My best friend since before I started school was Karl Heinz Martin, the son of the Superintendent of our apartment house, even after we had moved to a different more modest apartment nearby. I celebrated Christmas with his family and he Hanukkah with us, without either of us considering this as unusual. I considered it perfectly normal that I was Jewish. On Christmas Day 1932, only a few weeks before the Nazis came to power, my father took me to a children’s play. At the end of the play, the leading actress announced that because it was Christmas all the children in the audience would receive a bag of candies. When I got up and loudly announced that I celebrated Hanukkah, she replied that the child who celebrated Hanukkah would receive two bags.
I began school on April 3, 1933, in the neighborhood public elementary school for boys in the Knauerstrasse, two days after the Nazi nationwide boycott of Jewish Stores. I had experienced no anti-Semitism before and experienced none in the school. On the other hand, changes soon became apparent after the Nazi accession to power. During the first few months, we regularly greeted the teacher as “Guten Morgen, Herr Lehrer.” One day we were told that we should discontinue this and stand next to our desks, raise our right arm, and say “Heil Hitler.” I was not excluded from this, nor from the Monday morning assemblies in the schoolyard, where the principal in Nazi uniform addressed the children. The Swastika flag was raised and the German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” was sung, followed by the Nazi “Horst Wessel” song, honoring an SA (storm trooper) martyr.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 26