A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the photograph taken in 1933 of a brown-skinned boy wearing a swastika in a schoolyard in Hamburg, Germany, does not begin to tell the story of the remarkable life of Hans J. Massaquoi. Mr. Massaquoi, former managing editor of Ebony magazine, has now told the story himself in his new book, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.
"When I first heard about the book, I stopped in my tracks," said Yvonne Poser, associate professor of German at Howard University, who interviewed Mr. Massaquoi in the Pickford Theater on Feb. 16 as part of the Library's African American History Month program. "His is a victim's story that had yet to be told."
The question of how Massaquoi came to be raised in Nazi Germany is one he has been asked "millions of times." Grandson of the Liberian consul general to Hamburg, Mr. Massaquoi was born in 1926 to a well-to-do African father and a German mother. His early life was one of privilege, befitting the grandson of a diplomat.
"I associated black skin with superiority, since our servants were white," said Mr. Massaquoi. "My grandfather was 'the man,'" he joked.
His circumstances changed dramatically when his father and grandfather returned to Liberia in 1929. Refusing to expose her sickly son to a tropical climate, Mr. Massaquoi's mother chose instead to raise her son in Germany as best she could on her meager wages as a nurse's aide.
Although he had spent his early years in a villa, Mr. Massaquoi at first found life in a cold-water flat "interesting." What distressed him most was being the "oddity on the block."
"It was a constant problem," he said. "I was always pointed at because of my exotic looks. I just wanted to be like everyone else." Like other boys, he wanted nothing more than to join the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Movement). "The Nazis put on the best show of all the political parties. There were parades, fireworks and uniforms — these were the devices by which Hitler won over young people to his ideas. Hitler always boasted that despite parents' political persuasion, Germany's youth belonged to him."
Mr. Massaquoi was dealt a crushing blow when he learned that the Hitlerjugend as well as the local playground were not open to "non-Aryans."
Two events that occurred during the summer of 1936 gave him "a genuine pride in my African heritage at a time when such pride was extremely difficult to come by." Two young black American athletes, boxer Joe Louis and Olympic runner Jesse Owens, dominated the news. Mr. Massaquoi initially supported Germany's Max Schmeling, who was scheduled to fight Louis but quickly switched his allegiance to "the Brown Bomber" in the wake of racist remarks attributed to Schmeling. His classmates had taken to calling him "Joe," which gave him welcomed prestige.
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