As I got closer, I recognized a few of Papa’s friends amongst the crowd. Mr Muller, Mr Ferdinand, Mr Weber. They were all there in their big coats and their black hats, laughing at something in the middle of the group. There seemed to be lots of soldiers in uniform too. Some were laughing, some were shouting.

It looked like fun. Just what I needed after today.

The crowd was too big to see through to the middle, so I wriggled between the men until I got to the front.

I would have given everything I had to change what I saw. I would have walked out of school in shame a hundred times over to make it not be real.

There were three men on the ground, kneeling in muddy puddles, arms out in front of them. It took a second for me to realize that they were scrubbing the pavement.

It took another second for me to see that one of the men was my father.

I felt like a cannonball had been hurled at my stomach. I clutched my mouth. I could taste sick in my throat.

‘Harder!’ a man opposite shouted in a familiar voice. I looked up.

No. Surely not.

It was Mr Fischer. Max’s father.

He was wearing a uniform with a white armband on it. The armband had a shape I’d been seeing a lot lately. All the soldiers had them on their uniforms. It looked like an ‘X’ but each arm was bent into a right angle. I knew what it was called.

A swastika.

I’d already suspected the swastika was a thing to be feared. Now, looking at the scene in front of me, I knew it for sure.

Mr Fischer bent down towards Papa. A bit of spit sprayed from his mouth as he shouted again. ‘I said harder!’

My father looked up at him with pleading eyes from where he knelt in the puddle.

Papa.

The man everyone loved. The man who could make anyone smile, who would do anything for anyone.

My larger-than-life Papa, still in his smart suit and waistcoat, was kneeling in a puddle with a scrubbing brush in his hand.

‘I cannot scrub harder, sir,’ he said.

Mr Fischer took a step forward and stood in the puddle right next to Papa. ‘Maybe this will help,’ he said. And then he kicked my father in the stomach so hard that Papa fell forward, his face landing in the puddle.

‘Papa!’ I yelped as the crowd roared with laughter.

From the ground, Papa turned his head in my direction. His white, terrified eyes met mine. His lips moved silently. ‘GO!’ he mouthed, before kneeling again and resuming his scrubbing.

The thought of leaving Papa here on his own horrified me. But the thought of staying terrified me more. So I did what he’d said and inched my way back out of the crowd.