In December 1937, shortly after my 11th birthday, my parents sent me to the “Israelite Orphanage with Educational Institution” in Esslingen am Neckar. At first I felt this banishment as a shock; but very soon I felt comfortable there and as if liberated. The boarding school had been founded around 1830 as an orphanage. In 1899, Theodor Rothschild, then twenty-five years old, had taken over the management, which he retained until the school was dissolved by the Nazis in 1939. His attempt to move the school to America failed, and he perished in Theresienstadt in 1942. Very few of the foster children - about sixty boys and twenty girls - were orphans; some were considered difficult to educate, among whom I was probably counted. Some of the children came from smaller towns in Württemberg, where they could no longer attend school. For others, the parents had already emigrated or were about to do so, and wanted their children to join them. Despite its name, the school was organized in a much more open and student-friendly manner than the Talmud Torah in Hamburg or the elementary school in Knauerstraße. The cane, which had been reintroduced in Knauerstraße with the end of the Weimar Republic, or the slaps that were handed out in the Talmud Torah, did not exist in Esslingen. The two teachers and the teacher were all under thirty, athletic - the teacher was a German-Jewish table tennis champion - and had an even better relationship with the students than Mr. Pohle, who had always insisted on strict discipline. The teachers lived in the same house with us, as did Mr. Rothschild, who, however, sat at a separate table at meals, was better fed and generally treated as a person of respect. The school was housed in a very nice building on the hill just above the castle. The teaching was more hands-on than in the Realschule section of the Talmud Torah School in Hamburg. However, the overall scholastic demands were lower, so I was soon transferred from the sixth grade I had attended in Hamburg to the seventh. Many home-schoolers came from poorer families who were not necessarily eager to have their children graduate from high school. During my time in Esslingen, the lessons were aimed at preparing the children for emigration, with the emphasis on teaching manual and agricultural skills. Particularly among Zionists, the prevailing view at the time was that Jews in the Diaspora had for too long pursued predominantly commercial and intellectual professions. This negative assessment of traditional and especially intellectual Jewish occupations proved to be wrong in the emigration and later also in Israel, where a high level of education was required in increasingly technologized societies. Much of the romantic spirit of the youth movement was also noticeable in Esslingen. Sports played an important role. We hiked through the Swabian countryside with the teachers and sang Hebrew pioneer songs. Our home was run Orthodox, and at that time that meant that there was hardly any meat to eat. Prayers were said every morning and evening and before and after meals. Food and lodging were spartan, but that didn’t bother me.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 63f (translation)