“What do you know?”

“He was a traitor. A coward.”

“No he wasn’t!”

“Oh yes he was!”

“No he wasn’t!”

“He should have been hanged, hanged in the Tower.”

Amy had heard this before, but it was getting worse, unbearable. She didn’t dare tell the teachers about it, because she knew she mustn’t snitch, mustn’t tell on the older girls. Once, she had hit a girl who had said things about him, but that had gotten her into trouble, so now the only thing she could do was to find somewhere quiet where she could cry on her own.

She had been told that a traitor was somebody who fought against his own country, and that traitors were the worst type of people in the world. Some of the girls said that if your father was a traitor, then that made you one as well. She didn’t believe that, any more than she believed that Daddy was a traitor. Her father was a brave man, and he didn’t fight for the Germans, he fought for the British.

But if that was what the older girls said, then maybe they were right. She would never tell anybody at home about her doubts, because she was afraid of what they might say. It was hard to get away from the fact that the only people who said Daddy wasn’t a traitor were those back home. Everybody here thought otherwise. So what was she supposed to think? She didn’t know, but she told herself that when she was a grown-up, she would find out, prove to the world that her father was in fact a hero, a father to be proud of.

They would stop teasing her then.

JANUARY 1938

He’s gotten them really worked up.

“And so I ask you all,” he shouts into the microphone, “to embrace the Germans not as our enemies, but as our brothers! They, like us, have suffered for too long the scourge of Jewry in their society—those tumid Shylocks out to rob the helpless and the poor, sticking their long snouts into everybody’s trough except their own. They are a putrescent boil on the face of decency—a boil that must be lanced for the good of all!”

Huge cheers from the crowd. There must be at least four hundred of them, all crammed into this hall down in Maidstone. The Leader is away, so he is speaking instead. The honor! To speak in place of the Leader! His Eileen was so proud.

“In Germany, that process has begun. Their brave Führer is smashing the menace of Jewry, and has shown us the way forward. Smash up their shops! Smash up their homes! Send them anywhere, anywhere but back here! It is time for us to take our lead from the strong German people, and declare ourselves to be what we are: strong too, and above all, pure. The poison coursing through the Jews’ filthy veins shall not taint our blood. No! They are a subspecies, and their presence among us brings us down to their level. We are better than that! Far, far better!”