A CELEBRATION OF PRINCIPLE

Somewhere among the family photos of my childhood is a snapshot taken during an evil time that many people thought would be one of improvement and societal advancement. The photo was taken in the summer of 1938. A shadow falls on a boy approximately three and a half years old, cast by the adult who took the picture. The little guy is in knitted short pants that are held up by knitted suspenders over a checkered shirt. His bare feet stand in wet grass and the proudly self-satisfied look on his face does not quite hide the tears it had just replaced. He needs both his fists to hold up a flagstaff with an enormous swastika flag that reaches to the ground behind him. Staff and flag are taller and broader than he is. That boy was I, and I remember the day vividly as I remember much of even my earliest childhood.

"Let's go to Spandau tomorrow." had been Father's surprise announcement, and the mention of this relatively remote suburb of Berlin had created the usual high excitement in the family — we kept a lovely powerboat in a marina there. Typically, it took days of preparation to pack the family off for a boating event, and so the short notice produced double the eagerness. As it turned out, Father did not take the boat out that day at all. I think he just wanted to relax near his beloved toy from the already sharpening responsibilities of his job. Instead, we had lulled about without much purpose. I was bored and had gotten into some trouble which resulted in the tears.

"What a Heulboje you are!" (Howling buoy, in English) — an unkind label my two much older sisters had bestowed on me. The German colloquially describes someone prone to crying. That was also me. I was easily afraid and quick to cry. In fact, I was the antithesis of what was expected even of a very young boy in Hitler's Germany.

Because I already knew that I was supposed to be brave in all things, the heckling made things even worse, and on that particular day there was no calming me until someone who had been picnicking near us on the green came up with the ingenious idea of quieting the bawling by pressing the emblem of the "New Germany" into my hands. I was apparently already so well programmed that my young psyche had no trouble accepting the gesture as a superlatively positive one. For the rest of the afternoon I remained inseparable from the flag as I marched about to the applause of every group I passed. My confidence grew with each new clamor of approval until I finally marched up onto the marina's café terrace where the applause became a general one.

I have lived in two fundamentally opposite worlds and a few more in between. So different were they from one another, and one of them so dangerous and evil, that the country that was to become mine in the future was compelled by all the conventions of civilization to expend its treasure and the blood of its citizens to destroy the country into which I was born.

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