Adina Goldberg walked quickly to her destination, head bowed against the bitter wind. Tendrils of her brown hair had come loose from the tidy bun at the nape of her neck and they whipped around her face, blowing into her eyes. She sighed and tucked a stray strand behind her ear, fumbling as her heavy woollen mittens made her less dexterous.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">‘Please don’t be any guards, please don’t be any guards’</span>she muttered to herself as she walked. She was heading home - if you could call the Jewish ghetto home - from an illicit trip to an Aryan-run store in the centre of Munich. Adina could have passed for Aryan if she’d wanted to, if the Nazi’s didn't have such an uncanny knack for tracing a family tree and finding even the tiniest piece of Jewish genetic material. Her grey eyes and brown hair, while not quite the blue eyed blonde hair “perfection” that Hitler was obsessed with, weren’t as obvious as many of her brown eyed, dark haired friends. And the education her guardian had given her had left her with an ability to speak German with the best of them. Her native Yiddish had become a second tongue to her now and she had grown to love the once alien sound of the Germanic language coming from her mouth.<br/><br/>But Adina didn’t want to pass for Aryan. She didn’t want to live a lie. But she also didn’t want to hide. She’d heard about Jews, families who were so afraid of what Hitler had in store that they had used their non-Jewish contacts to find shelter, a hide-away, a place to hole up in until this whole<span style="font-style: italic">mashugana</span>plan of his was over and done with. She’d heard a rumour about a family hiding in the attic of a non-Jewish business. She admired their tenacity but that kind of behaviour just wasn’t her. No, she had other ideas.<br/><br/>Outside of the ghetto, somebody had cleared the streets of the snow banks that had formed after the blizzard. The snow was only falling lightly now but there was more to come, she could feel it. The cold air was beginning to bite through her shabby winter coat and her hands inside their mittens were starting to go numb. She kept a tight grip on the old brown leather satchel that she carried everywhere, refusing to let it stray from her sight. She could feel the familiar weight of the old book and it calmed her, kept her heart from pounding in her chest.<br/><br/>She knew that what she was doing was dangerous. Granted, in the half light of early evening nobody would see the puckered outline of a six pointed star on her left lapel. No matter how talented a seamstress she was, unpicking stitches always left a tell-tale mark. But that still didn’t balance out all of the rules -written or unwritten- that she was breaking by being outside of the ghetto after curfew and without the yellow Star of David emblazoned on her chest.<br/><br/>A street away from the ghetto she paused. She had no idea what was waiting for her around the corner, at the makeshift entrance to the ghetto. More often than not the brownshirts left them to their own devices but occasionally, when there’d been trouble in the area there were guards waiting to accost rule-breakers. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly and continued walking.