I shook his hand

When I saw him walking toward my table I thought, Oh. This is going to be interesting.

I was calm. I was collected. I was ready.

He was 92 years old. A veteran. A fixture at this World War II commemorative event, one of the largest in the country. The program booklet lists him under Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth, for boys 10 and under. He was 9 when he joined. The Hitler Youth was the Nazi Party’s youth organization, established to indoctrinate German children into Nazi ideology, train them in military discipline, and prepare them to be soldiers and supporters of the Third Reich.

Now this gentleman was walking toward my table. He stopped deliberately, not wandering from table to table the way others did. He had walked over with purpose.

He stopped. He looked at me. He said: Hi, I’m Herman the German.

I smiled and said: Hello.

He smiled. And then he said: Don’t get too excited. But I was in the Hitler Youth.

Most people in his position would hide it. Many would denounce it. He does neither. He introduces himself by it. Without apparent shame or regret. Just as a fact about himself that he leads with. I do not know what to make of that. But I notice it.

I engaged him.

I touched his forearm. I looked him directly in the eye.

I said in a deliberate tone: I have never met anyone who was in the Hitler Youth. I am really interested in hearing about your experience.

He looked confused. I had taken him off guard.

I wondered in that moment if anyone had ever said that to him. In all the years he had introduced himself as Herman the German and announced unabashed that he had been in the Hitler Youth. Had anyone ever leaned forward and said: Tell me about it.

I said: I’m being serious. I have never talked with anyone who was in the Hitler Youth and I am very interested in learning about it. I paused.

I said: So what did your day look like?

He did not respond. I asked again. Nothing.

I tried again. How many days a week did you go? One day? A weekend? Multiple days?

He said: I went for the weekend.

I said: So what was the schedule like?

The veteran looked at me. Puzzled. Not someone leaning forward with specific questions about the mechanics of his experience. Not the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. I repeated the question and waited.

The first hour was indoctrination, he said. His words. His characterization of his own experience. But he insisted he had not been indoctrinated because he was only 9.

The second hour, he said: We sang songs.

I asked: Do you remember the songs?

No response.

I offered: Were they songs for Germany? Nationalistic songs?

He said: Yes.

He could not name a single one.

I asked: How did you know the first hour was indoctrination?

He looked away. I asked again. He did not answer. Something in his posture shifted. My questions did not seem to fit the story he usually told.

I asked: Do you remember anything that was said during that first hour?

What I did not say out loud was this. I wanted the mechanism. The actual language. What did indoctrination sound like to a 9-year-old boy before anyone called it indoctrination.

I also wanted him to feel uncomfortable. I am not going to pretend otherwise. I kept all of it inside. But it was all there.

He smiled. A small smile. The kind that arrives when someone does not have an answer and knows it.

He said: No.

And then I watched him struggle. 

He was 92 years old. This had happened when he was 9. It was not his choice.

Then he asked if I was a mother.

I said: Yes.

He said: You would do anything for your child, right?

And then I understood why he was asking.

He went on to tell me his parents had no money. He needed a pair of shoes. Friends suggested the Hitler Youth. They gave him a uniform, shoes, and a meal.

I said: I understand.

He repeated it again.

I said: I understand. People like to think they would know what they would do. But the truth is no one knows until they are in the situation.

I did not excuse him. I said: People have had to make very hard decisions.

I did not pretend the world he grew up in was simple. We would all like to pretend we know the choices we would make under impossible conditions. The truth is we do not. None of us knows until we are standing in that moment with no good options and someone is offering our child a pair of shoes.

He insisted there was no indoctrination. Yet the story he offered was not about ideology. It was about poverty, shoes, and survival. Those are different explanations, and I do not know which one he wanted me to hear.

He told me his father had been a plumber. That he had not wanted to follow that trade. That he had immigrated to the United States and enlisted in the US Army before he was even a citizen.

I said: I imagine they had something they wanted from you. You knew the culture and you spoke the language.

He smiled. He said: Exactly.

I could not read that expression. But it was different from the small smile that arrived when he could not answer my questions.

He did not ask me a single question. Not about my family. Not about the documents on the table between us. Not about why I was there.

Between us sat a shadow box with passports issued by the same regime that ran the Hitler Youth. Stamped with the red letter J that marked Jews for exclusion. A reissued birth certificate bearing the middle name Israel. Not a name he chose. A mark the state chose for him. The same state that recruited 9-year-old boys with shoes and a uniform and a meal. A trifold sat beside them, with pictures of the before and the names of family members on cattle cars heading toward extermination camps. All of it between us. He never asked about any of it.

Before he left I looked him directly in the eye.

I shook his hand.

Not a quick handshake. A warm one. Two hands. The kind that says I see you as a person even here. Even knowing what I know about who you are and what you were part of.

I do not know what he felt in that moment. I cannot pretend to know what 82 years of living with that history feels like from the inside. I chose to believe that carrying it has been its own burden. I do not know if that is true. It is what I needed to believe in order to extend the humanity I wanted to extend.

That choice was for me. Not for him.

I pressed record on my iPhone.

I just spoke to Herman the German. The 92 year old who participated in the Hitler Youth.

I could not wait to tell my family.

I was genuinely curious about his experience. I also wanted him uncomfortable. I was not letting him off the hook. Something shifted in me.

Not because I excused him, or decided the Hitler Youth was acceptable, or that his parents made the right choice. He stood in front of documents from the regime that shaped his childhood and never once asked about them. He came, he spoke, and he left.

And the shoes story was also true.

His parents had no money. Someone offered their child a way out. He told me the circumstances. Whether he needed me to know them or simply needed to say them, I cannot say.

It struck me that he might have come to my table carrying a story he needed someone to hear.

And that is when I understood something I had not expected to understand.

It is easy to pass judgment on a group when we do not know the humanity inside it. We let the label stand in for the person. We accept what we are shown without asking what the full story is. What the circumstances are. What it looks like from inside a particular life.

That is how it begins. Not with hatred. With abstraction. With the decision that we already know enough without needing to know more.

The red J on my grandfather’s passport did not mark a person. It marked a category. And once you are a category the paperwork of exclusion follows almost naturally.

I found those letters. I had them translated. I wrote back.

Not as a memorial. As a refusal to let the erasure be the last word.

That is why I bring the shadow box to a table for six hours a day, three days a year, and answer the same questions over and over. The documents are not the point. They are the door.

A passport with a red J opens a door. A reissued birth certificate opens a door. A 92-year-old man walking up to a table opens a door.

What is on the other side of that door is not always comfortable. Sometimes it is a story about shoes. Sometimes it is a question nobody has ever asked. Sometimes it is a handshake neither person fully understands.

But the door has to open. That is the only thing I am sure of. Everything else, what someone does once they’re through it, whether they ask the next question, go home and look something up, or stand differently the next time they hear a name reduced to a category, is not something I can control.

I can only keep opening the door.

That is why I write. That is why I show up. That is why I touched a 92-year-old man’s forearm and asked him to tell me about his experience, with everything in me recoiling at what that experience represented, and everything in me needing to know anyway.

I never got my answer.

I still do not know what indoctrination sounded like to a 9-year-old boy before anyone called it indoctrination.

But I know it started long before anyone was loaded onto a train.

I shook his hand.

I am still glad I did.