“I do not know what I shall do about my children. School has become a hell for them and they can’t endure it any longer. My son simply refused to go back and sits brooding or wanders restlessly back and forth in the apartment or in the empty store. My daughter is still going to school. At least the teacher does not participate when her schoolmates annoy and torture her, and occasionally she even smiles at her. My wife and I tremble when she steals home. She does not say anything any longer, and we do not question her. We do not know what to tell them nor how to console them. What shall become of them if this persecution does not stop . . . .”
This is the report of a Jewish business man living in a German town of average size. Only three months ago he was content and busy in his store, proud of his German citizenship, of his respectable and lucrative business, of his well-educated children.
GERMANY WARS ON CHILDREN
A few days ago newspapers carried the announcement that a Catholic priest in Southern Germany proclaimed against the injustice done Jewish children in German schools. He made the following appeal: Don’t torture children, Christians, remember the words of your Savior, who said: “Suffer little children to come unto me”. If a Catholic priest protested in Germany, where Catholicism made peace with the Swastika by submission, what horrors must have occurred there to provoke him into raising his voice.
Germany is carrying on a war against children openly and without shame. They do not hesitate to state emphatically in their official documents that the great German nation has declared war against little Jewish children and that they are ready to continue the warfare against their little “enemies” with all the means in their power, even with hunger-blockades.
In the latest announcement from Dr. Meinshausen, the commissioner of state for the city school council in Berlin, the following decree was handed down:
So long as the percentage of the Jewish pupils at public schools surpasses the one percent of the total population, no economic assistance may be granted to the Jewish pupils.
The great German Reich is indeed struggling for her honor and her existence.
DEPRIVED OF FOOD, MEDICINE
Hungry, undernourished Jewish children are deprived of their food, while medicine is withheld from boys and girls suffering from tuberculosis and rickets. Everything is permitted in the holy war of the Third German Reich, including the embezzlement of Jewish taxpayers’ money.
The Jews are facing actual starvation. It is no wonder that in their tormented minds the frantic thought arises: It would be better to starve and perish than to accept morsels from these hands.
But starvation is not the greatest cruelty from which they suffer. Jews in foreign countries and German Jews will contribute their last cent in order to give children milk and medicine. The question is how to protect them from mental torture. Their teachers jeer at them, their fellow pupils torment them and the little martyrs have to hear by the hour that they, their co-religionists and their parents are the plaguesores of human society and that their extermination is an ethical imperative. What will become of children in whose ears resound constantly “Your race is cursed, your father is a criminal, your mother is a convict, you’re a born criminal.” They come home to unhappy parents, themselves unable to reassure or to help them. It seems that the only alternative to their becoming blunted and dull helots is that they become desperate criminals.
And yet even those who pronounce the death sentence on German Jews also play the pitiful role. They lament, they are querulous. Why? Because, by wounding the Jews, the offenders hurt themselves also. Loud complaints go up from the rulers of the Third Reich against the Jews of other nations for daring to protest and complain in the name of German Jews, for daring to think of boycotting German goods. Naturally the Jewish father and the Jewish mother, in London, in Paris, in Vienna, in Warsaw and Prague, as well as elsewhere, don’t want to buy the products that emanate from hands that have hurt Jewish parents and Jewish children. The sight of every product “made in Germany” summons the picture of the sad faces of German Jewish children. But the rulers of the Third Reich actually complain because “those malicious Jews abroad” will not buy goods made in Germany.—From Die Neue Welt, Vienna.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
