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of it to one side, onto a mental shelf for
the afternoon. He had accepted an invitation from Bemmelmann and his wife to take tea with them – a weak, black Darjeeling with feather-light flaked almond pastries Frau Bemmelmann made
freshly that day – and afterwards to walk in the Prater, the vast, hilly park on the eastern edge of Leopoldstadt that housed the city’s funfairs and, since the World’s Fair some
forty years ago, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel. The views over Vienna were unequalled. Hummel made a point of going up at least once a year. He valued the perspective. Whatever his own
troubles, to see the world writ large and humanity writ small – ants, as he thought of them – always sent him away calmer and more sanguine than when he arrived.
    They would not be going up today. Frau Bemmelmann had no head for heights. They would walk the lanes, slowly climb the hills, no more than that. They were tailors – on Sunday afternoons
mannequins for their own wares. It was June and still Bemmelmann carried gloves and a rolled umbrella.
    They had no warning, just the clatter of boots and the sudden surge in the volume of everything. Voices raised, birds put to flight, women screaming. Then the Germans were everywhere, herding
the Jews with rifle butts and steering them towards a clump of trees.
    Hummel raised his hands in surrender. Bemmelmann raised one arm, and embraced his wife with the other. For five minutes nothing happened. The Germans laughed and chatted amongst themselves,
aimed their rifles almost casually in the direction of the Jews. When they had about thirty penned, the Germans moved among them pulling out the men and telling them to kneel.
    Bemmelmann whispered to Hummel, ‘Is this it, Joe? Is this how it all ends? On our knees with a bullet in the back of the head?’
    Hummel looked at the Germans, still laughing, still not really aiming at anyone.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re having too much fun, it’s just a game.’
    A big, sweaty corporal spoke to them in a voice that could be heard in Budapest.
    ‘Right, Jew-boys. Get ’em off!’
    No one moved, because no one knew what he meant.
    ‘Strip, you buggers, strip. Take off your keks! Take off every last stitch! Now!’
    Hummel tugged at his tie. Bemmelmann still hadn’t moved.
    ‘Do it, Herr Bemmelmann. Please.’
    ‘I can’t Joe . . . the women. The women can see. I have not been naked in front of a woman for twenty years. Not even in front of my wife.’
    ‘Don’t think of the women. Just do it.’
    A dozen Jews discarded their best summer clothes and stood naked in front of half a dozen German soldiers and twenty-odd women of all ages, women who’d seen naked men and women who
probably never had. The Germans pissed themselves laughing. One went from man to man, a cigarette dangling from his lips, lifting up the cocks with the end of his rifle, delicately, displaying them
like prize fish to his fellows, helpless with laughter. Another German produced a box camera and snapped away as though they were all one big happy family at a beach resort.
    ‘Right you dickless wonders. On yer knees again.’
    They dropped to their knees.
    ‘Now eat!’
    ‘Eat?’ a lone voice queried.
    ‘Eat, my little piggies. Eat grass!’
    They chewed grass.
    Hummel felt he could read Bemmelmann’s mind. The old man was thinking that this was bad but if it was all they had in mind he would live through it. Hummel knew better. The show
wasn’t over yet. From nowhere the Germans produced a couple of ladders which they propped against the bole of a vast, spreading chestnut tree with boughs thicker than a man’s thigh.
    ‘Now . . . while the piggies eat . . . the birds can sing!’
    A woman was prodded to the foot of the ladder and made to climb into the tree. One by one the Germans forced seventeen women up the tree. Frau Bemmelmann was next to last, weeping and
protesting, pleading and begging. A young woman ahead of her took her hand. A