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‘I messed up and I’m really, really sorry. But when you hit that girl and sent her flying… It was such a shock. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do. Which is a rubbish excuse, but it’s true.’

It was, but it took Pascal three attempts to make Noemi listen.

She’d forgiven him in the end, and they’d stuck enough patches over their friendship in the year since he’d literally left her to fight her own battles to hold it together.

But she’d made him think about his behaviour first, and that wasn’t something he liked to do.

‘Friends are supposed to have each other’s backs; they’re meant to be loyal. And you weren’t – you didn’t stand up for me. That really hurt.’

He’d hated seeing her upset, and he’d hated what she’d said to him.

Loyalty was the basis of every honour code Pascal and his Hitler Youth squadron held dear.

It was the ideal Viktor had told him he should live his life by.

And Noemi was his best friend, so failing her when she’d needed him was the absolute worst.

No, it’s not. The worst bit is I can’t tell her why I hung back.

He hadn’t seen the danger she was in until the girls started screaming, and he had been shocked when he’d realised what Noemi had done.

But that wasn’t what had pinned him to the spot.

He’d heard the word, Jew . He’d known the other boys had heard it too, and that they would ostracise him at once if he’d gone to her aid.

So he’d chosen the coward’s path and deliberately stayed out of the fight.

He wasn’t going to tell Noemi that: he wasn’t sure she’d forgive him; he wasn’t sure he could forgive himself.

Fortunately, no one but the two of them knew what had happened in Nuremberg, so nobody else could judge him.

Noemi had been too afraid of the consequences to tell her parents, and Pascal couldn’t tell his.

Carina would be ashamed of him, but he had a horrible feeling Viktor would cheer, and he didn’t want to have to face that.

‘Why do you bother with her so much? Never mind she’s a girl, she’s a?—’

The boy who’d started that question knew better than to finish it.

Everyone looked up to Pascal; he was a natural leader, but – if they wanted to be his friend – they soon learned he wouldn’t discuss Noemi.

Pascal couldn’t put the importance of his relationship with her into words to himself never mind to anyone else, and especially not to people who didn’t think their friendship should exist. After the unpleasantness at Nuremberg, he’d decided not to try.

She was Noemi. She’d been by his side since his first memory, thinking the same thoughts, loving the same things.

She was his best friend in the world. Who or what she was beyond that was of no interest to him.

‘They’re peas in the pod the pair of them – always have been, always will be.’

He’d heard both Carina and Frieda say that.

And that their closeness was a blessing given they were both only children, which was a rare state of affairs in Unterwald.

That wasn’t a subject either woman lingered on – or that Pascal wanted to hear about – because it invariably made Carina cry.

There had been another baby once, a sister, but she’d died before Pascal could really remember her and only existed now in photographs.

Besides, although he knew better than to say it, he didn’t mind not having siblings: he liked being Viktor’s only son, the focus of all his attention.

His father was an important man, and Pascal liked that too.

Viktor had become Unterwald’s mayor in 1933, and the Lindiger farm was the biggest for miles.

Along with the Drachmann café, bar and shop – and the bakery and bottling and distilling workshops behind those, which Hauke’s parents had founded and he and Frieda had expanded – it was one of the town’s most valuable sources of employment, and the town was grateful for it.

People sometimes laughed when they saw him and Noemi together and teased them about founding a dynasty one day.

It had become a running joke to say their name in one breath and to make endless jokes about when they were going to get married.

That was confusing and embarrassing, but Pascal didn’t mind once he looked up what dynasty meant: the thought of following in his father’s footsteps and becoming as respected as Viktor made him walk taller.

Even if Viktor wouldn’t stop making Noemi’s Judaism an issue.

Which was another thing Pascal kept having to apologise for.

‘I know it’s not just those girls who say mean things, and my father can be as bad. That’s why I’d rather meet at your house than mine. But I don’t think nasty things about… people like you, and I don’t think many others really do either.’

He wasn’t actually sure he believed that about his father’s friends and his Hitler Youth leader, who were more than capable of saying nasty things, and he was almost certain Noemi didn’t.

It was hard to know. He didn’t like talking about her being Jewish, so he avoided all the problems that seemed to come with her religion and didn’t.

Besides – although she frowned at him sometimes when he sidestepped the issue – she never made a fuss about it either.

She never acted like some of the growing awkwardness around her family being different upset her.

She raised her arm in the Hitler salute every morning in school once she’d been sent home a couple of times for refusing to do it.

After they came back from Nuremberg, she’d stopped being cross that she couldn’t join in with the same clubs he went to.

And yes, he was aware she missed out on a lot of fun, but he’d tried to make up for that by spending as much time with her as he could, doing the things they’d always done, and having more adventures.

They’d done their first ice climb together in the winter after the rally and skied at break-neck speed down a steep tree-lined slope nobody else in the town had dared to attempt.

They’d driven the Lindigers’ goats to pasture together in the spring, the way they’d done since they were seven.

They’d completed a rock climb in the summer which had taken them across ledges so narrow they’d been left clinging to the rock face like lizards.

That had been amazing. They’d been so full of adrenaline when they finally returned to solid ground, they’d run round the meadow howling like wolves.

It had been a good year; he hoped the fun they’d had had wiped away that last night in Nuremberg.

But – for all the patching up they’d done – he knew better than to ask her to go to the rally there with him again.

Not that she would have done, or that Viktor would have allowed it.

‘This year’s gathering could be the making of you.

You’re fourteen – you’re old enough to stay in the youth camp, and the focus of events this year is going to be on the army.

There could be officers there scouting young talent.

So there’ll be no talk about taking that girl with us a second time. I won’t hear of it.’

His father always referred to Noemi as that girl nowadays, as if she was something clinging to the bottom of his shoe.

Pascal hated that, but he hated arguing with his father more.

The times when Viktor was angry and cold with him might be few and far between, but they were unbearable.

So instead of speaking up, he stopped mentioning Noemi at all, and he let his father think their friendship had drifted apart.

Which might actually be a possibility.

Pascal tried to focus on properly packing his brown shirts so they wouldn’t crease and make him look sloppy, rather than worrying about the cracks between the two of them that he didn’t know how to fix.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy to switch his thoughts off as he wanted.

He knew what the problem was, even if he acted like he didn’t.

He’d had to stop talking to Noemi about quite a lot of things lately, and that made him feel uncomfortable.

She seemed to have forgiven him for Nuremberg, but she didn’t want to hear about his Hitler Youth activities or the upcoming rally.

She’d cut him off in mid-sentence when he’d told her how badly he wanted to enlist in the army and how excited he was that it might now be possible.

Her, ‘I don’t want to know about that,’ had hurt him.

He hadn’t told her that either. It had been a shock to realise he couldn’t always share his dreams with his best friend.

He really wished she’d stop saying, ‘I don’t want to know.

’ It had become her chorus to everything good that happened – in his world anyway.

In the spring, Hitler had announced he was overturning the restrictions the Treaty of Versailles had imposed on Germany’s defeated armed forces at the end of the Great War, and was reforming the Luftwaffe and reintroducing conscription.

Viktor had clapped at that radio bulletin and laughed not shouted when Pascal leaped round the room like a firecracker.

Pascal had longed to be a soldier since he’d listened wide-eyed to his father’s war stories as a small boy and dreamed of being as brave, but – given that Germany had only been allowed to maintain a skeleton army since before he was born – he’d never imagined it would happen.

Now Hitler was promising him the future he’d imagined while he’d spent hours lining up his toy regiments.