backs of their beige uniforms as they played and laughed and smoked and chatted, there among the commodities. I learned later, from my host there—the friend who had told me about the Holocaust when we were sixteen—that this was daily life in Israel, a country protected by its youth, and I should not be afraid of weapons. When his eighteen-year-old daughter came home from duty that evening in her beige uniform, carrying her own Uzi as if it were a schoolbag, my education was enhanced yet again.

Later on Oranienburger Strasse I see the scene repeated in larger proportion in front of the Centrum Judaicum Neue Synagoge, a cultural centre, memory centre, art gallery and renovation of the bombed-out Neue Synagoge, Berlin’s main prewar synagogue that was inaugurated inof the Jewish and Israeli establishments in Berlin, Ilonka later tells me, are guarded by Berlin police, mostly out of fear of anti-Israeli terrorist attacks and, to a lesser extent, of skinhead vandalism. The skinheads, she says, are of course much less organized than the jihadists, and don’t have the level of technology to do more than deface property and beat people up. The barricades are not given as much notice by Berliners as they are by visitors. The only other barricades I saw in Berlin—large ones, patrolled by soldiers with automatic weapons—circled the American and British embassies in the centre of the city, where all traffic is redirected.

In the centre of the Holocaust Memorial just south of the Brandenburg Gate, I descend a narrow set of stairs