60 YEARS LATER, A GERMAN MAKES AMENDS

Johann's Mission: 60 Years Later a German Makes Amends By Donald Snyder (FOXNEWS)
NEW YORK — Johann Lutjens never thought he would be reading to a 98-year-old Jewish woman on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. At first glance, Johann and Hilda Weitman are an unlikely pair. He is a boyish 20-year-old German with spiked red hair and a silver earring over his right eyebrow. She is a tiny woman with a wisp of neatly coiffed white hair who fled her native Poland in 1938 because the specter of Nazism was spreading across Europe.

She came here alone on the Polish ship Batori, sailing from the Baltic port of Gdansk on the first day of Passover, the holiday commemorating the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. Most of Weitman’s family stayed in Poland and perished in the Holocaust. Johann came here six months ago on an airplane, as part of a project designed to make amends for Nazi war crimes...

Johann is spending a year in New York working with Project Ezra, a non-profit organization that sends voluteers to provide companionship and perform household chores for 350 largely homebound clients.

Project Ezra gets its German volunteers through Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, an organization established by German Protestant churches that assigns German volunteers to Jewish social service organizations throughout the world.

Like many young people who volunteer through Action Reconciliation, Johann is a conscientious objector whose volunteer work serves as a substitute for his required German military service.