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The pair of them continued to roam the way they’d roamed since they were big enough to scamper away from their mothers.

Climbing higher than they were supposed to, skiing faster than they were supposed to.

Daring each other on. Living a life full of secrets and as far away as possible from adults.

Learning to fish and to hunt rabbits with slingshots, and, on one memorable occasion when they were eleven – because Pascal found his father’s army pistol and managed to liberate it for a day without Viktor catching him – to shoot at old bottles.

They didn’t worry about getting caught or getting into trouble.

And they didn’t worry about National Socialism or about communism – which was more politics and apparently belonged to the devil – or who believed what.

Noemi wasn’t particularly interested in who Hitler was or what he was doing, and she assumed Pascal felt the same.

Until she arrived at school on a snow-covered day in early February 1933 to find him standing with his father at the gates and seemingly dressed for a war.

‘It’s my new uniform. I’ve joined the Hitler Youth and Dad’s joined the SA.

’ Pascal had rattled on at top speed as Noemi looked blank.

‘The SA. The Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s special soldiers; you must have heard of them.

The youth brigade is sort of part of that, and I’m meant to be in a different group till I’m fourteen – one for little kids – but Dad pulled strings because I’m so good at climbing and swimming and everything, and he’s been keeping this as a surprise for when Hitler became Chancellor, which he has now. Isn’t it brilliant?’

Noemi hadn’t been sure how to answer that. The new clothes had turned Pascal into someone she didn’t recognise, and that made her nervous. And neither he nor the father he worshipped looked as glorious as he seemed to think.

Viktor was too fat for the brown shirt and jodhpurs he’d poured himself into; Pascal’s shorts were too big on the waist and flapped at his knees.

She also didn’t like the way they were both standing, as if they were expecting to wade into a fight.

Arms squared to show off their swastika bands, thumbs tucked behind heavy belt buckles embossed with a swastika and an eagle, and the words Blood and Honour.

She wanted to say, ‘You look as if you’re in a play, as if you’re pretending,’ but she knew that would upset him, something she hated to do.

Luckily, she was saved from saying anything by the group of boys, and girls, who swarmed around Pascal like overexcited monkeys and swept him into the playground where the headmaster instantly started clapping.

Noemi didn’t follow them, although no one had told her she couldn’t.

She didn’t know why his new outfit felt like a barrier between them, but it did.

And the barrier had kept on building as more and more of the boys in the school joined the brown-shirted ranks of the Hitler Youth, and more and more of the girls joined an equally loyal league that had been set up separately for them.

Unterwald’s landscape transformed again once the uniforms spread.

Sundays stopped being about church bells and quiet family dinners.

Instead, the streets and the market square rang to the sound of trumpets and drums and the thump of marching feet as the youth groups and the SA led the crusade to spread National Socialism and root out unbelievers.

On Wednesdays, the League of German Girls gave out leaflets after school, encouraging the right kind of girls to join them.

On Friday evenings, the meadow above the town was filled with the strident blare of marching songs and the charcoal scent of a campfire as the Party’s younger members celebrated together.

And Noemi, who apparently wasn’t the right kind of anything and wasn’t included, stayed at home.

She’s not one of us – look at her eyes and her stupid brown plaits.

‘Wake up, sleepy head; we’re almost there. You’ve been out like a light the whole way. You can tell you’re not used to travelling by car.’

It took Noemi a few moments to pull herself out of the deep sleep the journey had lulled her into.

Her dreams had been filled with high walls she couldn’t climb over, and girls dressed in black skirts and white blouses, laughing at her colouring and pulling at her braids.

Pascal, who was almost jumping out of his seat with excitement, tugged at her arm until he had her attention.

‘Hitler’s coming tomorrow – we’re going to watch the procession. He’s going to fly over the city in a special Junkers D-2600, which is his own personal plane. Can you imagine owning something as amazing as that?’

Pascal began quoting aeronautical statistics at her and didn’t listen to Noemi’s reply.

Viktor did, and he clearly found her sleepy, ‘Not really,’ lacking in enthusiasm or reverence, or both.

She had to force herself not to flinch when she glanced up and caught sight of his curled lip in the mirror.

She wasn’t used to anyone looking at her so unkindly.

The car slowed down. Noemi stared out of the window as the traffic thickened around her. As half-timbered buildings five and six stories high, topped with turrets and gables and tiny windows embedded into the roofs, replaced the rugged mountain skyline she was used to.

‘Nuremberg isn’t Unterwald, which I know sounds obvious, but you need to be on your guard there.

We’re part of the community here, for the moment at least. Being Jewish might stop you joining in with your friends, but that’s all.

But there?’ Frieda had bitten her lip then, as if she had far more to say than she wanted Noemi to know, and settled on, ‘That city’s never been kind to Jews.

And if you’re surrounded by people who’ll look at your colouring and hear your name and think they know who and what you are…

Well, attitudes may not be so welcoming. ’

Noemi hadn’t really understood what Frieda had meant by who and what you are , and she’d been too busy trying to wriggle out of the conversation to ask.

She’d assumed her mother meant Jewish. Everything kept coming back to that in a way it hadn’t done before Hitler came to power, but nobody would tell her why a faith she rarely practised and rarely thought about had turned overnight into the most important thing about her.

Her parents wore their Judaism lightly. The town was largely Catholic and there was no synagogue there, but they never went to the nearest one in Munich.

They only kept the holidays for the sake of Hauke’s elderly and ailing parents, who had moved to Unterwald from the city long ago in search of healthier air and brought their traditions with them.

Noemi had no memory of ever discussing what being Jewish meant – it was simply one part of her heritage.

Then Hitler had become chancellor of Germany and started saying unpleasant things about Jewish people, and one part had suddenly become all of her.

Her grandparents had both died by the time she was ten, and they’d only ever been shadowy – and rather forbidding – figures in her life.

Noemi couldn’t remember being allowed to talk to them about anything except their health.

Her parents were very different people – they liked her curiosity.

But when she’d asked them why Hitler didn’t like Jews, they’d been reluctant to answer the question, and they’d grown even more close-lipped when she’d gone looking for answers herself.

The Volkischer Beobachter – the newspaper Hauke hated for being a Nazi mouthpiece but couldn’t ban from the bar or the café without losing trade – was full of strange stories neither her mother or father would discuss.

Reports of Jews being paraded through the streets of Munich for ‘daring to behave like their betters’.

Promises to the paper’s readers that Jews would learn their lesson when ‘the fist finally came down’.

All Hauke had offered her by way of an explanation was, that ‘Some people like a target to blame their troubles on,’ which he wouldn’t expand on.

Frieda had simply ordered her to stop reading it.

Noemi hadn’t. But when no one she knew was taught a lesson about their behaviour, and the nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses which the Nazis ordered never materialised in the town, she’d stopped worrying.

She’d couldn’t, and wouldn’t, get used to the fact that she wasn’t allowed to go everywhere Pascal went anymore, but she’d never felt unsafe. Or at least not in Unterwald.

Their world doesn’t seem to have room for us.

Frieda’s words suddenly felt more serious in Nuremberg than they had at home.

Nuremberg felt more serious. Everything in the city was so different, so big and so busy.

The thronged pavements. The houses and shops blooming with flagpoles, bristling with giant swastikas.

The uniforms, brown ones and black ones, which stretched out as far as she could see.

What if they can tell I’m Jewish from one look? What if that matters more here?

There was no one in the car she could ask. She didn’t want to risk another scowl from Herr Lindiger or spoil Pascal’s excitement. And Carina was sweet and kind-hearted, but, unlike Frieda, she always deferred to her husband and never answered a question without looking at him first.

I shouldn’t have come here. I should have listened to my parents when they said I wouldn’t fit in.

Noemi shrank back from the window as the car lumbered its way through streets that suddenly felt as if they very definitely belonged to the uniformed men striding down them but not to her. Wishing she’d brought a hat to hide her dark hair.