IRO Children's Village: Bad Aibling, Germany

From March 1948 until late 1950, my father lived at the International Relief Organization's Children's Village at Bad Aibling in Bavaria, Germany, under the name Konstanty Proniewicz. Bad Aibling is a resort town near the Austrian border that currently hosts a US military base. For more information about the town itself, here's Wikipedia's page on it.

Professor Andrew Reeves in Michigan worked there in 1951 while himself a refugee and Holocaust survivor. While his tenure began some time after my father was sent to the US, his description of the Children's Village gives a good insight into what life was like there. Reprinted below is an account from his memoir Between A Rock And A Hard Place, with his kind permission.

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Bad Aibling
The IRO had its "Children's Village" in the town of Bad Aibling, a subalpine spa about 30 miles southeast of Munich (the prefix "Bad" means Spa in German). Otto had been the Jewish chaplain of the Children's Village since the fall and he now notified me that a position for a high school teacher had become vacant and he suggested that I apply for it. I did, and to make a long story short I got the job, resigned my position as night watchman, moved to Bad Aibling, and by March 15, 1951 I started teaching at the IRO Children's Village High School. The job paid DM 250 monthly, or a little less than my former job but it included a room on the premises and opportunity for frequent free trips to Munich.

The Children's Village turned out to be a strange establishment. It was founded after the war for the care of orphaned and abandoned or otherwise displaced children in Europe, in order to organize their adoption and emigration and to provide them with sustenance and education in the meantime. Six years after the war's end most of the original inmates were already gone or grew out of childhood, but the ranks were replenished by refugees from the east, many of whom were not truly orphaned or abandoned but pretended to be in order to take advantage of the better living conditions the village offered in comparison to the adult refugee camps. Eligibility extended to age 20, but of course ID papers could be lost or gotten rid of and it seemed that some "children" were not too far in age from myself, who was at that time 26.

The staffing of the Children's Village was no less curious. Neither Otto as chaplain nor myself as high school teacher had proper professional credentials for our jobs, respectively, and it seemed that this was par for the course for the entire staff. The Director of the village, a Belgian gentleman by the name of Mr. Heuvelmans, materialized infrequently and was a rare presence on the premises. His deputy, Dr. Huth, a local German with a highly questionable personal history during the Nazi period, was in actual charge of day-to-day operations. He was cloyingly fawning to Otto and me (the only Jews on the staff) but we were aware that he dropped prejudiced remarks behind our backs and frequently plotted to our disadvantage. He supervised the various "house parents" (supervisors of dorms) and the school principal. The latter was Mr. Iwanski, A Polish-American who was amazingly uneducated for an educator and in my judgment almost certainly not a genuine high school graduate himself, at least in the traditional European sense. I reported to him.

Naturally, I assumed that I would be teaching science, but that was not to be. The school already had a science teacher (not a scientist, of course) and my classes turned out to be English and mathematics. I was quite taken aback by these assignments: mathematics was never my strong suit and, needless to say, my English proficiency then was not what it is today. I was reassured not to worry about these things. Indeed, it seemed that, in comparison to some other teachers in the school, I was superbly qualified to teach even English and math. However, my strangest assignment was to teach piano. The village never had music instruction before but they had a piano, and when they realized from my résumé that I had some background in that respect they insisted that I take that up as an additional assignment. Doubtless they figured it would add to the glamour of their annual report. Mr. Iwanski's concept was that I should be giving piano lessons to a class of 15 or 20 students together daily, or even twice daily--whenever they had open periods in their schedules. The idea of individual practicing requirements did not occur to him at all. He became quite annoyed when I told him that piano instruction could not be given the way he envisioned it--we had a drawn-out argument and we finally compromised. I could take two students at a time in turns, while the rest of the class watched. To keep them occupied in some way was the overriding requirement and generally the whole philosophy of the school was more heavily weighted on the side of babysitting than on genuine education.

There were no class programs, textbooks, or progression criteria from grade to grade. The teachers were entirely on their own with respect to content as well as method. Homework was frowned upon because it involved giving the children pencil and paper which was an invitation to mischief and which they would lose anyway. Generally, the High School of the IRO Children's Village was not too far from being a total farce. That of course was perfectly all right with the children themselves, or at least most of them. Among the old timers for whom the Children's Village was originally created, only the hard core remained --i.e. those hardest to place with foster parents abroad. They were a wild, uncivilized bunch. Among the later additions there were some nice kids but frequently demoralized by the former element. Most of the teenage girls were openly and sometimes brazenly seductive.

My first scheduled class, perhaps as a break-in assignment, was teaching mathematics to some of the toughest elements in the village. They were a group of "teenage" boys, but many obviously past 20. My romantic notions of teaching algebra and geometry in a well-ordered class environment dissipated fast. First of all, it took a good week or two, with all the psychological tricks I could think of, even to gain their acceptance--it was clear from day one that with this bunch the traditional teacher-student relationship based on respect and discipline would never work. I had to become their "friend". When we finally established some rapport it developed that these kids could hardly add and sub-tract; the "high school mathematics" that I ended up teaching was at the level of the multiplication table. Even that was possible only after I succeeded, by a lucky break, to get rid of the worst troublemaker in the class. He was a Ukrainian boy of about 18, nicknamed "Tarzan" because he was a genuine savage. Actually, he was probably a psychopath. One day I called on him to do some exercises on the blackboard and when I attempted to correct some of his figures he personally assaulted me in seething fury and actually tore the shirt off my chest. Characteristically, the outcome of the affair was the mildest reprimand for Tarzan and refusal of reimbursement of the torn shirt for me. He was not even taken out of my class. A few days later Tarzan got in trouble with the Bad Aibling police and jailed. Except for this coincidence, I probably would never have gotten rid of him at all.

My frustrations as teacher in Bad Aibling were numerous and my successes few and far between. Among the latter I must count a cute 15-year old Lithuanian girl by the unlikely name of Florida Stonkuta. She turned out to be quite musical and progressed to the point of being able to give a modest recital at the end of the school year. Another educational success was a group of Czech boys in their late teens slated for early emigration to the United States whom I had in an English class. First, gaining their cooperation was difficult. They ignored me totally, or pretended not to understand German and answered me in Czech. After the initial struggles which required super patience and sense of humor, I could prevail by appealing to their own self-interest in learning the language of the land they were to live in, and we started to make some progress. In the end, we became friends and I was appointed to serve as the escort person who took them to Munich for their emigration proceedings and eventual departure.

An amusing episode that sheds some light on the general cultural level of the teaching staff in Bad Aibling was during a lunch break in the village cafeteria. I was sitting with Mr. Iwanski, my principal, when the mail was brought in. I had a postcard from my friend John Spitzer who was already on his way to emigrate to Canada, and was about to embark shortly in an Italian port. He had the opportunity to make a side trip to Rome and the card he sent me showed the classic view of the Roman Forum, with the ruins of the palace of the Vestal Virgins, the characteristic three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, the arch of Septimius Severus, and so forth. It was the picture customarily adorning virtually every book on ancient history or Latin grammar. When Mr. Iwanski saw the picture he shook his head in startled dismay.

"Omygosh" said he. "I did not realize that Rome was that badly damaged during the war!"

I remained on the teaching staff of the Children's Village until August 31, 1951, when the facility was dissolved. It was about time; the number of children in the village had diminished from about 300 when I came to less than 100 in the course of 6 months, through aging or emigration. The staff numbered at least twice the latter figure. During the first few weeks of my employment I formulated enthusiastic class projects for the true education of my students but these for the most part remained unrealized. The children lacked the background as well as the motivation. Attendance was on the whole erratic and Mr. Iwanski frequently combined, redistributed, or otherwise broke up the classes according to contingencies created by the diminishing numbers, and in complete disregard for any degree of continuity. Babysitting with some disjointed exercises or storytelling during each period was the only realistic way of handling classes and eventually I had no choice but to conform to the general pattern. At least it gave me time to study, and soon after my departure from Bad Aibling I passed the Final Examination in Chemistry with a grade of "befriedigend" [halfway between good and satisfactory]. I could now commence thesis work; but before I get into the account of that, it is high time to pay attention to a progression of concurrent events of highest personal significance.