The driver stepped out of the Buick, stretched like a child, and looked up at the sky as if he was surprised that birds could be heard singing in a place like Dachau. I often had the same thought myself. The passenger stayed in his seat, staring straight ahead, and probably wishing he was somewhere else. He had my sympathies, and possessed of the shiny green sedan, I would certainly have kept on driving. Neither man was wearing a uniform but the driver was altogether better dressed than his passenger. Better dressed, better fed, and in rather better health, or so it seemed to me. He tap-danced up the stone steps and through the front door like he owned the place, and I found myself nodding politely at the hatless, tanned, bespectacled man with a face like a chess grandmaster who had considered every possible move. He didn’t look lost at all.

“Are you the owner?” he asked as soon as he came through the door, without making much of an effort at a good German accent and without even looking at me while he awaited an answer. He glanced idly around at the hotel decor which was supposed to make the place feel more homey, but only if you roomed with a milkmaid. There were cowbells, spinning wheels, hemp combs, rakes, sharpening stones, and a big wooden barrel on top of which lay a two-day-old Süddeutsche Zeitung and a truly ancient copy of the Münchener Stadtanzeiger. On the walls were some watercolors of local rural scenes from a time when painters better than Hitler had come to Dachau, attracted by the peculiar charm of the Amper River and the Dachauer Moos—an extensive marsh now mostly drained and turned into farmland. It was all as kitsch as an ormolu cuckoo clock.

“You could say that I’m the owner,” I said. “At least while my wife is indisposed. She’s in the hospital. In Munich.”

“Nothing serious, I hope,” said the American, still not looking at me. He seemed more interested in the watercolors than in the health of my wife.

“I imagine you must be looking for the U.S. military barracks, at the old KZ,” I said. “You turned off the road when you should have just driven across the bridge, over the river canal. It’s less than a hundred yards from here. On the other side of those trees.”

Now he looked at me and his eyes became playful, like a cat’s. “Poplars, aren’t they?” He stooped to stare out of the window in the direction of the camp. “I bet you’re glad of them. I mean, you’d hardly know the camp was there at all, would you? Very useful.”

Ignoring the implied accusation in his tone, I joined him at the window. “And here I was thinking you must be lost.”