‘So you will understand that for my parents to return to Germany it was not easy,’ she went on. ‘Their own parents, they had died in the camps. Needless to say, somehow they survived or I would not be here. And how I knew you are Jewish was the Star of David engraved upon your ring.’

‘My sister, who lives in Israel, gave it to me.’

‘I have my brother living there. He is an army officer and my mother, she worries about him all the time.’

A brief hiatus followed while their trays were whisked away, though they were allowed to keep their coffee cups.

Then Howard took advantage of his first encounter with one of Germany’s post-war Jewish community to ask a question related to his son.

‘What is it like for you and your children, living where you do?’

‘Most of the time I don’t think about it,’ the girl replied, ‘but I would not call it a happy situation. The Nazi graffiti has, as perhaps you know, begun appearing here and there, as my parents say it did in their youth. The difference between now and then is that the authorities remove it. And my children, they experience no more anti-Semitism at school than I myself did.’

‘I experienced some in my schooldays in England,’ Howard told her.

‘And I have heard that in your country also are the neo-Nazi groups. But there cannot be for you there the dimension attached to it for Jews in Germany,’ she said quietly. ‘For my parents what they sometimes see on a wall in Berlin, it must surely freeze their blood. For myself there is an uneasiness that has always been with me.’

‘Would you mind telling me why your parents returned?’

She gave him another smile, her expression wry. ‘I am aware that to the rest of Jewry our community it is an enigma.’

Howard would have called it a phenomenon.

‘I cannot speak for others,’ she went on, ‘but I would guarantee that all had very personal reasons. As for my parents, they were living first in what was then Palestine, to where they had gone after the camps. It was there that they met and married. Then one night, my father dreamt of his own father, and the next morning told my mother of his intention to return to Berlin. In the dream, his father had told him that there being no Jews in Germany was letting Hitler win.’

‘That’s an amazing story,’ said Howard.