Once a younger version of her buxom mother, Christina had shed weight along with the tears she had been unable to stem since returning to Munich.

‘Your father is right,’ Lisl said gently. ‘Our life it must continue as always, despite what has now happened. You have made a painful decision, Christina, but the hurt will pass. You will not go on crying forever.’

Lisl, however, was less inclined to believe, as Klaus did, that once their daughter’s initial distress was over, all would be well. This could not be like the broken marriages experienced by the sons and daughters of some of Lisl’s friends. More was at stake here than the usual matters of alimony and arrangements for the children to spend time with their father.

Divorce was always painful for the children, Lisl reflected. But the reason for Christina’s leaving Howard was, as Klaus had said, rooted in a matter Germans preferred not to think about. Until Howard entered their lives it had not been necessary for Lisl and Klaus to think about it.

Munich’s Jewish community had a synagogue, also a centre for their activities, Lisl had heard. But their number was small, lessening the odds of encountering any of them. Lisl never had. Nor had she paused to ponder on the fate of the Jewish children with whom she had played at kindergarten, in the days when Munich, like every major German city, had many Jews among its citizenry.

It wasn’t until her daughter gave her a Jewish son-in-law that she had questioned her own indifference. Then an evening had come when she had found herself facing up to a good deal more than that.

It was Klaus’s uncle’s birthday and the family was helping him celebrate it in a beer hall. Many toasts were made amid the drinking and the laughter, and Uncle Ernst had stood up and raised his Stein to the good old days. It was possible that he had done so at his previous birthday celebrations and that Lisl had thought nothing of it. But what those good old days had included for Uncle Ernst and his cronies, some of whom were present, had suddenly come home to her and she had got up and left.

A terrible quarrel with Klaus had taken place when he followed her. He had demanded an explanation for her rudeness to the elder of the family, but she was too sickened by his requiring one to provide it. By then they were the grandparents of a half-Jewish child.

Lisl returned Ben to his chair and began feeding him his unfinished meal, affected by the docility with which he allowed her to do so, though he was by nature a spirited little boy. Destined to grow up with a built-in inner conflict passed down by his parents, she thought, eyeing him compassionately.