A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (19 page)

From our balcony on the Wagnerstrasse, I could look over the garden on to the street below. The street — Hainholzweg — was
a popular pedestrian route leading into the countryside east of the city. It attracted many Göttingen residents, particularly
on Sundays, when entire German families would pass our house on their way to and from their walks. I would observe them from
our balcony with envy and hatred. Here were fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, walking with their children
and grandchildren — people who, for all I knew, had killed my father and grandparents! As I contemplated these scenes of happy
Germans enjoying their lives as if nothing had happened in the recent past, I longed to have a machine gun mounted on the
balcony so I could do to them what they had done to my family. It took me a long time to get over these sentiments and to
recognize that such indiscriminate acts of vengeance would not bring my father or grandparents back to life. It took me much
longer to realize that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles
to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.

By the time I arrived in Göttingen, I probably had no more than half a year, if that, of formal education, all of it in that
Polish school in Otwock. I was therefore not ready to be enrolled in a German school with children my age. After making some
inquiries, Mutti found a retired high school teacher who tutored me for a little over a year. During that year, I made up
the six or seven years of school I had missed. My tutor, Otto Biedermann, had been expelled from Upper Silesia when it was
taken over by Poland and came to Göttingen as a refugee. He was a wonderful teacher who, probably more than any of the teachers
I had thereafter, introduced me to the joy of learning. I would come to him every morning for a period of two hours, then
work on the homework he would assign, which he corrected the next day. Initially, of course, he had to teach me how to read
and write — the basics of what children learn in the first couple of grades — before he could introduce me to all the other
material I would have learned if I had been able to attend school like other children my age. That meant that Mr. Biedermann
had to make sure that I studied the following subjects, among others: German, English, history, geography, and mathematics.

The balcony in Göttingen, where Thomas fantasized about mounting a machine gun

To improve my reading skills, Mr. Biedermann introduced me to the books of Karl May, the famous German writer of Wild West
books set in America that have captivated German children since the late nineteenth century, when they first appeared. My
reading skills increased dramatically as I devoured these books, learning all about cowboys and Indians and the American frontier
from an author who had never set foot in that country, but whose imagination and research made up for his lack of firsthand
knowledge. His books were filled with suspense, making it very difficult for me to put them down. Once I had significantly
improved my reading skills with Karl May’s books, it proved easier for Mr. Biedermann to get me to read other books and thus,
gradually, introduce me to the works of German literature that students my age had to read at school.

To improve my writing skills, he insisted that I write a brief essay every morning, describing what I had seen on my way from
my home to his. Under normal circumstances, it would take me about fifteen minutes to walk to his house. Since I would soon
run out of new things to report unless I varied my route, I got up earlier and earlier each morning to look for new ways to
reach his home. On the way, I would see parts of town I had never seen before. I encountered all kinds of people in the streets
and would try to guess who they were and where they were going. In those days, the streets of Göttingen, like those of other
German cities, still provided ample evidence of the terrible human suffering the war had visited on ordinary Germans. I would
see amputees, people whose faces had been disfigured by burns in the most bizarre ways, and some who had been blinded in one
or both eyes. Many of these individuals still wore all or part of their faded military uniforms. I would pass people who,
judging from their demeanor and clothing, looked like refugees. These daily discoveries made it easier to write the essays
Mr. Biedermann demanded of me and led to interesting discussions about contemporary realities that I would never have encountered
in school.

Mr. Biedermann once told Mutti that teaching me was an experience like none he had ever had. On the one hand, he told her,
I was a child who lacked even the most rudimentary educational background and needed to be tutored as if I were a six year
old; on the other hand, I had the life experience and maturity of a grown-up and could discuss subjects with him that no child
my age would normally be aware of or interested in. While learning German and European history, I would ask him about life
during the Nazi period and the reasons why he thought the Nazis had come to power, whether he had known any Nazis and what
kind of people they were. I wanted to know about his expulsion from Upper Silesia and whether he blamed the Poles or Hitler
for what happened to him and the other refugees. When studying geography, we talked about places I knew, countries I would
want to live in, what types of people made up their populations, the foods they grew, and the animals that could be found
there. Learning was fun with him, and I missed that sort of learning very much when I eventually entered school.

The only subject Mr. Biedermann did not feel competent to teach me was math — he had alerted Mutti to that fact and suggested
that she find me a math tutor — but since I had no interest in or talent for math, I was pleased that we neglected that subject
for some time until Mutti contracted a university student to provide me with the math background I needed to be ready for
school.

When I returned to Göttingen for a brief visit a few years after emigrating to the United States, one of the first people
I wanted to see was Mr. Biedermann. I had so much to tell him. He was interested in a great many things, and I knew that he
would want to hear about my studies in America, about life there, about the books I was reading, and so on. When I called
his home, I learned that he had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Of course, I went to visit him there. He recognized
me as I walked into his room, and while he could not speak, he squeezed my hand and held on to it for a long time. I am sure
that he knew that I had come not only to say good-bye but to thank him for laying the intellectual foundation for the life
I was destined to live.

There were two high schools for boys in Göttingen in my time (in those days schools were still segregated by gender): one
emphasized classical studies, such as Latin and ancient Greek; the other, which is now known as the Felix-Klein-Gymnasium,
focused on modern languages and contemporary subjects. When Mr. Biedermann decided that I was ready for school, I opted for
the Felix-Klein-Gymnasium and was admitted some time in 1948.
^*
I was very pleased that I was admitted to the grade that I would have been in had I entered primary school with my classmates.
That made it much easier for me to become fully integrated into the life of the school.

I was the only Jewish student in the school. That had one great advantage: it meant that I was allowed to play in the school
yard during the one or two hours a week that religion was taught. As a rule, a Protestant clergyman or theologian would teach
this course to the Protestant students in my class, and a Catholic priest to the Catholic students. I was excused from the
religion course because, it was explained to me, there was no rabbi in town to teach me. Of course, I was delighted not to
have to attend any religion classes. Not surprisingly, some of my classmates envied my special status, since they too would
have loved to have been excused from taking religion.

None of my classmates had ever met a Jew, but, as some told me later, they had seen Nazi cartoons depicting Jews as dark-skinned,
alien-looking people with long crooked noses, black beards, and rapacious faces that were intended, because of their caricatured
ugliness, to illustrate the repulsive character of Jews. That is probably why some of my classmates asked, on first learning
that I was Jewish, whether I really was a Jew, for, as they put it, “You do not look like one.” Others were surprised that
I was good at sports, quite strong, and not afraid to defend myself when challenged by the class bullies. They had obviously
been exposed to Nazi propaganda that described Jews as weaklings, cowards, and lacking all aptitude in sports. Soon, though,
after the initial awkwardness and the novelty of having “a real Jew” in their class, I was accepted by my classmates as one
of them, and, what is more, I gradually came to feel that I was indeed one of them. I never heard any anti-Semitic remarks
from my fellow students, not even when I got into the typical schoolboy shoving matches with one or the other of them, nor
did I ever sense that they harbored anti-Semitic feelings that they were hiding from me. But as I reflect now on those years,
I am struck by the fact that I do not remember any of my classmates or my teachers asking about my life in German concentration
camps, even though it was no secret that I spent the war years in these camps. Was it that they did not want to hear about
my past, or did they believe that I would find it painful to talk about it? I do not know the answer.

Although my classmates accepted me, I could not help but feel that my presence made some of my teachers rather uncomfortable.
Quite a number of them had been members of the Nazi party. After the war, they had to submit to the denazification process
instituted by the occupation authorities and had to be cleared before they were allowed to teach again. I do not know how
many former teachers had failed to pass this process, but the impression current at the time was that many a real Nazi — in
contrast to the innocuous “
Mitläufer,
” or “fellow traveler,” one who had joined the Nazi party not out of conviction but for economic or other reasons — slipped
through the denazification net and was reinstated. In these early postwar years, most of these people were afraid to voice
their opinions. It was not surprising, therefore, that I was not subjected to any overt anti-Semitism, although I sensed that
some of them were always on guard because I was in their class and because of their own past. They carefully avoided expressing
their own opinions on certain “sensitive” issues that came up in class. I had the feeling, and that is all it was, that some
of them may have been denazified without ever eschewing their Nazi views. Only once did some of these sentiments come to the
fore. During a class discussion, and I no longer remember in which class it was, the teacher burst out with a harangue about
the Allied bombing of Hamburg and the large loss of life. It was barbaric and unprecedented, he claimed. I raised my hand
and asked, “What about the German bombing of London? Shouldn’t we also speak about that? And what about all the people who
were murdered in Nazi concentration camps?” Well, the man turned crimson and gave some explanation that equated the concentration
camps to the Allied bombings, which prompted me to walk out of the classroom, a totally unheard of step in a German school
in those days. My mother, of course, immediately complained to the school’s director, and the teacher apologized in due course
and said that I had misunderstood him. It was clear to me, though, that he apologized only for fear of losing his job. One
of my mother’s friends who had lived in Göttingen during the war chided her for not seeking the teacher’s dismissal because
the man was, as her friend put it, “
ein alter
Nazi” (a committed Nazi) who should never have been allowed to teach again.

We learned a great deal of history in our school, but it was mainly ancient and medieval German and European history. Contemporary
history was simply ignored. Not only were the Second World War, its causes, and the rise of Hitler never discussed but neither
was the First World War, which, if I remember correctly, seemed too current a subject to be dealt with. That was in sharp
contrast, of course, to the impressive efforts made in later years by the West German education authorities, who drastically
revised their school curricula to permit and encourage students to confront the past honestly and to foster a democratic spirit
of openness. Regrettably, that was not the case when I was at school in Göttingen. I was struck by the difference when I came
to the United States and enrolled in an American high school in 1952. Being used to the oppressive discipline that in those
days still reigned in German schools, I found the atmosphere in my American school almost too free and undisciplined. What
most impressed me, though, was the freedom that American teachers tolerated and encouraged when it came to the expression
of student views on almost any subject under discussion. We had a large number of student clubs and associations with elected
officers in my American high school; a schoolwide student government with a panoply of officers; and annual elections for
all those offices with election campaigns, pamphlets, and speeches mirroring American political elections. Whatever one might
think of the academic quality of American high school education, the American classroom struck me as a veritable incubator
of a democratic way of life, something the German classroom in my day certainly was not.