In any case, she and her children listened to the radio. They needed to understand what their fathers had died fighting, especially Fritz, whose sense of right and wrong was fickle at best. They listened to reports of rotting piles of bodies, gas chambers, and sadistic guards. And of the arrests of high-ranking Nazis, like Ilse Koch, the wife of the commander of Buchenwald, rumored to have turned the skin of executed Jewish prisoners into lampshades. In Lüneburg, Josef Kramer and forty-five other camp guards and workers were set to go on trial in September. Grisly pictures of camp victims ran in the papers, side by side with glamorous photos of Irma Grese, a sadistic concentration camp guard, rumored to be Kramer’s mistress.

Could you see a person’s soul in their face? Marianne and Albrecht had often argued about this. Yes, she had insisted. Didn’t you know from the moment you saw Hitler’s photograph that he was bad? Albrecht wasn’t sure. If it was so obvious, he pointed out, how did he fool the rest of Germany?

Some people are better than others at reading the signs, Marianne had said with a shrug. She was half joking, half serious. The conversation came back to her when she saw the photos of Irma Grese. The image on the paper’s front page was of a woman who could have been a starlet, with her coy smile and stylish hairdo, while the mug shot inside revealed a repellant bully with a look of stupid hardness in her eyes—the same person, seen two ways. But even in the first one, if you looked closely, you could see the cruelty at the edge of her mouth, and the meanness in her gaze. And this was the version that sold papers.

In town, the Americans were showing a film: footage of the liberation of Buchenwald. Everyone was required to attend except for Opfers. Marianne went anyway. Wasn’t it her—and every German’s—responsibility? She made a demonstration out of her commitment, standing tall and solemn at the front of the line.

She already knew, of course. But it was one thing to know from documents and stories, horrifying in their own right, and another to see. When the movie began, Marianne had to dig her nails into her palms to keep from throwing up. Here on the screen were actual bodies, heaped like scraps of fabric. Here were fathers and mothers and children, starving and naked, lying in piles. Here were victims staring into the camera as individuals with all the sadness and despair of unique lives.

For all the horror of the official reports she and Albrecht had seen, with their language of “extermination” and “elimination,” they could not come close to conjuring this. How could they? There was no point of reference. Later, such footage would come to be so familiar it became unseen—a kind of placeholder for human evil. The first black-and-white glimpse of barbed wire, dirt, and nakedness cautioned viewers, Look away. But in this moment, in the first unveiling, it was like nothing she or anyone else had ever seen. And it was impossible to look away. She looked and trembled in her seat.