Schultütte | First day of school Germany in the 1930’s
It’s June here in Phoenix, time to relax and begin to enjoy the lazy days of summer ….. but my mind is occupied with an invitation to share my story with a group of teachers attending a day focused on Holocaust Education at the Burton Barr Library in November!
Arizona is one of 29 States mandating Holocaust Education.
Why this preoccupation with an event 5 months into the future?
Perhaps I’m affected by this week’s attacks on Jews in Washington DC and Boulder, Colorado.
How to approach Holocaust Education in our present reality, an explosion of contempt, violence, lies, attacks on objective truth, ignorance of world history, raw self interest and the resurgence of antisemitism?
Will teachers resonate with memories of those early German school days?
Images Matter
Gemünd, Eifel, Germany, 1938
We lived on Dreibornerstrasse, the main street, only a short walk past the shops and St Nicholas, the Roman Catholic church, over the bridge to my first school, across the street from the Evangelische Trinitatis Kirchengemeinde (Protestant Church).
I was excited by this new stage in life, a leather satchel strapped to my back, holding a small slate with a knitted square cloth dangling from a hole in the wooden frame, rattling against the rectangular box full of slim slate pencils wrapped in thin colorful papers.
In my earliest school memory I’m sitting, looking up at a cross on the wall, opening the arithmetic book, counting red, blue, green and yellow balls, seeing the details of girls in their colorful dirndl dresses with long, blond Zöpfe and boys wearing leather hosen…maybe arithmetic could be fun?
One day without warning or explanation, I looked up, the cross was gone, replaced by the disturbing portrait of a man with black hair and a small Schnurrbart.
Our arithmetic and writing books were also new.
Now we are to add and subtract images of tanks, guns, soldiers and Hitler Youth in camouflage, and copy words under manipulative illustrations. No more toys or carefree children.
Source: Wiener Holocaust Library collection.
Words Matter
It is November 1938 and the whole school is milling around the concrete playground between classes and suddenly I am standing among the little group of jewish children, surrounded by all the other students, dancing round us singing violent, hateful Nazi songs.
And that was the last day at my first school.
Copy of a letter dated 15th November, 1938 sent by the British Embassy in Berlin to Lord Halifax, informing him that Jews are no longer allowed to attend German schools.
The letter did not mention Kristallnacht, November 8 and 9 1938, the night synagogues were burnt, Jewish shops destroyed and Jewish men arrested, only the murder of a German Embassy official in Paris by a young Jew.
And the dangers only increased.
Köln
On the evening of Monday, July 24, 1939 my parents brought me to the Köln, Hauptbahnhof (Cologne main train station). They helped me up the steep train steps, I turned around to wave they were crying and it was the last time we would see each other.
The Kindertransport. Köln, Hauptbahnhof, textile artist: Laura Nathan
I was part of the Kindertransport, an epic rescue of approximately 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. We were unaccompanied refugees received by Britain.
A noble effort but a tiny fraction compared to the one and a half million children who perished.
There was no place of safety for my parents, they were deported to the Lodz ghetto and gassed May 1942 in Chelmno, Poland.
New Images
New Words
World War 2 began September 1, 1939 and around that time I walked from 167 Coventry Road, crossed the busy street, followed the grassy path guided by a big girl from the neighborhood for my first day at Exhall Council Junior School.
I remember sharing a wooden desk with her and the teacher instructing us to draw a margin.
I whispered, What is a margin? She thought this so funny and put up her hand to share the novel question.
Suddenly I found myself in another classroom, the children were younger and the teacher was warm, round and smiling.
I think about the series of traumatic experiences I had endured in 1938/1939….the antisemitic abuse in the Gemünd playground, the sudden parting from my parents, the loss of security, family closeness, love, acceptance, language, culture, all that was familiar.
And I remember that teacher, I can’t remember her name but seared into my memory is the sense that she accepted me with my language limitations. She created a safe space.
My favorite part of the school day was story time, when our teacher would read a children’s story and transport us to another, magical world.
A return to Exhall Council Junior School, around the 1990’s
Words Matter
For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks
Matthew 12:34
Images Matter
Open my eyes so that I might see
Paraphrase of 2 Kings 6:17
Indeed the current worldwide Antisemitism is startling.
And again it is fed by images and words, both picked out deliberately from the whole pool called “truth”.
Basically the pattern is all the same again and again; People who think, they are superior by whatever opt for hatred;
basically I think it is the hatred against a sovereign God, Whom man cannot control.
Thank you Gaby for engaging so thoughtfully with the Blog!
Thank you Gabi for thinking deeply about “Images and Words”