When Freddy finished speaking, silence welled up around them in the comfortable library of Weisslau with its roaring fire and plush furniture, its dog snoring lazily on the hearth. Marianne sat frozen with a kind of stillness that aimed to stop time, to go back, to untell Freddy’s story.

For the longest time, Freddy said, I could not grasp what I was looking at. I saw it, but I couldn’t take it in. It was—he groped for an analogy, his pale face haggard with the effort—it was like one of those hidden pictures; you see a goblet not a face, a stairway not a flower, you can’t see it even when it’s right there in front of you. And then suddenly—he raised his eyes and looked directly at Marianne—you do.

Marianne dreamed of them that night, the mothers and children walking into the woods. And the men, her own neighbors and peers, her fellow countrymen, marching them. This was what all Hitler’s frightening rants amounted to: ordinary, middle-aged men marching mothers and children into forests to be killed.

For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people’s most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country. They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany’s fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses—“Jewish” ideas that led to defeat. They had wrung their hands over his dangerous conflations, his fervor, and his lack of humanity. But Freddy Lederer’s account was something new to Marianne. She lay in bed that night and knew Connie was right. Hitler must die.

For Albrecht, though, the answer still lay in the pursuit of justice. He too was deeply affected by Freddy’s report. He redoubled his efforts to assist Jews in their attempts to escape, and to bring Nazi horrors like the one Freddy described to the attention of the British and the Americans, who he believed were the only hope for defeating Hitler. He was a religious person—much more so than Marianne—and he grappled with his faith. He lost sleep and barely ate. But he still believed the answer was to judge the man in the court of law. Only when we prove that international law and the human rights of all mankind are greater than any villain can we vanquish evil. He remained steadfast in this belief.

But this is impossible, Albrecht! Marianne argued. How are you to bring Hitler to a court of law? All of Germany would have to rise up against him.

With the support of the outside world, he would say. And with time . . .

He was a dreamer, though, Marianne felt. There was no time. And all of Germany would never rise up. They were too steeped in Hitler’s rhetoric, too cowardly, too implicated in the horrors of his war to reject him.

Two weeks after his visit to Weisslau, Freddy hanged himself.