Nazi

The Nazis are the human perpetrators concealed behind the monsters in Abraham Portman’s childhood stories. Their persecution drove him from Poland as a boy and destroyed his family; the contrast between the fantastic creatures he described and the violence of human beings gives the stories their tragic historical meaning.

Historical Role

Abraham was twelve when his parents sent him from Poland to Britain before the Second World War, placing him on a train with a suitcase and the clothes he wore. He was the only member of his family to escape Poland. He never saw his parents, older brothers, cousins, aunts, or uncles again; all were dead before he turned sixteen, killed by the persecution he had escaped.

The novel distinguishes these historical perpetrators from the supernatural monsters of Abraham’s childhood tales. The creatures with rotting skin and hidden tentacles were a form a child could imagine. The people responsible for the violence, by contrast, wore crisp uniforms and marched in lockstep: their ordinary human appearance made them harder to recognize as monsters until it was too late.

From Family Story to Historical Witness

As a child, Jacob heard Abraham explain that he had been sent away because monsters were after him. Abraham elaborated on those creatures, and Jacob at first treated the tales and accompanying photographs as inventions. Years later, Jacob’s father explained that Abraham’s stories were exaggerated versions of the truth rather than simple lies. The monsters’ human identity makes that reinterpretation explicit: the childhood fantasy had carried the memory of real persecution in a form Jacob could initially absorb.

Abraham’s account also links Nazi persecution with the danger facing peculiar children. The children’s home where he found refuge seemed, in comparison with mainland Europe’s horrors, like an enchanted island; its endless summers and guardian angels recast a place of safety through a child’s imagination. In Jacob’s later understanding, the children’s supposed peculiarity was their Jewishness, and their survival of ghettos and gas chambers was itself extraordinary. The narrative therefore connects Abraham’s flight and the fate of his family to a broader history of Jewish persecution without treating the fantasy of magical powers as a literal explanation for it.

Abraham’s Later Understanding

When Jacob asks whether Abraham really fled the Nazis, Miss Peregrine confirms that he did. She recalls finding him at a displaced-persons camp on the mainland: a boy who had suffered greatly but was strong, and whom she immediately knew belonged with her community. Her recollection confirms that his flight was not merely a family legend but part of a wider wartime displacement.

Miss Peregrine later explains that Abraham experienced the threat to Jews alongside the threat to peculiars from the hollowgast. He was tormented by the thought that he was safe in hiding while both groups were being slaughtered. Though the war ended Nazi rule, the hollowgast emerged stronger, and many peculiars remained hidden. Abraham, however, returned from war changed: determined to build a life outside the loop, he refused to hide. In this account, Nazi rule is both the force that made his childhood flight necessary and the historical circumstance against which his later refusal of concealment acquired meaning.

Narrative Significance

The Nazis are not developed as a separate group of individual characters in the cited episodes; their significance lies in what their persecution did to Abraham and in the truth his monster stories both preserved and obscured. The tale shifts from a child’s frightening image to the recognition of human perpetrators, making the fantasy’s apparent unreality a way of approaching family trauma rather than evidence that it was invented from nothing.

That shift also changes Jacob’s understanding of his grandfather. The apparent paradise of the childhood stories is set against the loss that preceded it, and Jacob’s former envy gives way to shame at having mistaken survival for an enviable adventure. By recovering the historical reality behind Abraham’s metaphor, the narrative presents the stories as an imperfect but consequential form of inherited witness.