"I hate it," Susanna Weiss broke in. "I've always hated it, ever since I found out."

Alicia's father nodded. "We all hate it. But when times are dangerous for Jews, the way they are now, what other choice have we got?"

"This isn't the first time Jews have had to be what they are only in secret," Esther Stutzman said. "In Spain a long time ago, we pretended to be good Catholics. Now we have to pretend to be good Aryans and National Socialists. But underneath, we still are what we've always been."

The grownups all sounded so cool, so collected. As far as they were concerned, everything was fine, and everything would stay fine no matter what. That wasn't how it felt to Alicia. "I don't want to be a

Jew!" she shouted.

Her father's head whipped toward the windows. Sudden stark fright filled his face, and everyone else's. Alicia understood that. She clapped her hands to her mouth. If one of the neighbors heard, the Security Police were only a phone call away.

After a deep breath, her father said, "You have a way out, Alicia."

"What is it?" She stared at him, tears and questions in her eyes.

"You can just pretend this night never happened," he told her. "You know we'll never betray you, no matter what you decide. If you choose not to tell your husband one day, if he's not one of us, and if you choose not to tell your children, they'll never know you-and they-are Jewish. They'll be just like everybody else in the Germanic Empire. But one more piece of something old and precious will have disappeared from the world forever."

"I don't know what to do," Alicia said.

To her surprise, her father got up, came over, and kissed her on top of the head. "You may not realize it, but that's the most grownup thing you've ever said."

Alicia didn't want to sound like a grownup, any more than she wanted to be a Jew. She didn't seem to have much choice about either. Figuring that out was another grownup thing to do, not that she knew it at the time.