Her new friend. I studied the beast. He looked like the rest of them, thick-necked with ruddy cheeks, except that he was taller with a paunchy middle and hands like bear paws. He looked down at me now like a snake about to devour a mouse.

Before I could respond, Ana Lucia appeared from the dining room. “Fritz, I was wondering where you...” Seeing him talking to me, she stopped and frowned. “Ella, what are you doing here?” she asked, as though I had wandered in from the street and not come into my own home. Her dress, this year’s latest fashion from Milan, was too tight on her thick frame. Pearls that had once been my mother’s strained against her neck.

“Your daughter is quite charming,” the German said. “You never mentioned.”

“Stepdaughter,” Ana Lucia corrected, wanting to put as much distance between herself and me as possible. “My late husband’s child. And she’s soaking wet.”

“She should join us for lunch,” he said.

I could see the conflict in Ana Lucia’s eyes, wanting to accede to the wishes of her Nazi guest, yet wanting me gone even more. But Colonel Maust’s tone made clear that my joining them was not a request. “Fine,” she said at last, compliance winning out over spite.

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t,” I said, trying to think of an excuse.

“Ella,” my stepmother said through clenched teeth. “If Oberführer Maust is good enough to invite you to join us, then that is what you will do.” I could tell from her eyes that if I embarrassed her by refusing, the consequences would be severe. “You will change and join us.”

Ten minutes later, I walked into the dining room reluctantly in a fresh blue dress, hair still defiantly wet. There were four other guests, two men in German military uniforms and one in a suit, plus a woman about Ana Lucia’s age whom I did not recognize. They did not look up from their conversations to greet or acknowledge me as I entered. Seeing these strangers sitting around what had once been our family table and using my mother’s wedding china and crystal, I felt physically nauseous. I took the only empty seat, beside Colonel Maust and close to my stepmother. Hanna served me a plate of szarlotka, a warm apple pie grander than any I had seen since the war started. But the thick pastry stuck in my throat.

I set down my fork. “I saw a woman jump off the De˛bnicki Bridge today,” I blurted out. If I was going to have to be here, I might as well make it interesting. The other conversations around the table stopped and all heads swiveled toward me. “The police were trying to arrest her and she jumped with her children.” The lone woman beside Ana Lucia and me covered her mouth with her napkin, looking aghast.

“She must have been a Jew,” Colonel Maust said dismissively. “There was an aktion to try to root out the last few in hiding.” He had known about the very arrests that were taking place while he sat in our dining room, eating cake.