The Kissingers’ bourgeois existence (piano lessons, theatre visits) abruptly ceased. Non?Jewish neighbours turned their backs. It was Louis’s wife, Paula, who insisted that the family leave for a new life in America. On August 10 1938 they sailed from Le Havre to New York. It was a narrow escape: in November, Fürth’s synagogues were destroyed and the inhabitants of the Jewish orphanage were deported. By 1942, Louis and Paula’s siblings, and Kissinger cousins who had remained behind, believing that because they had been decorated during the First World War they would be immune, had all been sent to the gas chambers.