<Begin Segment 15>

TI: I'm going to sort of switch gears and now talk about going back to school, and your time in junior high school and in particular, your relationship with a Polish immigrant. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that and how you met this boy.

HM: Okay. Now we're getting into the time period when the war in Europe had already started and I guess most of the people know that the Jewish people were being rounded up and given treatment even more severe than what we went through. But when the Germans occupied Poland, they screened out the Jewish people, people with Jewish ancestry and Jewish religion, followers. And consequently they made the life pretty miserable for those people. They put them into ghettos and things of this nature. Some of the people were able to get out of Poland. And during that time period, the Seattle school system was trying to integrate some of these refugees from Europe into the school. And Washington Junior High School was designated as one of these recipient schools for these Jewish students.

In our class we had one Jewish Polish student come into our class. At that time all the students were seated according to alphabetical order and that was the standard procedure that was used in Washington junior high school at that time for our class. And we were broken down into four levels of class performance for each class. As it turned out this student, this Jewish student, had a name very similar to mine, so I was in between this new student, and the other party was Bertha Miyatvich. She was a kid that had gone through the same school routine that I did, Bailey Gatzert, and then Junior High School. Bertha was kind of an independent. She was a Yugoslav ancestry person and she was kind of independent character.

The Jewish kid was very good in science and mathematics. Unfortunately his manual capabilities weren't something to be desired. But he was a good soccer player, but he didn't have any capabilities with his hands, so if you're talking about baseball or basketball, I would rather have him on the other side than playing for me. [Laughs]

Consequently, because we were seated next to each other and at that time there was this team concept that was being played at Washington Junior High School, and you were supposed to help your buddy. So if you were able to help him you're supposed to give him a little bit of assist. Because of this situation, this homeroom teacher asked me to help this Jewish student and I accepted the challenge. And I thought, Gee, this guy must be able to show me things about math that I don't know. And sure enough, he was very good in math. He was probably advanced about one or two years beyond my math because he was talking about things that I really didn't have any conception of. But as it turned out, his manual capabilities like in the wood shop, was very... deficient, shall we say. In one project we had, we had a cutting board that we were to make out of a pine wood. It was a one inch piece of pine, and we were supposed to make it into a nine by twelve dimension. Before the teacher allowed you to make the next cut on the next side, you would have to have it very straight, very square and meet your perpendicular requirements. If you did not have that, he would ask you to plane away on that surface until you achieved that kind of capability. So his cutting board ended up about like this, [Gestures with hands] (approximately 4" x 5") this is a nine by twelve. And it wasn't really a cutting board at that point. But this was the level of achievement he had. I used to look at him and say, Man, this guy is smarter than all get out in math but boy he sure can't do anything in the shop.

And as things progressed, he was really trying to get into the American school system. And it was very difficult for him because the coverage of material was different and the subjects were kind of different. His English capabilities were good in vocabulary, but somewhat deficient in grammar and somewhat deficient in articulation. At the beginning of the new school year, we were asked to provide to the teacher a personal history that we would write ourselves in our own narrative, and he would ask each of us on a random basis to make a vocal delivery of this. My own recollection was in all the Nikkei students, all you had to do was change the name and the story would be just about the same. [Laughs] Maybe the individual's parents' names would be different and where they came from and what prefecture, was different but nonetheless it was almost the same. The Chinese guys were... it wasn't too much different. But this guy, he had a long preparation and his was the most interesting story of the whole class.

TI: And did he read it in front of the class?

HM: Yes, he was asked to read it. And he was telling about the persecution of the Jewish people by the Germans. It was kind of unbelievable at that time because in the newspapers they would cover the stuff in a general form and they weren't talking about the uncivil behavior of the Germans towards the Jews at that time, not in the sense that we know it today. But he stated it very candidly and he told about his own family and how they were able to escape from the system and get to the United States.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.