Pastor Jürgen Schwarz, principal of the Gymnasium Rutesheim, has taken on the patronage of our association – his greeting remembers Marleen Küchler.
The Background
We first met twelve-year-old Marleen Küchler as a leukaemia patient of HOPPS Stuttgart when we visited the children of the Olgäle in the summer of 2015 and played music for them. Marleen attended our concert at the Friedenskirche in October 2015 and afterwards asked us to be sure to repeat the concert and carry on “Was uns am Herzen liegt”. We promised her we would.
One month after our concert, we learned of Marleen's sudden death. We have been in touch with the Küchler family ever since – and did everything we could to keep our promise. That is also how we came into contact with Pastor Jürgen Schwarz, principal of the Gymnasium Rutesheim, the school Marleen attended. That he now stands by our side as our patron fills us with great joy – and we sincerely thank him for his wonderful greeting.
The Greeting in Full
Dear friends of “Was uns am Herzen liegt”,
Marleen came to us at the Gymnasium Rutesheim in September 2013 as a cheerful ten-year-old. Wherever she was, there was light and life. She had a remarkable gift for captivating everyone she spoke with. She was a magnet of good cheer. Her open nature and bright mind made her exceptional – a “designated class representative”, as her teacher aptly put it.
It was all the more shocking when, two months after she joined our school, she was diagnosed with leukaemia. After much fear and even more hope, after a large-scale donor typing drive, after home schooling and heartfelt sympathy from our student council and the entire school community, in November 2015 we had to say goodbye to her forever, in boundless sadness.
What remains is Marleen's very deliberate call for hope and joy in life. She entrusted us with both. Of the Olgäle, where she was cared for so attentively throughout her illness, she once said: “You may ask questions here, but you must not question everything – you have to trust.” And she laughed even as she said it, because “there was laughter at the Olgäle too”, as she told us at the time. At a press event she said:
Don't ask ‘why' – rejoice in the preciousness of life!
When “Was uns am Herzen liegt” once again supports the work of the Olgäle with its big benefit concert on 21 October 2017 at the Friedenskirche in Ludwigsburg, that is a wonderful thing. Marleen experienced the last concert in 2015 and, when the musicians visited the Olgäle afterwards, expressed the wish that the concert be repeated. She wished for nothing more than the work of such bearers of hope – that of the Olgäle and that of the members of “Was uns am Herzen liegt”.
Yours,
Jürgen Schwarz
Principal, Gymnasium Rutesheim
