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Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe
Syosset, New York
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According to recent surveys, today's school problems are as follows: drugs, alcohol, suicide, rape, bullying, robbery, and ADD. (Today, they call it attention-deficit disorder, but my mother's word for it was the Yiddish "shpilkes," He can't sit still.)
Look at some of the newspaper headlines:
And now to the title of this piece, "A" is for "Adolph." In the book, "Remembering:
Voices of the Holocaust" by Lyn Smith,
we read testimonies of men and women who had been directly affected by the
Nazi
Holocaust. They talk about their traumatic
experiences. Two such testimonies, those
of Sergei Hackel and Hedy Epstein, deal
with their school experiences.
The author begins, "After 1933 it was just
accepted that if you were a Jewish child you
were liable to be beaten up, bullied, or
whatever else they chose to do with you.
It was no use appealing to policemen or
teachers because they're not supposed to
interfere or even be interested in helping
you because you are perceived to be an
enemy of the state."
Story 1
Sergei Hackel, German Jewish schoolboy,
Berlin
I remember at the beginning of the school
day we had to stand up and raise our arms
in the Hitler salute; and instead of a prayer,
we had to thank the Fuhrer for giving us
such a nice day. Loyalty was expected,
loyalty was instilled, there was nothing other than loyalty. I remember
the schoolbooks; because the Nazi designers were so good at their jobs, the indoctrination
didn't strike one as aggressive, or abrasive, or alien. You opened your first alphabet book, or school book, and the very first picture would be of the Fuhrer, a very nice Fuhrer, kindly, in civilian clothes. I think he could have been in Alpenhosen standing on a flower-strewn mountainside holding two children, a boy and a girl, by the hand. And the inscription on the frontispiece, as I remember it, was, "Two things the Fuhrer loves best: children and flowers."...
On their part my parents kept quiet, a sort of DULL sillence. When I brought home cheerful reverberations of Nazism they didn't say, 'Nonsense, don't you ever talk like that in this home of ours," but nor did they say, "Lovely that you learnt all these things at school." There was some sort of in-between, neutral position which they adopted for fear of repercussions; and repercussions could have been severe.
Story 2
Hedy Epstein, German Jewish schoolgirl,
Kippenheim, 1938
I left for school at ten minutes after seven just like I did every other day, on my bicycle together with this one other Jewish child from Kippenheim who was at the school. As we approached the school we had to pass a house where a Jewish dentist had his home and his practice and I noticed every wndow in that building was broken and although I didn't know why, I assumed it was because he was Jewish. As we entered the school yard and parked our bicycles I could sense something was different but I didn't know what it was and I was afraid to ask; and so I proceeded to my classroom and this other boy proceeded to his. Classes started as they did every day and then about half an hour later, the principal walked in and he gave me a long talk--even later that day I couldn't remember what he actually said, but at some point while he was talking he pointed his finger at me and he said, "Get out you dirty Jew."
I heard what he said but I could not believe it. How could this nice man, this gentle man whose daughter was one of my classmates, how could he have said that? So I asked him, "Please would you repeat what you said, I didn't hear." And not only did he repeat it but came over, took me by the elbow and pushed me out of the door. I stood in the hallway and all kinds of thoughts were racing through my head: What did I do? Did I not listen? Did I yawn?What am I going to tell my parents? And the kind of searching questions I was asking myself, I heard later on, is typical of how victims think: what have I done? Rather than realising it is an outside force that has caused the problem.
______________________________
Marjorie Wolfe is a retired business educator. She says
to today's
students, "Zolst nit visn fun azelkhe tsores."
(May you not know of such troubles.)
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