Not today, though. Today, his mind had decided to seize on the stories his long-dead father had told about the concentration camp. About how his initial confusion and fear had faded into a numbness impervious to the death and suffering of others. About how the cruelty of the guards and the desperation of the prisoners eventually became indistinguishable. And finally, about what it was like to watch your humanity slip away.

When Dresner had first heard the stories—at what now seemed like an impossibly young age—his father was still trying to understand what had happened to his people and had been strangely desperate not to place blame. The average German had known nothing of what was happening, he’d said. Only a twisted few were responsible for the evil that had overtaken his country.

He’d believed deeply in the communist ideal and had been proud to use his scientific gifts for the collective good. But then he began to change. The drinking had started, as had long bouts locked alone in the cold, mold-scented basement. He spoke less and less, but when he did, his words no longer forgave. Of course, the German people had been lied to, he would slur beneath the dim light hanging over their rickety kitchen table. But the truth had been right in front of them. They’d just refused to look at it.

And so it had come as no surprise when Christian’s parents scooped him up and took him away in the middle of the night. Marxism hadn’t delivered the contentment and equality it had promised. Instead, it had become just another weapon to be wielded by men with no conscience—men willing to do whatever was necessary to hold the reins of power.

It wasn’t the Nazis, his father had told him as they hid beneath the false floor of a farm truck. It was humanity itself. We were nothing more than hairless monkeys, driven by the same violent urge to survive that had been built into our primitive ancestors.

Of course, they had been captured at the first checkpoint. His father, a man of otherwise extraordinary intellect, had little in the way of guile. The German secret police, on the other hand, was populated by paranoid and sadistic men who understood how to use the dark side of human nature to turn neighbor against neighbor, to create a nearly inescapable web of informants, betrayers, and spies.

He’d never seen his family again. It was only in the last few years that the Stasi records chronicling their fate had surfaced. His father had continued to work under the unveiled threat against the lives of his wife and child, but died after only a few years of being forced to labor eighty-hour weeks. No longer of any particular use, his mother had died of tuberculosis in a Russian gulag, and he had been abandoned to an orphanage in central Germany.

His own intellectual gifts had been identified almost from birth but, as he grew, they became increasingly difficult for the local apparatchiks to ignore. He was eventually transferred to a boarding school where the state could decide whether he could be of use to the great Soviet experiment.