Cruel Fun

The town I grew up in was lily white. I never saw a person of another race until I was in college. The teachers in my schools, the people in my church, everyone was white,  and as far as I knew, all Christian. But when I was in fourth grade, one of my teachers was Jewish, I think.

I only knew about Jews from what I learned in Sunday school and of course, what I learned later in history lessons about WWII. Then my fourth grade teacher came along and made sure we learned something about the holocaust at a young age.

I don't remember much about my teacher. She was fairly young and dark-haired. I'm assuming she learned what she told us from her family or from people her family knew. Or she may have been given the information from someone she knew, or read about it somewhere, and had no personal connection to it. Whichever it was, she told her story very dramatically as if to make sure we never forgot, and I have never forgotten one especially graphic part of it.

I can still see her in my mind's eye, standing in front of the class, talking. She told us some scary things about what happened to the Jews  during the war. I imagine the parts I don't remember were the usual accounts brought back by news reporters and soldiers. These accounts were upsetting but were soon forgotten. However, the one story that I have never forgotten is the one about German soldiers killing Jewish babies. She described an especially heinous method that still makes me feel chilled. It involved soldiers, bayonets, Jewish mothers and their babies, and someone's idea of cruel fun.

I haven't thought about this teacher in years, but thinking back about my school years brought her to the forefront. I don't know why she thought she had to frighten 9 and 10 year old children with this graphically told story, but she must have thought she had a good reason. After that year she didn't return to teaching in my town. Maybe some of my classmates went home and repeated the story to their parents and those parents complained.

I just hope she didn't think of it as her own cruel joke.