UROP in History: The Rosenstrasse Protests, 1943

The mission of the Rosenstrasse Civil Courage Foundation is to commemorate, encourage, and educate civil courage — concrete actions in opposition to injustice and human rights violations. The foundation seeks to defend the values of a pluralistic society. The foundation takes its name from the Rosenstrasse protest in central Berlin in early 1943, in which non-Jewish women married to Jewish men defied Hitler’s regime to protest the imprisonment of their husbands, leading to the men’s release. The foundation is dedicated to the development of knowledge about this and other acts of women-led defiance, as well as acts of civil courage more generally.

The RCCF was established as a non-profit organization by Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus, emeritus professor of History at FSU, and others in 2018. Liam Wirsansky has been its director of research and development since 2021. In that capacity, he supervises the UROP students as well as regular student interns, and coordinates with the Rosenstrasse RSO. Wirsansky has a master’s degree in library science and participated in UROP when he was an undergrad at FSU.

Over the last few years, the RCCF has hosted a number of UROP students. This year there were two: Isabelle, a History major, and Berto, a theater and political science major. Isabelle has loved history since childhood. After taking AP US and AP European History in high school, she knew that this was the topic she wanted to study at college. Her specific interest lies with American history, history of World War II and Nazi Germany. Berto, too, has been interested in history for a long time. He had a great history teacher in high school who taught IB History of the Americas. Berto’s particular interest in history is decolonization in Africa and Latin America.

How did you find out about UROP?

Berto: Last year, one of my friends did UROP.  I was studying with him when he was doing his project. I asked him about it. The idea of doing research seemed really cool to me and an opportunity I wanted to try. I applied to three different projects, too.

Isabelle: I found out through my older sister who told me to apply. It's a great opportunity. I applied to three different projects.

What made you apply for this particular project then? 

Isabelle: In spite of my interests in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, I had never heard of the Rosenstrasse protests before. When I discovered that it involved genealogical research, I felt this project was the perfect thing for me.

Berto: I had never heard of the Rosenstrasse protests either. I had studied the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. and wanted to learn more about movements based on civil courage in other countries.

What is the project about?

Isabelle: My project specifically focuses on the Pizerak family. They were a middle-class Jewish family. Their actions showed me how ordinary people can challenge injustices and exemplify civil courage. I found personal testimony from a member of the family, which was rare, about what it was like to participate in the Rosenstrasse protests in 1943.

I was looking through Ancestry.com which is an amazing source to use because you can find so many documents. Other websites gave me personal testimonies from people who attended conferences on the Rosenstrasse protests.

The hardest part of my project was finding a person or family for whom there was enough information to put together a fully fledged biography. An extra challenge is that many of the names of the people involved are very similar. Starting the project was difficult, but it got easier once I had found ‘my’ family. It sort of snowballed.

Berto: I am working on one person, Irmgard Sander. I found her birth certificate, and her request to become a refugee in France after World War II had ended. This request made me curious: why would someone request that? I had never considered that people would want to leave Germany after the war had ended.

Most of my sources came from Ancestry.com and also JewishGen.org. For me too, the beginning of the project was difficult, but once you find some information on a person, you often find more. What is hard is to find that initial piece of the puzzle.

What surprised you about your research?

Isabelle: I was surprised how much testimony I found because I hadn’t considered that some of those involved in the protests might still be living – and still be talking about it today. One member of the Pizerak family, Ruth Gross, is in her 90s but she was still giving interviews in Berlin a couple of years ago.

Berto: I was surprised of how much of someone's life you can piece together through documents. That made me think, will someone be able to piece together my life based on my birth and death certificates? I also realized that because my first name consists of multiple names, if someone were to research me, it might be harder for them to find the relevant information. In the documents I worked with names were spelled in many different ways making it hard to chart if it was one person or many.

What kind of training did you receive?

Isabelle: In the beginning of the project, we learned how to use Ancestry.com and JewishGen.org. And in our meetings, we had people show us how to find a candidate for a biography with the resources available to us.

Berto: Yes, as you get more involved in the research, you will find other websites that might be useful. I found the Arolsen Archives which are the largest archive on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution. That source was really useful.

How did the UROP colloquium support your research?

Isabelle: I found it really helpful because you are together with others who are in the same boat as you and your UROP leaders all did the program before. It made it easy to ask questions like how do I come up with a research question? How do I present my project? What's the correct language to use?

Berto: I also really enjoyed the class. Because my UROP mentors had done UROP themselves, they gave useful tips. I remember they told me how to layout the posterboard to get the most usable space out of it. That’s something they knew because they had to do it themselves.

How did you handle the issue of time management?

Isabelle: At first, time management was definitely a challenge. But as the semester progressed, I learned how to create time for my UROP work. I found biographical research fascinating, and it was easy to lose track of time. It was good to have weekly meetings, so I could schedule my work accordingly.

Berto: The first semester doing UROP on top of everything else was a lot, but as I got into the process, I learned how to pace myself. If you set some time aside for it, you can manage quite well. We only had one weekly meeting, and we could do our research whenever we had free time.

What was your favorite part of the UROP process?

Isabelle: My favorite part was probably doing research because I felt like a detective of some sort, combing through these people's lives. I'm a bit of a nosy person, which made it interesting to find out all this information about other people and then write a biography of them. I feel that I came to know the people very well.

Berto: I really enjoyed learning about the Rosenstrasse protests. I feel that sometimes you think you already know everything about an event or a historical period, like World War II and Nazi Germany. Didn’t I take a class on that? But then you come across something new, and I ask myself how did I not know this? It made me realize that there are so many things that I don’t know anything about, that I might never know. Just to think that regardless of how much research I do, I’ll never know everything. That was an interesting realization. 

What's your advice to other students who might be thinking about doing UROP?

Isabelle: Definitely apply and make the most out of your experience. Do a project that you're passionate about. Because if you are passionate about it, I think your work will be better. You'll enjoy it a lot more, and you'll really get something out of your experience. 

Berto: My tip is also "just apply." It is a worthy extracurricular to do. But sort out the time you need to commit to it right away. Set aside a day during which you’ll mainly work on UROP. Then having a "UROP Day" will be part of your routine, and when you transition from the fall to spring semester, it will be easier to keep that going.

Would you do anything differently if you could go back to the beginning of the project?

Isabelle: Maybe I would have tried to make a better schedule for myself, like Berto just mentioned. Set aside a day, because I was kind of a random person in the beginning. It would have been better to have been more organized. 

Berto: I think I also could have been a little more organized. I feel like I say I spent a day a week, but then sometimes I just moved it to the week after. And then I kind of tumbled. If I had got my  time management right sooner, the process would have been so like amazing and a lot easier. 

Are you going to continue with research?

Isabelle: I am hoping to continue with the Rosenstrasse Foundation and continue with the kind of research I have done. I love biography writing and learning about all these people’s lives!

Berto: I actually now want to go into more research, but I want to focus on theater, which is one of my majors. I would like to look at how decolonization and post-colonization is reflected in theater. I would like to do an Honors in the Major project next.