The Bully And The Boy

The Bully and the Boy

Bavaria. 1934. It was the wrong time and the wrong place to be a Jew. And Heinz was a Jew. The little Bavarian village of Fürth was already overrun with Hitler’s young thugs. To be a Jew…of any age…was to be a target. And Heinz was only eleven. It was the first minute of a black hour in European history. Some fled before the clock ran out. For many, time stood forever still. But Heinz was one of the lucky ones. And he would take with him…from that place of creeping horror…an indelible lesson with which one day he would make the whole world less dark.

Tradition, the song goes. Heinz’s father was a schoolteacher as had been his father before him. Tradition. The precepts of Judaism were carefully handed down from one generation to the next…and Heinz learned them well. The observance of the Sabbath, of Rosh Hashanah, of Yom Kippur. But, for Heinz’s parents, those ancient traditions had gained a new importance. They were a means of teaching their children self-control at a time when sudden impulse could be dangerous.

In the beginning, it was different. Heinz started out in a cozy, close-knit little world. He vastly preferred soccer to school. A happy, often mischievous child, there were always tricks to play…pigtails to pull. He was an undistinguished student, expounding at great length and with great flourish only when he knew the answers. But Heinz didn’t always know the answers. Then that black hour descended, as it always does…one second at a time. Heinz’s father was dismissed from his teaching post. There were fewer and fewer soccer games. Heinz was expelled, forced to attend an all- Jewish school. Slowly the playful, exuberant boy became more cautious. Slowly the streets became a battleground.

Hitler Youth roamed everywhere…but Heinz remembered what he’d been taught. There was no such thing as a sudden impulse. When a gang of bullies approached him on the street, he’d cross to the other side…when he could. Sometimes a beating was unavoidable. Sometimes it was not. Whatever the case, he must not pick a fight…and he must not speak up.

One day, the silence was broken…one day in 1934. Eleven-year-old Heinz was forced into one of those inevitable confrontations with a Hitler bully, but this time…for the first time…he started talking. Perhaps it was about anything and everything. And perhaps Heinz himself didn’t remember how he talked his way out of it…but he did talk his way out of it. And that was important. Today, Heinz recalls his childhood in Bavaria. “I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not serious…the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life. That part of my childhood was not a key to anything.”

Maybe. Or maybe the boy who talked his way out of a beating learned something that would one day be valuable to all of us. Gratefully, Heinz and his family escaped Bavaria in time, made their way to America. Even there, he would cross the street whenever a group of boys walked his way. He’d been preconditioned to expect violence, I suppose. But he never forgot how to talk…and if indeed the pen is mightier than the sword, for Heinz the spoken word is most powerful of all. You see, he Americanized that Bavarian name when he arrived in New York. And Heinz, who had negotiated that first peace for himself, ultimately devoted his life toward a more peaceful world. Henry Alfred…Kissinger (4).

Henry Kissinger. Star number 17, 876, 542? Certainly one of the stars in the night sky found in Genesis 15:5;

He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars-if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

(4)Paul Harvey’s by Paul Aurandt. The Rest of the Story. DoubleDay & Company, Garden City, New York, 1977, pg. 74-75.