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‘Noemi, will you please hurry up. Herr Lindiger is here; he’s parking the car. If you want to go with them, you have to come down right away. Unless you’ve changed your mind about going.’

Noemi hovered in her bedroom doorway, pulling at the blue ribbons wrapped round the ends of her tightly bound plaits.

She’d taken such care over those, but getting the style right wasn’t the problem.

It didn’t matter what she did with her hair and her clothes to fit in, her chocolate-coloured braids and hazel eyes would always be the wrong colour.

Tell me to stay home and I will. I’ll listen to you this time.

She knew he wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t the kind of father who laid down the law; besides, she’d argued her case for attending the National Socialist rally with Pascal far too forcefully for her father to attempt to talk her out of it at this late stage.

And her mother – who hadn’t been so easy to convince and wasn’t as tightly wound round Noemi’s little finger as Hauke was – had already left for work and taken her arguments with her.

‘Why on earth do you want to go to Nuremberg and mix with thousands of Hitler’s adoring fans?

Talk about walking into the lion’s den. Their world doesn’t seem to have room for us, Noemi.

I don’t know what that means yet, but none of us can afford to ignore the way the tide’s turning, including you and Pascal.

There’s heartache coming, I can sense it. One of you needs to open your eyes.’

Frieda’s frustration had bounced unheard off her daughter.

Noemi hadn’t wanted another lecture about their world or to be reminded that Jewish girls like her didn’t belong in it.

She didn’t care about politics or Germany’s new leader.

She was thirteen years old: all she wanted was to be part of the crowd.

And to do whatever Pascal did. He was her best friend and she was his; they’d been inseparable since before they could toddle.

As far as Noemi was concerned, a world in which there was him and me and not us didn’t exist, and she had no interest in any so-called facts that said it did.

When she’d pointed that out to her mother, it hadn’t helped.

‘Nothing’s changed, really? So, if that’s true, why aren’t you allowed to join the same clubs as Pascal and the rest of your “properly German” schoolfriends?’

Noemi’s lip had wobbled at that; she hadn’t been able to help herself. And Frieda – who was far more worried about her daughter than angry – had instantly softened.

‘I know it hurts to be excluded, sweetheart. But following Pascal to the rally in Nuremberg isn’t the answer. The city is a very different place to Unterwald and, trust me, if you’re starting to feel left out here, you’ll feel ten times worse there.’

They’d hit a stalemate then which they hadn’t resolved. Pascal wanted her to go with him, and that was enough for Noemi. His mother wanted her there too, and Carina’s ‘She’ll be company for me and I’ll keep an eye her, don’t worry,’ had to be enough for Frieda.

And maybe nobody will care that I don’t have the right clothes or blue eyes or flowing blond hair. Nobody except Viktor cares here.

‘Are you coming then or what?’

Herr Lindiger leaned on the car horn; her father called to her again. Noemi picked up her suitcase, but she only made it as far as the top stair. Although she would rather have died than admit it, she was nervous about the trip, and her head was bursting with reasons why it would be easier to stay.

Autumn had arrived, which meant trees heavy with fruit and ready for harvest. If she went, she would miss the first jam-making of the year.

Her mother had already gone to the workshop behind the café which was one strand of her parents’ string of businesses to get that started.

While Noemi dithered on the stairs, Frieda would be sorting out the last haul from the cherry trees and the first from the plums. Laying out the jars and the Produce of Café Drachmann labels ready for the cooks to use; preparing the pans that would make the air sweet and sticky.

And next Saturday was the day when the cattle would be brought down for the winter from their summer pastures, wreathed in flowers and mirrors and bells.

Every season in Bavarian villages like hers had its own rhythms and celebrations, and Noemi’s life had been shaped by them since she was a baby.

She wasn’t sure who she would be if she let the rituals slip by without marking them.

And she’d also never been to Nuremberg; she’d never been to a city at all.

‘Which is why you have to come with me. I’ve never been there either – or to such a huge rally. It will be an adventure, and we always do those together, don’t we?’

Pascal’s voice chimed through her head, louder than Frieda’s or her own.

Louder than the increasingly irritated car horn.

Herr Lindiger wouldn’t wait long – he’d been very definite with her about that.

Unlike his son and his wife, he’d be perfectly happy if Noemi stayed behind.

His, ‘I’m not comfortable with her coming , it’s not as if she can pass for one of us , ’ had not been a nice thing to overhear.

But Pascal doesn’t think like that about me, and he never will, whatever my mother says. And I’m not going to disappoint him or miss out on an adventure because some people have stupid ideas about Jews.

‘Noemi, will you please hurry up and decide what you’re doing. He’ll have the entire street cursing me if he carries on.’

‘I’m on my way.’

She needed to do, not to think, or she’d never get anywhere. She clattered down the stairs as her father began walking up them, planted a kiss on his cheek and ran out of the door while he was still throwing out advice.

‘You’ll be careful, won’t you? I know we keep?—’

Hauke stopped abruptly in the doorway behind her and didn’t finish the sentence.

Noemi instantly understood why. Pascal had opened the car door ready for her to climb in; his father Viktor had wound down his window.

Both of them were visible from the house.

And both of them were dressed in the brown uniforms Hauke hated and she’d been trying her best for a year to ignore…

‘What on earth are you both wearing?’

The instant she asked Pascal the question, Noemi wondered why she hadn’t suspected that this would be the next step.

National Socialism had come slowly to Unterwald, but nobody was surprised that Viktor Lindiger was its first champion or that Pascal was his father’s first protégé. Especially not Hauke Drachmann.

‘That man lives half his life in the past, moaning about how Germany should have won the war and how unfair the Treaty of Versailles was. And just because he met Adolf Hitler once in 1923 – and fought with him, by the way, in what was a glorified Munich bar brawl, not some crusading attempt to found a new Germany, whatever he says about the so-called putsch – he thinks he’s part of the Nazis’ inner circle.

God help us all if that’s the kind of fool they attract. And God help poor Pascal.’

Noemi normally took very little notice when her father started another of his rants about Viktor.

Hauke hadn’t fought in the war because of a hearing problem; Viktor had won two medals and carried himself as if he’d single-handedly won every battle he’d fought in.

Noemi didn’t believe her father was jealous – he was far too decent to stoop to such a petty emotion – but it was the wives, not the husbands who were friends.

She didn’t take a lot of notice either of the stories about the Great War, or the revolutions and attempted coups which had followed it, which the men who came to her father’s bar always fell back on when the schnapps took hold.

But God help poor Pascal was a strange thing to say, so that registered, and so did the broken-cross lapel pin Viktor wore at the unveiling of the town’s war memorial in November 1931 because it upset Hauke.

And nobody could miss the way those pins began to spread like a rash across the chests of the postmaster and the local policemen in the weeks afterwards.

Or the red armbands – with what she’d soon learned was called a swastika inside their white circles – which appeared next and bloomed like summer roses all over the town.

So the Lindigers wearing uniforms shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

By the summer of 1932, Unterwald’s colours and allegiances had shifted, due in no little part to Viktor’s determination to make the town, as he put it to anyone who would – or wouldn’t – listen, ‘a shining example of National Socialism’s glorious new future’.

Bavaria’s blue-and-white flag vanished from the public buildings.

Posters proclaiming Adolf Hitler to be ‘Germany’s Great Hope’ covered the lampposts and the market square’s noticeboard.

People’s arms started springing up in the air by way of a greeting as if half the town had turned into traffic policemen.

It was all very odd in a place that hadn’t changed for centuries, but the mountains Noemi loved stayed the same, and so did the flower-filled meadows where elections and armbands seemed a million miles away, and that was far more important.

Her life carried on as it always had, which meant – or so she assumed, given that they’d been born barely twenty-four hours apart and they’d always shared everything, including their thoughts – so did Pascal’s.