T E A C H E R

   We had to learn vocabulary every day, of course. He called that ‘victus diurnus’, daily nourishment. If I had had to nourish myself from that... But that’s what he was like. He had absolutely no understanding of children at all. He was one of those teachers from the old tradition of teachers in Germany at that time, not quite as bad as a teacher in the ‘Volksschule’ whose dictum was: ‘With me, you will learn. Anything you don’t learn voluntarily, I will beat into you with my stick.’ That’s just what he did. It was quite different in Wesel, where there was a kind of Jewish mini-school. There was just one teacher there, called Dannenberg, one teacher for all children up to 10 years old, after which you went on to grammar school. But at the time there were these laws, whereby Jewish children were separated from non-Jewish ones – and I am deliberately not using the word Aryan – and they had either to go to a Jewish school or have no lessons at all.
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