I Shall Live by Henry Orenstein Read Free Book Online Page A

lap and asking him all sorts of questions about America. He was surprised at how much I already knew about it from the books I had read, and he gave me his Waterman fountain pen as a reward.
    Soon after Morris left, Felek came back from France. Studying wasn’t as easy for him as it had been for Fred, so it was decided that he would help run the shop, learn the business, and eventually start one himself. At first Felek was unhappy working for Father,and I felt sorry for him. But after a while he fell in love with a girl from Galicia. There was talk of marriage, and Felek would go to visit her and her family. This brightened his mood considerably, and we were all happy for him.
    In the spring of 1937 my first year of gymnasium was drawing to a close. I continued to be the only straight-A student in my class. At the end of the school year a prize-giving ceremony was held, which was attended by all the students and their parents, with the director of the school awarding a prize (usually an inscribed book) to the best student in each class. When our turn came, to everyone’s surprise the director announced that the award committee had decided that no one in the freshman class had reached the required level of excellence, and that therefore no prize would be awarded.
    I sat in a state of shock, realizing that this was their way of preventing a Jew from getting the prize. To give it to another student would have been impossible, a travesty of justice; therefore, ours was the only class without a prize. My parents were saddened, but not surprised. Father said to me, “This is our fate, and we must deal with it as best we can.”
    This incident had a profound effect on me. It made me very bitter, and when the sophomore year began in the fall, I had lost all interest in my studies and didn’t bother to do any homework. This caused no difficulty at first, because by this time the teachers assumed that I knew all the answers and seldom checked up on me. I actually was ahead of the others anyway, so I could afford to coast for a while. I even stopped reading books, and instead played a lot of ping-pong, read the newspapers, and listened to the radio with great interest.
    Hitler was now the undisputed dictator of Germany. Many, if not most, Jews had begun to realize that this former “painter,” the butt of many jokes and initially not taken seriously by most Germans andother Europeans, was now becoming a serious threat to our very existence. Polish anti-Semites were encouraged more and more by the example of their powerful neighbor to the west, and talked openly of the necessity of finding a “solution” to the Jewish “problem,” which meant nothing less than finding a way to get rid of the Jews altogether. Signs reading “Jews to Palestine,” even “Jews to Madagascar,” appeared everywhere. Palestine was not a realistic possibility, because the British had no intention of letting any substantial number of Jews into their protectorate, but the Madagascar option was widely discussed. This former French island colony is located east of Africa, not far from the equator, and consists mostly of tropical jungle—a highly unsuitable spot for mass immigration from Europe. It was symptomatic of how desperate the situation in Poland was becoming for Jews that some of them considered the “Madagascar option” as a feasible possibility.
    In 1938 Uncle Morris came to visit us again. This time we were expecting him, and after he spent a few days with us, Father took him for a week’s vacation to a spa. This was shortly after Chamberlain’s visit to Hitler in Munich, from which he had returned to England waving a piece of paper signed by the Führer and proclaiming that he had achieved “peace in our time.” Chamberlain then stood by and watched helplessly as the German soldiers trampled brutally over what was left of Czechoslovakia.
    The morning after Morris