The objects of the patron’s attention walked from table to table, from customer to customer. The Wirt, the owner and manager of the establishment, looked discreetly at the elderly man, dimly lit in a corner. Shall I tell them?

The patron shrugged. Machts nichts. “Matters not”. You know what they are as well as I do. If they want me they will find me.

Nodding his understanding the Wirt called to the two. “If you are looking for Herr Brasche, that’s him over there in the corner.”

The patron, Brasche, watched with interest as the two men approached. When they had reached his table, he raised his beer in salute. “And what can I do for the BND today, gentlemen?”

“Hans Brasche?” one of them asked, flashing an identification.

“That would be me,” Hans answered.

“You must come with us.”

Brasche smiled. If he was afraid, neither of the men who had accosted him, nor any of the other patrons, would have known it. He had never been a man, or a boy, to show much fear.

* * *

Times were hard and getting worse. The calendar on the wall said 1930. As the boy entered the bare cupboarded kitchen, the expression on the mother’s face fairly shrieked “fear.”

“Your father wants you, Hansi.”

The boy, he could not have been more than ten, suppressed a shudder. This was always bad news. He steeled his soul, raised his ten-year-old head, and walked bravely to where his one-armed father — more importantly, the father’s belt — awaited him. He knew he could not cry out, could not show fear; else the beating would be worse, much worse.

Afterwards, when the long beating was over, the boy, Hans, walked dry-eyed past his mother, his walk stiff from the bruises, the welts, and the cuts.

The woman reached out to her son, seeking desperately to comfort him in his pain. All she felt was his shudder as her hands stroked his bruises and wounds. “Why, Hansi? What did you do wrong?”