Rebeka tucked her knees under her chin. Autumn was young still, but the night was growing colder by the minute. “No. We’re from Berlin. Originally.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

That was true. She’d been six when the National Socialist Party took control, but it wasn’t some dramatic change. The rest of Berlin already hated them. They already talked openly about the diseases Jews supposedly carried, the babies whose blood they surely drank. She could see the hate oozing from them, a tangible thing. Vast lacework conspiracies alleging they controlled every nation, every bank, every newspaper—Rebeka always thought, If that were true, then maybe the papers might not run so many articles blaming everything on the Jews.

But things did change, so seamlessly she couldn’t be sure it was the world changing around her or her becoming more aware of the world her parents had always known. Signs in the shop windows. Stars on their clothes, bright as bull’s-eyes. A slow peeling away of every basic right, like peeling away strips of flesh.

Rebeka was ashamed to admit it, but she didn’t blame their parents for what they did: the ways they tried to conceal what they were, renounce it. She and Daniel and Ari had continued to attend German schools until the government barred them, and they stopped observing Shabbat, even though their previous observance had been more an excuse to socialize with their friends. But it was far too late to pretend. They’re going to send you away soon, their neighbors leered, under breaths, on streetcars, in the stores. Germany will be great once more.

“I’m sorry,” Liam said. “I can’t even begin to understand what you’ve been through.”

“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for,” Rebeka said.

Daniel clenched his jaw, shooting her a look. “We—we left Berlin after they smashed our parents’ shop. Burned our synagogue. Dragged our friends through the streets and took them away.”

Rebeka shrank deeper into her coat. She hadn’t needed her strange sense to see that night coming. It was written in the sneer on every German’s face, every headline in Der Stürmer, every band of brown-shirted boys trouncing through the streets. All the night of glass did was smash that fragile belief they all held that this could ever go away.

The Jews are our misfortune. They were the Judenfrage—the Jewish question. Not fellow Germans, not people, but a question to answer, a problem to solve.