In Europe

a column or even sleep. That was to be it for me in the coming months, this was to be my European house.
    It is clear spring weather today, and I steer my new acquisition along the back roads of the old Germany, through all those hills where our grandparents mailed their postcards in the 1930s – Pension Die Fröhlichen Wanderer, ‘
Gutbürgerlicher Abendtisch!
’ – past half-timbered villages smelling of fresh buns and newly ironed aprons. They are still there, unchanged, the rocks upon which Germany stands. The forests have their first light-green haze, the fields are brown, farmers are out ploughing everywhere, on the village square the little soldiers in the bell tower creak the hours away.
    I drive past Cologne-Klettenberg, where an Amsterdam acquaintance of mine grew up in the 1930s. In those days Truusje Roegholt lived at Lohrbergstrasse 1. On the corner across from her lived her playmates Anna and Lotte Braun, in a house hung with portraits of Nazi leaders and with a swastika banner stained with real human blood, probably from some fight on the street. ‘Mr Braun was a real beast of a man, even on his deathbed he wore an armband with a swastika on it,’ she told me. ‘But what did we know, and what didn't we know? People simply didn't talk. The Third Reich was a dictatorship based, to a great extent, on silence. But you saw a great deal, even as a child.’
    She remembered vividly, for example, the first triumphal scenes. ‘Right from the start you saw everyone marching in nice, new uniforms. Heaven knows where the money came from. But the effect was stunning. Allthose poor people who had never owned a set of decent clothes, suddenly they were someone. They sang the greatest nonsense, but they had new shoes!’
    She also told me about the great girls’ secret of the Third Reich, the campaign to give the Führer a child. ‘They organised solstice parties with selected blonde girls and boys, to breed children like that. A fanatical girlfriend of ours tried to get us to come, but we thought it was nauseating. These days they deny that, no one talked about it, but those campaigns really existed.’
    Immediately after the great pogrom of Kristallnacht on 9–10 November, 1938 – almost 100 Jews were killed and 7,500 Jewish shops destroyed – the teachers read aloud a printed statement: the Jewish students were to leave the school. It had obviously all been arranged beforehand, down to the last detail. Ingeborg Goldstein and Edith Rosenthal packed their bags, looked around the class, then got up and walked out of the door together. ‘You could hear a pin drop.’ Truusje stood up and protested; after all, these were their classmates. She was told to leave the classroom as well.
    On Luxemburger Strasse she saw Jewish shops being sacked. ‘One Jew had hidden in his cupboard. They picked up the cupboard, with him in it, and threw it from the fourth floor, then beat him to death. It was unimaginable that something like that could happen in this peaceful city. A few people stood watching, one woman said: “Those poor Jews”, another woman put her hand over that woman's mouth right away. It was like walking around in a dream.’
    It snowed that winter, and she went sledging in the park with her playmate Miryam Meyer. When she walked past the Brauns’ house the next day, a window opened. Lotte shouted: ‘Truusje, is it true that you were sledging in the park yesterday?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, then it's me or that Jewish bitch!’
    Little has been said about a question that now presents itself: how could this shift in mentality take place so quickly, in both Frankfurt and Cologne, after 1933? Where, for God's sake, were all those hundreds of thousands of active communists, social democrats and Christians who had taken part in protest demonstrations not so long before this? Where were the56.1 per cent of the public who voted against the Nazis on 5 March, 1933?
    There was, of course, the atmosphere of burgeoning intimidation. Right after the National Socialists seized power, the SS and the SA were given the status of ‘auxiliary’ police. Atrocities took place on a daily basis. More than a hundred temporary torture chambers were set up in Berlin, scattered over all of the city's ‘red’ neighbourhoods. In Breslau and Munich, Jewish judges and lawyers were literally beaten out of the courthouses.
    An estimated 10,000 communists and socialists were arrested in Bavaria alone in spring 1933. In Prussia,