Kindergarten teacher's Christmas gifts of song and love endure | Opinion

Over 30 years ago, Robert Fulghum wrote “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Before reading the book, I smiled upon seeing its title. It conjured the memory of a person I had known since childhood whose life meshed well with Fulghum’s title. That person, Inge Meyring Smith — “Miss Inge” to many generations of Franklin’s children and parents — died on Nov. 5 at 99.

Meeting Miss Inge when I was 5 remains an indelible memory over 50 years later. I had never met anyone with an accent like hers. She had lived in Franklin for years, but Miss Inge was German, as was her father, “Opi,” who often came out of the family’s adjoining house to greet us kindergarteners. Miss Inge and her kindergarten staff summoned up something magical. Neither before nor since have I heard a person who was a virtuoso on the autoharp. She had us sing along and dance with her daily on a range of songs and tunes.

A crowning moment of our time in the Smith Kindergarten occurred in December, when we put on a holiday pageant for our families. The girls dressed in white and red dresses, the boys in white shirts with red bow ties, and we did our best to make our way through “Froggy Went A Courtin’.” If that hardly sounds like traditional Christmas fare, our show-stopper was one that was perfectly seasonal; it was also the first time many of us said or sang anything in a foreign language.

In her German accent, Miss Inge carefully taught us the lyrics:

"O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter … "

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It did not matter that we could not spell its words beyond, maybe, “tannenbaum.” In teaching this old German carol to young American children, Inge Smith revealed much about the depths of her soul.

You see, Inge and her family barely escaped the Holocaust. With her mother and father, Inge boarded an ocean liner in Hamburg days after the Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ 1938 “Night of Broken Glass.” Although the family escaped to begin a new life in America, many of Inge’s other Jewish friends and family died. Her home city of Dresden was leveled by Allied bombers shortly before World War II’s end.

Teaching us a German Christmas carol, after all the Nazis and Gestapo had done to her family and her world, might seem like an impossible step for a woman who faced what Inge had faced. Yet one of the greatest lessons taught by Inge was that nothing is impossible if you can work hard, play well with others, learn, have adventures, be happy to sing and dance when you can, and keep your head up.

Maybe her choice of this song was an unspoken way of showing us that one can survive and prevail, and that regardless of the destruction and hate Adolf Hitler and his minions brought to Germany, much was still lovely and worth celebrating in Germany’s culture — especially during the holiday season.

Besides raising three of her own children, who knows how many hundreds, if not thousands, of other children Miss Inge helped raise in and around Franklin, through Smith Kindergarten and later, the K-sixth grade Harpeth Academy she founded in 1968? Her passion for education was matched only by her passion for civil rights. In 2018, she and her parents were recognized in Dresden with a Stolpelstein (”stumbling stone”), commemorating her family’s former home among those sites where Jews faced Nazi persecution and oppression.

Her autobiography’s title, “Born for America,” fit Inge Smith squarely. That was what the U.S. customs officer pronounced to her on Nov. 29, 1938, on seeing her passport and date of birth: July 4, 1923.

Had God or fortune not smiled on Inge and her parents — if they had not been able to board that liner bound for America days after Kristallnacht — what would have become of her? Looking out across the decades, what then might have become of generations of young children, like me, who would not have experienced her, Smith Kindergarten, Harpeth Academy and other programs she led, started or inspired?

The gifts of Christmastime are not always new. Some of them can be from the past; seemingly, from past lifetimes ago.

This year, when I hear "O Tannenbaum," I will recall Miss Inge and that gift of song and love she gave to my classmates and me 56 years ago.

Jack H. (Nick) McCall is a Knoxville lawyer, writer and teacher. He is the author of several books, including "Pogiebait's War."

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Opinion: Kindergarten teacher's gifts of song and love endure