I was nervous about meeting Otto. He wasn’t just Jürgen and Karl’s boss and a manager with the program—he was also a senior member of the Nazi party. Otto’s wife, Helene, would be in attendance too, as well as the other senior staff from the Kummersdorf program…and our neighbors Dietger and Anne Schneider, who lived across the road from us.
Dietger had recently been appointed the official Nazi Blockleiter—our neighborhood block warden. He was the perfect choice. He had always been the neighborhood gossip, and the authority that came with the role only amplified his keen observation skills. I had no idea how he kept abreast of the business of the entire neighborhood, but if a window was smashed, he knew how it happened, seemingly before the owner did. If a husband and wife had an argument, he knew who was at fault and who had been wronged. It was because of Dietger that Jürgen, Mayim, and I realized we had no choice but to adopt the now-standard greeting—the Hitler salute. Another neighbor from around the corner, Leopold Braunbeck, refused to give Dietger the salute. By the next morning, Leopold was imprisoned in one of the horrid concentration camps the Nazis had set up to punish their political enemies. It was months before Leopold was released, and when he came home, he was a quiet, compliant shadow of his former self.
Maybe once upon a time, we’d have said a variation on hello or good day a handful of times each day, but now we were absurd parrots, greeting every person we encountered with a Heil Hitler.
Dietger’s remarkable ability to keep track of the neighborhood’s business was deeply unnerving. In the beginning, I dared to mention this to some of the neighbors, and we all agreed we were feeling more than a little paranoid. But over time, as none of us could figure out how he knew so much about our private lives, we realized it wasn’t even safe to speculate. A call from a Blockleiter to the Gestapo guaranteed trouble, usually starting with a knock at your front door in the middle of the night.
Our second-story bedroom window opened to the street, and I’d heard some of those overnight visits. First came the roar of an engine, then the sound of hard-soled boots on the pavement and men scurrying like rats. Even if I didn’t hear the thumping on the door and the cries of protest as people were dragged from their homes, I often heard the car speeding away. Dietger was always there, seemingly delighted at the cascading fallout from his phone calls.
“What should I expect tonight?” I asked Jürgen, as he drove us to the party in his new Daimler 15. I pressed my hands over my stomach, trying to quell the nervous butterflies. Jürgen’s entire life had changed with that new job—he now worked from sunup to sunset, six or even seven days a week, out at Kummersdorf, a forty-minute drive from Berlin. But while I’d been a firsthand witness to the changes in wider Berlin society, I felt so removed from Jürgen’s work life.
“The staff are all scientists—just ask them about their work and you can let your mind wander while they ramble on. You’re good at that after all of these years with me.”
“Very funny.” I swallowed a lump in my throat and prompted hesitantly, “And Otto and Helene?”
“I’ve never met Helene. Otto takes some getting used to.”
“In what way?”
“He reminds me of your brother, actually.” Jürgen paused, then clarified, “Which one is the pastor? Is it Alwin?”
“Alwin married that peasant girl,” I corrected him. I didn’t blame him for confusing my brothers—they all looked similar, and he’d only met them three times: at our wedding, and then at each of my parents’ funerals. “Edwald is the pastor. So Otto is very religious?”
“He’s a zealot, but not for the Christian faith,” Jürgen said heavily. “He’s a Party man—very much all about his ideology. It’s hard, Sofie—I won’t lie to you. You’ll hear things you don’t like. But for God’s sake, don’t argue with him—it would do me no favors at Kummersdorf, and from time to time I get the impression he only tolerates me because he needs me.”
“I hoped that the program was so focused on the rockets, you weren’t dealing with any of that.”
Jürgen parked the car, then turned the ignition off. He sat for a moment, pondering this. Then he turned toward me.
“My work—my team’s work—is about the rockets, that’s true. But there’s no escaping ‘that,’ not even at Kummersdorf. I bite my tongue every day. Every hour, on the worst days.”