What's to Become of the Boy? Read Free Page A

in the process, men who later, on their return, maintained a stony silence. Paralysis spread, an atmosphere of fear prevailed, and the Nazi hordes, brutal and bloodthirsty, saw to it that the terror was not confined to rumors.
    The streets left and right off Severin-Strasse, along which I walked to school (Alteburger-Strasse, Silvan-Strasse, Severin-Strasse, Perlen-Graben), constituted a far from “politically reliable” area. There were days, after the Reichstag fire and before the March election, when the area was entirely or partially cordoned off, the least reliable streets being those to the right of Severin-Strasse. Who was that woman screaming on Achter-Gässchen, who that man screaming on Landsberg-Strasse, who on Rosen-Strasse? Perhaps it is not in school but on our way to school that we learn lessons for life. It was obvious that along those streets, people were being beaten up, dragged out of their front doors. After the Reichstag fire and the March election it grew quieter, but it was still far from quiet. One must not forget that, after the November 1932 election, the Communist Party had become the second-strongest party in a city as Catholic as Cologne (Center Party 27.3 percent; Communists 24.5 percent; Nazis 20.5 percent; Social Democrats 17.5 percent), a state of affairs somewhat similar to that in Italy today. Despite its Catholic reputation and all the clerical machinations, Cologne was and still is a progressive city. Thenin March 1933 the Nazis obtained 33.3 percent, the Center Party still as much as 25.6 percent, and the Communists and Social Democrats, despite terror and purges, 18.1 and 14.9 percent: the “unreliable area” was still far from being “normalized,” there was plenty of work left for the Storm Troopers to do. (There would be a lot more to say about Cologne, but in my opinion, after the Cathedral Jubilee, Pope John Paul II’s visit, and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne has had ample publicity. Moreover, the Rhine flows on.)
    It must have been about this time that the father of one of my older sister’s school friends, a quiet, reliable police officer with a Center Party background, took early retirement because he could no longer stand the sight of the “bloody towels” in his precinct: those, too, were not symbolic signs; the “bloody towels” were related to the screams I had heard from Achter-Gässchen, from Rosen-Strasse and Landsberg-Strasse.
    By now it will have become increasingly evident to the reader that, as far as school is concerned, this is no more than an “also” story, that, although it deals with my school days, it doesn’t deal only with the days I spent in school. Although school was far from being a minor issue, it was not a primary issue during those four years.
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    A clean-up operation of a quite different kind brought considerable changes in my daily walk to school: the crackdown on the cigarette smugglers who stood at streetcorners or in doorways whispering offers of “Dutch merchandise.” The cheapest legally acquired cigarette cost at least two and a half pfennigs, a feeble object, half as firmly packed as a Juno or an Eckstein, which cost three and a third pfennigs each. The Dutch product was pale gold, firm, a third plumper than an Eckstein, and was offered at one to one and a half pfennigs each. Naturally that was very enticing at a time when Brüning’s penny-pinching policies were still having their effect, so my brother Alois would sometimes give me money to buy him illegal Dutch cigarettes. Between Rosen-Strasse and Perlen-Graben, the focal point being somewhere around Landsberg-Strasse, with scattered outposts extending as far as the Eulen-Garten (the smugglers’ headquarters that were located close to our school on Heinrich-Strasse), I had to be both wary and alert, had to appear both confidence-inspiring and eager to buy. Apparently I succeeded, and that early training or schooling (which, as I say, cannot be acquired in school but