Towards the End of the War 1944

                                Towards the End of the War1944

                                   (An Extract from my Memoirs)

The village school in Lichtenow had two class-rooms, but only one teacher for the whole school. The teacher used just one of the class-rooms. In that room he gave each grade his individual attention. When it came to reading, as for instance the Nibelungen Lied or the Gudrun Saga, this was read out to the whole class and all students ( boys and girls from age six to age fourteen) were allowed to participate in discussions about the characters in those stories, who were partly mythical, partly historical. Some poetic passages we learned by heart. I can remember them to this day!

The school in Herzfelde was very different. After the summer holidays of 1944 I found myself in this school in a class of about thirty girls, all aged nine to ten. In this class we were often given dictation. Every spelling mistake was marked by the teacher and counted as one bad point. For a punctuation mistake only half a point was marked. The student with the least mistakes was seated at the top of the class. Every one was seated according to the number of mistakes they had made in dictation. I usually ended up among the top three students in the class. The girls with the most mistakes, were seated at the bottom of the class right in front of the teacher.

Due to the war I went to that school for about three months only. From that time on I had a preferance for sitting in the back rather than the front of the class. When I went to a girls’ high-school in Berlin later on, I always made sure, that I got a seat in one of the back-rows. (In high-school we were allowed to choose , where to sit!) I used to pity the girls in the front-rows, who often had to suffer a lot of spit shooting out of the mouth of German teacher Dr Petzel. The standard joke after an enormous spitting session was, that the girls in the front rows should put up umbrellas, when Dr. Petzel was talking!

Right through my childhood I was made to wear a roll of hair on top of my head, which hovered over the midst of my forehead. Finally, when I turned ten, Mum let me discard this ridiculous curl. Because of this, I felt, I was on the way to becoming a grown-up person.
I always liked talking to grown-ups, such as Frau E.T. She told me, what sort of books she had read as a girl. She offered to let me read her Nesthäkchen books. These books were written by Jewish author Else Ury. I liked all the Nesthäkchen books very much. I did not stop reading them, till I had finished all ten of them. Nesthäkchen ist the youngest child in a middle-class family. Her name is Annemarie Braun (Brown).I remember Nesthäkchen as an ordinary girl, growing up in Berlin. In the first book she’s a six year old – approaching school-age. In the last book she is a grandmother with white hair.

The Nazis banned Else Ury – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Else_Ury – as an author by 1935. She was killed in a concentration camp in 1943. I found out about this very recently. It is so very, very upsetting. It brings tears to my eyes. –