaned child-survivors of the Holocaust. His connection with his family’s history and his experience as a son of immigrants propelled him into reconciliation work bonding families of victims with communities of former perpetrators to create safer and more connected societies for future generations. After a successful first-ever Butterfly Project (TBP) initiative in Germany in early 2019, Steven launched GenerationE, a network of education partners to inspire empathy, to counter growing anti-Semitism and nationalism, and to connect and cultivate young upstanders amongst youth in the USA, Germany, Europe and beyond. Steven is an insightful brand strategist and integrated marketing communications authority whose work is focused in several impact areas: Purpose, Social Justice and Environmental Conservation. As a business advisory, Steven helps organizations align purpose with brand and vision to grow impact and deliver sustainable results. His extensive for-profit expertise and nonprofit know-how empowers his passion and commitment to protecting wild places and ensuring the rights for people of all nationalities, color, culture, sexual orientation and religion. When he’s not working, you can often find Steven on his road bike rolling up and down the southern California coast or along the shoreline reveling in nature’s wonder.
Co-Founder and Executive Director (Germany)
Nicole Nocon
Nicole Nocon is one of the Germans for whom it is an internal necessity to deal with the history of National Socialism and to keep alive the memory of the crimes of the Holocaust. During her history studies, she dealt intensively with National Socialism and privately with her own family history. Her motivation to support Holocaust-education in German schools is not a sense of personal guilt, but of responsibility – responsibility for learning from history and responsibility for the protection of values such as tolerance, democracy and humanity today and in the future. As a journalist and as a citizen of the city of Cottbus, Nicole Nocon has seen in her own environment how right-wing forces and hate preachers are becoming “socially capable” again and are increasingly finding followers. She does not want to stand idly by – sensitized by her preoccupation with history. In Steven Schindler, Nicole Nocon has found a friend and like-minded person with whom she shares the conviction that human rights must be protected and that acceptance, humanity and empathy must be cultivated from an early age. This is the basis on which they founded their generationE initiative. Nicole has a passion for literature, art and travel – across borders.
