Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (5 page)

to have both bravery and luck. when her uncle was arrested in Düsseldorf, twenty-year-old Ruth Abraham hurried from one jail to the next

until she found out where he was. Then, she appealed to a judge who seemed attracted to her. He requested that she come to his home in the evening, where he would give her a release form. knowing that she risked a sexual demand or worse, she entered his home. The judge treated her politely and signed the release. She commented in her memoir: “I must add, that I look absolutely ‘Aryan,’ that I have blond hair and blue eyes, a straight nose and am tall.” Later, these traits would save her life in hiding; now, she was able to gain the interest or sympathy of men who did not want to believe that she was Jewish.
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The judge’s treatment of Abraham notwithstanding, traditional sexual conventions could be quite menacing. Despite increasing propaganda about “racial pollution” or “race defilement” (
Rassenschande
), Jewish women recorded frightening incidents in which “Aryans,” even Nazis, made advances toward them.
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one woman wrote of the perils of sexual encounters:

During the Hitler era I had the immense burden of rejecting brazen advances from SS and SA men. They often pestered me and asked for dates. each time I answered: “I’m sorry, that I can’t accept, I’m married.” If I had said I was Jewish, they would have turned the tables and insisted that I had approached them.
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overcoming the stereotypes of female passivity or sexual avail-ability meant confronting gender conventions. These new roles may have increased familial stress in some cases, but both women and men generally appreciated the importance of the new behavior. edith Bick summed up the situation: “in the Hitler times . . . I had to take over, which I never did before. Never.” Her husband “didn’t like it.” But, “he not only accepted it. He was thankful.”
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As conditions worsened, role reversals became ever more common.

women forced themselves to behave in “unwomanly” ways, some putting up a strong front when the men were falling apart. For the sake of her children, one woman struggled to retain her self-control as her husband sank into a deep depression:

He could no longer sleep. He stopped eating, as he said no one had the right to eat when he did not work and became . . . so despondent that it resulted in a deep depression . . . He feared we would all starve . . . and all his self-assurance was gone . . . These were terrible days for me, added to all the other troubles, and forever trying to keep up my chin for the children’s sake.

They decided to send the children away because it was not good for them to see their father in such a state, and because they were also be-ing constantly humiliated at school.
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Children and the Effects of School on the Family

well before legislation drove them out, Jewish adolescents over the age of fourteen (after which attendance was no longer compulsory) left school in droves, the result of the insufferable atmosphere there. This occurred even in cities with large Jewish populations. In Berlin, 5,931 Jewish youths attended higher schools in May 1933; the following May, 2,777 were left; and two years later, only 1,172 remained.
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In württemberg, the April Laws (1933) affected only 10 percent of Jews attending higher schools, yet shortly thereafter, 58 percent left school due to the massive hostility they encountered while there.
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University students suffered even worse discrimination. For example, they had to sit on separate “Jewish” benches, or in the back of the lecture hall. By 1934, Jewish students at the Friedrich wilhelm University of Berlin had to come to terms with a wide yellow stripe stamped in their matriculation books. The result was that by the summer of 1934, only 656 Jewish students (485 men and 170 women) matriculated at German universities, compared with 3,950 (2,698 men and 1,252 women) in the summer of 1932.
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The pain of their children—who often faced antiSemitism from classmates and teachers more immediately than their parents— disturbed both women and men profoundly as parents, but women learned of and dealt with their children’s distress more directly than men. when children came home from school, their mothers were the first ones to hear the latest stories and had to respond to them.
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Prin-cipals summoned mothers to pick up their children when they were expelled from school—and this could happen more than once—and these mothers then sought new schools for their children.
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Teachers often telephoned mothers when children were to be excluded from class events or to receive grades beneath their actual achievement level. In a small city in Baden, the (female) teacher sent Verena Hellwig a letter regarding her daughter’s grades:

Today we were informed at a teachers’ meeting that Jews or
Mischlinge
could no longer receive prizes for their achievements. Because your little daughter is the best pupil in the class, she will be

affected by these measures. I’m informing you in order that you can tell Irene, so that she won’t be surprised and too hurt during tomorrow’s awards ceremony.
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one can envision the depression and anger that would set in among children treated so badly, and the repercussions this could have in the home.

Mothers also supervised their children’s homework. Imagine the contradictory feelings and thoughts of a Jewish mother who was
reas-sured
to learn that her son had sung patriotic songs, said “Heil Hitler” to the teacher, and received praise for his laudatory essay about Hitler: “[His] gross political miseducation at school would keep [him] out of trouble.” About a year later, the same child, now enrolled in a Jewish school, wrote a story about Jewish resistance as a Mother’s Day gift for his mother. Upon reading it, she was frightened: “[His] political awakening . . . could lead to trouble for the whole family.”
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Another mother, in a small south German town, commented on the lies that her children were expected to echo in their homework assignments:

There were . . . compositions with delicate subjects, and they were not allowed to put down a contradictory opinion. Sometimes a judicious teacher gave a selection of subjects . . . but . . . all the children knew what they were expected to write. It was bad enough, that this kind of state’s education taught them to hate, to despise, to be suspicious, to denounce, but worst of all perhaps was this . . . lying.
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Small children shared their distress openly with parents. Six-, sev-en-, or eight-year-olds found it agonizing not to be part of the group. one little boy, referring to his circumcision, confided to his father that he wished he were a girl, because then the other children would not know immediately that he was a Jew. when asked what he would wish for (late 1933), a seven-year-old answered, “to be a Nazi.” Taken aback, his father asked what would happen to the rest of the family, and he responded that he wished they could be Nazis too. This is the same child whose teacher noted that he flinched every time the Nazi flag was raised.
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older children kept more of their pain to themselves, hiding their feelings and some of the more troubling events in their daily school lives. Their already overburdened parents had “no time and too much
Angst
.”
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In a small town in ostwestfalen-Lippe, the only Jewish girl in the school had enthusiastically participated in preparatory swimming exercises in the gym all winter long. when spring came, the class was

to go to the public pool to actually swim. with sadness, her (female) teacher told her she could not join the class. “‘You know why you can-not go with us to the park swimming pool?’ And I said, ‘yes, I know.’ I did not cry. For a minute, I believe, I wanted to die . . . Curiously, I was hurt more for my parents than for myself.”
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Attempts by children to spare their parents notwithstanding, mothers, and probably fathers too (to the extent their wives did not shelter them), surmised what was happening. The Protestant mother of two
Mischling
children noted that many of her daughter’s friends no longer came to their home. “Loneli-ness enveloped us more and more each day,” she wrote.
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often, children had to walk a tightrope between the demands of school and the apprehensions of parents. In one small town, the elementary school teacher insisted that Jewish children give the Nazi salute. The parents advised the children not to do so, both because it was against Judaism to exalt a human being, and because the newspapers stated that Jews were not supposed to give the salute. The teacher’s response boded ill. He threatened the Jewish children with the wrath of their “Aryan” schoolmates: “‘I am not responsible if the children turn against you. . . .’ He goaded them, really goaded. And then, after a short time, we went along, cooperated, and didn’t tell it at home.”
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Another Jewish child was simply delighted when he was forced to give the Nazi salute in school (something his parents had forbidden).
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Unlike Jewish adolescents, Jewish children under fourteen could not simply leave school. why did they remain in public schools as long as they did, when, as early as 1934, the Reich Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden) reported that many Jew-ish children were showing signs of psychological disturbance?
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There were practical reasons: the Jewish community could not build Jewish schools as quickly as they were needed. Further, the public schools had acquired reputations for educational competence. Moreover, some Jews still lived in towns in which the population of Jews was too small to support a Jewish school. A gender-specific family dimension also appears to be involved: while mothers voiced grave trepidations, fathers exhorted the children to remain in school. Toni Lessler, the founder and director of a Montessori School in Berlin, which became a Jewish school when the government forbade “Aryan” children from attending it, described the attitudes of Jewish families:

The circumstances in the city schools became ever more difficult for the Jewish children and ever more unbearable. But there were still many parents who wanted to give children the advantage of a city

school. If the parents had only guessed what the children had to go through . . . [It] must . . . have been . . . false pride which caused the fathers in particular to keep their children in city schools.

Lessler pointed to fathers’ aspirations to give their children a quality education, but also to their “stand tough” approach, since many did not believe that their children were actually suffering.
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Memoirs, too, attest to fathers’ (unrealistic) hopes that their children would not suffer and to their insistence that their children “tough it out” and develop “thicker skin.” when a sixteen-year-old, the only Jewish girl in the class, balked at participating in a class trip, aware that the class would eat at a hotel that displayed a “Jews undesired” placard, her mother supported her. The mother dreaded the anxiety and pain her daughter might experience—“she’ll worry about what might happen during the entire trip”—but her father, a rabbi, insisted that she participate.
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Another father knew the horrid details of his son’s school experience, but did not seem to fathom the child’s emotional state. when this man finally agreed to take his child out of school, the ten-year-old proclaimed: “Father . . . had you continued to force me to go to a school, I would have thrown myself under a train.” The father confessed: “My hair stood on end with fear, cold chills ran down my spine. what must have been going on in the soul of a small, innocent child?”
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These and Lessler’s observations are examples of gender-specific reactions in which men wished to stand firm. They are also examples of gender-specific roles in which husbands made the ultimate family decisions, although their wives had more immediate contact with their children and their children’s emotional states. Also in accordance with gender socialization, wives (and children) may have kept the worst from the husbands/fathers, and boys, trying to be “manly,” may have remained more silent than girls. They sought to spare their fathers yet another strain because their business or professional lives were bitter enough. one boy remembered coming home many times to his moth-er’s admonition, “Don’t talk to your father,” who was very upset.
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