The Education of a WASP

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-six Fear, guilt, and unconscious needs were not the simple solution I had once hoped to find for hate between people. Instead, as America neared the presidential election of 1968, I wanted to believe I was wrong. Unconscious fear could cause good people to do terrible things; guilt was more easily exploited by unscrupulous men than hate. On October 15, 1968, a disturbing article appeared in the Philadelphia Bulletin . It stated that the City Hall switchboard was deluged with phone calls from residents of an all-white area who had heard gunshots when police apprehended a (white) burglar. The white citizens believed that a "militant invasion" had come in retaliation for the neighborhood's opposition to school integration. Another small article ran the following week. Two white high school girls confessed they had slashed their hands with broken glass and then told school authorities they had been attacked by black students. vVhen police found their original lies conflicted, the girls, fourteen and fifteen, admitted the ruse was designed to escape punishment for being tardy. Even children had learned to exploit white fear. Early in November, my own fear took a new form. It began at an informal evening at a neighbor's home. Sitting next to me on the sofa was a slender man in his late forties with graystreaked blond hair. His name was Kurt Mayer. He was a sociology professor and a colleague of our host. He spoke little, but I heard what sounded like a slight German accent. As the casual conversation continued, someone talked about the army. Kurt said he had been "in the army," too. I asked Kurt quietly if he had been in the American Army. He gazed at me for a moment with light blue eyes that seemed tired. He had been in the German army, he said, and turned away. The surge of revulsion that took hold of me was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Every Jewish friend I had ever had seemed to be in the room with me. This man had been a Nazi. It was only because I was trying to suppress my impulse to run that I forced myself to talk with him. Could I force myself to see him as an individual instead of as a member of a group as unquestionably evil as the Nazis? "Were you a member of the Hitler Youth Group?" I asked him quietly so that only he could hear me. Kurt Mayer shifted his body, turning to face me across the sofa. Again, he looked at me silently out of tired eyes. With a sigh, Kurt began to talk. "Yes, I was a member of the Hitler Youth Group. Every child joined. It was like joining your Boy Scouts. We were, of course, taught to idolize Adolf Hitler. To us he was a saint, a savior. And when I was seventeen I joined the Nazi army." I listened as silently as I had once listened to blue-collar worker, Woody Beecher, and with the same initial distrust. Kurt continued, "In the army we heard rumors of brutality toward the Jews in the cities, but we didn't believe them. If these rumors were true at all, we thought, they were isolated incidents involving petty ignorant officials." Hitler, Kurt had believed, would not allow Jews to be harmed. Kurt smiled wryly, and I noticed that his long slender fingers were constantly in motion, tWIstmg, twitching , going to his face. "Some of our best friends, of course, were Jews," he said, "but if Hitler thought it was best for Germany that the Jews leave, then it must be best. Still Hitler would not, we told ourselves, be unjust." Kurt was talking louder now and I was conscious that other people were listening. His face took on a wistful, clouded look. When the war was lost and he came home, he found out what had happened to Germany's Jews. "Even then," he said, looking out of blank eyes, "I couldn't accept it. There are several months that I have never been able to remember. I don't know what I must have seen during those months." A young woman with a Jewish name had been listening to our conversation. She broke in from across the room. Her voice sounded sardonic and bitter. "What did you think was happening in Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald?" "My parents," Kurt said, "lived...