I kissed him good-night and watched as he walked to his bedroom, holding Mayim’s hand. I tucked Laura into her bed, and then went downstairs to make tea for me and Mayim. When she joined me in the sitting room a few minutes later, the color was gone from her face. She sat opposite me and rested Georg’s satchel on the coffee table between us.

“Open it,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.

I opened the satchel and withdrew the books. On the cover of the first was an image of a street parade. Most of the adults and children were giving the salute, and no less than eight swastika banners and flags were displayed in the scene. I made a sound of surprise, and Mayim reached forward, her movements jerky as she withdrew the rest of the books to spread them side by side.

I reached to pick the next one up, Children, What Do You Know about the Führer? I leafed through the pages, watching a fiction unfold about a benevolent Hitler who was restoring the Fatherland to glory. The second book was called The Crossbreed, and while the cover was of a cute puppy, I only had to skim the first few pages to realize it was a simplistic parable discouraging relationships between Aryans and Jews.

By the time I picked up the third picture book, my hands were shaking.

It was called Never Trust a Fox on the Green Heath and Never Trust a Jew by His Oath. On the first page, a handsome Aryan man was depicted beside a rotund, coarse man ostensibly representing the Jews.

When I looked up, Mayim was weeping.

“Please tell me you didn’t read these to him, Mayim,” I whispered sickly.

“He wanted that one,” she choked out, pointing to the last book. “He liked the cover best. I managed to convince him we should read one of his own books and he was easily distracted, but that won’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’s going to realize that the Jews he’s learning about are the same as the Jew in his house.”

“I’ll talk to him—” I started to say, but her eyes widened in alarm.

“And tell him what?” she said. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Tell him that the Führer is wrong? That Jews aren’t the enemy? You can’t say those things to him. If he repeats them at school, you’ll have a visit from the Gestapo.”

“But I can’t just let him think that this is okay,” I whispered back.

Mayim choked on a sob. “He must have spoken about me in class. His teacher told him to make sure I read them with him. She was trying to make a point.”

I was only grateful that Jürgen was coming home that night. He’d warned me he would be late, but I waited up for him.