Nobody Moved
Nobody said a word. That’s the part I can’t get past.
Ten-year-olds on a Fasching outing—kids from an elementary school in Kreuzberg, Berlin, on their way to a bowling alley on a Monday morning—and a man on the S-Bahn decided that was the moment. A woman had already warmed things up: It’s not German here anymore. Germany for Germans.
Quiet, conversational almost, a little appetizer. Then the man started screaming. Scheißtürken. Should be gassed. Türkenpack ab nach Auschwitz. The full repertoire, directed at children dressed up for carnival. And the other passengers sat there.
The class got off at Alexanderplatz. Their teachers went to the train conductor. The conductor said there was nothing he could do, and the train pulled away. According to the initial report in Der Tagesspiegel, the teachers planned to file a police report—against unknown persons, essentially against thin air, because not a single person in that car thought it was worth standing up for a group of ten-year-olds on a school trip.
I keep turning this over: what would I have done? I want to believe I’d have said something. Gotten between him and the kids. At least stood up. But I’ve been on enough trains at enough tired hours to know how fast that inertia runs—just get home, don’t make it worse, he might be unstable, what if he has something on him. The calculus of cowardice is very quick and it usually wins.
The thing is, these aren’t the jackbooted Nazis of history-class footage. This man goes home to an apartment. He probably has an iPod, manufactured in a country he’d also like to purge. He goes through life without consequence, because consequence requires someone to create it, and on that Monday morning nobody did. Including the woman before him, who delivered her xenophobia at a lower volume and almost certainly considers herself a reasonable person.
That’s the part that’s harder to be angry at—not the man screaming on the train, but the neighbor who doesn’t have anything against foreigners, really, just prefers things the way they were. The hiring manager who runs two stacks of CVs without quite knowing why one name ends up in one pile. The ambient, structural agreement that some people are less native to a space than others. The screaming man is the visible pressure release of something that runs much deeper and much quieter through the whole edifice.
Still: he was screaming at children. And nobody moved. That fact should embarrass everyone in that car for the rest of their lives. Someone could have pulled out a phone. Blocked the doors. Called the emergency number. Made the situation cost him something, even if it was only the discomfort of being documented. The emergency brake exists. None of it requires courage exactly—just the refusal to perform the blank face of someone who has somewhere else to be.
A group of kids found out that day what adults are actually like when no one is watching. I can’t decide if that’s the worst part of the story or just the most honest one.