That evening, he came up with a plan. It involved me dressing up as a displaced person and him as a policeman. We would approach Meier and I would accuse him of some crime - a petty theft. Meier would naturally protest and, taking the opportunity of surprise, I would pretend to fly into a rage and pounce on him: in the resulting mêlée, either Father or I would retrieve any capsules he had on his person. As soon as this was done, Father would ‘arrest’ Meier, and it wouldn’t be until we were some distance away that he would realize what had happened.

After going over it several times, we set out for Hamburg the next afternoon. We found Meier soon enough, working in one of the gardens as he had been the previous day. We approached him in our respective garbs and I claimed that the tools he was using were mine, stolen from me the previous week. But either Father’s plan wasn’t as clever as we’d thought or my acting was poor, because he saw through it at once and made a dash for it across the garden and into a nearby field. We had no choice but to go after him, but when I caught up and leapt on top of him, I found that he didn’t have any capsules on him - but he did have a knife. Where he had hidden it, I don’t know, because he had been dressed in very little in the afternoon sunshine, but I felt it go in, and it was the last thing I remembered when I woke in the sanatorium.

I have very little recollection of the first few days after the stabbing: I was blacked out for most of it. I do remember being forced to drink endless amounts of a tepid broth that seemed to stick in my throat. And I was occasionally lucid enough when being given a bath or being taken to the bathroom to feel enough residual shame at the indignity of being exposed to strangers that I lashed out at a few people who, after all, were only trying to help me.