Sanchez

Sanchez is a new classmate of Lukas, Gino, and Julius whose ingenuity helps set the theft plot in motion and whose loyalty becomes physical in the story’s final fight. He is neither merely a schemer nor simply a loyal friend: he moves easily between joking companionship, hard-headed persuasion, and sudden intervention, while the choices he makes help draw his friends deeper into risk.

Identity and Arrival

Sanchez enters the class as an outsider to its established routines. Herr Schiezeth introduces him as a new pupil from Marzahn-Hellersdorf and asks the class to help him settle in. The welcome is immediately complicated by remarks that reduce the place he comes from to a stereotype and his presence to a racial novelty. The scene establishes the social divisions surrounding the group before Sanchez has said much about himself.

In a conversation with Lukas, Sanchez identifies himself as Cuban and reveals a gold chain bearing a Cuban flag pendant from beneath his shirt. The small, visible emblem makes his self-description concrete without making it a full account of his background. Lukas also notices that Sanchez is the only foreigner he knows who speaks Berlin dialect. Sanchez’s voice is presented as part of how he moves through the city and among his peers, not as proof of any single, uncomplicated identity.

Sanchez speaks frankly about ethnic and national categories. While describing the people around Marzahn and Hellersdorf, he sorts groups into blunt hierarchies and singles out Russians as the worst, except for Nazis. His casual manner does not soften the exclusions in what he says; it makes them sound like everyday assumptions. The conversation places his own Cuban identification alongside a broader environment in which people are repeatedly classified by origin.

Friendship and Everyday Life

Sanchez quickly becomes part of Lukas’s close circle. When Julius approaches him to buy something at the park, Sanchez greets him warmly, shakes his hand, and nods to Lukas and Gino. His manner is familiar rather than ceremonial, and the exchange shows that he knows how to deal comfortably with both friends and people from the wider neighborhood. He is friendly even when the business at hand is practical: Julius hands over coins, and Sanchez counts them with evident annoyance.

His connection with Lukas extends beyond school. Sanchez’s mother jokes that the two boys are in the same class and live next door, making it easy for them to skip school and visit whichever home is empty. Sanchez answers that he has spent more time at Lukas’s than at home over the previous three weeks. The joke conveys a real routine of shared time and truancy, while also showing that their closeness is visible to the adults around them. Sanchez can treat that closeness lightly, but his frequent presence at Lukas’s home gives the friendship an everyday weight beyond the group’s schemes.

The Computer Theft and Its Aftermath

Sanchez is the one who presents the group with its plan to steal the school’s new computers. At Julius’s room, he builds suspense before explaining that the school is due to receive fifty brand-new PCs, complete with monitors, keyboards, and mice. The boys could steal the equipment and sell it for thousands, he proposes. His pitch turns a specific opportunity into a shared prospect of quick money; Julius and Gino grin, while Lukas is less immediately convinced.

When the first attempts to sell the stolen machines fail, Sanchez does not agree with Lukas’s suggestion to abandon the effort and hide or dispose of the computers. After five shops have refused them, he argues that giving up would make the whole operation pointless. He backs Julius’s decision to keep looking for a buyer and offers to do the talking himself, signaling both persistence and confidence in his own negotiating ability. He even tries to draw Lukas along with the promise of an ice cream if the attempt succeeds.

Later, on the train, Sanchez presses Lukas to wait one more day before deciding what to do with the remaining computers. If what Momo has heard proves true, they can get rid of them by throwing them into a canal; if not, Sanchez sees the chance to sell the remaining five machines and make more money. He describes the possible payoff as a jackpot and insists that, once the computers are gone, nobody can touch them. The logic is persuasive because it offers two paths while privileging the profitable one, but its confidence depends on treating delay as safety. Sanchez’s ingenuity keeps the scheme alive even as the police have publicly described the burglary, the stolen equipment, and the possibility that the thieves were armed.

Loyalty and Violence

Sanchez’s loyalty is clearest when Julius attacks Cem and Cem retaliates. After Julius strikes Cem’s girlfriend, Cem beats Julius, knocks him down, and kicks him. Sanchez sprints in and kicks Cem away from Julius. When Cem charges back, Sanchez intervenes again, placing himself between them. Cem rams his shoulder into Sanchez’s chest, but Sanchez remains in the struggle; when Lukas and Julius pin Cem down, Sanchez joins them in holding him.

The intervention is not a clean resolution: all three boys are pulled into the violence, and Sanchez helps restrain the person who had been attacking Julius. Still, his actions make his allegiance unmistakable. The same willingness to act that makes him an effective accomplice in the computer scheme also makes him a physical defender of his friend. In both situations he does not stand back and wait for events to settle; he commits himself, and the consequences arrive immediately.

Character and Narrative Role

Sanchez’s role is defined by initiative. He supplies the theft idea, argues against abandoning it, offers to approach another buyer, and steps into a fight when Julius is in danger. His humor and easy social manner coexist with his appetite for risk; the story does not present one as cancelling out the other. Instead, his ability to make a plan sound workable helps explain how an impulsive group can keep moving from one decision to the next.

His speech also locates him within the book’s contested social world. He is introduced through other people’s assumptions about where he comes from, identifies himself through a Cuban symbol, and speaks in a local dialect while repeating rigid ethnic distinctions of his own. That combination resists a simple outsider-insider label. Sanchez belongs to the group through friendship and shared action, but belonging does not make him immune to the prejudices that structure their surroundings—or prevent him from reproducing some of their categories. His importance lies in that unsettled position, and in the way his energy repeatedly turns talk into action.