Following Nemo’s advice, Patton kept her hat pulled as low as it would go and hung her head so that no one, and no CCTV camera, would get a good look at her. This meant her impression of Munich was mostly of sidewalks and shoes. She wandered the streets for a couple of hours, noting her path carefully so she would be able to return to the van. She eventually emerged onto a wide grassy square and could not resist a quick glance up.

On the two sides stood the neo-classical behemoths of a pair of museums—the Staatliche Antikensammlungen and the Glyptothek and in front of her stood the grand city gate, or Propyläen. She had arrived at the Königsplatz, one of the great plazas of Munich. Here, Patton shouldn’t have felt the sense of doom that descended upon her in the dark confines of the van lifting. She was surrounded by a wide-open space and huge, beautiful buildings; the sky behind the Propyläen blazed with reds and oranges as the sun set over Munich, and only a few other pedestrians shared this vast, stunning space.

But her mood only darkened, and the fiery sunset did nothing to help. As soon as she saw the sky against the Propyläen her memory began to play a film on which she enhanced the original black and white with the colors before her, the colors of flame and fire. She had watched that film for the first time in middle school and several times thereafter, including in a class on military history that she took after joining the Army. It had been taken in Berlin on May 10, 1933, but the same thing had happened that night in cities across Germany, including in Munich here in the Königsplatz—university students and Nazi officials burning tens of thousands of books. Patton almost thought she could feel the heat of those flames that had tried to, in the words of the oath that the students took, “destroy and combat subversive and un-German literature.”

Patton had loved books since her second-grade teacher had read the class From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. She had taken classes in the library school as an undergraduate and, if there had been such a thing as a minor in library science, she would have added it to her math degree. She knew as much about the topic as most people with a master’s degree in the subject.