“Otto said the villa was a reward. Somewhere big enough for you and the children to come and stay. I was pleased at first—it’s a lovely home.” His villa was outfitted with expensive furnishings, new appliances, and ample space. “I learned from the neighbors that the villa belonged to a Jewish businessman. They took it from him, and they took his business too. I bought a new mattress, but it is his bed I sleep in. When I come home after work, I feel him there. We have taken everything from the victims of the Reich. Their homes. Families. Communities. Clothes. Assets. And now we work the prisoners day and night for us at Mittelwerk, and all we give them in return is the chance to take one more breath—there is never any guarantee of more than that. There is no hope of rescue or reprieve. This is what I have done to them.”
“Well, you haven’t—” I started to argue, but behind me, I felt him shake his head fiercely.
“I have been to the camps. I’ve seen the conditions these people are trapped in. I’ve stood idly by while Otto and Karl worked them to death at Mittelwerk. Those men build rockets according to my instructions. When the story of the war is written, the pages will be full of men saying I was only following orders and the world will know that is fiction. Every single time I opted not to take a stand, I was taking a stand—for the wrong side.”
I sat up, turning to face him. He was shaking with rage and guilt, and when I touched his shoulder, he shook me away.
“None of this is your fault, Jürgen.”
He turned to stare out the window. It was freezing outside and fat flakes of snow began to fall. Without turning back to me, he murmured, “The only thing that’s kept me going the last few years is that you get to live a reasonably ordinary life in Berlin with the children. But from time to time, I realize that it’s my fault that you have no idea what it has cost for you to have that nice life.”
“Jürgen…” I whispered, stunned.
“I wanted to shelter you from the horrors of what I was seeing. What I was a part of. But I can’t keep doing that, Sofie. Sooner or later, you have to know the truth.”
“The truth?” I repeated hesitantly.
“A while back, I mentioned to Otto that it made no sense to make the prisoners at Mittelwerk live and work as they are. I know he hates the Jews. Even at a practical level it seemed to make sense to be smarter about our work practices. And do you know what he said?” He didn’t wait for my response before he carried on. “He said that whether the workers fall off a scaffold or die from starvation or disease or go back to the camps, the outcome is the same. Some of the camps have transitioned. They are now extermination camps.” Jürgen’s voice broke. He cleared his throat, then whispered, “Otto knows the war is lost—we all do. The Reich will aim to wipe the Jews from the face of the earth right up until Germany falls.”
“But—there must be hundreds of thousands of people in those camps…”
“Millions,” he corrected, and then to my horror, he choked on a sob. “And they plan to murder them all.”
“The logistics of that would be impossible,” I said urgently. “You must be mistaken, Jürgen. This simply cannot be.”
“They have developed a gas that suffocates in minutes. Men, women, children—it doesn’t matter to the SS. Thousands of people die at one time, and some camps are executing them around the clock.”
“You can’t be sure. This can’t be real. Not millions of people—”
“Sofie. I’m sure.”
I had been turned inside out—my nerves left raw and my breath shallow. I started to cry, big heaving sobs of shame and confusion and grief. War was always ugly. What Jürgen spoke of was different—a scale of cruelty and violence that was impossible to fathom.
Maybe I had assumed that Germany would fall and the normal rules would apply again—that Mayim would come home or that I’d meet up with her in Poland, and Jürgen might be a prisoner of war, maybe he’d even go to jail, but that eventually, there would be an after.
But we were playing by a different rule book—the scale and depth of the Reich’s depravity changed everything, and the impact on us was the very least of it. The world would never be the same.
“I’ve known for months and I did nothing. How many people have died in that time? How many lives could I have saved if I just made different decisions along the way?” he whispered, almost to himself.
My limbs had turned to jelly. I sank onto the bed, my head fell onto the pillow, and I curled my legs up as my sobs came harder. For a long time, we lay like that. Me on my side, facing Jürgen, him on his back, crying silently as he stared at the roof. The light outside shifted as the sun moved overhead, until shadows were falling over the snow, and the room began to grow dark.