The rainbow never sets

to have a sense of humour. As Hermann was responsible for putting the ad in the paper, he had to leave the school. Our class was very proud to have witnessed the best prank of my school years.

Our sports teacher was Mr. Korn. He came from Riga, one of the Baltic States. He was tiny. Most of the pupils were much taller than he, but he was quite wiry and strong. He took us out to the stadium for athletics, or in bad weather we used the well-equipped indoor sports hall. After sports we usually had a hot shower (ours was a progressive school!). Mr. Korn felt he had to supervise us there too, which we didn't like. So we sang a ditty to annoy him:

"All corns grow, all corns grow, only the Korn from Riga not"

"Who has started this ditty?" he wanted to know. Being all naked, we lined up in front of him and replied with one voice: "I did."

So poor Korn couldn't do a thing, but he always tried desperately to catch the one who started it, much to our amusement.

Relationship between the German authorities and the Polish population deteriorated constantly. Early in 1940, a law was introduced which prohibited Poles to travel in the same tram cars or train compartments as the Germans. They encouraged Germans to dob in those Poles, who tried to ignore this law. We students felt it was our duty to police this law from time to time. Most of the time we could tell by the face who was Polish and who was German. We would then go to the conductor and tell them to check their I.D. cards. If they were Poles, they had to go into the car at the rear.

We, as Germans, were allowed to travel anywhere in the trams, but very rarely did we want to go to the rear as it usually was full of smoke and we didn't like it. In the trains, there were also compartments for Poles and compartments for Germans. Initially this meant that we always had far more space than the Poles had. But as the German population increased, Poles were gradually 'evacuated', i.e. they were thrown out of their flats and put into a special buffer Zone between the USSR and Germany, called the General Gouvernement.

Günter, Bernd and I were asleep one night in the large front room of the Siebenbürger boarding house. The row of narrow windows was facing the road. One of them was open.

"What was that?" asked Günter in the middle of the night. Günter, Bernd and I were rudely disturbed from our deep sleep, waking up at the same time. All three of us raced to the windows and saw a large number of uniformed men standing around several delivery trucks. What had woken us up was the scream of a woman who was dragged by the uniformed men into one of those trucks. The uniforms were all black.

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