My name is Achmed Blumstein. My first name, given to me by my long deceased mother, means “praiseworthy”. I stare at the raging fires that fill the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. The all-consuming fires I had helped to create. What would she have said, had she been here to see me now?
I often think back to my childhood. Things had not been easy for me as a young boy. My mother had been categorized by the authorities as second degree Mischling. She had had one Jewish grandparent, my great grandfather. This earned my family much ridicule from “pure-blooded” Aryans. It was, as one could imagine, the worst for my mother. As she was only second degree Mischlinge, she wasn’t sentenced to be deported to a concentration camp. She was, however, excluded from the Nazi Party and barred from civil service. This was a severe embarrassment for my father who had always been “an Aryan and proud of it”. It was during this time he began to abuse my mother.
Despite this, my mother always managed to find the strength to enrich my young mind with extravagant tales of other lands. She was always a wonderful storyteller. When I was old enough, she would sneak picture books, and later novels, for me to read. She always made me swear not to tell a soul. It is a promise I keep to this day. As I would soon learn, however, nothing lasts forever.
It happened one week after I turned thirteen. It had been my father that had broken the news to me that fateful Saturday morning. There hadn’t been a hint of sorrow in his voice as he explained. My mother had apparently been out late the previous night.
been out late the previous night. She had been walking down the street carrying a bag of forbidden books intended for me. She was stopped by a group of Aryans, the very same ones that had so often taunted her. They had been out late drinking, when they had discovered what had been in her bag. She was found in an alley earlier the next morning with a knife in her back. The murderers were not punished.
This news rattled me to my core, but above all else, it filled me with pure, deep, dark, ugly fury. Who did I blame, you ask? Not the Aryans, my mother’s murderers. Not Adolf Hitler, their ringleader. I blamed my great grandfather, the Jew. It had been my mother’s Jewish blood that had gotten her killed, the very same blood that flows through my veins. I through myself into my work at the Hitler Youth with ferocity I hadn’t previously known. My teachers were impressed. The boy with the Mischlinge mother, the embarrassment, had morphed into a pure, cold-blooded Aryan at the top of the class. That had been the first time I had completely bought into Hitler’s, our Fuhrer’s, ideas. It came as no surprise when I was eventually enlisted into the Schutzstaffel. I felt no pride or happiness. My father, on the other hand, had never been more proud. To be honest, I couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t care at all anymore. My grief and anger had hardened to form an emotion-proof exoskeleton. I was invincible.
I had tried in vain to forget my mother, but I was reminded every time I looked in the mirror. From a distance, I looked just like an Aryan should: blonde hair, blue eyes. But, upon closer inspection, if one was to stand scarcely five centimeters in front of me, they would see a few traitorous scattered light brown highlights in my short, neatly groomed hair. If they looked into my eyes they would see a dangerous slight tint of green. Thankfully, no one ever did. I eventually succeeded in convincing even myself these treacherous nuances didn’t exist. I was an Aryan, a Nazi. That was all.
Loyalty
By I. Nowak