There were many things he had forgotten in the Children’s Home. His father, for example: the shadowy figure Marianne later referred to as a hero and his mother never mentioned. And life before the war, before air-raid sirens and nights spent in the cellar, before the deafening roar of low-flying bomber planes.

But there were things he remembered in the home, too. How he’d arrived, for instance. A long train trip on a military transport, the pockmarked face of his SS chaperone, and the salty, tangy taste of dried meat on his tongue—it was the first time he had ever tasted such a thing, warm and a little gritty from its home in the SS man’s pocket. He had thrown up afterward, holding his head out the window of the moving train so that the vomit spewed back in his face.

He also remembered the sunny flat in Berlin, air thick with dust motes, and the view over shady, elegant Meerstein Strasse, with its pale stucco buildings and café on the corner. And the warmth of his mother’s body curled against his at night in bed. The cameo pendant that hung in the hollow of her throat. The words of the song she would sing to him—Kommt ein Vogel geflogen, setzt sich nieder auf mein’ Fuss, hat ein Zettel im Schnabel von der Mutter ein’ Gruss. “A little bird comes flying, sits down on my foot, has a letter in its beak, from my mother a kiss.” But at the Children’s Home there was no bird, no letter, and no kiss.

The home was not all bad, though. It was a cozy stucco house outside a village in the foothills of the mountains. It had a pleasant garden full of fruit trees and flowers, a broken fountain, and a high brick wall. The children were not allowed to leave.

Frau Vortmuller, the potato-faced grandmother in charge of the place, was not unkind. She was firm and orderly and saw to it that her charges were bathed and clothed and fed. Every night, she played the recorder for them: sorrowful folk ballads about poor millers’ daughters and princes, witches and resourceful, neglected youngest sons. These were sweeter, softer melodies than the Nazi-endorsed songs the children learned from Herr Stulper, who supervised their reeducation. He taught them “The Rotten Bones Are Trembling,” “The Horst Wessel Song,” and “Germany Awake,” all full of verses about blood, slavery, and revenge; politics and war.

Every day, Frau Vortmuller wore the same tweed skirt and green jacket with a Nazi Mutterkreuz, which she had been awarded for bearing eight children, on the lapel. Four of these were dead: two killed in the war, one dead at birth, and another who had “succumbed” in an institution for the “feeble-minded.” Frau Vortmuller hung this one’s picture in the pantry, where she could see his face every time she pulled out the ingredients for supper. Of those living, her sons had not yet returned from wherever they’d been fighting, and her daughters were married mothers themselves. Martin found the Mutterkreuz pin beautiful—with its gold points and shiny blue inset—and the pride with which she rubbed it clean and wrapped it in a handkerchief every evening lent it an almost holy significance.