When Things Get Back to Normal - Excerpt

"She's a snob about the Fuhrer," my mother explodes when we're alone. "I wish we could see her if his name was non anything!" My mother goes through this every time her mother has held forth on her favorite subject: how mother and I should take as much as we can and join Aunt Else and her children in Lausanne. How she herself will stay here, just in case the insect brings things off and things get back to normal. How when all is said and done she will go to him and pleas ("I might have pride, but it's not foolish pride!") for the return of her great house, which is now headquarters for some official business of the Reich. Plead on the strength of "von Rundstadt," her trump card.

"After all," she always says, "If he manages things and things get back to how they were, what use would his officers have for my house?"

It is as if she had never sold the house.