July 20th

 

Three weeks travelling into my own biography part 2

My high school was at the other side of town and I biked at least 25 minutes one way. One hill down, one hill up. Inner town school buses were rare 40 years ago, as were helmets! We completed a road exam in our 4^th grade and off we were on the roads. How different is that in the US where it is forbidden that kids even take care of their younger siblings under the age of 14.

In front of our school were in the 1980s often groups of strange people who distributed flyers with “the lie of Holocaust” on it. There were banned for a kilometer around the school but got their paper anyway. I wanted to know a lot and also what that was. Our school reacted with a project week for the 10 and 11^th grade. In various subjects we learned about the preparation of the Nazi regime and the 12 years of dictatorship and the Holocaust. I do recall us three preparing a presentation about the “women in the 1930s to the begin of the Nazi time”, meeting in each other homes and finding out how to organize and present the material. We copied a brochure for all the classmates and were proud. 1982 we went to the Herzo Base (the US American military base, a remainder of the 4 sector occupation after WW II, in our area the US troops. We also fought for the ban of the right wing extremist party (the communist one was forbidden), a still ongoing topic on Germany.

Last week my former teacher, now a dear friend, and I strolled through my high school from 1978-1984 today part of a school center. Several school gardens (they even won a price for beauty and diversity of their garden!) taken care by students and my teacher, a beautiful cafeteria I only could have dreamed of in my times where school days until 1 or 2pm even in high-school were common practice.