The Passengers
Scheißtürken. Go to Auschwitz. Turkpack get out. Last Monday morning, a man on a Berlin S-Bahn screamed this at a group of fourth-graders. Ten- and eleven-year-olds from Kreuzberg, mostly kids whose parents weren’t born in Germany, on a class trip to go bowling. A woman had already told them This isn’t Germany anymore
as they boarded. Then this guy started. Full Nazi rhetoric, the kind you read about in news summaries, not something happening in front of you while your coffee gets cold.
No one said anything. No one stood between him and the children. No one told him to shut his mouth. The other passengers just sat there. The train kept moving. When the teachers reported it to the conductor, he couldn’t do anything, so he kept driving.
That’s what freezes me. Not the man himself—every society has its assholes—but the rest of them. The women staring at their phones. The men pretending they hadn’t heard. Whatever was going through their heads in those seconds. Fear? Apathy? Agreement? It’s that question that won’t leave me alone. What would I have done?
And I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. I like to think I’d stand up, say something, physically block his access to the kids somehow. But I’ve been that person on the train, tired and small and eager to not be involved. Easier to disappear into the moment, become invisible, let someone else handle it. The cowardice isn’t unique to those passengers. It’s contagious. It spreads through a car like a gas.
The thing that really gets me is that this isn’t even the worst kind of racism in Germany. The worst is the kind that doesn’t scream. It’s the landlord who won’t rent to someone with a name that sounds foreign. It’s the HR manager sorting resumes. It’s the casual thing a colleague says at lunch that everyone laughs off. It’s structural. It’s quiet. It doesn’t shout; it just closes doors. The man on the S-Bahn is almost honest, in a sick way—at least you know where you stand with him.
But I can’t think about that right now. I keep coming back to those kids, the shock on their faces probably, the teachers trying to figure out what to do with a man saying he wants them dead. They’re just going to a bowling alley. They did nothing wrong. Neither did the bystanders, technically—no law says you have to intervene. But something in me knows that’s not the point.
I know what I should say here: someone should do something. Everyone should stand up. We should all be better. But I’m tired of hearing that, and I’m tired of saying it. The real answer is probably that I’m going to sit on this memory until it stops bothering me, and then I’ll forget it happened at all, just like everyone else. And that’s maybe the most depressing part—not the Nazi screaming on the train, but knowing that even thinking about it won’t actually change how I’d act if I were there.