On the first day of school, Albert cried all the way there. His teacher, Fraulein Goguel, directed him to sit next to another boy. Albert recognized him as the butcher’s son, but didn’t know his name. Although Gunsbach was a small village, Albert’s mother had always forbade her children to play with other village children. When Albert questioned her about this, she explained that being a pastor’s son was an important position in the village and he could not make friends with the farmer’s son or the blacksmith’s son. Now that Albert was in school with these boys and girls, he had no idea how to make friends with any of them.
After the school bell rang, the children sat at their desks and recited the alphabet. Within minutes Albert’s mind began drifting. He wasn’t in the classroom anymore. Instead he was sitting on his favorite rock, looking out at the ruins of Schwartzenbourg Castle farther up the valley.
“Albert, didn’t you hear me say it was your turn to come to the front?” Fraulein Goguel said, her stern words breaking into his daydreaming. Albert scrambled to his feet as the boy seated behind him snickered.
During breaks, Albert stood alone. He only had sisters, and most of them were younger. He didn’t know how to play with other boys. Instead he looked up to the Vosges Mountains, wishing he were there and not standing in the schoolyard.
On his first afternoon at school, they had singing class. The music teacher played one note at a time on the harmonium as she encouraged the children to sing German folk songs. Albert was puzzled. The single notes were jarring. He thought it would be much better if the teacher played with both hands, as his father had taught him to do.
When singing class was over, Albert couldn’t contain himself. “Why do you play with only one finger at a time?” he asked the teacher. She looked surprised, and Albert felt he had to explain further. “Like this,” he said, sliding onto the stool at the harmonium. Thinking back to the last folk song they had sung, he played the melody with his right hand and the accompanying chords with his left. It sounded much more beautiful to him than the single notes the teacher had played. When Albert finished, he turned to the teacher to see if he had gotten the point across. The music teacher had a strange look on her face, as if Albert had done something odd. He felt his face turn red.
As the weeks went by, the music teacher’s harmonium playing did not improve, and it dawned on Albert that that might be the best she could do. Five-year-old Albert felt embarrassed when he realized that, without trying, he had surpassed his music teacher at the keyboard. He hadn’t meant to humiliate an adult, and he determined not to shine in class again.
Not long after, however, Fraulein Goguel told the class the story of Noah’s Ark and the flood. This was a subject Albert considered himself somewhat of an expert on. His father had told him the story several times, and since the summer before had been particularly wet, Albert had witnessed what happens when it rains for what seems like all day and all night for forty days. The village didn’t fill up with water, but the rain ran down the cobblestone streets and into the river. How then, Albert asked his father, was the rain that fell for forty days and forty nights enough to flood the entire world? His father smiled. “At that time, at the beginning of the world, the rain did not come down in drops the way it does now. It came down in bucketfuls.”
Since the answer made perfect sense to Albert, when he heard his teacher tell the story and omit the part about bucketfuls of rain, he couldn’t help but interrupt her. “Teacher, you must tell the story correctly. You must say that at that time the rain came down in bucketfuls, not drops. That way there was enough rain in forty days to cover the whole earth.”
The teacher looked oddly at Albert. Once again Albert had the feeling he did not fit into his class. None of the other boys or girls seemed at all concerned about how much water fell from the sky. Why, he asked himself, did it bother him?
Chapter 3
Fitting In
Over the next several weeks, Albert tried to make friends at school. Sometimes the other boys let him play with them, but he always felt they only tolerated him. This led him to try harder to fit in, even when he didn’t feel good about it afterward.
One afternoon, Albert was walking home from school with several other boys. One of them starting yelling, “Mausche, Mausche, go away!” Albert looked behind him to see a bent old man leading a donkey cart along the main thoroughfare through Gunsbach. Another of the boys joined the chant, and then another. They folded the corners of their jackets to look like pigs’ ears and began walking alongside the old man leading the cart. At first Albert was shocked that schoolboys would act in such a disrespectful way toward an old man, but somehow an irresistible pull to be like the other boys overcame him. Soon Albert was also yelling, “Mausche, Mausche, go away!” and watching gleefully as several of the boys picked up stones and pelted the old Jewish man as he passed on down the road.
That night in bed, Albert thought about what he’d done. He tried to remember everything his father preached about Jews. They were God’s chosen people. Moses was a Jew, as were King David and many other heroes of the Old Testament. As far as Albert could remember, Mausche was the first Jewish person he had seen, and he looked like so many other old men in the village. So why did the boys hate him? And why did Albert himself join them in yelling at the defenseless old man? Albert had even felt a tinge of joy in joining in with the others. For once he was one of the boys, united against a common enemy. But that realization made him feel even more ashamed of his actions, and he promised himself never again to yell at the old man if he came back through the village.
School was hard, but home was difficult too. When Albert was seven, his youngest sister Emma died. Her death haunted him. She had been a sickly baby, but so had he. Albert’s mother often told the story of how, when he was six months old, they had moved from Kayserberg to Gunsbach. One day after their arrival, the church women came to meet their new pastor and his family. Albert was puny and yellow. Albert’s mother said she overheard a woman say that the first service Pastor Schweitzer would likely hold in Gunsbach would be the funeral for his baby son. When Albert’s mother heard the comment, she fled the room in tears and refused to return to the “welcome” gathering. And now, as they prepared for Emma’s funeral service, Albert wondered why his life had been spared and hers taken. Why did God allow some people to die and others to live? Albert wanted to ask his father about it, but he was too shy to do so.
Albert also wondered about Uncle Albert Schillinger, after whom he was named. Uncle Albert was his mother’s brother and had been the pastor at the Church of St. Nicholas in Strasbourg. In 1870, five years before Albert’s birth, the Germans were preparing to invade Strasbourg. Uncle Albert offered to journey to Paris to gather medical supplies in preparation for the battle. He managed to collect the supplies, but as he tried to return, he learned that the Germans had already surrounded Strasbourg, and his beloved city was under siege. The Germans captured and imprisoned Uncle Albert, but the supplies he had procured in Paris were allowed into the city.
When the war was over, Uncle Albert returned to pastor his church, but soon afterward he collapsed and died. Albert’s mother often told her brother’s story, adding that she hoped Albert would be worthy of his name and grow up to be a scholar and hero like his uncle. But Albert wondered about it all. Why would God allow Uncle Albert to survive the war, only to to drop dead when it was over? It seemed impossible to think of a good reason why that had happened.
One month after Emma’s burial, Albert’s mother gave birth to another baby. This time it was a boy, whom his parents named Paul. Albert was surprised. He was so used to sisters that it was hard to imagine having a brother. But there he was, healthy and strong, lying in Emma’s old crib.
Despite his unhappiness at school, Albert still had to attend classes. As he glumly counted up, Albert realized he might have twelve more years of education stretching out in front of him. He could hardly imagine that. It seemed like an eternity. Very slowly and with a lot of repetition, Albert learned to read and write and to do simple addition and subtraction. His letters and numbers were clumsy, and his teachers always told him he could do better if he just concentrated more. Albert tried, yet he couldn’t help but feel he did not fit in at school, at home, or anywhere. He was bigger and stronger than other boys his age, but what use was that when he was sitting behind a desk?
On Albert’s way home from school one day an older boy, George Nitschelm, challenged him to a wrestling match. Albert agreed. Both boys put down their slates, stripped off their shirts, and wrestled by the side of the road. Even though George was older and taller, Albert was a natural wrestler, and he won the contest. As Albert pinned George down, George looked up at him and hissed, “Of course you won. If I had meat twice a week like you, I’d be as strong as you are.” Albert was mortified. He thought he was making progress at being accepted by the other boys, but apparently not.
That night when his mother placed a pot of steaming chicken soup on the table, Albert pushed his bowl away. It reminded him of every way he was different from the other boys. He knew he would have to take decisive action if he didn’t want to be an outsider all his life.
One thing separating Albert from the rest of the boys at school was the clothes he wore. His mother took great care to make sure he was always well-dressed. Unlike the other boys, Albert often wore a starched-collar shirt to school along with leather boots. But Albert knew that would have to stop. The following morning, he dressed in his oldest pair of trousers, pulled on a plain brown smock, threw his boots under the bed, and pulled out a pair of wooden clogs like the other boys wore. He had to admit they weren’t as comfortable as the leather boots his grandfather had given him, but Albert didn’t mind. All he wanted was to fit in.
“What do you think you are wearing?” Albert’s mother said in a raised voice when he came downstairs for breakfast. “Your father has already left for Colmar, but he would tell you the same thing. Go right back upstairs and change into your school clothes. Do you want to disgrace our family?”
Albert certainly didn’t want to do that, but more than anything, he wanted friends at school. So he stood his ground. “This is what the other boys wear, Mama.”
“You’re not the other boys. Go upstairs and change,” she retorted.
Albert ignored her and sat down at the table, knowing he wouldn’t win a verbal argument with his mother, yet doubting she would actually carry him upstairs and change his clothes.
That day Albert wore his “peasant outfit” to school, and he was pleased that he looked more like the other boys. But it came at a price. That night, after Albert’s father returned from Colmar, he took Albert down to the basement and demanded an explanation about the clothes he had worn to school. Although Albert shook with fear, he refused to back down. His father slapped him across the side of the face and locked him in the basement to think about the sin of disobeying his parents, but Albert didn’t care. At school, he wasn’t going to look like the privileged son of a pastor ever again. The situation went on for several weeks. Albert would come downstairs wearing his oldest clothes, and his mother would nag him while his father slapped him and banished him to the basement. Eventually, they reached a compromise. Albert could wear his old clothes to school but on Sundays or when they had guests at the house, he’d wear his best clothes.
Every time Albert got a new item of clothing, the disagreement was revived. At the start of winter his father got a new overcoat, and a tailor cut up the old one and reworked it into a smaller overcoat for Albert. But none of the other schoolboys wore overcoats, so Albert refused to wear it. His mother knitted him warm woolen gloves, but the boys wore fingerless ones. His aunt wanted to buy him a sailor hat, but his classmates all wore brown woolen caps. On and on it went. Even though he was only seven years old, Albert was a stubborn match for his parents.
