And so here, at eight o’clock on this particular Monday morning, Margot Groszbart sat on the bottom-chilling, metal folding chair in the windowless basement meeting room under Samuel Rosen’s reform synagogue. The upright in the corner had the jolly, debauched look of a ballroom piano. Here, for the next five days, she was going to sit building bridges with children and children’s children of the Hitler generation.      

                  Rabbi Sam liked Gretel’s input. “Isn’t that what we have come together for? To tell each other — and ourselves — what we don’t even know that we are thinking about each other?”

                  “What don’t we know that we are thinking?” said Ruth Schapiro. Across her breakfast coffee, Margo Groszbart had come to feel as if she had always known this small woman —neat ankles, nice blue suit, hair nicely kept, the kind of red that’s got redder with each passing year. Bob Schapiro looked at his wife and she said, “We know what we are thinking.”

                  “And will you share it with us?” Rabbi Sam asked. Bob Schapiro looked at Rabbi Sam and his wife said, “The six million.”

                  Konrad Hohenstauf looked at his shoes. He lifted pointed, tremulous fingers to cover his mouth, which must once more have parted because Father Sebastian Pechter seated on his right and Shoshannah Goldberg on his left, heard him murmur, “What have I done? Ach, what have I done?”

                  To fill the resulting pause, Margot Groszbart said, “I have a question. How is it all of you speak such efficient English?” The Austrians demurred. “Well, you seem to get said what you want to say.” Margot had given up the attempt to activate her rusty childhood German first in conversation with the round-chinned, baby-cheeked Erich, then with the priest who had stood before her bent at the waist as if in a condition of bowing. Neither of the young men had been about to give up the opportunity to practice his English. Margot said, “Why could I never get my American daughter to learn any German?”

“Why do you want her to learn German?” asked Ruth Schapiro.