Standing at the window and picking at the pills on her stockings, she has an idea. The most radically transgressive idea she has ever had in her life. She will climb out the window, across the roof of the kitchen, down the mirabelle tree, and into the garden. If someone catches her, she will certainly receive the beating that lurks behind all her father’s commands, implicit in the switch that peeks out from behind his umbrella stand and his perpetual air of restrained violence. She would rather die than catch this beating. So she will make sure she is not caught.

Ania crab-crawls along the window ledge to the flat roof, a move so nimble she is surprised at her own ability. At the edge, she shimmies down the rough tree trunk and drops to the ground. From there, she dashes along the bushes at the far side of the garden and into the alley. And with a heaving chest, she looks around. She has done it. She has escaped. It is the first time she has ever disobeyed her father; the feeling is thrilling and sickening.

Ania draws closer to Uhland Strasse and hears the booming rumble of tanks receding—she has missed it!—and the hard clip-clop of horses’ hooves. But rounding the corner, she comes upon everyone: here are the citizens of Dortmund, lined up on both sides of the street, watching restively.

The French ride through the middle of the street on proud, high-stepping horses, bayonets poised on their shoulders like oversize needles. Underneath their helmets, though, they are disappointingly ordinary looking. There are no nine-foot Africans. No fire breathers or weasel-faced French overlords. But the soldiers’ disregard for the crowd is an open insult. The air is thick with anger and hostility.

Ania edges her way forward. She reaches the front line in time to witness a humiliating spectacle. One of the foot soldiers marching at the front of the battalion breaks formation to lunge toward a man in the crowd who has forgotten to remove his hat. The soldier knocks it to the ground.

The man, who is young, stocky, and strong looking—the kind of boy Frau Richter would call ein richtiger deutscher Bursche, a real German lad—attempts to fight back, striking at the soldier, but the people around him grab his arms. It sends a stir through the crowd, a collective intake of breath. Once the soldier has moved on, the people release the young man’s arms, and Ania watches him scurry forward to retrieve his hat, now rolling dangerously close to a set of stamping hooves. As he darts before the great beast, he nods at the mounted soldier—a small, demeaning act of self-preservation.

It is nothing in the grand scheme of things (they have just been through a war, after all), but at the time, Ania is shocked. The rough way the soldier swatted the hat from the man’s head—it was as if he were an unruly child, or worse, an animal. It alters her understanding of what it means to be a German. This is a personal manifestation of defeat. This is what it means to be a member of a defeated nation.