“No, no, Friedrich is an evil man,” she said. “They could never grant amnesty to a man like that. Not after what he did. And he deserves whatever is coming to him. Nothing would please me more than to know he’s dead. Believe me.”

“Oh, I do, I do. Why don’t you tell me what he did?”

“Before the war he was in the Freikorps, and then the Party. Then he joined the SS, and rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer. He was transferred to the Lemberg-Janowska camp in Poland. And that was the end of the man I had married.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t heard of Lemberg-Janowska.”

“Be glad of that, Herr Gunther,” she said. “Janowska wasn’t like the other camps. It started out as a network of factories that were part of the German Armament Works, in Lvov. It used forced labor, Jews and Poles. About six thousand of them in 1941. Friedrich went there in early 1942 and, for a few days at least, I went with him. The commander was a man named Wilhaus, and Friedrich became his assistant. There were about twelve or fifteen German officers, like my husband. But most of the SS, the guards, were Russians who had volunteered for service with the SS as a way of escaping a prisoner of war camp.” She shook her head and tightened her grip on the handkerchief, as if squeezing tearful memories out of the cotton. “After Friedrich got to Janowska, more Jews arrived. Many more Jews. And the ethos—if I can use such a word about Janowska—the ethos of the camp changed. Making Jews produce munitions became of much less importance than simply killing them. It wasn’t systematic killing of the kind that went on at Auschwitz-Birkenau. No, this was just murdering them individually in whatever way an SS man felt like. Each SS man had his own favorite way of dispatching a Jew. And every day there were shootings, hangings, drownings, impalements, disembowelings, crucifixions—yes, crucifixions, Herr Gunther. You can’t imagine it, can you? But it’s true. Women were stabbed to death with knives, or chopped to pieces with hatchets. Children were used for target practice. I heard a story that bets were made as to whether a child could be cleaved in two with a single blow from an ax. Each SS man was obliged to keep a tally of how many he had killed, so that a list might be compiled. Three hundred thousand people were killed like this, Herr Gunther. Three hundred thousand people brutally murdered, in cold blood, by laughing sadists. And my husband was one of them.”

While she spoke she looked not at me but at the floor, and it wasn’t long before a tear rolled down the length of her fine nose and hit the carpet. Then another.