... a woman in pedal pushers stood casting for bullheads.

They are in court-hand, like transmisses; but they have no writs & the membranes are connected, not at bottom, like transmisses, but at the side. We refer to them by the letter D.

Her memoir describes what it’s like to hate the Nazis — as she and her husband did — but to protest unheroically: making a snide comment when a building super rants against “unpatriotic people”; not finding humor in a party member’s joke; walking out of a movie in which a Jewish prime minister is executed (“the audience burst into applause”).

Again and again she recurred to the scene of his execution, whose horror was heightened by the familiar circumstances with which it was attended. The customary scaffold has its own awe—justice and obedience and usage surround the place; but to die a violent death, and by the hand of man, amid life's daily scenes, all associations so domestic and so ordinary, aggravates the ghastly spectacle, and makes the doom seem at once cruel and undeserved.