“Are you prepared for our trip in the New Year?” Otto asked Jürgen. He motioned toward the bar, and Jürgen shot me a quietly apologetic glance, then fell into step beside Otto as he made a beeline for the bar on the other side of the room, staffed by men in crisp uniforms.
“If I can manage to give my husband eight children with all of the travel we do now, you can surely manage at least a few more,” Helene remarked.
“You travel with Otto?” I asked, surprised. She pursed her lips.
“If you want to climb the ranks of the Party, Sofie, you need to find a way to support the work. I won’t be joining him and Jürgen for this trip in the New Year because the baby will come soon, but I’ve been with him to the camps plenty of times before.”
“To the camps?” I repeated, startled. She gave me a confused look.
“We need many more prisoners for the factory.” I was so bewildered, I was struggling to keep my expression neutral. “While Otto and Jürgen find new workers, I’ve been inspecting each facility. There’s groundbreaking research happening at Auschwitz, Dachau has a delightful herb garden—oh, and of course, there’s the zoological gardens at Buchenwald. You should come along for a trip. It’s so important for wives to support their husbands in this work.”
“I’ll talk to Jürgen about it,” I managed.
Later that night when we were alone in our hotel room, I motioned toward the covers as Jürgen went to turn out the lights, indicating we should pull them over our heads and whisper, but he yawned and shook his head. I shot him a forceful look and he sighed and complied.
“You’ve been to some of the camps?”
“I’m tired. I don’t want to talk about this,” he said.
“Helene said she goes with you.”
“She’s tagged along with Otto a few times.”
“She said—”
“I don’t want you to come with me, Sofie,” he whispered sharply. “Not now. Not ever.”
“But—”
“Otto did the deal with the SS—we rent the prisoners off them at a discount. We had the first shipment of workers from the camps a few weeks ago, but they were…” He trailed off, then stopped. I was startled by his choice of words—shipment, as if the prisoners were a resource one could send around the country in boxes. The silence stretched, and all I could hear was my pulse in my ears.
“What?” I prompted him urgently.
“I don’t want to talk about this with you,” Jürgen whispered.
“Tell me,” I pressed. “Tell me what was wrong with them.”
All of those rumors I’d heard on the streets of Berlin were flying through my mind. I’d suspected all along that the Jews in those places were in terrible danger. Did Jürgen know for sure?
“The prisoners are not being well cared for and that’s all you need to know.”
The point of pulling the blankets over our heads was to muffle our conversation, but we didn’t need to bother that night. Jürgen’s voice was so faint that even right beside him, I had to strain to make out each word. It was clear that he was deeply troubled by this development but wanted to protect me from the worst of what he knew and what he’d seen, as he always did.
I couldn’t bury my head in the sand. Whatever he was involved in, I was a part of too.
“Just men?” I asked. I shifted closer to him, suddenly feeling very cold, despite the suffocating blanket over our faces.
“No.”
I closed my eyes and an image of Mayim flashed before me, her face vivid, as if I’d only seen her that morning.
“You haven’t seen Mayim, though?” I had to know.
“The camps are huge, Sofie. Tens of thousands of prisoners in some.”
“Do you think she’s in one of those camps?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. Jürgen folded the blanket back down, exposing our faces to the cool air in the hotel room. I turned toward him.
“Tell me the truth,” I whispered.
“I would only be guessing.”
“I don’t care.”
I pulled the blanket up again, and Jürgen whispered, “Most of the Jews are imprisoned in ghettos now.”
“That’s better than a camp, I suppose. She would be okay there?”
“Of course, my love.”
38
Lizzie
Huntsville, Alabama
1950
It was hot that night and I couldn’t sleep. I kept reliving the hurt on Sofie Rhodes’s face when I clued her in to what a raging gossip Avril Walters was.