Peace event commemorates non violent marches of 1989

In 1990, several students from Leipzig, Germany, visited Houston as part of a historic Rotary Youth Exchange that took them to District 5890, just months after street marches in their city set the stage for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The seeds of the exchange were sown years earlier, when Houston Rotarians took seriously a suggestion from Rotary International to reach out to non-Rotarian countries in communist-controlled Europe. 

"We were working on putting something together before the wall came down," recalls 2009-10 District Governor Ed Charlesworth, a member of the Rotary Club of Willowbrook (Houston). "When it did, that sort of accelerated things."

The exchange was the first of several, including Group Study Exchanges (GSEs) back and forth between Houston and Leipzig, which ultimately led to the establishment of a Sister City Association.

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two cities and their RI districts are as close as ever. District 5890 and 1880 paired up in October to host a four-day peace conference commemorating the nonviolent street marches that helped bring down the Iron Curtain. As part of the event, the Rotarians took part in a candlelight vigil through the streets of Leipzig on 9 October.

"Being part of that peace march was probably one of the most emotionally moving experiences I have ever had,'' says Charlesworth, who hosted the first GSE team from Leipzig in 1991. "When I see the hundred thousand people marching through the streets, carrying a candle for peace and protecting the flame with their other hand, that to me is Rotary, because it represents something you have to have both hands on: the task of serving humanity.

"We were even joking the wall came down to make our GSE feasible " Hilmar Zeissig
Rotary Club of Space Center (Houston)

"Events like this solidify the importance of peaceful change coming about through the things that Rotary promotes," he adds. "In my club alone, we have 64 applicants for Youth Exchange this year. What happens during those Youth Exchanges has a lot to do with breaking down the barriers in peaceful ways."

As part of the peace conference, District 5890 and the Houston-Leipzig Sister City Association funded a stained glass peace window for St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, dedicated during the event. Funding the window was the idea of Philip Cezeaux, the district's GSE cochair, who began conversations with the pastor of the church to hold a contest to select an artist. See a video about the window .

The window sparked the idea for the conference, whose attendees included a GSE team from Houston and a Rotary Friendship Exchange group of more than 80 Rotarians and non-Rotarians.

"It was one of the most exciting times of my life," said Frank Rohrwacher, who participated in the 1991 GSE and went on to become a Rotarian and president of the Rotary Club of Leipzig. "I am so thankful for those days in the autumn of 20 years ago, which changed our life completely."

"In the late '80s, RI decided to do a GSE with so-called non-Rotarian countries. And they asked us, our district, to do one with East Germany," says Hilmar Zeissig, a member of the Rotary Club of Space Center (Houston). "I was the GSE chairman. I tried for several years to get it done. I couldn't. The wall came down. We were even joking the wall came down to make our GSE feasible. A year later, we had a team from Leipzig in Houston and a team from Houston in Leipzig.

"It shows what Rotary can do if some people get engaged."

Read an adaptation from Rotary Magazin When the Berlin Wall fell