Even though I continued living in the same apartment and going to the same school, many things did change in fifth grade after all. For starters, I had completely different classmates. I had seen a few of them in the halls before and I knew some of their names. But mostly, they were complete strangers to me. The reason for this change was that apparently my fourth-grade class had the most students who went on to Gymnasium in the entire school, and the rest of us were divided among the other classes. One class lost five students and I was among the five who replaced them, in order to keep decent class sizes. We also for the first time had a man as a class teacher. He was very experienced and had the reputation of being one of the strictest educators in the school. He also had the useful habit of asking two students (either of his choice or volunteers) three questions ranging from politics and scientific discoveries to sporting events and entertainment before the start of the first class each morning. 

Along with those changes came three new subjects: GSE (which was history, sociology, and geography) PCB (physics, chemistry, and biology) and most importantly, English. The latter replaced HSK as the third major subject. There at least, I had a huge advantage over the other students, due to my time at the Peto Institute and my parents’ knowledge of the language. In fact, it had been my mother’s college major, along with German and literature. However, despite my good grades in that subject, I was still only average in German and even worse than that in math. I was good at writing essays in German, but the spelling tests caused problems for me. As for math, I was completely clueless in the subject and required my father’s help on every homework assignment. Somewhere in the first half of that school year my aunt (my mother’s sister), her husband, and their newborn daughter, who had been living in Frankfurt longer than we had in Bavaria, needed to leave Germany and go to Lawrenceville, Georgia in the US, where they had some childhood friends.

Toward the end of that school year, surely the biggest sporting event in Odelzhausen’s modest history took place. The then star-studded Bulgarian national soccer team that was preparing for the 1998 World Cup came to face the local village team in a friendly match. I heard about it late, but my father and I got in for free because he and the man responsible for ticket sales knew each other well. As noted in a previous chapter, the Bulgarians had reached the semifinals in the 1994 World Cup at the expense of Germany. They were not as amazing four years later, but still had great players that played for clubs in the best leagues in Europe, including some in the German Bundesliga.  The match was of course never a real contest. Odelzhausen’s goal was a major achievement in itself, while the visitors took their scoring tally well into double digits without really breaking a sweat.

The World Cup itself that year was very special to me, due to the fact that Croatia made its debut in that tournament as an independent nation. They had of course done the same in the European Cup two years earlier, but the global tournament is still on a higher level. They defeated Jamaica and Japan, before losing to Argentina, to advance as the runners-up in their group. In the round of 16, they narrowly beat Romania, to move on to a quarterfinal date with Germany. My father prepared Ćevapčići on the grill and we watched the game together with a Croatian family in our apartment. It was played on a Saturday evening, so I was allowed to stay up.

It was incredibly loud in the living room that night and became more so as the game went on. The first highlight was a red card for a German player, which gave Croatia the early numerical advantage. Before half-time, they made it count on the scoreboard as well and we cheered louder than on any prior occasion I can remember. In the second half, as the Germans furiously attacked, looking for the equalizer, it left more open space for Croatian counter attacks, from which the goals that made it 2-0 and ultimately 3-0 resulted. That was how it ended. There was a lot of shock and disbelief in the German media in the days that followed. They were stunned that they could lose to a team from a country that had a smaller total population than Germany had registered soccer players. There was also humor, however. On the radio, a few days later, a talk show host said that the Croatian team had forced the Germans out of France (where the tournament took place) in the same way a certain cabinet minister in Helmut Kohl’s government was forcing Croatians out of Germany.

The host nation was Croatia’s semifinal opponent and due to the incredible meaning of that game, I was allowed to watch, despite its having been played on a school night.  Croatia played slightly better than France in the first half, but it was scoreless at halftime nonetheless. The former rewarded themselves in the first minutes of the second half by taking the lead. However, they were shocked by the equalizer only seconds later and the hosts scored their winning goal toward the end of the match. France went on to defeat Brazil in the final, while Croatia beat the Netherlands to amazingly take the bronze medal.

During the tournament, I had started taking lessons in Wing Tsun, a Chinese martial arts discipline. One of my mother’s coworkers first gave the lessons in a gym in another town to three Peto patients, before giving me private lessons near my home, which I much preferred, because before that, the drive there was longer than the lessons themselves.  Later on, my brother also took lessons for his own age group and he even earned a certificate.

when the school year was over, we went on vacation to Croatia and for the first time since the war, also to Bosnia. We stayed for a total of three weeks, first visiting my aunt, uncle, and cousins in Zagreb. The only thing I remember from the few days we were there was that I played the World Cup ’98 video game on my cousins’ computer. Then we went to Mostar to visit friends and family. We stayed in our home in which my paternal grandparents were living. Nonetheless, my room stayed the same as I had left it about seven years earlier. The only exception was the poster of the Croatian national team on the door, which was more of a representation of my tastes at that point than all the little children’s toys, anyway.

We then went on to visit my maternal grandfather, who meanwhile had moved to Boračko Lake and rebuilt my mother’s family’s former vacation home there. It was amazingly beautiful there and the air quality was better in that mountainous area than anywhere else I can recall. But at the time, I was mostly interested in my grandfather’s German satellite TV. That was due to the fact that the German Bundesliga season had already begun. The main game I was able to watch, however, was a Champions League qualifying match between my favorite team, Bayern, and Serbian champions FK Obilič Belgrade, which had then been owned by the wanted Serbian war criminal Arkan. After about a week there, my parents left my brother and me with our grandparents in Mostar, before going to a Croatian island together. Then, we all went back to Germany with my grandmother, who then stayed with us for about six months, as she had done several times while we had lived in Bavaria.

Sixth grade had few highlights for me. My computers broke regularly and my classmates often accused me of taking advantage of my disability. It did not end with these simple accusations, however.  A large number of them were determined to ruin my time at school. Worst of all, several of those students had been among my best friends at earlier times. I felt angry, sad, and betrayed. The worst was the fear of never knowing what to expect. They threatened to destroy my assignments and flatten the tires of my tricycle (which I had used to go to and from school every day for years at that point). To their credit, they never did any of those things per se, but they managed to keep me in a state of constant fear at school. When I participated in the school’s bicycle race, however, they cheered me on and were nice to me for a few days. Nonetheless, the damage had been done for me. I lost my trust in people and became more and more comfortable with just being alone. My transformation from the very social person I had been in elementary school to the introvert I am today was well underway at that point.

Despite all the problems of the previous school year, seventh grade was off to a great start for me. My brother started first grade that year so that my parents’ focus was largely on him and I had much more freedom to do schoolwork my own way. Another factor was that my class got a young female teacher who was not too strict and had a much better understanding of students that age than her predecessor did. My grades at the start were all ones and twos, even in math. The class teacher made the prediction that I would surely be able to move on to a higher level  school at the end of the year.

One day slightly further into that school year, there was a misunderstanding that caused most students in the class to believe that I was playing computer games during the lessons. As a result, their vicious behavior toward me began again.  That had a major effect on my subsequent school performance and I was unable to keep my grades up. Everything I did or did not do was put under heavy scrutiny. Hardly a day went by until the end of the school year when a lesson was not interrupted by at least a short altercation between me and virtually all of my classmates. They argued that I was given special treatment by the teachers and that I have always said that I wanted to be treated like any of them. In fact, I only wanted them to leave me alone at that point. I argued that whatever was going on with me was none of their business, a point that they could not seriously dispute.

A majority of the students in the class convinced the teacher to hold what was called a reading night in January, but it had little to do with reading and was essentially a sleepover party in school. The teacher spent a long time talking to me in private until she was able to persuade me to participate. When the others found out I was coming, they went back to treating me well. Again to their credit, they tried their best to include me in their activities that night, but I was disinterested and uncomfortable with them, and not feeling very well on top of that. I had brought an Alfred Hitchcock short story collection and hoped to let the time pass that way.

Soon after that night, however, the harassment continued at school. Some students talked about deleting or sabotaging my schoolwork; I therefore needed to create a password for my computer there. As I could not be certain about whether anyone was able to see it, when I typed it in each morning, I had to change it regularly. In those days, I was not used to having to remember passwords and I did not think of writing them down anywhere. For these reasons, I eventually forgot the latest password and had no idea what it could be. Thankfully, a neighbor in our apartment knew a way to mechanically unlock the computer, thus temporarily taking away its password protection and enabling me to use the computer again.

Toward the end of the school year, the bicycle race was held again and as I had twelve months prior, I decided to participate. The support from my classmates may not have been quite as strong as it had been in sixth grade, but for many of them, it changed their opinion of me for the better once again. I was not only physically disadvantaged   at the race, but my tricycle also had no gears to change to. My participation there was purely to show that I could even take part in contests that required physical strength. Both years that I “raced,” I finished the three -kilometer track in around twenty minutes and both times I received the honorary trophy, which I felt somewhat guilty about.

Something much more consequential also happened around that time. As our chances of being able to stay in Germany seemed to become more and dire, my parents decided look into the possibility of immigrating to the United States. My aunt and her family already had permanent resident status in the country by that time and they therefore had the right to formally invite us to come. It took only a few months before we had an appointment at the American embassy. It was only then that I started taking the possibility seriously that I would soon have to leave my familiar environment behind and move to a country half a world away. I finished the school year normally, without telling many people about this issue.

Next Chapter: Eighth Grade and Beginnings in the US