I want to hug her for putting Ingrid in her place.

‘Everything’s so upside down these days,’ she says, once Ingrid has left the room. ‘The order of everything. It was all clear in the old days. Parents and children. Master and servant. The bosses and the workers. The upper classes and the lower. Now it’s all got muddled.’ She moves to scrubbing the top of the cooking range, slopping water onto the hot surface so it sizzles. She scrubs hard, rocking back and forth, both hands atop the brush. ‘Everyone telling on everyone. Trying to get one better on people. Children ruling their parents, servants their masters. It’s not right.’ She sniffs hard and I wonder if she’s crying.

‘I wasn’t doing any harm today, Bertha, I was—’

She turns slowly to face me. ‘I don’t want to know where you were or who with, Fraülein Herta,’ she says. There is fear in her wide eyes, in her tense shoulders. ‘What you do in your spare time is your business and nobody else’s. Ingrid would do well to remember that, but she thinks she knows better. She thinks because she has Karl’s ear—’

‘Karl’s ear?’

Ingrid.

Bertha stares at me, eyes wretched.

‘She likes to gossip, that one,’ she says. ‘Wants special treatment. Praise. She wants to get noticed. And, by gossiping, she gets what she wants. But I know one thing,’ Bertha wiggles the brush, then plops it back into the sink, ‘it will end badly for someone. Her, in all likelihood. All I can do is tell her to keep her mouth shut.’ She shakes her head and purses her lips. ‘You shouldn’t—’

But before she can finish her sentence, the front door bangs and Mutti and Vati’s voices fill the hallway. Bertha begins to bustle around, getting ready to serve the meal and says no more about it.

Watching her, I wonder where her loyalties lie. With Hitler and the Fatherland? With the family; us, who she works so hard for? Or with her own folk, whoever and wherever they may be. Or perhaps, and the back of my neck prickles as I wonder, fleetingly, could it be that Bertha has some sort of secret sympathy with those excluded from this Aryan revolution?

7 October 1938

We walk separately, a hundred metres apart, past the soaring, classical structure of the university building, centuries old, solid and constant. I lift my face to the sun; a feathery breeze touches my skin. I glance back. He’s on the other side of the road. The slightest tilt of his head as he acknowledges my look. However many times we do this, it’s the same rush of adrenaline. Fear and excitement in equal measure.

I enter the small park beyond the university buildings. A park where Jews are forbidden. Thank God for Walter’s blond hair and blue eyes. A young man passes on his bike, a bag of books slapping heavily against his thigh. An elderly man shuffles in the distance with a stick. Nobody else is in sight. It’s as safe as it will ever be. I sit down and rest my back against the solid trunk of a tree and a couple of minutes later he sits beside me.