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periods of time: the one that came before he was sent to Spiegelgrund and the other that began after he had become a registered inmate. He realised only then that the gravelled paths between the pavilions that he had to take to the school building every morning were the very same that his mother had taken on her Sunday visits to uncle Florian just a few years earlier. It was not only that it was the same place, but alsothat the Spiegelgrund staff recognised her when she delivered him, because almost all of them had been working at Steinhof as asylum nurses. In their eyes, his mother was one of those crazy women who would turn up at every which time and make nuisances of themselves by asking about husbands or brothers or children, even after it should have been clear to them that there were no more Steinhof patients left to ask about. It must have been how they looked at her when she came to visit him, Adrian, the only time she did. For one thing, she was dressed exactly as when she visited Uncle Florian, the same skirt and woolly, grey cardigan and worn coat and beret, so she had presumably stood in front of the mirror and prepared herself in the same old way, her eyes anxiously fixed on her reflection while she applied shiny red lipstick to her thin, pale lips.) In October or November 1940, Uncle Florian and forty-or-so other males had been herded onto buses run by the charity GeKraT (Gemeinnützige Krankentransport) and driven to Hartheim. Leonie Ziegler had not been informed of this. The official letter arrived several weeks later and announced that Mr Florian Dobrocz – some ill-educated clerk had either misheard or simply couldn’t spell – had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia and, despite every effort by the staff, his life could not be saved. Adrian remembers when the letter arrived. The family was seated at the table. So far, one Sunday night after another, his father had sat down, calm and sober, at the carefully laid supper table and, every week, put up in silence with his wife’s tearful face and endless wailing about dear Florian with the warm hands who was simply fading and receding away from her, but this Sunday he could take no more. Enraged, he stood up with such force that the table rocked and sent plates and glasses flying, then crashing onto the floor. He had had it with all the miserable moaning and groaning, he shouted, then he left and slammed the door after him. At firstLeonie sat very still, then she hid her face in her hands and wept so wildly her shoulders shook. But it might be that none of this had happened by then. In March 1938, Helga was already born and, just over a year later, Leonie had become pregnant again with Hannelore, who arrived in February 1940. Adrian was a pupil in the school on Erdbergstrasse. Just as in the Münnichplatz school, it was understood that he was an imbecile and, as such, placed at the back of the classroom. By then, the other children in the class wore uniforms with a Hitlerjugend pin on the jacket lapel and, once a week, went off to a Heimabend at someone’s home after school. When his classmates asked him why he and his sister never came to someone’s house for these evening get-togethers, which after all were compulsory, he didn’t know what to say. When Eugen Ziegler had received a document stating that he was wehrunwürdig , he probably felt a certain sense of relief, but for his children the fact that Ziegler was classed as unfit for military service meant exclusion from the Deutsches Jungvolk and presumably all other organisations with a link to NSDAP. Adrian was dead keen to wear the same uniform as the others. It wasn’t because he was crazy about uniforms or the stupid Home Evening singalongs but because the uniform was the one thing that could stop his father from beating him up. All children in an HJ uniform were under the personal protection of the Führer, and no one could punish them except, of course, the Führer himself. At Spiegelgrund it grew