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fine,’ Martin said, surprising himself. ‘They promised bigger and better celebrations this year. There’ll be so much excitement no one will notice us. Besides,’ he said, looking at their daughter white-faced and silent on the couch, ‘Alice desperately needs a change.’
    Amalie Friedman decided to stay home. She was too old and too German – properly German, she added – to tolerate what was happening out there. And despite pleadings from Alice that her Oma change her mind, would not be persuaded. Amalie had seen quite enough of what her compatriots had become.‘I don’t know these people,’ she said.‘And I don’t know my country.’
    She withdrew to her room and a short time later the sombre beauty of the second movement of the Pathétique emerged, softly, ever so softly so the music wouldn’t escape the flat, because Beethoven had been taken from the Jews too.
    Not long afterwards, Martin, Renate and Alice slipped quietly from the building. They had learned that the less one’s gentile neighbours knew the better. Hitler, an inspired innovator in so many respects, was a genius at wielding the threat of reprisal. It took a courageous German these days to defend a Jew, and best not to test it.
    It was quieter now in the streets and the Lewins assumed everyone was either at the local Putsch celebrations or in their homes listening to the broadcast from Munich. But as they approached the station they saw the Putsch had been poached by the vom Rath attack. ‘JEWISH MURDER ATTEMPT IN PARIS – MEMBER OF THE GERMAN EMBASSY CRITICALLY WOUNDED BY SHOTS – THE MURDERING KNAVE, A 17-YEAR-OLD JEW’ read yesterday’s headline in the Völkischer Beobachter .And today beefed up to:‘THE SHOTS IN PARIS WILL NOT GO UNPUNISHED’.A glance at the text showed that all German Jewry was being blamed and not just a seventeen-year-old boy. The newspaper demanded immediate action against the Jews, calling on all good Germans to respond according to their conscience to this savage assault not simply on a loyal servant of the Fatherland but on the Fatherland itself.
    Renate read the headlines over and over. A call to violence if ever there was one and they probably should return home. Yet here they were at the station about to embark on a much-needed holiday and what was wise and sensible no longer seemed to have much muscle. Nothing did. Besides, they could pass. Their colouring – neither blond and blue-eyed, nor dark and Semitic – was unremarkable, and as assimilated Jews, their clothes were indistinguishable from those of other middle-class Germans. To go or return home? Renate forced herself to read the whole article properly. Ernest vom Rath, fortunately injured not dead, an unknown German functionary at the Paris Embassy; how much unrest could result? She looked at the other families gathered at the station, the Lewins were interchangeable with any of them, and she looked at Alice, a live spark hopping about on the pavement.
    ‘All right,’ she said.‘We’ll go.’
    Once they were on the train, she felt much better. Not simply relief at being out of the flat, but the familiarity of this journey, connecting as it did the two places which had formed the backbone of her life. Ever since her marriage and the move to Krefeld she had made a weekly visit to Düsseldorf. Every Thursday she would see her parents, would browse the familiar shops, perhaps meet a friend for coffee or take lunch in the Alstadt . The weekly trip helped her adjust to the move – not that she wasn’t aware of the advantages almost from the beginning. There was the proximity of Düsseldorf, but as well she had the excitement of a new life in Krefeld: Martin, marriage, new people, and work – this last the most surprising of all. For with marriage to Martin, Renate had discovered silk.
    Renate had always wanted to be a painter and from her earliest years had seemed to possess the talent. As a toddler she had produced paintings of such