In September of 1927 I started school. The day before school started I sat on the swing in the garden feeling sorry for myself because I saw school as the end of my freedom. I went to the German girls’ grade school where the first three grades were taught together by the somewhat old-maidish Fräulein Quitterer. While she concentrated on one grade, another class read and the third did calculations on the blackboard, all in one classroom. Being impatient, I read ahead in the reader. Fräulein Quitterer solved the problem by having me read to the class from a reader about Emperor Joseph II, an idealised portrayal that must have been published in the days of Emperor Francis Joseph, or from another book about the history of our town since the Middle Ages.
All of my friends were Gentiles; the few Jewish children in the school were either a little older or younger than I. The Jews of my parents’ generation were mostly either unmarried or had moved away. Only much later in gymnasium did I briefly have a Jewish classmate. On Thursdays, which the Catholic children had off we had religious instruction. Mr. Zwetschkenbaum taught all the Jewish children from town and from the villages in one group, which meant that we had to listen to the same stories year after year. He had come from Galicia as a 14 year-old refugee and stayed when the other refugees returned to Galicia at the end of the First World War. He impressed everybody as a very intelligent man with high moral principles. The salary that the Jewish community paid him was not enough for him to live on, so he earned money on the side buying and selling feathers for bedding and furs for tailors and furriers. Apart from my great-aunt Sophie Popper, he was the only Orthodox Jew I knew.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 18 (translation)