It had been a shocking few months in Berlin. First came the destruction of our parliament building, the Reichstag—then a series of communist attacks across the nation were only narrowly averted. I’d pored over the details of the planned terror campaign in the newspaper: bombs hidden under bridges and in train stations, women and children used as human shields, the execution of swaths of public officials, poison in the Berlin water supply.

Even through all of that, I had never once been as terrified as I was at the rally I just attended with Lydia.

“There was a lot of passionate analysis of the problems we face as a nation, a lot of hints about who’s to really blame.”

“Who might that be?” Mayim said lightly, but I could hear the tightness in her words.

“They managed to be hateful toward the Jews for hours on end without saying the word Jew even once.”

“They adjust their rhetoric depending on where the rally is being held. In the country, they can say what they really mean. But we’re in the cosmopolitan city, so I suppose here they know to hide their hate beneath a veneer of respectability.”

By the end of the rally, I’d felt physically ill, and that sensation surged all over again as I sat in my living room and thought about what I’d heard.

“A Volksgemeinschaft is possible!” one speaker thundered, as he painted the image of a German people’s community, which sounded almost Utopian until he followed it up with references to the racial purity it would be built upon. Another looked to the past and found a villain he didn’t need to name. “The Treaty of Versailles was designed only to cripple us! We were stabbed in the back by those who agreed to it.” We all knew this was a clear reference to the long-standing conspiracy theory that Germany had not really lost the Great War, but that our brave soldiers were betrayed by those at home, mostly Jews, who fomented unrest and undermined the war effort.

Another man spoke in generalities—rattling off a long list of the challenges we faced as a nation, from economic woes to the ever-increasing political instability—and then he simply shrugged and said, “Germany should be for Germans. We shall bear our national misfortune no longer.” That use of the word misfortune struck an uncomfortable chord. I’d seen it on the Nazi posters around the city, usually beneath a crude, offensive caricature of a Jew.

“People seemed enthralled, Mayim. Like they were under a spell,” I said uneasily. “It was a flashy affair—almost like a concert, with an orchestra and a choir and boundless enthusiasm and passion. I just don’t understand how a bit of music and some theatrical speeches could turn a crowd like that into a bunch of raging anti-Semites.”