And how inane this conversation is, thought Howard. But she’s helping me deal with whatever’s troubling Ben, and I couldn’t have a better wife. Howard had never known his son so silent.

‘There is also some of Frau Schwartz’s Apfelkuchen in the refrigerator,’ Karin went on with the charade. ‘On Sunday, Ben, he asked for a second helping.’

‘If he does not want it, I would like to have it with my ice cream,’ said Magda.

Howard thought it time to prod his lad into saying something. ‘Why don’t you and Magda share the Apfelkuchen, Ben?’

‘I don’t feel like eating dessert this evening and when I told my mother she made a fuss and asked if I was feeling ill.’

‘I would worry that Magda and Rudy were ill if they had said they did not want dessert,’ said Karin. ‘That is how we mothers are.’

‘But I’m not ill!’ Ben replied with feeling. ‘And my mother said I was making it up, when I told her what has upset me.’

He was standing beside the window, his expression now mutinous.

‘How about telling your dad what’s upset you?’ said Howard.

‘While he is doing so,’ said Karin, ‘Magda and I shall go upstairs to her room and decide what she shall wear for her friend’s birthday party.’

‘We have already decided I shall wear my new skirt and blouse—’

Karin took her by the hand. ‘Come along, Magda.’

Ben waited for the door to close behind them before saying perceptively, ‘Karin knows that this evening it’s only you I’ve come to see, Daddy—’

‘And I’m always here for you. I want you to know that. Let me add, though, that angry as you seem to be with your mother, she loves you as much as I do and—’

‘But I wasn’t making up what I told her!’ Ben interrupted. ‘And she didn’t give me time to tell her everything!’

Howard put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Calm down, lad. Let’s make ourselves comfortable, shall we?’

They sat down on the padded window-seat, Ben’s favourite place to curl up with a book when he came on Sundays and the family stayed at home.

Did he feel part of this family? Howard hoped so. ‘Come on, then. Out with it, I’m listening.’

‘There are things I don’t understand, Daddy, and they stop me from being happy.’

‘Would you like to tell me what sort of things?’

‘Once, at Uncle Ernst’s house, he said to me that the Jews are lying. That there wasn’t a Holocaust. I didn’t know what that word meant and when I asked him, he said it wasn’t necessary for me to know. Only to believe him, like all the children in his family do.’

Good old Uncle Ernst! The one-time SS officer. ‘Was your mother there when he said that to you?’