Pedro Lilienfeld

Repeatedly we hear these days about the damaging effect on the education and future prospects for a successful career that children would suffer if normal schooling and exposure to other children were to be stymied, delayed or interrupted due to the limitations imposed by Covid-19 preventive measures.

I would like to disagree about the inevitability of that assumption based on my own experience, that of my spouse and of one of my friends, among many others. Our common denominator is our survival as children in, and emigration from, Europe during and after World War II.

I was born in Spain, shortly before its Civil War. My family and I then escaped to Paris where I went to kindergarten. Then, WW II broke out and we were on the run again. We managed to escape to the small town of Sète in the Vichy zone of France where I attended 1st grade which I did not complete as we escaped back to Spain. While in Sète, acute food shortages caused me to break out with infected pustules on my legs, and my mother was hospitalized for about a month.

In Madrid, I went to 2nd grade at the Lycée Français which I did not finish either as we emigrated to Ecuador in South America. In Quito, its capital, my 3rd grade education was curtailed by closure of the private school I was attending because it was placed on a “black” list, suspected of Nazi connections.

These disruptions of my early education were compounded by repeated deracinations, changes of language and overall insecurities. Nevertheless, I graduated summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Quito. I had what could be considered a successful professional career in science and technology culminating with the position of Principal Science Advisor at a major instrumentation firm in the Boston area.

Evelyn was born in Romania where she survived WW II and the beginnings of the Communist regime until she and her family managed to get to Italy where they lived for 4 years until they emigrated to the U.S. in 1951. As a child she lived in Transylvania, she went to a Hungarian kindergarten although her family spoke German and Polish. She then attended 1st grade and then only partially 2nd grade at a Romanian speaking school.

She and her family were then able to leave Romania and after a stay in Vienna, left for Italy without completing the 2nd grade. Her first stop in Italy was in Bologna where she did not attend school. From there they moved to Merano where German and Italian were spoken. Since she was not fluent in Italian yet, she was enrolled in a German speaking school which did not work out. Eventually, a private tutor was found in a Tuscan village where they spent the summer.

Since in Romania school did not start until the age of 7, whereas it does at 6 in Italy, she was behind a year. Since she already spoke 4 languages at that point, the addition of Italian was effortless. The tutor provided the transition to 4th grade and she had to pass an exam for that. The family then moved to Florence where she attended the 4th grade at a very good school called the Leopoldine. Before completing the 4th grade she moved to Milan where another tutor was hired for her. Then they returned to Merano where she went to a German speaking school which was, again, not a good fit. To continue beyond the 5th grade she had pass another exam for which she had another tutor.

Then, as a result of various family illnesses she went to a Catholic boarding school in Bolzano for the 6th grade. Finally, the family settled back in Merano where she completed the 6th and 7th grades at the public school.

At the age of 13 she left with her family for the U.S. and since she had had a very good schooling she was allowed to skip 8th grade and go on to Forrest Hill high school (which had special courses for foreigners), although her English was rather imperfect. She went on to graduate cum laude from Barnard College and to teach languages at Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

My friend Elio Schaechter was born in Italy and went to elementary school there where he missed out one full year which he never made up after he and his family emigrated to Ecuador during WW II. More to the point, he eventually emigrated to the U.S. His parents came from Jewish shtetls in Galicia, Poland. They emigrated to Milan, Italy, after WWI, were Elio was born in 1928. They eventually moved to Turin where he went to school.

German was spoken at home, Italian at school. The family managed to escape from Italy in 1940 and in 1941 arrived in Quito, Ecuador when Elio was twelve years old. He went to secondary school (Colegio Mejía, as I did) there after having learned Spanish. In 1950 he left Ecuador for the U.S. where he had to learn English, and obtained an M.A. in bacteriology two years later, followed by a Ph.D. in microbiology at the U. of Pennsylvania after another two years. Eventually, he went to teach at Tufts University where he would remain for 33 years, 23 of them as chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, and became Distinguished Professor in 1987. He retired from Tufts in 1995. He has published several books and texts.

All of us, as described above, had disrupted childhoods, incomplete school years, had to learn several languages, even concurrently, some as late as in their 20s, discontinuous childhood friendships, and worst, family lives in acute danger. And yet, we led successful, productive and essentially happy lives.

So, whence the concern about today’s childhood? I believe that the critically important factor differentiating our experience from that of many socially Covid-19 potentially affected children is the role of family. Elio’s, Evelyn’s and my family extended a protective and nurturing shield over us. All three of us were only children and received full attention and love from our respective parents. Today’s American families are too frequently dysfunctional, broken up, uneducated, financially stressed, etc., all of which is not conducive to providing the environment within which children need to grow up when disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.