‘But from now on you will,’ said Howard, ‘and you’re doing very well. So is Rudy. It was what you and Ben said about the family tree that made us laugh.’

Karin smiled at the guests. ‘If you will please for a moment excuse me, I shall explain to the children in German what is a family tree.’

So intrigued were they, the board game was abandoned and a questioning session began.

‘When was our tree planted?’ Ben asked Howard.

‘Shall I begin with Sarah and Abraham stepping off the herring boat, Marianne?’

‘Given all that’s happened since, I’d say that was far back enough.’

But not for Ben. ‘Who were Sarah and Abraham, and where did they come from?’

‘It was they who put down new roots,’ Howard told him. ‘They were your great-great-grandparents, Ben, who left Russia in 1905.’

‘But why did they travel on a smelly herring boat?’

‘When people have to run for their lives, they’re not choosy about how they travel, son.’

‘Why did they have to run for their lives?’

Howard’s brief résumé of how the Sandbergs had fled the pogroms, and his explanation of that word, had a sobering effect upon the children and a moment of silence followed.

‘But our name is not Sandberg,’ said Ben. ‘Did what you told us also happen to the Klein family?’

Howard shook his head. ‘They came from Vienna.’

‘Because of Hitler?’ Rudy inquired.

‘Long before anyone knew there’d one day be a Hitler,’ Howard replied, ‘when the worst that was then happening to Viennese Jews was getting their windows broken, that sort of thing.’

‘Jewish people have too often had to run for their lives and it is unfair,’ said Magda.

Her grandfather, on his face a reminiscent expression, emitted a long sigh. ‘We have learned not to expect what is fair, Liebchen.’

‘But the time when we had to accept that was our lot is over,’ said Marianne.

‘A sentiment now being forcibly expressed by the black South Africans,’ Jake put in. ‘I’d prefer the force not to be necessary, but more strength to their elbow is how I feel.’

‘How could you not?’ said Laura, toying with the jade necklace that matched her pleated silk dress. ‘You’re one of the other scapegoat race, aren’t you? But the worst of it for us is now, we hope, in the past.’

‘Hope isn’t enough,’ Marianne declared, ‘and certainly not with what has again begun happening. Austria is an alarming example, and I’m reminded by what Howard told Ben about our Viennese forebears that they were wise to make their exit while the going was good.’

‘What are forebears?’ Ben wanted to know.

‘The people from whom we’re descended,’ she explained, adding to the adults, ‘It seems an impersonal way to describe one’s grandparents, but they died years before I was born.’