CHAPTER 3

School life in Posen

For ethnic Germans life returned to normal in what used to be Poland. Poland had once again been carved up, this time between the USSR and Germany. Our province was occupied by Germany and we became automatically German citizens. For the Poles in our region, life would change slowly for the worse. The official line was that they were not allowed to forget that they were the enemy. For us who had never seen them as anything else but as other human beings, with whom we played and were friends, this caused a conflict within us, which was only solved at a later stage.

When our parents heard that schools would start again, they checked with the school and boarding house in Posen, whether we could go there as arranged before the war in Poland. Günter and I had sat for and passed our entrance examinations to a public school before the war broke out. Günter has had five years of private tuition, the first year from Mutter herself. When I needed schooling, a teacher was engaged to teach both of us. From September 1935 to June 1937 our teacher was Fräulein Müller. She was a warm-hearted, and fun loving person who taught us the usual three R's and also the Polish language, for which we needed to learn the latin script (German was taught in Gothic script), music and singing, craft work, and the appreciation of God's beautiful nature. I had always shown interest in flowers, but she helped me to see so much more in them, also in trees, birds and animals.

From September 1937 to June 1939 Fräulein Parr was our teacher. Both teachers came from German-speaking families who lived in Poland. Both had to teach us also Polish, but for proper pronunciation (we tended to speak the local dialect, which was not acceptable in well educated circles) the local primary school teacher was hired for a couple of sessions a week. We thought it was a great joke, as this teacher came from an area where Polish was spoken with a Russian accent. Our Polish can't have been too bad, though, for at the entrance examinations to enter public schools, our results were better than those of other Polish children, who also had received private tuition at home and wanted to go to public school during the new term in 1939. All subjects had examinations that had to be done in Polish.

Our school in Posen was the only German school, the Schiller Schule. Its Primary School was at a different location from the High School. The

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