I know now that at the time, when I was lying in my bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air all over Europe . . . over the ruins of the German cities, over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt . . . there was scarcely a place in Europe from which no one had been deported to his death in those years.