Zeitzuegen

Monday, June 15th
Basic school things- hw hand in rate of 6b continues to be terrible but this is hardly surprising since they already know what school they got into for next year and the work they do no isn’t going to change that, 5c was looking good though (one student ran up to me before school started to tell me he had done his!). In 3b we took half the class to another room (Gabbi stayed with the other half) and on the way there so many of them were hitting, stealing pencil bags, kicking… Two of them continue to take turns kicking each other well into the lesson, and since Sarah was only half heartedly telling them to stop and they were definitely not listening, I eventually just asked one of the boys to stand up, moved his chair five feet away, and asked him to take a seat again (all with a smile that said ‘try and kick him from here’)…yay for effective discipline where both students and teachers are happy.
We had an outing this afternoon to the Haus der Wahnsee Konferenz, where the genocide of European Jews was planned on January 20, 1942. The museum housed there is regarded as a ‘site of the perpetrators’ and consequently displays detailed information about the aims and activities of different branches of the SS, and the effects this had on European Jews. We met with two Zeitzeugen, or Witnesses of that Time, above the museum. Mary Louise Gericke, 84, said she was lucky to have grown up in a non nazi family and to attend a school where the headmaster wore the swastika but allowed several ‘suspect’ teachers to work. She did try once, when she was young, to go on a swimming trip with the Junge Madels but her parents forbid it. Later, she was asked to become a Fuhrerin of a youth group and denied, luckily without repercussions. She had one good friend at the time who was jewish, and she remembered her (Pauline) wearing the star on her jacket, and hiding it with a pocketbook when they walked together. The doorman of Pauline’s apartment asked her if she really wanted to visit those Jews again, she said, and there was one time when her mother forbade her to go to Pauline’s- the day that would later be remembered as krystalnacht. Pauline and her family belonged to the lucky group of 9000 Jewish Berliners who were able to emigrate and she later sent Mary Louise a package from California. 1600 other Jewish Berliners survived the war in Berlin, and 6000 perished. After the war, Mary Louise and her aunt obtained fake papers and left the Russian Sector for West Berlin. She first learned about the Holocaust after the war- previously she had been aware of deportation but not the camps. In the time since, she has met one person who said, “I am happy my father died in action, because he was an ardent Nazi” and another who was told by his father, a German officer, that people were gassed- when he was 15 years old.
The man who spoke was less interesting to me- he talked about the Jung Volk, said his grandfather had hid jewels in their home for Jewish friends, said he used to illegally listen to BBC. He did describe one night, in 1942, when his father told him to get his Hitler uniform and they drove to a burning building that he later learned was a synagogue. He watched many people carrying backpacks walking to it, silently- so silently. And his father said, “Listen.” The group, once assembled, was deported. This man had watched Jews being deported in the same city where someone in my family was deported. I am the descendant of the sister of one of Auschwitz’s victims, and I was sitting in the building where Hitler decided how to kill the Jews, across from a man who had watched these plans being implemented.
I spoke to Mary Louise briefly after the talk, and told her. She said it isn’t trendy in Deutschland anymore to speak of this time- that it’s already too far away and the students only care about the fall of the wall now. “There’s too many terrible things- and too many people don’t want to speak of it- I was also raped, you know, when the Russians came,” she said, “But we didn’t speak of it.”
The Second World War was not a time for Jews or Germans. And it’s terrible to think about the things that haven’t changed:
Prejudice against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Persecution of Trans people. Discomfort with disability. Violence against women. The abuse of civilians, including those in Palestine and Iran. Silence and inactivity in the face of all this.
Sean was very kind and walked with me until my mood picked up again, and we all went as a group back to the city and Hooka-ed, got lost, ate Mexican food, and came home late.