On a soft April day in the mid-’80s, I sat with my sister, my mom and one of my great-aunts in a beer garden deep in the hills of northern Bavaria. The Germans call this woodsy place Frankische Schweiz, or Swiss Franconia, in tribute to its passing likeness to the Alps. They like to climb and hike and kayak there. In the 1920s, my Catholic-peasant grandparents had ditched it for a cold-water flat in Greenpoint.

That spring afternoon, we ate lunch and drank the local beer, talking comfortably in German. Tante Lena was a particular favorite aunt, easygoing, with a slow, sweet smile. Our beer garden sat by a winding two-lane road with craggy hills rising behind it, stippled with gray granite. Across this road stood another timbered café of Hansel-und-Gretel sweetness, nestled into the hillside with a terrace much like ours.

So pretty, one of us remarked. Have you ever been there, Tante?

Oh, yes, she said. I waited tables there during the war.

Really! What was it like back then?

Very busy. Very popular. Hitler used to go there all the time.

We were silenced. My eyes flew wide open. So did my mom’s, so did my sister’s. Tante Lena remained serene, smiling a little.

Wait. Wait, Tante. Did you say … Hitler … ?

Yes. They used to come in on the weekends. To get away. Hitler, Goering, Goebbels — all the big shots. 

Tante Lena paused again, her eyes traveling across our blank faces. She shrugged.

All the big shots, she said again. They liked the food. Hitler liked the trout.

She shrugged again, something weary in her gaze. And she began talking about something else, and we never spoke of it again.

Naturally, I have thought about this a lot. About Hitler, unleashing hell upon Europe, murdering the Jews and the Gypsies and the gays and anyone else on the list. Beheading dissenters, throttling the press and the arts. Indoctrinating the children. And, when he needed a break, heading for a cute café where he liked the way they did the trout.

I have often wondered about that weary, neutral look in Lena’s eye. Did she think: Were you expecting Nazis from the movies? Godzillas in lederhosen?

I have never forgotten that the horrible and the usual can sit side by side, perfectly easily. That Nazis, including the most famous Nazi of them all, do some things just like the rest of us, without ever being the rest of us. Right next to the rest of us.

Nazis believe things no decent human being should believe, want what no decent human being should want. They don’t mind killing us to prove their point.

And (not but, and): They go to Target. They’ve got Nintendo. They’re kind to their families.

They like trout.

They are not us.