Treffpunkt für ambitionierte Amateurfotografie. Bilder hochladen und bewerten, sich mit anderen Austauschen. mehr...
Die Online-Tagebücher bei stern.de: Freie Autoren schreiben hier persönlich, direkt und eigenständig. mehr...
Vertiefende Informationen zu der aktuellen und den vergangenen Sendungen von sternTV. mehr...
Das Recherche-Team des stern. Erfahren Sie mehr über die Recherchespezialisten und ihre Enthüllungen von Terrorismus bis Wettmanipulation. mehr...
There weren't many black people living in Germany during the days of the Nazi regime. Hans Jürgen Massaquoi, one of those few, talks about how he survived, what he learned and what his experiences can teach us all.
Maasquoi and a childhood friend enjoy a day at the city park in Hamburg
When I showed them »Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany«, the moving autobiography of Hans Jürgen Massaquoi, both my wife and daughter immediately asked, »How did he survive?« When I interviewed the former managing editor of Ebony he said: »Everyone's first question always is: How did you survive?«
As a black child in Germany, Massaquoi lived in a time and place where the odds were indeed stacked against his survival. His grandfather was Momolu Massaquoi, king of the Vai people, a tribe in the African republic of Liberia: He went on to become his country's first consul general in Hamburg, Germany. Hans Jürgen's father was Al-Haj Massaquoi, the diplomat's son, who had fallen in love with Bertha Baetz, a nurse from the Harz region of Nothern Germany. Although the young German woman appreciated the sophisticated charm of the well-educated African, the two never married, and when the diplomat returned to Liberia, Bertha stayed behind.
Bertha's decision vastly changed Hans Jürgen's young life. Barely four years old, the little dark-skinned, curly-haired kid and his mother had to move from a villa in one of Hamburg's most prestigious districts to the working class neighborhood of Barmbek, where other kids taunted him by singing »Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger« (»Negro, Negro, chimneysweeper«). »But after people had gotten used to me and my exotic appearance, they treated me as one of their own,« says Massaquoi.
By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hans Jürgen Massaquoi was fairly well integrated in Barmbek, with an elderly neighbor he called »Aunt Möller« taking care of him while Bertha went to work in a hospital. Although he was threatened and bullied many times by some of his teachers, the local Nazis abstained from persecuting this boy who presented such a stark contrast to their racist ideals. But Massaquoi was under no illusion: »Blacks were not too numerous at that time. They did not pose a threat to the Nazi regime, but they would have been exterminated event-ually. The war ended so rapidly that the SS did not get around to killing me.«
WeFind
