Getting An Education

With all the discussions lately over Houghton Mifflin and Riverdeep merging to become an educational materials publishing behemoth, we might forget that there were once small, local companies cranking out textbooks for the little ones. Men like Albert Folens, who made his fortune in producing textbooks for Irish schoolchildren. Now people are wondering what sort of propaganda he might have put into the books, and thus the heads, of the wee ones.

RTE aired a program about Mr. Folens last night, and Mrs. Juliette Folens has been busy denying the allegations presented. She even went to court earlier in the week to get the program stopped, to no avail. Loyal wife, you'd have to agree, to argue against evidence that her late husband was in the Gestapo.

It was reported that Mr. Folens volunteered for the Flemish Legion, which fought on the Eastern front with the Nazis. According to the missus, Folens signed on to fight communism, and not for love of Hitler or Nazism. She also insists that the poor man suffered dreadfully from ulcers, and was sent home after six weeks of training. After all that, he never got to the Russian front.

During the war, he did nothing more than translate newspapers into German, so that the Nazi occupiers could understand what was being said about them. RTE, on the other hand, reported that Folens did indeed serve on the Eastern front, went on to join the Gestapo, and was gainfully employed by the Gestapo at their Brussels headquarters.

Disputing other details, Mrs. Folens said that her husband was never held by the British after the war. She agreed that he was tried for treason in a Belgian court, but he was only proven guilty of membership in the Flemish Legion. As he was handed down a sentence of ten years, not life, Mrs. Folens feels that her point is validated. If her husband were in the Gestapo, surely he would have been sentenced to death? And just ignore the file of evidence that was produced by the Americans, which paints a radically different picture of Mr. Folens during the war.

The late Mr. Folens was incarcerated for all of thirty months before he escaped on a false passport. Wherever could a man go, with that sort of past, and on the lam from justice? To Ireland, where else? He found a safe harbor, and the space to launch his publishing firm. From that beginning, he grew his company until he was the leading provider of textbooks to Irish schoolchildren across the Republic.

A fine, upstanding citizen who pulled himself up from ignominy to publishing glory...and now everyone will want to go back and review the parts of their old history books, the pages that covered the Emergency. And come up with some reasonable excuse for their country giving shelter to a convicted war criminal.