While the #growingupwithmyname Twitter hashtag has been collecting hilarious and frustrating experiences tied to people’s names, one Ecuadorian man has trumped them all with what is surely the most WTF middle name: Hitler. Except, as it turns out, in Huigra – a small town of 4,000 in Ecuador where Giovani Hitler Cando is from– there’s at least another person named Hitler.
“I don’t know what Germany would think of a small town like mine, but I can describe the look of surprise I was met with by police when I arrive to a German airport,” wrote the 43-year-old in El País’ Verne. I was in Germany visiting my mother in law – an Ecuadorian who lives in Bonn. On that occasion, police looked for a translator who asked me questions about my name. I replied by asking what fault it is that my name is Hitler. They also asked me if I knew who Hitler was. Like I wouldn’t know that.”
Cando has never learned why his father, Bolívar, who walked out on their family when he was 2, named him Hitler. But based on his brother’s name – Lenin Helen – he concludes that the choice was not motivated by political or sociological ideologies.
At the same time, Cando isn’t too fazed by his name, and he enjoys seeing people try to keep their composure as they learn about it. “The other day I went to buy a metro pass, and once again, I saw that hidden astonishment, the desire to want to run to his co-workers and tell them what he just witnessed,” he wrote.
But truthfully, he says that it hasn’t negatively impacted his life. Instead, he says he’s faced more discrimination as an immigrant living in Spain.