Mostly About Me

There were quick visits to Flehingen and Offenburg, but in the end very little time elapsed between the several days it took to fill the crates and our own departure.  With our new passports in which we were given new middle names, “Israel” to all Jewish men and “Sarah” to the women, we traveled by Rheingold Express to Holland.  This was an exciting prospect for boys who of course knew all about the railroad, since the Rheingold was a very special train.  And the compartment in which we settled was certainly the most elegant I had ever seen.  The issue, the issue, was of course the border.  No person brought up in the Europe of those years will ever cross a border without an accelerated pulse, even when the current keepers of those boundaries fail altogether to be in evidence.  Effectively, one’s papers were in order only when you were safe on the other side.  Until that point was reached, we were Jews in Nazi Germany at the end of February 1939.  I understood that well.  But I was not aware of the continuing worry that there might be a last-minute obstacle brought on by a revelation that earlier Jacob had illegally taken money out of Germany.

At the border to Holland, SS men in uniform did ask us and all Jews to get off the train, to face who knows what scrutiny.  We stood next to the train while our papers were checked and were then told that we had to stay overnight while further examinations were undertaken.  To the old worries was now added the question as to how we would manage to stay the night without any money, since, in conformity with the law, Jacob had no money on his person.  Luckily...and it was just a matter of luck...an older SS man then said, “Why don’t we let the families with small children go.”  Whoever was in charge, probably having no more in mind than Gründlichkeit (thoroughness), relented and we returned to our compartment, hearts pounding.  The train soon pulled out of the station.  We were in Holland.

Two things occupied my mind on this journey out of Heidelberg:  the events then current, just related, and an incident of only a few days earlier.  One piece of furniture that belonged to me was a desk of the kind then commonly found in schools...a combination bench and slanting writing surface that served as a lid of a container for books and other school paraphernalia.  Our packing activity had led us to stuff everything full of things to go, so as to use our Lift space efficiently.  That desk, too, had been crammed full or, as it turned out, more than full, since the lid rested on the contents without fully closing.  I knew that, but I was careless.  Monkeying around, I leaned on the lid, heard a small, sharp crack, and was quickly bathed in the most powerful odor emanating from a dripping liquid.  I had broken a large bottle of eau de cologne, stashed away in that desk, to the effect that our living room reeked of its smell until we left it forever.  It was not the first thing I ever broke.  What made me muse about it during our Rheingold journey was the astonishing and unprecedented fact that there were no raised voices, there was no punishment.

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In two ways, inflation was hard on us.  It both reduced the faculty’s real income, while hampering the university’s ability to do something about it.  Not only were there years of budget reductions...though there was little fat to be squeezed out of the college’s...but there were several years of minimal salary increases, with at least one year of none at all.  The mood of the faculty certainly darkened, finally erupting in a resolve to vote “no confidence” in the president.  While the leaders of this move were certainly aware of the economy’s role in Northwestern’s plight, they also believed that the central administration had been irresponsible in not engaging in budget planning.  It is hard to say how the university would have fared had there been effective planning, but it is certainly true that for all practical purposes, there wasn’t any.  Indeed, Bob Strotz did not help himself by making sarcastic remarks about the idea of planning, making no bones about the fact that he didn’t believe in it.  Thus, in the spring of 1982, I had the uncomfortable duty of presiding over a meeting of the CAS faculty at which the no confidence motion was made with a call for the president’s resignation.  I am sure that the motion would have passed easily, had not the university’s General Faculty Committee intervened.  On behalf of this group charged with speaking for the faculty of the entire university, its chairperson, a professor of engineering, had written to a member of the college faculty warning that such a motion would undermine the faculty’s relationship to the board of trustees.  The letter was read during the meeting, with the effect that the motion to postpone a vote on the resolution just barely passed, in effect killing it.  A motion to review and evaluate the administration passed unanimously.  More than one member of the Board of Trustees, I was later told, advised Bob Strotz to fire me as dean for presiding over this meeting:  “In my company he would have been out by the end of the day.”  In fairness to Bob, who knew how faculties worked, even if he didn’t like their and my actions, he also knew that I had no choice but to let the motion be made and discussed and never changed his attitude toward me.

But it was not a good time to be a dean at Northwestern; repeatedly reducing an alr