Chapter 3: Final Days in Europe

Our life was already changing significantly before the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, even from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old. Among our neighbors were two boys of comparable ages to my brother Robert and me. They were our “best friends,” and we played regularly with them, including splashing in the small pool in our garden. In the spring of 1937, they suddenly refused to have anything to do with us and began taunting us by calling us “dirty Jew boys” when we foolishly continued to try to interact with them. Similar problems occurred at school with our non-Jewish classmates. Before this, my school experience in the first grade (Figures 3.1a and 3.1b) and the beginning of second grade had been wonderful, in part because I had a great teacher, Herr Schraik, not the least of whose outstanding attributes was that his wife ran a candy store. When my class was ready to advance to second grade, the parents petitioned that Herr Schraik be “promoted” with us and, because of his outstanding record as a teacher, this request was granted. Nevertheless, in the middle of that school year (1937–1938), he was no longer allowed to teach. He was Jewish and the authorities had decided that any contact with him would contaminate the minds of the children. The new teacher was incompetent and blatantly anti-Semitic—he constantly criticized the Jewish students like myself, independent of how well or poorly we were doing. The situation soon became so bad that my parents took me out of the school…