When The World Was Ours

Although he begins the story as Leo and Elsa’s friend, Max eventually takes on the role of the anti-hero. Max is a flawed character, for his childhood self is filled with vulnerability and longing for affection, belonging, and acceptance. Before meeting Leo and Elsa, Max did not have friends, and his parents were never there for him because they were always focused on their financial problems. The young Max therefore relishes every bit of attention he receives from other parental figures, such as especially Leo’s father, who is a warm and joyful presence in Max’s life. When the story begins, Max and his friends are nine years old, and Max feels like he needs nothing else in the world than his friends. Before long, the children’s ideal lives and their hopes for a wonderful future are robbed as the Nazi regime gains power. Failing to understand the deeper nuances of the political currents that threaten his friends, Max with anger and frustration as Elsa and her family flee for their lives, but his desire to be part of a unit and to be “noticed and praised” (62) by authority figures ultimately becomes his downfall. Although his childhood self falls in love with Elsa and kisses her before she leaves, hoping to marry her one day, he is unaware that their paths will one day converge in an entirely different way.

When Max and his family move to Munich, he is given a chance to start over and become a different person. For years, he fights against the person he was and the friendships that he left behind. Pressured to conform to his father’s loyalty to the Nazi regime, he wrestles with his integrity and with what he knows to be right, but he ultimately succumbs to what the Nazi regime expects him to do and think. Because he loves being part of a team, he begins to see his time in the German Youth (and later, in the Hitler Youth) as evidence that he is part of a higher purpose. He therefore manages to suppress his memories and emotions whenever they trouble the remnants of his conscience. Slowly, Max gives in to The Insidious Process of Dehumanization and stops viewing the prisoners of the concentration camps as human. When his father compels him to burn the photograph, Max stands “tall and proud beside his father as a door in his heart silently close[s]” (227). With each move, the severity of the abuses that Max witnesses increases, and his folly finally culminates when he is urged to shoot Elsa. However, seeing her in this context unlocks something in Max that he tucked far inside of himself, and he cannot bring himself to kill her or take the final step into becoming a full-fledged Nazi. For this reason, Max is killed, and he never truly loses the person he is inside.

Elsa is the only girl in the group of three friends who begin their lives in Vienna as innocent nine-year-olds full of Hope, Resilience, and the Endurance of the Human Spirit. Elsa is always thinking of her future and imagining what her adulthood will be like. She hopes to be happy like Mrs. Stewart, not like her mutti (mother) and Vati, who are always unhappy. Elsa is constantly suspicious that something is horribly wrong with her society, but her parents refuse to tell her anything until they decide to move to Czechoslovakia to escape the growing reach of the Nazi regime. Elsa does not take much with her, but she does take her photograph from the day at the Ferris wheel. Like Max and Leo, she treasures that memory and sees it as a time when her life was still full of promise and freedom. Elsa is mature for her age and accepts the changes that she must endure as she leaves her home country and her friends to move somewhere safer. However, Czechoslovakia does not remain safe for long, and soon she must leave her home and her new friend, Greta, behind.

Elsa endures her father’s absence at war, and as her family is constantly moved to worse and worse circumstances, she remains hopeful and positive. She refuses to accept that life will always be this way. However, with each new hardship, something is taken away from Elsa, and she and her family are slowly dehumanized. Before her untimely end, Elsa lives in two different concentration camps and experiences starvation and all forms of abuse, as well as isolation from her brother and father. She often feels like the world has forgotten about her and all those with her, and she wonders why nothing is being done to stop the atrocities taking place. In the first camp, Elsa takes care of her mother, who becomes weaker and weaker by the day and is later killed at Auschwitz along with Elsa’s father and brother. When Greta is also killed, Elsa has nothing left, and she accepts her impending death. When she sees that Max is the one who is assigned to kill her, she attempts to save him from doing something that she knows he will regret, even though she knows that she will die regardless of his decision. Elsa dies alongside Max after having endured enough torture for several lifetimes, but she dies with her integrity intact.

Leo’s mama and papa, Mr. and Mrs. Grunberg, are pillars in his life and are equally instrumental in helping him to survive and escape the Holocaust. Leo’s papa starts out as a professional family photographer who specializes in taking candid, treasured photographs. He takes one such photograph of Leo, Elsa, and Max on the Ferris wheel, and this photograph becomes a symbol of hope and The Eternal Bonds of Friendship. Leo’s papa knows how to make conversation with anyone and is full of humor and zest for life, “like an always-full happiness machine that gave out laughter tokens to anyone who passed by” (19). He makes instant friends with Mr. and Mrs. Stewart on the Ferris wheel, and these secondary characters later play a crucial role in helping Leo and his mother to escape Austria. When Papa suggests riding the Ferris wheel a second time, Leo’s admiration for his father is clear, for he says, “That’s what Papa could do. Take the best day ever and double it” (11). Even Max depends on Mr. Grunberg to be the type of father that he does not have.

Leo’s papa is eventually arrested and taken to Dachau and later to Auschwitz. He manages to endure the abuses of both camps and even serves as a symbolic reminder of the past when he encounters Max. In these moments, Max notices that despite the hardships that Mr. Grunberg has endured and despite the stark changes in his appearance, he is still the same person underneath. As the narrative states, “But the smile. Even with half his teeth missing and the other half rotting it was definitely familiar. His eyes, among the grayness of everything about him—and everything about Dachau, come to think of it—they still twinkled in a way that danced like light on a speck of dust” (174).

Leo and his mother escape Austria together and start a new life in England, where Leo takes care of his mother and grows up quickly. Leo’s mama is aging and slowly losing hope that her husband will ever return, and it is up to Leo to keep her spirits up. Leo’s papa eventually comes home when the war ends, and the family is reunited at last. He brings with him the photograph that he found next to the bodies of Elsa and Max. Leo’s bond with his family is the driving factor in his survival and in his ability to stay strong amidst the chaos.

Max’s parents are in constant disagreement and do not offer Max the attention and affection he needs and deserves as a child. He always hears them fighting, and his father is constantly engaging in antisemitic rants about Jewish people, claiming that they are the reason for his poverty. He even tries to get Max to stop spending time with Leo and Elsa. Max’s mother tries to stop this at first and insists that Max can continue to see his friends, but she stops fighting Max’s father when he becomes a Nazi and a senior SS officer. When Max notices this change in his mother, he tries to emulate her example, hoping that he too can let go of who he used to be. As the story unfolds, Mr. Fischer proves himself to be a brutal and cold man whose hatred is his defining trait, and Max avidly seeks any shred of praise that he can glean from his father. For this and many other reasons, Max falls victim to the Nazi ideology in an attempt to impress his father and Hitler. Mr. Fischer slowly works his way up the ranks, and the family eventually ends up in Auschwitz, where Mr. Fischer relishes each new opportunity to abuse the prisoners there. With his toxic influence, he trains Max to become a full-fledged Nazi soldier.