True Story

Inge Deutschkron’s moving account of what it was like to live under the Nazi regime growing up in a Jewish, Socialist, middle class family took us on a journey to discovering the details of the everyday struggles of a outcast living in Nazi Germany. I especially enjoyed this week’s reading because the story helped me to form a clearer and more vivid picture in my mind of the situation at the time.

Interesting to me was one of the novel’s major themes, the idea of an outcast, its real life implications and how it was perpetrated in Germany at the time. As Hitler gradually and systematically stole away the rights of Jews, the "outcasts” were forced to adapt to impending threats of the regime. As early as 1933, Deutshckron’s family felt the urgent need to burn radical books that the Nazis would outlaw for appearing oppositional to the regime. When the Jewish children were banned from attending the same school as the Aryans, the Jewish community united and formed schools of their own, teaching their children not the common and traditional subject areas like the humanities, but rather equipping them with essential daily survival skills such as cooking and sewing, in an attempt to better prepare them for the coming storm. As their identity was unjustly used against them, the outcasts had no choice but to adapt to their dangerous and changing environment, doing their best to cope with the impending perils, though for many of them in the end proved to be pointless effort.

What also caught my attention was Deutschkron’s reference to the utter baselessness of anti-Semitic sentiments, as we have also learnt and read about in previous readings. Deutschkron tells the story about how she was both infuriated and saddened by the fact that she had to reveal her ears to in her passport photo to identify herself because Jewish people can supposedly be distinguished from Aryans by the appearance of their ears. Although this claim cannot possibly be true or reasonable in any sense, many Germans blindly accepted it because of their unconditional belief in the Nazis. When a Jewish man was mistakenly taken as an Aryan to illustrate the superiority of the Aryan ears, people failed to recognize the difference between the two. This just goes as far to show that such a silly assertion rings true to the Nazi’s racial theory, for they are equally absurd, ridiculous and unwarranted.