November 1, 2006 -- A student at a Brooklyn high school named for a prominent Jewish educator faced a blitzkrieg of trouble yesterday when he arrived dressed as Adolf Hitler for Halloween.
Walter Petryk, 16, insisted his masquerade was a lampoon of the Nazi dictator - but administrators at Leon M. Goldstein HS declared autumn for Hitler and detained Petryk as their "prisoner of war."
The junior honors student, who grew a moustache for the occasion, was pulled out of his second-period English class and told to remove his beige coat bearing a red swastika armband or risk spending the day in the of fice.
"Excuse me, fuhrer, can I talk to you for a minute?" is how Petryk recalled the dean, Paul Puglia, summoning him out of class.
Should he have been allowed to stay in class wearing his Hitler outfit?
Post your comments here Puglia then allegedly asked, "Are you out of your mind, you idiot?" and ordered him to the office with, "Consider yourself my prisoner of war."
Celeb Halloween costume photos
More photos here Petryk said he understood the concerns of administrators that faculty members had lost relatives in the Holocaust. But he maintained the costume was a parody protected under his right to free expression, and refused to take it off
"I figured somebody would say something eventually, but I really do believe that people have a right to express themselves," said Petryk, an aspiring comedy writer who counts Mel Brooks, "Weird Al" Yankovic and the Monty Python cast among his idols.
His mother and stepfather, who is Jewish and lost ancestors in the Nazi genocide, defended Petryk's stance. They rebuffed pleas by the dean to advise their son to remove the costume so he could return to class.
"This is a matter of artistic free expression and a school not being stupid," said his mother, Diane Petryk- Bloom, who picked her son up at school. "[The dean is] offended by a parody of Hitler - and he's acting like Hitler."
Petryk's stepfather is Howard Bloom, a journalist whose book, "The Lucifer Principle," has been targeted by censors who accuse it of being anti-Islam. Bloom said he bristled at the thought of Walter being censored, even though he was initially "very disturbed" by the Halloween getup.
"If he had wanted to advocate my genocide, I wouldn't have allowed [the costume]," Bloom said. "That wasn't the spirit in which he was doing this at all. He was doing it in the spirit of Monty Python and Mel Brooks."
City Department of Education spokesman Keith Kalb said school administrators "followed appropriate procedures" after receiving "several complaints from offended students and staff."
The department's discipline code states that students who wear clothing deemed disruptive to the educational process may be removed from class.
Petryk said he was a hit with his peers, who clamored for photos of him as the fascist tyrant. "The first class I went to, everybody was laughing," he said.
Students had mixed reactions to the outfit.
"Why would you come as something that is supposed to offend people?" asked junior Dean Waterlan, 16. "It's not cute, it's not cool. I think the school was right."
My Bui, 16, a senior, said, "I thought it was funny, but a lot of people didn't like it."
Petryk said he didn't set out to push the envelope as Hitler. But he acknowledged that he made a decision to disguise himself as Charlie Chaplin with a bowler hat and cane on his way to school to avoid ruffling feathers on the street.
"I wasn't going to get on the subway in a Hitler costume," Petryk said.
david.andreatta@nypost.comhttp://www.nypost.com/seven/11012006...k_gallahue.htm
