There must be some mistake! I am German!

During discussion in a graduate-level 20th Century England class, Dr. Robin Rudoff said he sometimes wondered what he would have done had he lived in Europe and the Nazis come for him.

Dr. Rudoff lost family to Nazi murderers; how many I do not know. In my two years in his classroom, he never brought up the camps.

When Dr. Rudoff mentioned his question, I said, “You would have survived because someone would have to tell what happened.”

That was not just making nice with the professor; I believe Dr. Rudoff would have written down and secreted what happened in whichever ghetto the Nazis put him, and had he been sent to a camp, he would have left clues or directions to what he wrote.

I then considered what I would have done, and the other three people in the class. What would they have done?

I would have fought from sheer pissoff. A bunch of thugs in charge of government wall me off and tell me I cannot go outside … Somebody is going to pay a price.

A young man in the class, I figured would have fought because it was the right thing to do. He was a somewhat redneck from North Texas, and had definite opinions he did not mind sharing.

Another young man I thought like a British politician of whom someone said, “He is like a pillow. He agrees with the last man who sat on him.”

A woman student, about my age, was in a line connected to what once had been Family somewhere around Tyler. She was related to Dad Joyner, who discovered the East Texas oil field.

Had we all been in Germany 1933-45, she would not have been Jewish.

“There must be some mistake,” she would have said to Gestapo agents who came to arrest her. “I am German. Yes, it is true my grandfather was Jewish, but I am a loyal German.”

She would have walked into the shower telling everyone, “There must be some mistake.”