Returning home after surgery and months of rehabilitation was amazing. Best of all was that there was over a month of summer vacation left before my second year of schooling began. In Germany, much is done to keep classmates together in the same class for as long as possible. The teacher also only changes every two years.  While I was certainly enjoying my free time, I was also looking forward to seeing my classmates again and to having a much easier and more independent daily routine at school. I only had my classmates’ letters that my teacher delivered to me when she visited me in the hospital. Otherwise, there was virtually no contact with them from the time I came to Aschau to the start of the new school year in September.

On the first day back at school, virtually all of my classmates came up to me in the morning, asking me whether I was able to walk. I was sitting in my seat and each time, I pointed to my walker and said that I could walk holding on to it. Some were a bit disappointed, but they soon grasped my situation and seemed happy for me.  I was able to walk up the stairs to the classroom by holding on to the stair rail. Two of my classmates (who became my best friends for years to come) would fold up my walker and carry it up or down the stairs. We mostly stayed in our regular classroom all day, but some lessons took place elsewhere. It often took me more time to get to these other classrooms, which were usually located on the bottom floor of the building, as described earlier.

I was not the only person in my family for whom life was changing for the better. My mother received a phone call one evening from the mother of a school friend of mine. She had heard that a business in the village where the school was looking for a secretary who knew Serbo-Croatian. It sold trucks and buses to the former Yugoslav republics. The company owner was a Syrian man who had gone to college in Zagreb. My mother went to the job interview and was soon hired. Meanwhile, my father later got a job as caretaker of a newly opening Lutheran church also located in Odelzhausen.  These changes were the reason why we had to move there. After all, not only was my school there, but now so were both my parents’ jobs. They quickly found a nice three-room apartment for us that was significantly larger than the one we had been living in up until then. We spent all our remaining years in Germany there. Moving was stressful; however, I remember how we went back and forth during our last nights in Pfaffenhofen, as my father was moving all the furniture over. It became so bad that I fell significantly far behind with my homework and had to make a deal with the teacher that I would make it all up on the first weekend after our move.

The apartment was very close to my school and also to my parents’ workplaces. The only drawback to it was that I still had to share a room with my brother. A problem from my parents’ point of view was the question of who would look after the two of us when they were working. They found the daughter of my great-aunt’s friend from Croatia. We were told that she was a hard worker and a devout Catholic.  Both of these characterizations turned out to be wildly exaggerated at best and completely false at worst. When she came to us, she was about twenty years old, very ambitious, and as we soon found out, incredibly fond of herself.

Meanwhile, I was involved in intense physical therapy. Apart from the two hours a week with my regular therapist, I also went to Peto-style treatment in Munich for five hours every Saturday. I started to walk a few steps by myself. When my principal found out, he said I should try it at school one day, and he promised me a chocolate bar if I managed ten steps. One Monday morning before the first period, we agreed for me to try.  In a small school, in which I had star status in many ways, something so significant quickly made the rounds and many people came to watch. They all lined up just outside our classroom and counted every step I made out loud.  It was almost surreal, like in a movie. To everyone’s amazement, including my own, I managed to take exactly thirty steps. There were many unforgettable occasions for me in that school, especially in the early years--that one, however, was at the top of the list, to be sure.

Unlike today, I enjoyed being in the center of attention then. I was proud about how far I had come, and as a nine-year-old boy, I was unaware of the negative impact all this attention had on what my goal should have been: to become just another student. But at least I had two good friends who usually treated me normally and who were quick to bring my feet back firmly to the ground, whenever I was out of line in my lofty self-confidence and adoration. It sometimes did not seem clear to me that not only did I not run the school, but that I was also highly privileged in the fact that I was allowed to attend.

Something else that happened that school year was that my maternal grandfather was staying with us in Bavaria. He had made several high-quality pictures of ruined buildings, bridges, and monuments from war-torn Mostar. He was allowed to put up a gallery of these pictures in the school for several weeks. This, of course, brought more attention to me, which I had craved at the time.

At the end of July, the school year was over and I was able to enjoy my first full six-week summer break. I do not remember very much of it, other than that the conflicts with our arrogant housekeeper really began in earnest. Admittedly, my brother and I were not easy to take care of-- neither at that particular time nor at any other. But the way she treated us was unacceptable nonetheless. She would insult us quite often; she also hit us at times, and I remember one time she left my brother with a full diaper as she was sitting outside with her boyfriend and some other friends. That was quite representative of the carelessness she exhibited in her day-to-day dealings with two small children. While she did keep her position throughout that summer, needless to say, she did not last too long beyond it.

The only other things I can remember about that summer are that we were given an old video gaming system by someone and that my father and I went to watch preseason games of the Odelzhausen village soccer team, which was preparing for its upcoming county league season. County league is the lowest level in the German soccer league system and really the purest form of the game there. Looking back on it, I regret not having followed the team more closely.

That happened toward the end of my six-week vacation that year. In September, it was time for school again.  The third grade brought with it some major changes. While the students in the class stayed almost entirely the same, we had a new teacher, and also for the first time, we received meaningful grades on our tests. Instead of comments such as “Well done!” or “In order,” there was a grading scale from one to six, with one being the best, five being potentially failing, and six definitely failing.  While there were classes like religion, art, and PE, the most important ones in grades three and especially four were mathematics, German, and what was called HSK, which was a combination of very basic science and social studies.  At that point, I was no more than an average student. When it came to math, I was even below average. But for understandable reasons, the worst thing of all was my handwriting. For this reason, my teacher called my mother one night and had a conversation with her, which would forever change my life.

She was informed that there was still enough money left from the donations for my surgery to buy two computers, one for the classroom and one for home. My parents quickly agreed, not knowing anything about computers at the time. They were both very basic and had Windows 3.1 on them. For years after that, my parents regretted not having added extra money to the fund, so that they could have bought Windows 95 for me. As it turned out, I was quite happy with a very basic word processor and an even more basic set of computer games, for the time being.  I became used to it all quickly, as there was not much to learn about such basic computers.

One afternoon, I reported to my parents some incident we had with our housekeeper. I do not remember what exactly had happened that day, but it certainly was something already mentioned above. My parents quickly fired her, as they had wanted to do long before. She moved in with her boyfriend and my parents found a quick replacement. This time it was an acquaintance from a former colleague of my mother’s in Bosnia. She was about the same age as her predecessor, much nicer, but also quite lazy. She would usually sleep until noon whenever possible and when she woke up on the first day, she asked whether the television had been broken because it was turned off at the time. When Christmas break began that year, my parents asked her whether she would like to spend the holidays at home with her family; she agreed but never returned. They then decided to give up on the idea of a housekeeper and due to my father’s flexible working hours at the church, they could afford to do so. Meanwhile, my brother started kindergarten. First, it was a private one, where the care was bad and the teachers gossiped about him and about our family. Then he went to the main kindergarten in Odelzhausen, which was located near the school. He had a great time and made many friends there.

There were three other major occurrences before that school year was over. First, I had my tenth birthday party in the community center of the church where my father worked.  I invited a majority of the boys in the class and even four girls. Then, the principal of the school left for a teacher education job in Shanghai, China. Since then, we have been writing to each other; sometimes it has been more regular, sometimes less so, but it is an important correspondence that continues to this day.

 Soon after that, the new principal was able to arrange for the local cable affiliate of the television network RTL to come and do short news segment about me. Unfortunately, my family--and most people in Germany and Europe as a whole, for that matter--have satellite TV and therefore do not get these local cable channels. Nonetheless, it was a big deal and the television crew was with my class for the entire school day. It featured my life story as well as the fact that deportation to Bosnia was a major possibility for my family, due to the lack of an immigration law for war immigrants at the time as well as the conservative state government in Bavaria. I was disappointed to find out that that the segment did not air on RTL’s nationwide satellite network and when I saw the tape of it I was also very disappointed that it was only a five-to-ten-minute segment, given that they had spent the whole day with us. Perhaps most irritating of all was the fact that they cut out all the interviews with my friends and left in some of those with classmates that I was not close to.

 Outside of school, the German national team won the 1996 European Cup in England. It was the first major international tournament that I watched the majority of. I did not see every match, however, because my bedtime on school nights was still 8:00 p.m. (The only exception was the final between Germany and the Czech Republic). I was mostly happy that the Germans had won, despite their controversial quarterfinal win against Croatia, whom I had favored. That summer, we actually went to Croatia to swim and to visit some relatives. It was mostly a nice trip, except for the fact that I had lost my ability to swim due to lack of practice. I felt unsafe and scared in the water, despite having protective gear.

Fourth grade was busy, important, and difficult. It was busy because, besides school, I had physical therapy twice a week, piano lessons once a week, and I took part in the school’s acting club once a week. (In that acting club we worked on two major plays. In the first, I ironically played an angel in a Christmas play on my tricycle and the other one was a medieval play, where I played the much more fitting role of the Black Knight, also on my tricycle.) It was important because it was the year when it was decided whether students could go on to Gymnasium (the first step toward eligibility for college!), or whether they would just go on to Hauptschule (the lower alternative, which went only to ninth grade). One had to have an average grade of less than 3 and only grades in mathematics, German, and HSK mattered. I was average in the latter two and below average in math; therefore I could not go forward. The only possible advantage was that I stayed in the same school for the remainder of our time in Germany and I did not leave the environment, which I was comfortable with in those years.

Next Chapter: Grades Five Through Seven