Another Sophie’s Choice
It is Christmas Day, 2002. This year’s story is a little late. As a 54-year-old graduate assistant, most of my writing is directed toward other things; literature on reading literature and compositions on writing compositions. I have little time to be alone with my own thoughts. Even when I do so, the thoughts are not really mine. Today my thoughts belong to a couple of crazy college students.
Silly kids. Even though she is 21 years old and her brother is 3 years older, to me they are not that much older than my own little people- Amelia, who loves books too, and Zeke, who got his first real drum set this morning. But today, I cannot help thinking about those college students. Crazy kids. What were they thinking? You know how they are: wild and young and idealistic. They have to protest something.
I was like that once. But that was a long time ago. Well, these two and a group of their friends printed some leaflets. I read them too, but felt like I was too far away from their age to offer any decent criticism. Although I agreed with what I thought they were saying, I didn’t think it applied to me. Something about resisting the government and the country being taken over "by an irresponsible clique." Whatever that means.
They made references to Goethe and Aristotle, ran around campus leaving their leaflets on windowsills and ledges, in doorways and lecture halls. Right. Like anybody’s going to read them. And if anybody does, who cares? That didn’t seem to bother those two, distributing these highfalutin tomes like so much litter. And then, get this: they had some leaflets left over. So what do they do?
They go running up the stairs of the university’s main building and dump the rest of their copies into the courtyard. Papers fluttered down in the spring-like air, curious students picked them up, I suppose some even read them. The two goofmeisters: they had to know they were going to get in trouble. And they did. The school’s caretaker caught them on the stairs and told them they were "under arrest."
Can you be "arrested" by a janitor? Well, yes. This is Munich, February 18, 1943. Their trial begins at 9am on February 22. By 5pm Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, their friend, Cristoph Probst are dead. Their little group was known as Die Weiße Rose: The White Rose. The story is known all over Germany, but few know it here. But I know it. And now, you do too. Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.
"Lo- how a rose ere blooming;" a song we sing this time of year. "It came, a flow’ret bright, Amid the cold of winter, When half spent was the night." We sing that too. Do we know what it means? I wonder.
Crazy kids.
Sophie Scholl
1921-1942
I guess that’s what I love about my job-- and about my students:
Ihre Gedanken sind frei!
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