‘Five more years to go. Seems like a lifetime…’ ‘For you, it does, because you are young. Five years, for me, will pass in a flash.’

‘All Jews have been expelled from the university,’ he said without preamble. She gasped. ‘What do you mean, “expelled from the university”?’ ‘I went to register, and they shoved a piece of paper at me. There’s been a Royal Decree excluding Jews from public office and higher education.’ Renzo’s deep baritone voice seemed to have gone up an octave. Lidia shook her head. ‘There must be a misunderstanding. They can’t do this to us.’ ‘We’re Jews and that’s a good enough reason for them.’

‘I don’t think it was that. The generational gap between parents and children was very different when I was growing up. It seems that everyone talks about everything nowadays. In those days, it was normal for adults to keep things from children. Many of us had parents who’d suffered horrible experiences in the war and they preferred to forget all about them.’

I’d read that there was a monument in the square with a list of the Venetian Jews who’d been deported to concentration camps from the city between 1943 and 1944. My skin tingled with nerves; I hoped I wouldn’t find Gran’s family’s name etched onto the memorial.

Obviously, those air raid sirens had been a distraction. People’s eyes had been on the sky and the noise had prevented them from hearing what was going on. Would they have done anything, though? She doubted it; they would have been too afraid—

It had been as if they were possessed by the Devil as well as by the Nazis. Evil incarnate. She shuddered. How could they have done what they did?

‘I think we should defend the summit to the last man, show the Germans that Italians know how to die,’ Rocco insisted. But Silvio, who’d been quiet up to that point, shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t it be better we show them we know how to live?’

Francesca gave my arm a squeeze. ‘Italians pitted against Italians. Germany pitted against the Allies. Young people fired up by the spirit of insurrection. It was a terrible time in Italy.’

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