European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I started school in 1919.

The school was not far away from our parents’ flat.

Role model functions developed later with progressing age.

But there was no role model between the teachers I had.

Partly, they were teachers who had been demobbed by the imperial army

and who were put into teaching profession; like the sports teacher

or the teacher of religious education who had no educational skills.

And characteristic for this time was that we had a teacher who was a real bully.

When the lesson was about to start, first two or three pupils were given a good thrashing, with the cane.

That was from the United States, from the Quaker association

and there I got half a litre of milk soup and a bread roll.

You have to see that this was 1920/21, where a lot of problems occurred in this post-war period.

Post war period – deserting the army

They wanted to keep me in the army when the war ended.

I had some sort of Partisan rank,

something like second lieutenant, but I had no intention of building a military career.

I deserted the army in September 1945.

I wanted to study and I believed that I fought for that too, for my own personal freedom, for the right to decide for myself what I would do.

I didn’t want anybody else deciding for me.