My family keeps memories alive by telling stories. While Mother made potions or when Father had sunk into his chair at the end of the day, they would spin out tales of their younger years. The one I heard most, and my favorite, begins I first met your mother when we were both eleven, but I never knew her until that day we went flying. Sometimes, long before I ever went to Durmstrang, I thought I could conjure it up in my mind, just from their stories.

But there was one I heard only once, told over many nights in my grandmother’s low, musical voice. It was the summer I stayed with her for a month, alone, in her little farmhouse near Leipzig. I think I was eight, but that story stayed with me for the rest of my life.

“Now, Viktor,� she would begin, as we sat behind her house looking up at the stars, small rustlings and night noises all around, “where did we leave off?�

She told me of a wizard with the most fearsome wand in history, one who had studied at my parents’ own school. She described a darkness that fell over Europe; while Muggles fought, Grindelwald took advantage of the chaos and launched a campaign that nearly brought wizarding Europe under one rule for the first time in history.

I can picture the gathering at the German Ministry of Magic in October 1942. My grandmother took me to see the inside of the building. It’s been restored in the intervening years, but she assures me it looks much the same: gleaming wood floors, walls covered in ruby-red wallpaper that looks as soft as velvet, the wooden vaults of the ceiling covered in carvings and gold ornamentation. Thousands of tiny golden flames float just under the vaults, lighting the room. And at the far end from the Visitors’ Entrance, standing on its own, is a simple block of dark granite, covered in the names of casualties of Grindelwald’s rule.

He stood in that very spot, that day in 1942. He had been denied a chance to speak to the members of the Zauberrat. Instead of being discouraged, he strode to the front of the entrance hall and spoke to all present. Anyone else might have been laughed out of the room, my grandmother said, but he had a magnetism that made people stop and listen.

And how they listened. Every face in the room turned towards him, witches and wizards stopped in the middle of their duties to listen to him as he spoke of Muggle inferiority, of how they had been allowed free reign for too long. How they wrought destruction time and time again in their petty squabbles between countries. How bombs had rained on several German cities just the month before, killing Muggles and wizards alike.

It was there that his Army began to take shape.

Grandmother tells me that she’s not sure if Grindelwald would have taken hold so quickly had he been born in France. Beauxbatons has always accepted Muggle-borns, and everyone knows that they’re not invited to study at Durmstrang. Their wizarding community had a closer tie to its Muggles than ours ever did. It made me uncomfortable, the clearly implied criticism of Durmstrang. It was a place of fantasy to me then, before I’d set foot there, perfect in my mind. She saw that, I think.

“Remember this,� she told me then. “No place is perfect. Never stop questioning the institutions you love. Never stop trying to make the place you live or study or work a better place for all.�

And I did remember. My grandfather had certainly never stopped. Even when the Owlet fired him for what they viewed as dangerous political leanings, he printed his own newspaper out of the shed behind the farmhouse.

Grandmother’s stories were coming closer and closer to the date of Grindelwald’s great duel with Dumbledore, something I was looking forward to, when my parents came to join us for the final week of my stay. Father sat with us and listened, his face impassive but for a tightness around the eyes, as she told me how - with loyal followings in countries across Europe - Grindelwald began to carry out Purges. Any witch or wizard who spoke out against him was hunted down and killed.

One evening, Grandmother didn’t ask me where we had left off. She leaned back in her rocking chair and fixed her eyes on the crescent moon. “The eleventh of March, 1945,� she said slowly, as if tasting each individual word.

Father, who had followed us out again, stood abruptly and went back inside. She watched him go, sadness in her eyes.

On any other night, it would have been both of them out here, sitting side by side the way Grandmother and I were now. But that night, Grandmother had taken Father to visit her brother and his wife, leaving Grandfather to his work. When she came home, she said, there was nothing left of the shed but a smoking ruin and a few scorched pieces of parchment drifting across the ground. She looked high and low for Grandfather, until finally she steeled herself and walked into the ruins of the shed.

He burned.

Usually, she was so descriptive, weaving the details of the scene together so I could picture it in my head. But she spoke those two unadorned words about Grandfather, and a shiver of horror zipped down my spine. And that was all she said for the rest of the evening. I sat next to her as she rocked in her chair, staring up at that crescent moon as tears streamed down her face.

The next day, I followed Father all the way down the road to the graveyard behind the church, green fields spreading out to either side of us. He barely spoke, and I felt no need to either. We visited Grandfather together. I’ll never forget how old my father looked that day. He was only a child himself in 1945, but the shadow of Grindelwald still haunted him.

It haunted me, too.