The Nazi years

I cannot remember a time that I was not disgusted with the man who ruled Germany for all of my formative years.True, I was influenced by both of my parents. By my father, who stormed through the apartment, fuming” That man means war” as well as by my mother though in a calmer fashion. Aside from the fact that my parent’s large circle of friends started to leave the country to settle in Sweden or Denmark or even Amerika, our childrens' lives were being invaded by urging us to join the Hitler Youth. At first just by trying to entice us:”Don’t you want to come to our meetings?” Once, I have to admit, for about one minute, I was tempted. I was walking with my mother and saw a group of my class mates in their uniforms standing around their leader listening to her attentively. When my mother noticed my curiosity she asked if I would like to join such a group. By the time she was done asking I had already decided that I didn’t want to.
      I certainly in no way want to give the impression that I was somewhere heroic by not joining the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mådchen), I was simply not a joiner. Every time we moved someone would come and extend an invitation to come to a meeting. So I went. I think in total it was about three or four times.Maybe I was simply too much of a snob sitting with a group of girls watching a slightly older girl (the leader) read from some sort of propaganda book, mispronouncing every foreign word. Since I had both English and French in school I shuddered when I heard her pronounce the airplane Spitfire “Spitfeere."
      Though I did like to sing I hated the kinds of songs they sang which glorified Blood and Soil. In other words, I did not fit. Also, I had a very good friend, for a while my best friend who had a Jewish parent which meant she was termed “half-Jewish” and excluded from all Nazi activities.Which made these girls somehow outcasts.Not that the other classmates did or said anything derogatory to her or people like her but the simple fact that they could not wear a uniform on days when it was required to do so, such as a national holiday, separated them from the rest of us. Somehow I managed to have enough of a uniform (black skirt,white blouse black triangular kerchief) to pass inspection.
      In History class I had started to talk about “non-arians“ instead of Jews because I detested the way the word was pronounced, always with a kind of sneer. Clearly I did not endear myself to the teacher who then proceeded to tell me the difference between Arians and Non-Arians. This aversion to just say the word Jew remained with me until quite a few years after the war. I learned to be at ease with it only after I had been in this country for a while and gotten to know and befriend American Jews.
      In the spring of 1935 my parents separated and my mother and my sister and I moved into town into a formerly mostly Jewish neighbourhood. As the train passed the synagogue my mother told me that it had been heavily damaged a few nights ago by Nazi rowdies.When I mentioned this to a classmate of mine,who I knew was and ardent admirer of Hitler she exclaimed, she wished she had known about it so that she could help When I tried to argue that I thought this was an awful way to treat people and that Hitler had people tortured,she vehemently denied that he would ever permit such a thing. There was clearly no point in having any discussions with people like her. And I never tried again.