At the end, everyone clearly enjoyed our performances. They clapped, stood up, and cheered, as the children came to the front of the stage and took their bows. Then I joined them as the play’s director, and the audience cheered some more. The children were elated by the enthusiastic response, and so was I.
As others in the audience filed out, several soldiers came onto the stage and one asked me, “Can we come back whenever you have a new show ready?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll let you know about the next program.” Later, sitting backstage as the children put away the sets and took off their costumes, I felt a huge surge of pride in what we had created and my role in putting on the project, for I had developed this project all on my own. I had never been responsible for so many others by myself, and I found I enjoyed being a leader.
A Fire in the Forest
There was a big fire that occurred when the student leaders of a contingent from the Napola elite school hiked into the forest at the base of the Mala Tatra Mountain. They had some meat they wanted to cook over an open fire, and they gathered some branches from the forest floor, cleared out a large circle, piled up the branches, and lit the fire with a match. But when they held out their hunks of meat on sticks to cook it, they were not very careful with the fire. Suddenly, a gust of wind spread some of the flames, and soon the fire spread to the nearby trees. Frantically, the boys tried to put out the fire by covering the leaves with their jackets. But it was no use. The fire tore through their attempts to douse it, and soon much of the forest was aflame.
The boys came rushing back to the hotel, and the clerk put in a frantic call to the local police and fire brigade, who came roaring up to the hotel in minutes. Then they rushed into the forest with their axes and hoses to try to put out the flames. But by now the fire was so widespread that they couldn’t stop it, so within a few hours the forest was decimated. The ground was covered with the burnt husks of tree trunks, and the plants and bushes were burned to the ground, which was covered with a carpet of soot and ashes.
After the police and fire brigade returned to their stations, they reported their failure to the Bürgermeister. He summoned the two guilty boys from the Napola school who had created the fire and lit the match, and he brought them before a tribunal, which consisted of members of the town’s government, including an alderman and a magistrate. The German consul accompanied the boys and acted as their advocate. I imagine the boys were remorseful and terrified. Punishment at this stage of the war was often harsh, and they had no idea what might become of them. Now it was up to the tribunal to decide, since there was no jury. My boys and I followed the trial closely, since all the newspapers in the region widely reported the incident, and the other boys from the Napola school talked about it incessantly.
At the tribunal, as at any trial, a prosecutor read aloud the charges. Then the German consul entered a plea on behalf of the boys, describing how sorry they were to be so negligent. The boys also had a chance to briefly share their own story about what happened, and how much they regretted what happened.
Still, they had caused the fire, so the tribunal, headed by the magistrate, found them guilty of setting the forest on fire. But because of their young age and deep contrition for what they had done, he sentenced them to only a few weeks in prison. Since the German consul did not interfere with the verdict, agreeing that it seemed reasonable in light of the charges, the boys served their time. Also, since the Germans were occupiers of Slovakia, the consul didn’t want to incur the wrath of the local populace by letting the boys get away with their crime.
While they were gone serving their sentences, this left a leadership gap for the two groups of boys they led. Without any direction from its leaders, the groups were in disarray over the next few weeks. During this short time the boys in the two groups ran wild, since the teachers only taught their assigned classes for a few hours in the hotel room that had been turned into a classroom. But that was the boys’ only structure, as the student leaders had kept them in line. Unfortunately, without them, the boys were dirty, their rooms were a mess, and their clothes were filthy and wrinkled. They didn’t even sleep under the covers, but went to sleep fully clothed on top of the beds.
I was called in to return one group to some kind of order. The leader of all the boys asked me if I would take over, since my own group had been successful. So I now had twenty-four boys to supervise. I immediately tried to get them back in shape, but they gave me a hard time from the moment I called them together to tell them, “I’ve been assigned to be the new leader for your group.”
After several weeks of enjoying their wild freedom, they resisted. One boy said, “Why should we listen to you? You’re not our leader.” When I took them outside to play, they wouldn’t even play cooperatively when they played football, which they usually loved. Repeatedly, I called out to them, “Please, please. This is a game with certain rules for you to follow” or “Please, don’t fight with each other.” But they ignored my pleas. Instead of kicking the ball, they pushed and shoved each other to goad me into losing my temper.
I kept trying to restore order. However, they were so used to running around, chasing each other, and fighting, a little like dogs or cats might run around and get into fights, that it was hard to get them to listen to what I was saying, much less follow my directions. So it took me days to get them to cooperate, though eventually I hit on a strategy that worked. I insisted that some of the worst-behaving boys go inside and miss out on playing football—or whatever the boys were doing on the field. So little by little the boys learned I meant business, and peace was restored. Fortunately, I didn’t have to supervise the group for more than two weeks, since these boys, as well as my original group, returned to Germany.
Once they were gone, I had to help with the orientation of a new group of Austrian students who had just arrived. I was relieved not to have to deal with the unruly students any longer. I later learned that the two guilty students were eventually released from jail and they, too, returned to Germany.
Working with Austrian Students
The students from Austria arrived at the Lubochna railroad station accompanied by two teachers, a man and a woman. There were about twelve children, who were eleven or twelve years old, and one of the boys was disabled. The teachers were in their forties, and like the German teachers, they were responsible for all subjects. As they stepped off the train in a line behind their teachers, I met them, telling them, “I’ll be taking you to your quarters. You’ll be staying at the Villa André, the same hotel where I have been staying with my first school group, which has now gone back to Germany.”
After we got to the hotel, much as it happened when the German students’ group first arrived, I led the boys and their teachers along the hotel corridor to assign them rooms. Again, the boys were assigned four to a room with two bunk beds, while the teachers each had their own rooms.
I quickly discovered that the teachers and students were very different in their attitudes and behavior from the German teachers and students, and as I later learned, their approach to life was typically Viennese. The teachers were much more relaxed, freer, and very loving and affectionate to their pupils, while the boys were very respectful of their teachers. It was a real eye-opening experience, since I had come to think that the German way was the ideal way to teach students, and to get them to behave and perform well. For the Germans, the emphasis was on using rules and discipline to achieve these goals. By contrast, the more informal, warm attitude of the Viennese teachers toward the boys seemed to produce better results in achieving respect and good behavior than our militaristic style of learning. In turn, when the Viennese teachers heard I was from Berlin, they assumed I was a typical Prussian, stiff and formal, and reluctant to have fun. Perhaps I was.
Our first breakfast together helped to show these stark differences. As the two teachers sat across from me at our table in the hotel dining room, they watched with surprise as I ate my oatmeal without any sugar, h
oney, or anything else that was sweet. The female teacher said, “Don’t be such a Prussian! We’re going to teach you to enjoy life. Try putting a little sugar on that porridge!”
At first I hesitated, since I was so used to eating my oatmeal a certain way. “Come on,” the female teacher said. “Try it. It’s good.” Finally, I did, and it was a revelation. The oatmeal tasted so much better, and from then on I sweetened my oatmeal.
A New Independence
This time I spent in Slovakia gave me a new sense of independence. It was here I first kissed a girl. This happened after the performance of the play I had created with my student group. We performed in a large room in the hotel where we were staying. The leader of one of the other groups came over to me outside the theater and told me, “We want to create our own play. Can you tell us how you did this? We’d like to use some of the techniques in our new plays.”
“Sure, I’d be glad to help,” I said. Then several boys from my student group asked half a dozen girls from the BDM (short for the Bund Detutscher Mădel), the female contingent of the Hitler Jugend, to join them. We walked along the river until we found an empty room where we could talk.
A few minutes later, I was sitting across from the leader and a dozen fifteen- to sixteen-year-old boys and girls for our meeting. After the leader described how impressed everyone in the group was with our play, he explained, “It was so much fun to see some of the Grimm’s fairy tales come alive on stage. Now we’d like your help in guiding us.” Then he asked me what he and his students should do. “We’d like you to show us how to set things up and organize rehearsals.”
“Certainly,” I said, and explained the basic steps. “First you need to decide on what story you want to turn into a play. Then decide on main characters in the play and who will play them. You can put on auditions to determine who would be best for a part. Then develop a script, either by yourself or get the boys and girls playing the main characters to help. You can use the original story as a guide. Then be as creative as you want to turn the events in the story into scenes. You can even feel free to improvise.”
As I continued my explanation, I noticed one of the BDM girls sitting across from me. She had long blonde braids, blue eyes, and to me she was beautiful. I smiled at her, and when she smiled back, I felt a thrill go through me. At the end of our discussion, I invited all the group members to come to our rehearsal at our hotel for the next play. “We’ll be starting to rehearse tomorrow,” I said. “Now that we’re finished with one play, we’re beginning to work on another.”
The next day after the rehearsal, she came over to me and said, “How wonderful it was to see your group perform. They’re so good.” Then we strolled through the city for a while. I felt even more drawn to her as we talked about our backgrounds, our schools, what subjects we liked, and what it was like to be away from home. Suddenly, as we strolled along the banks of a river, I turned around and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. She looked at me startled, and I was unsure whether she liked what I did or not, or whether I should have been so forward as to kiss her. Not knowing what else to do or say at that moment, I turned away, embarrassed, and ran away as fast as I could. I felt my cheeks burning, likely red as a beet, and my pulse was racing, not just from running, but from the excitement I felt at kissing her.
But apparently my kiss hadn’t scared her off, since a few days later she wrote me a note, saying how much she enjoyed meeting me as well as seeing our group rehearse. She avoided mentioning the kiss. It was too embarrassing for both of us. After that I started writing to her every day. Yet while I spoke about everyday things in my letters, there was so much I wanted to say, but couldn’t, since I was afraid to express my feelings and say how much I liked her. In fact, I was so confused and bewildered by my feelings that I wrote some of the letters in Latin! She had to ask her camp leader to translate for her. I only wrote a few sentences, since my Latin was not very good. I also knew she would be likely to need someone to translate for her. That was my first kiss, and my first blundering attempt at romance.
I also had my first drink while in Slovakia. It was slivovitz, a strong plum liqueur. Another boy had somehow obtained the slivovitz, and he invited me to join him behind the hotel to share it together. As I put the glass to my lips, I felt the excitement of doing something normally for adults only. But as the cool liquid went down, I suddenly felt my throat closing up and I began coughing. The boy laughed, then patted my back until I calmed down. Yet while the slivovitz practically choked me at first, I continued to drink some more. This time, it went down more easily, and I got a little drunk. After that, I slunk up to my room and fell asleep.
I smoked my first cigarette in Slovakia too. I was with three or four student leaders, relaxing and talking at my hotel, when one of them proudly pulled out a pack of cigarettes he had acquired. “Look what I got,” he said. “Do you want to try them?”
Of course, everyone did. So the boy passed the pack of cigarettes around the circle of boys who were crowding around him, reaching out their hands to get one of the coveted cigarettes. After we shared them the boy with the cigarettes passed around a lighter, and soon we were all smoking, laughing, and showing off, proud that we had taken another step toward adulthood. Even so, after I took a half dozen puffs, my tongue felt like sandpaper, and I was not tempted to try another.
Despite having this new independence, all these transgressions—drinking, smoking, and even chaste kisses—were forbidden by the school, though the sugar on the oatmeal was certainly allowed. While I felt a little guilty for crossing the boundaries of what was permitted, I enjoyed the freedom we had in Slovakia. I was even a little thrilled to have broken the rules.
Later I compounded these transgressions, when we got back to Sonthofen from Slovakia. As we gathered in one of the school classrooms to report on our experiences on the trip, the head teacher of my unit asked, “Have any of you boys had any alcoholic drinks or smoked?” Though a number of boys raised their hands, I did not—the first time I lied at school. My friends were furious with me because they knew the truth, and they were punished for admitting what they did, but I was not punished for telling a lie. Ironically, it never bothered me that I had lied, perhaps because I was beginning to learn that the way to get ahead in Nazi Germany was to shape the truth into what one wanted it to be, so as to seemingly conform to the rules. It was better to lie to show that one was going along with the rules rather than tell the truth about breaking them.
While in Slovakia, I became worried about losing school time, so I asked the Austrian teachers to help me with math, physics, and history of the countries of Europe. I was the only one of the boys to do this, and the other boys were disgusted with me for asking for help. They repeatedly gave me disapproving frowns when they saw me go off with my books to get a lesson, and some teased me, saying things like “Why do you want to spend your time studying?” “Don’t you like being away from school and the boring classes?” and “Why don’t you just relax and enjoy yourself?”
Many of the boys also made it clear I was the only one doing this, and these extra studies showed I was more interested in my intellect than my athleticism. As one boy told me, “Nobody else is studying like this. Why are you doing this? Why don’t you work on getting better at sports? That’s what’s more important if you want to get ahead after school.” But I didn’t let their criticism deter me, because I was still very determined to become a doctor, and I knew that I would need good grades to get into a good medical school and achieve my goals.
However, since there were no formal classes on the subjects I wanted to learn, I asked the Austrian teachers to help me individually, and they were delighted to help. It was as if my interest in learning inspired them as teachers, and they wanted to take me under their wing and guide me.
Most importantly, I got special help from the female teacher who taught me math, which was especially difficult for me. So she watched out for me. She helped me with calculus, and she helped me make sure
that all the boys in my group were doing what they were supposed to do. She also helped a disabled boy, who had cognitive and physical difficulties. I found her help especially interesting, since in German society perceived weakness was considered unacceptable. Then, inspired by her lead, the other Austrian boys were kind to the disabled child, and helped him sit down and walk ahead, among other things. Once, when I was sick—possibly with pneumonia—she took care of me and tended to me like a mother.
When the two Austrian teachers found out it was my sixteenth birthday, they presented me with a painting of Lubochna. They made a big ceremony of it. They called me into the classroom, and, in front of the boys, they handed me the painting, which was a scene of the forest and mountains in the snow painted by one of the math teachers. I was thrilled to see it and told them, “I shall remember this gift always, and how you helped me so much here.” The painting now hangs on the wall of my study.
Later, when we returned to the Adolf Hitler School in Sonthofen, the help I got from the Austrian teachers put me ahead of most of the students who did not ask for help, so I did much better in all of my classes.
The experience in Slovakia had been a real eye-opener for all of us, especially the opportunity to be leaders and experience a much greater independence. As a result, when we eventually returned to Sonthofen, most of us were more independent and no longer believed everything the teachers told us. Some students, including myself, did not believe that there was only one good way to run a country—the Nazi way. However, while we felt this way, we didn’t dare to share this thinking with anyone else. It was only later, after the war, when I met with some of the men who had been students with me, that I found out that they had felt as I did, but said nothing about this at the time.
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 9
