Children learn to tip toe around their world
Children learn to tip toe around their world
Kids may know less than adults but their minds make use of what they know often as well as adults. Just watch kids cautiously move about a dangerous world and you will see what I mean.
Nine and ten-year-old brothers Werner and Egon along with their parents were German refugees. At the last possible moment, the Barth family stumbled their way out of Nazi Germany. Their luck held and so they landed in the USA and settled along with many other similar refs in an area of New York City called Washington Heights. With black humor they referred to that neighborhood the Fourth Reich. Danger was an intimate part of their world view and so these new refs tried to stay invisible and taught their children to do the same. Kids understood what that meant ‘stay hidden’.
The Barths and their kids live on the 5th floor of a shabby apartment building, 600 west 150st. Unfortunately, the superintended of the building was Herman Drummer, a committed Nazi. For example, while people in the building collected tin cans in support of the war effort Drummer disposed of them. He threw them out with the garbage. Werner and Egon saw him do that on a bunch of occasions. They didn’t tell their parents who knew Drummer was a Nazi. Did he look like a Nazi? Not really and anyway what does a Nazi look like? However the nose sometimes can read people better than their eyes. Werner and Egon had well trained noses.
The Barths along with the other refs in the building were stuck with a Nazi superintendent.
Werner and Egon learned to make small talk with Drummer. They knew how to spot danger and how to deal with it mostly learning how to stay hidden, not revealing who they were to strangers. They had been skilled at knowing how to hide and reveal nothing about themselves. When asked by Drummer “Do you like school?” they gave one-word answers like “Sometimes.”
They could tell others about their baseball predictions but nothing about who they were.
Egon and Werner each had sometimes functional bicycle. The only bike store that could fix these old bikes was in Yorkville the section of New York that had been home to the American Nazi Bunde. Egon and Werner were well aware of where they were and had learned to ‘act normal’ even in the presence of people who would love to see them dead even as they experie3nced fear and the hostility of the bike mechanic.
Two doors down the hall from the Barth apartment lived Mr. and Mrs. Dorn. They were perfectly comfortable voicing their racist views of different groups of people including Jews, especially refugee Jews. Of course, Werner and Egon knew this and actually found their attitudes funny. They sometimes teased them while waiting for the elevator with them. One-time Werner told them that they would not join them in the elevator since it might make them uncomfortable. Egon had trouble suppressing his giggle. Racism for Egon and Werner was serious business so for them knowing how to hide who they were took precedence over fun and games.
Fast forward decades. Werner and Egon never did leave their fears of being identified as the unwanted. They never forgot how to hide who they were. They never could relax completely in a dangerous world. Children are super learners that don’t forget what they had learned as children.