One evening in 1967 Thorsten brought to the club the latest record by the Beatles. On one side was a bouncingly happy number called “Penny Lane,” which they all danced to energetically; on the other a weirdly fascinating song, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” to which Lili and others did a kind of slow dream-dance, swaying to the music and waving their arms and hands like underwater plants. They played both sides of the disc again and again.

When people asked Thorsten how he got the record, he tapped the side of his nose in a mysterious gesture and said nothing. But Lili knew the truth. Once a week Thorsten’s uncle Horst drove across the border into West Berlin in a van full of bolts of cloth and cheap clothing, the East’s largest export. Horst always gave the border guards a share of the comic books, pop records, makeup, and fashionable clothes he brought back.

Lili’s parents thought the music was frivolous. For them only politics was serious. But they failed to understand that for Lili and her generation the music was political, even when the songs were about love. New ways of playing guitars and singing were all tied up with long hair and different clothes, racial tolerance and sexual freedom. Every song by the Beatles or Bob Dylan said to the older generation: “We don’t do things your way.” For teenagers in East Germany that was a stridently political message, and the government knew it and banned the records.

They were all freaking out to “Strawberry Fields Forever” when the police arrived.

Lili was dancing opposite Thorsten. She understood English, and she was intrigued by John Lennon singing: “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.” It so vividly described most people in East Germany, she thought.

Lili was among the first to spot the uniforms coming through the street door. She knew right away that the Stasi had at last caught up with the St. Gertrud Youth Club. It was inevitable: young people were bound to talk about exciting things they did. No one knew how many East German citizens were informers for the secret police, but Lili’s mother said it was more than the Gestapo had. “We couldn’t do now what we did in the war,” Carla had said; though when Lili had asked what she did in the war her mother had clammed up, as always. Anyway, it had been likely all along that sooner or later the Stasi would get wind of what was going on in the basement of St. Gertrud’s Church.

Lili immediately stopped dancing and looked around for Karolin, but could not see her. Odo was not in sight either. They must have left the basement. In the corner opposite the street door was a staircase that led directly to the pastor’s house alongside the church. They had probably gone out that way for some reason.

Lili said to Thorsten: “I’m going to fetch Odo.”

She was able to push through the crowd of dancers and slip away before most people realized they were being raided. Thorsten followed her. They got to the top of the staircase before Lennon sang: “Let me take you down—” and stopped abruptly.