In the evenings, when it’s hot, she and Rainer take the boys on the hay wagon to a nearby lake with cold black water that reflects the hillside and the sky. The boys make a game of swimming to a float and throwing one another off. The biggest, strongest boys are always “King.” Ania lies on her blanket on the grassy bank and watches their horseplay. Sometimes Rainer swims out and joins their wrestling, his pale, wiry body so different from theirs—more mature and also sharper somehow, harder and more determined, frizzled with fine black hairs.

She does not enjoy the physical element of their marriage, but she tolerates it. And Rainer himself is not an avid lover: He turns to her only sometimes, in the darkness, quickly and without preamble. Their lovemaking is over in a moment, and neither of them speak of it.

On Saturday nights, Rainer builds a wonderful bonfire and the boys sing and have contests—who can spring the fastest, jump the farthest, balance the longest on a fallen tree limb. Rainer is in his element here with so many adoring young people looking to him for guidance.

In the future, Ania’s daughter will send her son to an American summer camp. It’s all about archery and soccer and fishing and camping, how to be a good citizen and good friend, how to be a confident young man, she will tell Ania. She will say it in a wry tone that suggests she sees something amusing about this. But that’s beautiful, Ania will say. It’s like what we did in our lager.

Except they don’t teach them to kill Jews at Camp Wykona! her daughter will exclaim. My God, Mother! You can’t seriously compare a New England summer camp to a Nazi youth lager!

But we didn’t teach them to kill Jews, Ania will protest mildly. We didn’t even talk about Jews.

Her daughter will stare at her as if she is insane.

But Hitler did, she will say, as if speaking to a child. Didn’t you hear what he was saying?

No, Ania will say, shaking her head. I was too busy. Or too stupid.

But this is not exactly true. She was busy, but she was not stupid. And she did listen to Hitler, though she does not recall what she actually heard. She remembers gathering around the radio in the elegant dining room with murals of pastoral farm scenes painted on the walls. She remembers the boys in their pajamas, exhausted from a day of physical exertion, sprawled across the wood floors, smelling of fresh hay and dust and clean sweat. There was great excitement about listening to the Führer. She remembers his exhortations and energy, his talk of building and unifying the Reich, the unique and wonderful qualities of the German Volk. But she does not remember the ugly quotes her daughter confronts her with.

Maybe because at the time what she heard did not seem radical.

Listening to the radio at that first lager in 1936, Ania believes Hitler’s assertion that Jews are rich businessmen who have profited from Germany’s troubles and taken the best jobs in Germany. And that those who are not rich, which is to say mostly the eastern Jews who have immigrated here from Poland, Romania, and the Baltic, are freeloaders and Bolsheviks. They are Trotsky followers, the same people who set the Reichstag on fire and created the “Bavarian Soviet Republic.” Her grasp of the details is vague, but she understands this last group of agitators is dangerous. She accepts this in the abstract, of course. The actual Jews she knows are different. Herr Goldblum, the grocer, or the Cornbluth girls from her grammar school, for example, are neither rich nor Bolshevik. They are kind, ordinary people who happen to belong to a bad group. But how can Hitler know who is a “good Jew” and who isn’t? Easier to evict them all and prevent infiltration. Where they will go—back to Poland, Romania, wherever they came from? America? Palestine? Madagascar?—is not Ania’s concern.