Over a small pot of coffee that the waiter had brought us, I discovered that Marlene taught German literature at the University of California in Berkeley, that her husband never came on any of her trips to Europe, and that she was in Poland to visit her sister. I felt easy with her. She was interesting, liked to talk and didn’t ask too many questions. She was German, but had left for America in 1947; she had three grown up sons, all lawyers like their father, and her mother, at ninety-three, still lived in a resplendent Victorian in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. She ordered aperitifs for us both and continued her story.

They’d had a difficult war, according to family legend, but since she’d been born in 1932, her memories were mostly those of a happy schoolgirl. She recalled that her mother’s American citizenship had created some problems and that they’d had to go to the police station almost every day to register. She remembered, too, that her father, a theology professor, had brushed with the Gestapo because of his professional relationship with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Then there had been the business with her little sister, Hannelore. Some of the California sunshine went out of her face when she explained that they took all children with Down’s Syndrome to a state hospital, though they had managed to hide her right up until 1943.

I had begun to feel uncomfortable as the bleakness of the memories hardened Marlene’s face. I sensed that her immediate thoughts, worlds away from the words she’d spoken, might bring us to the edge of an intimacy that would be improper after so little time. I told her that we, Griff and I, were in Zakopane to walk, and as I said it, I realised that she’d become embarrassed by my unease.

Marlene eventually breached the silence that had cut between us like a mountain gorge. She asked whether Griff was a special friend. I knew that she knew. When she began to talk about her son Matt and his lover Kip, I realised that what Griff called ‘gay man’s mother’s intuition’ had seen through me. Eased by the new understanding between us she had become animated once again. She explained how she’d tried to persuade Matt and Kip to make the trip to Europe with her, but Kip had balked at the idea, as had Matt who didn’t consider those tens of thousands with pink triangles as his brothers. I heard myself say that I’d go with her. For hours afterwards I tried to convince myself that I was only going because of the rain.

We moved away from the blood stained concrete post with its bouquet of carnations. We walked on in the silence that had closed over us as we’d stood before the huge mound of women’s hair; a silence that numbed as we looked into the eyes of a child with Down’s, sitting on the infamous doctor’s knee, smiling from a photograph. It was an external silence only; inside me was a screaming bedlam. At the railway tracks, overgrown with wild grasses and purple-headed thistles, we sat on one of the iron rails. Overwhelmed by the malignity of the scene, I recalled the frightened eyes and the hate-scarred faces of the people in my own village. I’d been interviewed for a television programme about the age of consent for gay men. I heard again their insults and their jibes. I smelled the dog shit that someone had put through our letterbox and the paint of the words Queers Out daubed on our garage doors. As my thoughts became too painful I turned away.