The small dinner party was assembled in haste at the partly destroyed gothic mansion on Frankfurter Strasse in the week after Kristallnacht. On November 10, 1938, the second night of the state-sanctioned pogroms that ripped through Germany and Austria, a marauding group of Nazis had stormed the Offenbach residence of German-Jewish industrialist Oswald Basch. Fifteen Nazis had “forced their entry into the house and smashed most everything,” recalled Basch’s youngest daughter, Lisa, an aspiring medical student who had to give up her studies when the Nazis came to power. They had ripped out cabinets and thrown them down the grand...