100 years ago today, the First World War ended. How do you explain to young people or even children what happened back then? Why there was a war? Would adults even put it together properly? What is important?

These were the questions asked by a primary school teacher from the Frankfurt area. Corinna Budras reports on this in an Article in the F.A.S. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntags-Zeitung) today.

The dedicated young teacher approached the topic by telling her schoolchildren, who were about 10 years old, what the children thought and experienced at the time. How they got time off from school when a battle was won. How they wanted to go to war themselves in 1914 as teenagers because they were so excited by what was being reported about it. But how the little ones also experienced that their brothers and fathers often did not come back. How they painfully felt the gaps. How hunger and work determined everyday life.

The teacher initiates a friendship with a class from near Bordeaux. Over the course of a school year, the children from both countries fill it with life; they write to each other with the help of their parents; they exchange ideas and learn a lot about each other's countries, about the similarities and differences, about what separated them and unites them today.

In March of this year, this teacher takes her children to a place where war once raged. To Colmar in Alsace, which became a terrible battlefield in 1915. There, the two school classes meet. Together, the German and French children walk across the trenches, which are still covered with snow this spring. The cold and the road get to them, and yet nothing compares to what the young people and men experienced there over 100 years ago.

But the children also spend time together, play together and understand each other, even if they don't speak the same language. They have internalized why the Franco-German friendship and the EU are needed.

In the end, like many adults I'm sure, they can NOT explain why there was this war. Is there any greater proof of how insane such a war was and how senseless the deaths of the countless victims were? This is what this teacher was able to convey to her children.

That is why such courageous initiatives - even if you have to convince parents first - are absolutely necessary. That's why movements like pics4peace.... are needed. Encouragement to continue!