“Don’t you dare come into my house and speak to me like I’m a senile old fool, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes.” Adele gently rested Laura on a rug on the floor beside Georg, then dropped herself heavily into a chair at the kitchen table as she shot me a sharp look. “Even if there were another election tomorrow, those Nazis wouldn’t honor the results. They started as thugs in 1920 and they have done nothing but stir up instability ever since. I am old enough to know that history is not an archive—it is a crystal ball. People don’t change, and political parties change even less than that. From the Party’s very inception, its intent has been clear. They plan to segregate Jews from Aryan society and to strip them of their rights.”

“We just have to stay calm and keep level heads,” I repeated. I had plenty of practice ignoring Adele’s rants and her tendency toward hasty judgment. “There isn’t anything we can do about it now anyway.”

Adele sighed wearily, then turned her attention back to the children, seated on the rug beside her.

“I only care for the sake of you young people, you know. Hopefully God will take me soon and I can be with Alfred and our boys, but you and these babies have a lot of living left to do, and so does Mayim and her family. I just can’t see how a man like Hitler can bring anything but chaos, especially for the Jews.”

“We could talk about this all day and we still won’t solve it. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”

“Actually, there are some other unpleasant matters that you and I must discuss,” Adele said. Then she tilted her head at me. “I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to talk alone. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your artwork and furniture vaporizing over the last six months. I know things are tough for you and Jürgen. He tells me that you are determined to hold on to your family home, and I understand that better than most.”

Like me, Adele had grown up in a family of considerable wealth, and Alfred made a comfortable living for them both. But Adele unexpectedly found herself with a young child to care for right when the hyperinflation crisis began.

She laid off her personal staff, and when that wasn’t enough to stabilize her financial situation, she remodeled, converting her family’s expansive ancestral home into apartments. She kept the smallest of these for herself and Jürgen and rented out the rest. Her apartment now comprised only the back part of the ground floor of her building. Her front living room was a studio apartment occupied by an elderly Bavarian couple, and her entryway and stairwell were common space for all of her tenants.