Anti-Semitism is the animating force behind the events of the book. Leyson directly addresses the question of anti-Semitism in two particular passages of the book. On pages 51-52, he describes propaganda posters issued by the Nazis in which Jews are crudely caricatured. Leyson declares, “I couldn’t understand why the Germans would want to make us look like something we were not” (52). Leyson revisits this theme on page 82, reflecting on how the racial stereotypes of the Jew versus the Aryan were not true to reality:

In reality we were not their opposites at all. Plenty of Jews had blue eyes and blond hair, and many Germans and Austrians, including Adolf Hitler, had dark eyes and hair. But Nazi dogma grouped Jews as one, as the loathed enemy of the Aryans. For them, being Jewish was not about what we believed, but about our so-called race. It made no sense to me, and I even wondered how Nazis could believe such contradictions themselves. Had they taken the time to really look at us, they would have seen human beings just like themselves…they would have seen families just like their own. (82)

Thus, Leyson depicts anti-Semitism as irrational and contradictory.