Heinrich was still busy when Alicia came out for a goodnight kiss. Usually, that was just part of nighttime routine. It felt special tonight.

He said, "You don't have to be frightened every second, darling. If you show you're afraid, people will start wondering what you have to be afraid of. Keep on being your own sweet self, and no one will ever suspect a thing."

"I'll try, Papa." When Alicia hugged him, she clung for a few extra seconds. He squeezed her and ran his hand through her hair. "Good night," she said, and hurried away.

He let out another sigh, even longer than the first. Finding out you were a Jew in the heart of the National Socialist Germanic Empire was not something anyone, child or adult, could fully take in at a moment's notice. A beginning of acceptance was as much as he could hope for. That much, Alicia had given him.

His own father had shown him photographs smuggled out of the Ostlands and other, newer, ones from the USA to warn him how necessary silence was. He still had nightmares about those pictures after more than thirty years. But he still had the photos, too, hidden in a file cabinet. If he thought he had to, he would show them to Alicia. He hoped the need would never come, for her sake and his own.

Lise walked into the kitchen a couple of minutes later. She dragged in a chair from the dining room, sat down, and waited till the sink was empty and the washer full. Then, as the machine started to churn, she got up and gave him a long, slow hug. "And so the tale gets told once more," she said.

As he had with his daughter, Heinrich hung on to his wife. "And so we try to go on for another generation," he said. "We've outlasted so much. God willing, we'll outlast the Nazis, too. No matter what they teach in school, I don't believe the Reich can last a thousand years."

"Alevaiit doesn't." Lise used a word from a murdered language, a word that hung on among surviving Jews like the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father. "But, of course, now that the tale is told, the risk that we'll get caught also goes up. You did just right there, keeping her from running when the police van came by."