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

left in Brunswick. You go inside every time you pass by. This little bit of defiance helps relieve a little bit of the pressure you feel building up inside you.
    There’s nobody you can tell the truth to—nobody you feel you can trust. Not even Leni, the local girl you’ve begun dating. She’s in the BDM—Hitler Youth for girls. Members of both groups are encouraged to report their parents for opposing the Nazis. There’s no reason to think she’d protect you.
    When you go to see Leni one day, she’s not at home, but her mother invites you in. There’s something on her mind.
    After a long silence, Mrs. Latsch asks, “Are you really German?”
    Caught off guard, you tell the truth. “Please don’t report me,” you whisper.
    You lucked out. Little things about Josef Perjell’s life’s story just didn’t add up for Mrs. Latsch, but you picked the right person to be careless with. She kisses you on the forehead and tells you that your secret is safe—but she makes you swear not to tell Leni. She doesn’t trust her daughter any more than you do.

DECEMBER 1943
LODZ, POLAND
    You hear your classmates making plans to go home to their families for the holidays, and you decide you should be able to do the same. You’ll need the school to provide a travel permit, train tickets, food ration cards, and some cash.
    â€œI would like to go on vacation,” you tell the administrators.
    â€œOh, and where would you like to go?” one of them asks in surprise, knowing that you’re an orphan.
    â€œTo Lodz,” you say. “I want to settle some affairs.”
    What you want is to find your parents and to . . . what? What is your plan, exactly? When you get to the walled ghetto your parents wrote to you about when you were in the orphanage, what will you do? What will you do if you find your parents? And what if you don’t? What then?
    Your first morning in Lodz, you climb onto a streetcar marked “For Germans Only.” Your black uniform shows that you are a Hitler Youth—who could question you? You travel past streets that the Nazis have renamed since you left, and so you almost miss the stop that you once knew as Freedom Square.
    You walk past a heap of rubble—torn-down houses, the better to isolate the ghetto from the rest of the city. You scale one of those piles of debris and look down, beyond the barbed wire, into the ghetto. For the first time in years, you see other Jews.
    They’re gray-skinned, shabbily dressed, and wasting away in an urban prison. This is what your disguise has shielded you from. This is what your parents have endured—if they have survived at all.
    You approach the gate, only to be stopped by a Volksdeutscher guard. “You must have lost your way,” he tells you, careful not to offend a Hitler Youth and real German. “Only Jews live here. You are not allowed here.” Diseases, you know.
    The only way into the ghetto is through it, on a nonstop streetcar locked up tight to keep any Jews from climbing on board to escape. You get on, standing behind the driver. No other passengers seem to notice the dreadful scene outside the windows, but you can’t look away.
    And there it is—the apartment house at 18 Franciszkan’ska, the address where you sent your letters years ago. You stare at the decrepit dwelling as if the power of your own yearning could draw Mama and Papa outside to watch the passing streetcar. But there is no sign of them. Where are they? In silence, you pass through to the other side of the ghetto.
    During your days in Lodz, you take the streetcar back and forth, back and forth, as often as you think you can get away with without raising suspicions. But you never see your parents—not at the apartment house, not on the footbridges you pass beneath, not among the weary souls trudging along with bundles of scrap wood. Why don’t you try to slip into the