The phone rang, the shrill sound jarring my frayed nerves, and I ran so fast to the study to answer it that I almost tripped over my feet.
“Hello?” I blurted into the handset.
“Hello, my love,” he said. He sounded exhausted, but more than that, he sounded defeated.
“Hello,” I whispered, tears filling my eyes. There were so many things I wanted to say to him that weren’t safe to say, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to explain to me what he’d been through either. “Are you well?”
“I’m fine,” he said. He didn’t sound fine at all—his words were thick and a little slurred, as if his mouth were injured. His tone was heavy with dread too. “I have great news to share.”
“You do?”
“I’ve been invited to join the SS,” he said. There was no mistaking that he was crying now, and I gave up trying to contain my tears. Who cared if they heard us now? “I’ve been awarded the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer. It is a great honor.” This was a high rank—the equivalent of major in the Wehrmacht. I wondered why our plan failed, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it.
“Can we visit you this weekend?”
“I don’t want the children to see me like this,” he whispered brokenly.
“Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll wait a few weeks.”
When I took the children to visit Jürgen at Nordhausen a few weekends later, there was still a green shadow on his jaw and a purple haze around both of his eyes. He’d warned me he still wasn’t himself, but he’d grown impatient to see us.
“Papa,” Georg said stiffly. “What happened to you?”
“Ah, silly old thing I am,” Jürgen said dismissively, as he reached a hand to touch his face. “I fell down the stairs working late one night.”
The girls accepted the lie easily. They each hugged Jürgen, then ran ahead to take their bags into the villa. Georg remained standing by my car, staring at us.
“I know you were in trouble,” he said. “I could tell from the way Mrs. zu Schiller was acting while Mama was away. And then you both come home looking like this.” Even after some weeks, Jürgen and I were both rail thin. I was still struggling to eat normally. Even my stomach was traumatized by the experience. “Papa, I’m not a fool. It’s obvious you were beaten. You were both arrested, weren’t you?”
“I am a clumsy fool and your mother was away attending to family business,” Jürgen said dismissively.
“But—”
Jürgen raised his chin and adopted a tone that left no room for argument. “You’ve been raised to respect your elders,” he barked. “Collect your things and go into the house, and I don’t want to hear this nonsense in front of your sisters.”
I hated to hear Jürgen take that tone, but I understood why he did. The last thing we needed was the girls becoming suspicious too.
Georg’s nostrils flared, but he scooped up his overnight bag from the ground and stomped toward the villa.
“He can accuse us all he wants, but until the war ends and we can explain, we can never confirm his suspicions,” Jürgen said heavily. “His whole identity is wrapped up in the Nazi cause. I fear he’d lash out if he knew.”
I looped my arms around his neck and stared up at him.
“I love you,” I whispered.
The tension in his face eased a little as he stared down at me and whispered back, “I love you too.”
Under the blankets that night, with the children all asleep in their beds down the hall, Jürgen’s voice shook as he told me how it had all gone wrong.
“Otto was waiting for me on-site when I arrived that morning. It all happened so quickly, before I even had a chance to help anyone. He told me that someone saw us stop at Kassel and asked me why we’d checked in under a false name. I told Otto that I wanted out. They arrested me immediately.”
“They must have been following us the whole time,” I said. Jürgen nodded.
“I thought they’d just execute me, but there was a beating…” His tone was curt—an unmistakable message that he wasn’t yet ready to discuss the assault. My heart broke for him.
“Oh, Jürgen…”
“I thought it would continue until they killed me. But over the days, I realized they were toying with me—beating me unconscious, patching me up again…just trying to get me to break and beg for mercy. But I refused to speak, mostly because I knew you were being held too, and I didn’t want to incriminate you. It nearly killed me knowing you were in a cell somewhere, Sofie, but we’d prepared for that.”