Kansas noted, "Hubert Oches enjoyed the excitement of the occupation and his being allowed at such a young age to contribute to the building of a new nation after Germany's surrender. Specifically, after the fascists had been defeated in Germany, Oches was very proud of having helped set up the first all-European network of airlines. Nonetheless, despite his having enjoyed these and responsibilities that the war era had afforded him, Oches returned to the U.S in 1948 to start his Kansas life over-again in Great Bend City where he still owned car dealerships."
"Oches only returned for the first time to Germany and Munich again in the mid-1980s as part of a tour of Europe with his wife. As she didn't speak any German, the couple had opted to go on a package tour for Americans. Finally, in Munich, whereby Hubert Oches felt he knew the city and its history fairly well, Oches and his wife determined to prepare to leave the American tour group to go off on some short tour by themselves. Nevertheless, since Munich had continued to change quite a bit in the intervening decades, former officer and navigator Hubert Oches approached and asked the young German female tour guide for a set of directions out to Dachau, the infamous Nazi-era concentration camp north of the city." Meanwhile, Kansas continued, "Mr. Oches related how that young Bavarian tour guide responded irritably to his request for help in making his way out to Dachau. She had asked him with derision, 'Don't you know that the stories about the atrocities at Dachau are made up or are in general exaggerated. Why do you want to go out there?'"
"Hubert Oches, who had served formerly as translator out at Dachau and for occupying forces in Southern Germany after the war, responded with loud and angry indignation in the best German he could afford to the uninformed young Bavarian : 'Das stimmt ueberhaupt nicht! Ich war da in dem Lager am Ende des Krieges!' or That is absolutely incorrect! I was there in the camp immediately at the end of the war!"
Kansas noted, "Later, in mid-1989, at the end of that same decade, Mr. Oches helped translate again in Germany as part of a delegation from Great Bend's Sister-City International program as it traveled to a small town in southwest Germany, Villengen-Schwenningen. On this trip he helped the city of Great Bend form an international peace partnership in Germany--just as a few hundred miles to the northeast, the Berlin Wall was about to come down. This school-to-school partnership program had begun in Great Bend starting in the mid-1980s as the local high school in Great bend began to offer German language for the first time in many decades."
Kansas added with pride in his voice, "I was running that very same exchange program between high schools the year I met Mr. Oches. That was one reason I chose to conduct the interviews about German--speaking settlers of Barton County, i.e. before the present generation forgets the heritage of their forefathers."
"Wakarimashitaka?"
Dachau photo from the month, April 1945, of the camp's liberation. A civilian breaks down at seeing the half-burnt body of one of the camps inmates. Dachau was the first NAZI concentration camp and became the model for most of the thousands that followed. Thirty-six thousand from all over Europe died here. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered here-many being sent to other camps. Ojii-san stated with a chuckle, " Before ... going to China I ... had never ... learned to speak Chinese [laughing]. There had been no ... foreign teachers or Assistant Language Teachers [ALTs] of Chinese to teach us ... 'living Chinese.' We knew soldiers only knew the Chinese kanji or symbols used in ... our own alphabet ... prior to the war.... I knew how to read ... kanji ... which helped only a ... little ... in ... the ... mountain village where we ... were ... stationed ... Only ... through writing ... in the sand or on scraps of paper ... at first ... could ... we make ourselves ... understood ... or communicate with the villagers.... I slowly ... learned to ... speak quite a ... a bit of the ... local ... tongue ... or dialect before.... I was sent ... back to ... Japan."
One last time, Kansas' mind was wandering.
He thought, "This unequal conversation with Ojii-san reflects a great deal about both my life-long preoccupations with learning and my occupations--teaching history and languages.
Kansas continued, "My occupation in Japan was specifically to be an assistant language teacher--or ALT--as part of one of the largest cultural educational exchange efforts ever undertaken. The program was called the Japanese Exchange Teacher (JET) and it has brought over 40,000 foreigners to live and work in public and private schools throughout the islands of the formerly fairly isolated economic superpower over the past few decades. The various Japanese government creators and sponsors of the JET program have sought to promote the developed of more well-rounded or international citizens in the 21st century."
"However, the JET program was remarkable in two important areas of neglect for an exchange program of its size. First, it required effectively little or no foreknowledge of the Japanese language on behalf of the participants or the incoming teachers. Second, little or no Japanese language training opportunities were made available to many of those ALTs who were located in rural prefectures. I, myself, had the opportunity only about once a month to meet with a tutor of Japanese who lived several kilometers away from me.. Meanwhile, at work I was generally expected to speak in English most of the time in the teacher's lounge, while planning lessons, or when I was team-teaching in the classroom."
"By the end of my two-year stint in Japan, it was obvious to me that as more and more participants in the JET program-such as ones from places like the Philippines, China, India, Australia, Africa and Europe as well as America-came to remote areas of Japan that much more needed to be done in the way of integrating them into the local community: This could be done via more assistance both in acquiring the Japanese language and through more cross-cultural communication training for all of those involved in the exchange efforts. An alternative would be to use the arms of civil society, i.e. through such organizations as sister-city international, which directly helps promote the building of partner communities across the region and around the globe. Promoting more people-to-people exchanges in the long term could certainly make a difference with Middle Eastern countries where wars are fought so often today. Japan specifically needs to take this avocation seriously because long-remaining cultural memories of Japanese imperialism continue to affect relations between Japanese people, the Japanese state, and peoples of the other nations in the Pacific."
"You see," Kansas went on, "it is eventually important for all of us to observe how our own unexplored skeletons-in-our-closets can stop rapprochement among peoples across or within national borders. It leaves mistrust or suspicion that is passed down over generations. In my own homeland a lot of un-discussed history is all to prominent in communities. Yet debate on interpreting history has continued and will continue to stunt intercultural understanding in my homeland if memories that raise suspicion continue to be neglected or ignored. This is true in America even in communities where there is good-will to realize closer cross-cultural ties."
"Once the will to discover and discuss is present, one of the most important things to do is to learn to speak the same language as the other. The second, step is 'to establish contact with the past literally, before we can handle the present with any depth.' By the way, that phrase comes from author Alter Van Tilberg Clark of the Ox-Bow Incident fame."
Kansas, a rural and western historian-at-heart notes, The Ox-Bow Incident is a classic Western tale which emerged popularly in America during the 1940s and 1950s-i.e. an era bridging both WWII and the days of the early Cold War decades in the U.S. The novel's readers and the subsequent movie house audiences in America were revealed the darker side of cowboy vigilantism in the U.S.-my homeland's--history.
Kansas adds, "The movie version, the Ox-Bow Incident, came with Henry Fonda in the lead. In both this movie and in the parallel TV classic drama, Twelve Angry Men, Henry Fonda's characters twice reminded American viewers that both historical evidence and good sound memory of what events have actually taken place are essential for just ice and understanding."
