Summary

Chapter 1 takes place in 1922. An old woman named Jerusza is outside an apartment in Berlin, the home of Siegfried and Alwine Juttner. She knows a lot about them and their habits. Siegfried rushed to join the National Socialist German Workers' Party after hearing a speech by “an angry young man named Adolf Hitler” (1). Jerusza also knows that Alwine has dreams about the young man she loved who died in the Great War (World War I). She has a supernatural power to know things, a gift from God handed down from her mother who was driven to suicide. Jerusza is 82 years old and knows she will live 20 more years “and that she would die on a spring Tuesday just after the last thaw of 1942” (3). She sees a warm, white light in the room where baby Inge sleeps – the same light that drew her to...