Joshua was his name. Not that anyone cared, of course. Sometimes he forgot he had a name. When you’re referred to as a nine digit number, your name loses its value. 0012549548. Every morning at seven his number would be called out and he’d respond. He learned very quickly that if you didn’t respond bad living conditions would be the least of your problems. His ribs still ached if they were pulled the wrong way.

When he woke up every morning he would repeat his name to himself over and over again. Every morning he was terrified he’d forget what it was throughout the day. He never did, but every morning he made sure. His named meant “the Lord saves.” He prayed and hoped every day that his name was right. That somehow some way the Lord would save him. Death would be salvation from this place.

As the morning sun roused him, he quietly said his name. “Joshua Lautman. Joshua Lautman. The Lord saves. The Lord saves.”

When he filed outside for the morning roll call they started calling out the numbers for the gas chambers. Everyone lived in fear that their nine digit number would be called. Most of these people still had family on the outside. Most of them had family on the inside too. Joshua didn’t. He watched his family be slaughtered in front of him. He was much younger then, as he got older he realized that when you aren’t considered a person, when you’re referred to as a number, life isn’t worth living. To Joshua Lautman, 0012549548, life wasn’t worth living. He was cattle waiting to be lead to the slaughter.

“…and 0012549548, to the chambers!”
Adolf Ernest Koehler had almost had it. His parents were large Nazi supporters. They wanted Adolf to be just like the Führer. He wasn’t sure how they’d react to the fact he’d been attending the secret underground meetings. There were a lot of things that Adolf wasn’t pleased about the Nazi reign.

When he attended the first meeting they started calling him Ernest. Since then he’d had convinced nearly everyone to call him Ernest. Those who didn’t know him, like his teachers, thought he was doing it out of respect to the Führer. Those who did know him knew exactly why he changed his name. He was distancing himself from the life and expectations of his parents. They weren’t exactly sure why, but they would soon. There was another book burning occurring tonight and the attendees at the secret meetings planned to make an appearance.

It wasn’t hard to sneak out of his house. His family thought he was the perfect Führer supporter. They didn’t know that he planned to protest. They didn’t know that he was okay if he died tonight. He wanted to prove the expectations wrong. His family wanted him to rule Germany like Adolf Hitler. Ernest wanted nothing of the kind. Maybe it was the fact he saw his best friend, who happened to be Jewish, shot down right in front of him and the soldiers expected to be thanked. Maybe it was the fact he saw through the propaganda, at least once he attended a meeting.

He was melted into the shadows when the riot started. He ran out with the others, shouting. The adrenaline was pulsing through him. He didn’t register the soldier yelling at him to stop. He didn’t realize what the solider was doing. He didn’t notice until it was too late that he had taken aim. It wasn’t until he was lying on the ground did he realize that he had been shot. It was an odd thing, though. He didn’t mind. He had made his own choice and it wasn’t pleasing to his parents. It wasn’t anything the Führer would do and that thought made Ernest smile.

He might be dying, but he was his own person. He was Ernest, not Adolf and he was okay with that.