“Now let’s see if everyone who is supposed to be here is actually here,” she resumed. “When you hear me call your name, you raise your right hand, stand up so I can see you, and answer, ‘Here!’” With that, she started calling roll. When my turn came to say here and stand up, some boys looked at me and started to giggle.
“Those boys who were laughing just now are very ignorant. In fact, they are too ignorant to be in my class,” Fräulein Beyle scolded. “The next time anyone laughs at Hans-Jürgen or anybody else, he will have to leave the classroom and wait outside in the hall until class is over.” Then, turning to me, she said, “I hope you won’t let stupid boys like that upset you. You are a fine boy. Don’t let anybody make you think otherwise.”
I could have hugged the teacher for putting my tormentors in their place, but of course I did no such thing and merely responded with a barely audible, “Yes.”
When the bell signaled the end of class, Fräulein Beyle instructed us to leave the classroom quietly and walk in a double file along the hall and down to the schoolyard for recess. Quite pleased with the outcome of my first class in spite of that little “incident,” I was beginning to feel my anxiety about school disappear. If that was all there was to it, I thought, then school and I would get along just fine. But no sooner had I reached the schoolyard than a big, sandy-haired boy with coarse, ugly features and nearly a head taller than I, took one look at me and started to holler, “Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!”
Soon, other kids had taken up the chant, and within seconds I was the center of attention of the entire school. All of a sudden “Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!” became the rallying cry of literally hundreds of boys, until the entire schoolyard reverberated around me in a deafening crescendo of the hated chant.
Desperate, I looked for an escape route through the dense mass of jeering boys that surrounded me, but without success. Recognizing the hopelessness of my situation, my first inclination was to simply cry. But my feelings of despair and humiliation quickly turned to blind rage when the big ugly boy who had started the commotion stepped forward, put his hand on my head and mockingly stroked my hair. “Why do Negroes grow sheep wool instead of hair on their heads?” he asked me, to the delight of the crowd. Before even I had become fully aware of my reaction, my right foot had hauled back in a wide arc and, with all the muscle power I could muster, came crashing forward against the bare shin of my tormentor. The impact of my hard leather boot on my adversary’s leg was audible and, quite apparently, excruciatingly painful to him.
As if struck by lightning, he collapsed. Still shaking with rage, yet emboldened by the effect of my fancy footwork, I surveyed the crowd for other potential attackers, prepared to give anyone who dared to touch me a dose of the same medicine. But, to my surprise, if not disappointment, there were no takers. On the contrary, the same boys who seconds earlier had been taunting me now turned their ridicule and jeers on the vanquished bully who was still writhing on the ground in pain.
Abruptly, the jeers stopped as Fräulein Beyle appeared on the scene. Sizing up the situation, she turned to my attacker, who was holding his badly bruised and swollen shin. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded to know.
“He kicked me,” he blurted out while pointing accusingly at me.
“Why do you think he did that?” Fräulein Beyle demanded to know.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gerhard Rademeier.”
“And who’s your teacher?”
“Fräulein Rodewald.”
She then turned to me. “Well, Hans-Jürgen, is it true that you kicked him?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me why you kicked him?”
“Because he was touching my hair and making fun of me and calling me names.”
“Did you touch his hair and call him names?” Fräulein Beyle continued her interrogation.
“Yes, but I didn’t hit him or anything,” my adversary conceded under the mounting pressure of the investigation.
“Then you deserve what you got,” Fräulein Beyle ruled sternly. “You have no business calling people names or making fun of the way they look. In the future, if you ever bother Hans-Jürgen again, I will report you to Fräulein Rodewald for punishment and, in addition, have a word with your parents. Now run along and never let me catch you picking on anyone again!”
While my adversary limped away, physically and morally crushed, Fräulein Beyle admonished me never again to take the law into my own hands—or feet, for that matter—but instead to report any abuse by fellow pupils to her or the nearest teacher. It was an admonition that I was never able, nor willing, to heed. A quick, violent temper kept compelling me to retaliate instantly. And besides, I realized that my unexpected attack upon my adversary’s shin had decisively leveled the playing field and snatched for me victory from almost certain defeat.
Looking around the schoolyard that had turned back to normal, Fräulein Beyle waved to a tall, handsome teenager whose height and white-blond hair made him stand out in a group of older boys. “Come here a minute, Wolfgang,” Fräulein Beyle called.
When the boy stood before her, she introduced us. “This is Hans-Jürgen; he’s just started school, and this is Wolfgang Neumann, who started school exactly seven years ago on this day, also in my class. The reason I called you, Wolfgang,” she continued, “is that it looks as if Hans-Jürgen here could use someone to look after him. How would you like to be his bodyguard?”
Wolfgang replied that he’d like it a lot.
“Well, then, this is how it’s going to work,” Fräulein Beyle explained. “Each recess you keep an eye on Hans-Jürgen and make sure nobody bothers him. If there is a situation you can’t handle, you report it to the teacher on duty or come to me.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Fräulein Beyle. Nobody’s going to bother him. I’ll make sure of that.”
“I know I can depend on you, Wolfgang,” Fräulein Beyle replied, “and you, Hans-Jürgen,” she continued, “be sure to let Wolfgang know whenever you run into a problem during recess, like today. I’m awfully sorry about what happened to you today. There’s just so much ignorance in the world—so much ignorance,” she kept repeating, more to herself.
After I shook hands with Wolfgang, my new hero and bodyguard, the school bell signaled the end of recess and we returned to our respective classes. When I entered the room, all eyes of my new classmates turned to me. For a moment I feared another verbal attack. To my surprise and great relief, the entire class broke out in loud cheers mixed with praise of the way I had brought the bully to his knees. The tumult did not end until Fräulein Beyle entered the room. She didn’t ask for the reason of the commotion, but I had a feeling that she knew exactly what happened.
Within a few days it seemed as if everybody had forgotten that ugly scene on my first day of school—everybody, that is, but the bully and me. Occasionally, I would spot him in the schoolyard or in the hall looking at me sheepishly or altogether averting his eyes. Having learned his lesson the hard way, he made sure to always stay out of my boots’ range. Wolfgang, true to his word, kept a watchful eye on me until he graduated the following spring. After that, I was more or less on my own. But by that time, I had become a toughy of sorts in my own right and no longer needed a bodyguard.
Quite contrary to my earlier expectations, I had come to like—no, love—school, and apparently school had come to like me. I got on well with my classmates, and several had become my closest friends. I also liked my teachers, especially Fräulein Beyle, who helped me discover the immense joy of learning for learning’s sake. At the same time I appreciated the respect and status that my newly acquired knowledge and skills conferred on me. I found that there was a strong correlation between doing well in school and being respected and accepted, and since learning came easy to me, I had every reason to feel that I had it made. That view seemed to be shared by Fräulein Beyle, whose brief evaluation of m
y first year in school contained the following observations:
“Hans-Jürgen is a remarkable pupil who has made a good adjustment to school. He is unusually talented in reading, writing, drawing, music, and athletics. In arithmetic he is average, but manages to find the correct answers with the aid of his fingers. He is a born leader who is always willing to help out slower classmates. Due to some teasing he suffered in the beginning and the need to defend himself, he has become a bit more aggressive than he ought to be. Judging by his first-year performance, I am expecting good things from him. Hans-Jürgen will be promoted to Class 7A [2nd grade] and I am looking forward with pleasure to again having him in my class.”
By the time Mutti had finished reading my first school report to all of her friends and acquaintances, and anyone else who would listen, I could recite Fräulein Beyle’s laudatory words by heart.
OUR NEW NEIGHBORS
On January 30, 1933, three months before I entered second grade, Adolf Hitler became Reichskanzler of Germany. It was an event that stirred barely a ripple in Barmbek, a former Communist stronghold, although its lethal impact would eventually be felt throughout the world.
I had heard the words Hitler and Nazi and the letters NSDAP (National Socialist German Labor Party) many times, but at first they were largely meaningless to me. That, however, was soon to change. While we kids hadn’t a clue what political parties were all about, we nevertheless began to choose our favorite parties the way we did soccer teams based on what we heard and saw at home, in the streets, and at school. Before we realized what had happened, the unprepossessing man with the Chaplinesque mustache had ceased to be an object of ridicule to us. Barely seven, I, of all people, became an unabashed proponent of the Nazis simply because they put on the best shows with the best-looking uniforms, best-sounding marching bands, and best-drilled marching columns, all of which appealed to my budding sense of masculinity. The Communists, or Komune, as well as the Social Democrats, or Sozis, by contrast, often looked ragged and undisciplined to me during their demonstrations, having chosen to project an exaggerated proletarian image rather than one of Prussian militarism. Thus, when I had gotten my hands on an embroidered swastika emblem, I had Tante Möller—who didn’t know any better—sew it on a sweater of mine, where it remained until my mother removed it over my vigorous protest.
Except for the increasing number of swastika flags flying from the tenement windows, and the abrupt disappearance of the hammer-and-sickle flags of the Komune and the “three iron arrows” banner of the Sozis after the new Nazi government outlawed all political parties, there were no visible signs in the Stückenstrasse indicating that a major change had taken place.
In school, the revered national father figure and symbol of authority had been Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg, the aged field marshal who represented Germany’s old military aristocracy and who in his heyday, in World War I, had crushed the Russian army at the battle of Tannenberg. When he died in 1934, the first indications of change were the introduction of Heil Hitler as the official form of greeting and the replacement of Hindenburg portraits with those of Hitler throughout the school building. From the walls of every classroom, corridor, and office, Hitler’s piercing blue eyes seemed to follow us kids wherever we went, as if intent on casting a hypnotic spell. Before we realized it, the face of the Führer had become as familiar to us as that of Fräulein Beyle, who was again our teacher. Yet even more intrusive on our consciousness than Hitler’s portraits was his extraordinary guttural voice—a curious marvel of range, stamina, and flexibility. Whenever the Führer addressed the German people, which happened with increasing frequency, all instruction came to a mandated halt. Our entire school, like all other schools throughout Germany, would assemble in the auditorium, where we would listen to the broadcast speech in its entirety. Most of Hitler’s speeches lasted over one hour. Yet in spite of the length of the speeches and the fact that much of what the Führer had to say was beyond our comprehension, we never were bored or failed to be fascinated and moved by the sound of his voice. One minute, that voice would be a low, measured, and reassuring baritone, as Hitler spoke calmly of his trials and tribulations during his rise to power. The next minute it would explode into a high-pitched, angry crescendo as he lashed out at groups and individuals whom he deemed his—and therefore Germany’s—enemies. Jews, non-Aryans, Marxists, Communists, liberals, reactionaries, and democrats were the most frequent targets of his wrath. While we kids were too young to understand the meaning of these words, we nevertheless sensed the power that emanated from the speaker, and we took pride in an emerging, all-powerful father figure who was courageous and not intimidated by Germany’s adversaries.
Calling Hamburg’s venerable Rathausmarkt in front of City Hall “Adolf Hitler Square” after it had been renamed took some getting used to, but as the months went by, we managed. Before long, raising our right hand and shouting “Heil Hitler!” instead of simply greeting people with Guten Tag, as we used to do, had ceased to strike us as somewhat peculiar, as it had at first. It also didn’t seem unusual to us that we had gotten into the habit of sitting and standing at attention and clicking our heels. Like soldiers, we wore nail-studded boots and tiny “horseshoes” on our heels that made our school and the streets reverberate under our feet. We also became accustomed to what at first appeared to us as a strange Monday morning schoolyard ritual before the beginning of classes. While we stood at rigid attention with our right arms raised, a Hitler Youth “honor guard” would raise our two new national flags—the traditional black, white, and red banner of pre-Weimar Germany and the Nazis’ Hakenkreuz flag. This was followed by our singing of Germany’s dual national anthems, “Deutschland Über Alles” and “Das Horst Wessel Lied.” The latter was named after its composer, a young SA trooper who was gunned down in 1930 by Communists during street clashes over turf in Berlin, and whom we were taught to worship as the Nazi movement’s star martyr No. 1. Star martyr No. 2, we learned, was Albert Leo Schlageter, a Freikorps officer in the French-occupied Ruhr after World War I, who was executed by the French in 1923 for sabotage and espionage.
To help us gain an appreciation for Hamburg’s naval tradition and inspire an interest in the German navy, our entire school was transported to Hamburg Harbor for a sight-seeing tour of the newly built and commissioned school ship Gorch Fock, a three-mast sailboat used for the training of naval cadets. The vessel was named in honor of the renowned North German folk poet and author of seamen’s tales Gorch Fock (the nom de plume of Johannes Kinau), who was killed in action during the famed sea battle against the British at Skagerrak in World War I. Following the tour, one of the teachers, a navy veteran, lectured us for an hour on the bright future that awaited young German boys who early in life decided to make the navy their career. I wondered whether Gorch Fock, who was killed at age thirty-five, would have agreed with that, but knew better than to voice my thoughts.
Once Hitler was firmly in control of the nation, there literally was never a dull moment in Hamburg. Each week brought new major events and excitement. Nobody felt the excitement more than we schoolchildren, especially after our teachers had whipped our youthful enthusiasm into a wild frenzy. And there was so much for us to be enthusiastic about. There were endless processions of SS, SA, and Hitler Youth units marching through the city to the traditional martial strains of old Prussia and the new fighting marches of the Nazi movement, dramatic torchlight parades at night, and fireworks over the Alster. There were Massenkundgebungen (mass demonstrations) in the Stadt Park and on the Moorweide, a large parade ground in front of Dammtor railroad station, and speeches by party bigwigs, all trying to outdo each other with their flatteries of the now near-divine Führer.
None of these events, however, did I recognize as presenting any particular personal threat—not until the bizarre drama that nearly swept me away one day. It happened in the early part of 1934, when I was in the third grade. On that particular day, at age eight, I got my first inkling of the danger t
he Nazi regime might pose to me.
It was a bizarre twist of fate that the newly formed local Nazi chapter chose for its weekly meeting place Zanoletti’s tavern and meeting hall, directly adjacent to the apartment building in which we lived. For several months, our new neighbors and I were oblivious to each other’s existence, since the Nazis held their regular meetings at night after I had gone to bed. Then the inevitable occurred. It happened on a beautiful spring Sunday that had started upbeat with a giant paramilitary parade through our neighborhood. For more than two hours, column after column of brown-shirted SA and black-uniformed SS strutted through the neighborhood. The occasion, which had no meaning for me at the time, was one of Hitler’s infamous sham referendums, in which the German people were ostensibly given an opportunity to accept or reject a Nazi proposal by voting Ja or Nein in polls that had been flagrantly rigged to favor the Nazis’ agenda and tighten their stranglehold on Germany.
The colorful procession had attracted large crowds of spectators, who were lining the parade route along Am Markt that intersected the usually quiet Stückenstrasse. Like all the other kids, I had gone to watch the parade and, like everyone else, become caught up in the excitement. I was especially thrilled when I saw Wolfgang, my former bodyguard, marching at the head of a troop of Hitler Youth. And I nearly burst with pride when, after spotting me in the crowd, he waved and smiled at me. I watched until the last unit of storm troopers had marched by and the crowd started to disperse.
As I walked home, I heard loud singing and shouting coming from the building next to ours. My curiosity aroused, I tried to catch a glimpse through the wide open door of Zanoletti’s meeting hall. It was packed to overflowing with beer-guzzling, smoking, shouting, laughing, and singing brownshirts who were celebrating their spurious election victory. None of them seemed to notice me—the living antithesis to their obsession with racial purity—as I peered into the meeting hall. Or so I thought. Suddenly, I felt myself grabbed from behind by two huge fists and lifted into the air. Instinctively, I stretched and bent in rapid succession like a fish on a hook. The next thing I knew, I had slipped from the grip of the two fists and was running as fast as I could to escape my captor. Looking over my shoulder, I caught my first glimpse of my attacker, a huge SA trooper with short-cropped white-blond hair and mean little eyes set deep in a ruddy, beer-flushed face. I might have made good my escape had it not been for two other brownshirts who, alerted by the shouts of my pursuer, blocked my path. Like a hawk descending on his prey, the SA trooper reclaimed his hapless quarry and this time, none of my kicking, wiggling, and biting could loosen his viselike grip.
Destined to Witness Page 6
