I realized in that moment, sitting in the center of more Nazis than I could ever shoot, exactly what these people were. Cold-hearted bullies. It seemed so simple I wanted to burst out laughing. These were the boys on the schoolyard I’d never cared about being friends with. These were the boys so terrified of being labeled a fag, a Jew, a sissy, a traitor, a communist, a Catholic, or whatever else the insult of the day was, they’d march off to genocidal war to prove their manliness in front of their friends and fathers.
