I was nervous about meeting Otto. He wasn’t just Jürgen and Karl’s boss and a manager with the program—he was also a senior member of the Nazi party. Otto’s wife, Helene, would be in attendance too, as well as the other senior staff from the Kummersdorf program…and our neighbors Dietger and Anne Schneider, who lived across the road from us.

Dietger had recently been appointed the official Nazi Blockleiter—our neighborhood block warden. He was the perfect choice. He had always been the neighborhood gossip, and the authority that came with the role only amplified his keen observation skills. I had no idea how he kept abreast of the business of the entire neighborhood, but if a window was smashed, he knew how it happened, seemingly before the owner did. If a husband and wife had an argument, he knew who was at fault and who had been wronged. It was because of Dietger that Jürgen, Mayim, and I realized we had no choice but to adopt the now-standard greeting—the Hitler salute. Another neighbor from around the corner, Leopold Braunbeck, refused to give Dietger the salute. By the next morning, Leopold was imprisoned in one of the horrid concentration camps the Nazis had set up to punish their political enemies. It was months before Leopold was released, and when he came home, he was a quiet, compliant shadow of his former self.

Maybe once upon a time, we’d have said a variation on hello or good day a handful of times each day, but now we were absurd parrots, greeting every person we encountered with a Heil Hitler.

Dietger’s remarkable ability to keep track of the neighborhood’s business was deeply unnerving. In the beginning, I dared to mention this to some of the neighbors, and we all agreed we were feeling more than a little paranoid. But over time, as none of us could figure out how he knew so much about our private lives, we realized it wasn’t even safe to speculate. A call from a Blockleiter to the Gestapo guaranteed trouble, usually starting with a knock at your front door in the middle of the night.

Our second-story bedroom window opened to the street, and I’d heard some of those overnight visits. First came the roar of an engine, then the sound of hard-soled boots on the pavement and men scurrying like rats. Even if I didn’t hear the thumping on the door and the cries of protest as people were dragged from their homes, I often heard the car speeding away. Dietger was always there, seemingly delighted at the cascading fallout from his phone calls.