Georg Iggers in front of pupils in Esslingen, 2004
“Whether there was a break in the educational orientation of the school in 1933 ? Not really. I had namely thought that with the coming emigration, agriculture and crafts would be emphasized. But they were already emphasized before 1933. So, the children in the school - it was actually what you would call a secondary school here - so there was no thought of a high school diploma (Abitur), and, well, in the elementary school Knauerstraße, and in the Talmud Torah, there was strict discipline. In Knauerstraße there was the cane. That was reintroduced by the Nazis. In the Talmud Torah there was no cane, but there were slaps. And there were also discipline problems. So I remember, I think it was in the Talmud Torah school, that the children made fun of one - can you all understand me ? - that the children all made fun of one teacher, and started eating their sandwiches in class. So in Esslingen there was nothing like that. There was no cane, there were no slaps, there was a very good relationship between teachers and pupils. There were three teachers, and then the house father, Rothschild, two male teachers who were very young, I think 22 and 24, 25 and a very young female teacher. And, so I felt at home very quickly. And, of course, you had a lot that reminded me of the youth movement, although in some ways the school was very traditional. So this whole direction came much earlier. There was also agriculture. I could remember that there was, well I worked with the chickens, we all had to do something in agriculture. I could remember that there were cows. And , but I wasn’t sure, I found today at the orphanage that I was right. And then there was farmland. And, yeah so it was very nice. So what I didn’t like was the cleaning out of the chicken coop.We were hiking a lot, there was sports, and we also knew, though, that emigration was coming. Today, I was looking at the curricula, so the foreign language used to be French, when I was there it was English. And then if I’m not mistaken, we had English every day. And we had New Hebrew every day, and we also had, of course, Biblical Prayer Hebrew. Those were two very different classes. And, yes, I felt very comfortable then, and there was talk that the school would go to America, it didn’t do that afterwards, I didn’t want to go home, I had hoped I could come to America with the school, and I was very lucky, I went back to Hamburg to my parents at the beginning of September, and on October 7 we emigrated, and on November 10, was the pogrom in the school.”