She looks round at the bed. My daughter’s room. She died in 1933. Not here! Not here, she thinks. She shudders. The way he said it. Surely the daughter also died because of—them, but he’ll never talk to me about it, and I’ll never dare to ask him, either. No, I can’t sleep in this room, it’s awful, inhuman. Why doesn’t he leave me his servant’s room, a bed still warm from the body of a real person sleeping in it? I can’t sleep here, I can only scream…

She picks up the tubes and boxes on the dressing-table. Dried-out creams, lumpy powder, verdigrised lipsticks—dead since 1933. Seven years. I have to do something. The way it runs through me—the fear. Now that I’ve landed on this island of peace, my fear comes out. I have to do something. I can’t remain so alone in my thoughts.

She looked through her handbag, found paper and pencil. I will write to the children, Gerda in Copenhagen, Eva in Ilford, Bernhard and Stefan in Brooklyn. But there’s no point, the foreign post no longer goes, it’s wartime. I will write to Siegfried; somehow I can smuggle the letter to him in Moabit. So long as the servant is indeed reliable. The judge doesn’t need to know, I can bribe her with money or jewels. I still have enough left…

She took these out of her handbag as well, and spread them out in front of her, the money in little bundles, the jewels. She picked up a bracelet. Siegfried gave that to me, when I had Eva. It was my first birth, it was hard. How he laughed when he saw the baby! His belly shook he was laughing so hard. Everyone had to laugh when they saw her with her tight black curls and her thick lips. A white Negro baby, they said. In my eyes Eva was beautiful. That’s when he gave me the bracelet.