In July 1938 a woman in her sixties sat on a train watching the German landscape go by, carrying two small suitcases of summer clothes, no valid passport, almost no money, and a diamond ring in her purse to bribe the guards if the SS pulled her off. Lise Meitner was leaving a world-class laboratory and thirty years of research behind, and taking the theoretical framework of the atomic age with her in her head. She had spent her whole life getting around locked doors. Public higher education was closed to women in the Vienna of her childhood, so she compressed advanced mathematics, physics, philosophy, and classical languages into two years of private tutoring, passed the external exam as one of only four women to do so, and became the second woman to earn a physics doctorate from the University of Vienna.

Berlin was worse before it was bett ...