Can I See Your I. D.? Read Online Free PDF Page A

safe among them as Solomon instead of Josef—but you can’t help but like them. They’re your card-playing, beer-drinking buddies—genuine pals. And when Heinz gets hit during a Russian attack, you crawl out from under the tank where he had pulled you to safety just moments before. You hold him as he bleeds to death.
    Not long after, the powers that be decide you’re too young to be on the front lines of the war. No person your age should be subjected to such a horrible thing. You’re ordered back to Germany.

1942–1944
BRUNSWICK, GERMANY
    They send “Josef Perjell” to a boarding school for the Hitler Youth. They want to mold their splendid Volksdeutscher find from the Eastern Front into a grade-A Nazi. Back with your unit, you were among a bunch of guys who were just doing their jobs. Here, you’re surrounded by Nazi true believers armed with daggers inscribed “Blood and Honor.” And you’re supposed to feel safer?
    It gets worse. The school is in Brunswick, not even twenty miles from your hometown of Peine. What if someone recognizes you as that little Jewish boy who left seven years ago?
    That’s not the only thing you’re afraid of. What if you talk in your sleep, speaking Yiddish or saying something else revealing? Each morning, the first thing you do is check your roommate’s expression for signs that you’ve betrayed yourself in the night. There’s also your circumcision. You wear your underwear in the shower, but you worry that your schoolmates will suspect you of something more than mere modesty.
    You hide your fears behind stiff-armed Nazi salutes and greetings of “Heil Hitler!” You’ve been disqualified from potential membership in the Führer’s all-powerful S.S.—at five two, you’re too short, and you have black hair instead of Aryan blond. But in your swastika-adorned uniform, you look like your fellow students, and you act like they do. They think they’re invincible, destined to rule the world, and their confidence is intoxicating. You can’t help but feel it too.
    At the same time, you ache for your family. You long to simply be around other Jews. For all you know, you’re the only one left in Germany. And beyond Germany—who knows? You’ve read of a plan to send all of Europe’s Jews to the African island of Madagascar.
    It’s impossible for you to see such a scheme or anything else—any idea, any person, any situation—just one way. There’s the point of view you have to have, no matter how much you despise it, so that you’ll act the way a Hitler Youth is supposed to act. And then there’s the way you really feel: tormented. Torn. Enveloped in layers of hatred: of Solomon for being Jewish, of Josef Perjell for hating Solomon, and of Solomon Perel for being Josef.
    You ping-pong between being alarmingly cocky that your deception will last and swimming in anxiety that you’ll be found out. Your schoolmates’ dinnertime sing-alongs don’t help: “We’ll be even better off once Jewish blood spurts from our knives,” goes one song. For your studies, you read and reread Hitler’s rants against Jews. In the classroom you force a smile as you recite the themes.
    The teacher in your class on racial theory, Borgdorf, rattles off stereotypical physical traits of Jews. You grow certain that you resemble this one, and that one, and another one too, and that it’s only a matter of time before everyone notices.
    One day, Borgdorf calls you to the front of the room.
    You tremble as you walk up the aisle.
    â€œClass, take a look at Josef,” he says.
    Oh, God.
    But then:
    â€œHe is a typical descendant of the Eastern Baltic race.”
    In other words, an Aryan, like the rest of them.
    Fools.
    Near the school, there’s a pastry shop with a sign on the door reading “No dogs or Jews allowed”—as if there were any Jews