“Let me put Laura to bed and then I’ll see myself out,” Adele said quietly. “It sounds like you two need to talk.”
“Thank you, Aunt Adele,” Jürgen said, and he bent to kiss her cheek.
We retreated into the study with a bottle of wine. I locked the door behind us, then wandered past his heaving bookshelves, over toward the armchairs in the corner. The study had grown dusty with Jürgen away so much. I hated to clean and we could have afforded a housekeeper, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring someone into the sanctuary of our home without bringing Nazi ideology with them.
There was simply no escaping it.
I dropped myself into an armchair, stretching my neck to look at the ornate plastering on the ceiling.
“We could leave Germany,” I blurted suddenly. Jürgen was uncorking the wine at his desk, but he paused and looked up at me in surprise.
“Where would we go?”
“Adele has been trying to convince Mayim to go to her grandfather and Moshe in Krakow. We could pack up and leave Berlin behind.”
“We’re going to uproot our entire family and move to Poland just because Mayim’s grandfather lives there?” Jürgen said wryly, as he poured us each a glass of wine. I slumped. It was a terrible idea. “I don’t love the idea of Poland. Neither one of us speaks Polish, for a start. But we could think about leaving Germany.”
“Then where would we go?”
“England? My English is basic, but you know I’d pick it up quickly. You could help me.”
“Or France,” I suggested, since we both also spoke rudimentary French. We stared at one another, as if we were assessing just how possible this was. “How would we survive?”
“I’d find work at a university.”
His salary would drop and we’d be back to trying to stretch our money as far as we could. Poverty seemed almost appealing if it came with the freedom to raise my children right. Only one thing gave me pause.
“Mayim’s parents rely on the money we’ve been giving her,” I said uneasily. We had been giving Mayim money every month ever since our own finances had stabilized, and I knew she passed almost all of it on to Levi and Sidonie.
Jürgen considered this for a moment. Then he sighed. “I suspect they would sooner see her safe abroad with us. They would find another way.”
“And Adele?”
There was no hesitation this time before Jürgen said, “We’d try to convince her to join us too.”
“She would never agree.”
“I know.” He rubbed his eyes. “She was born in that house—”
“—and she will die in that house,” I finished on a sigh. “So you really want to leave the rocket program?”
“Truthfully, Sofie, it would be a relief,” he admitted, staring down into his wine. His shoulders were stiff, his expression taut. In the time that passed since he took that “miracle” job, my husband had aged. There were fine lines around his eyes and bags beneath them.
“Has it not been going well?”
“Hitler is rebuilding the German military. It will be public knowledge soon.” I gasped in shock. “Otto says that Hitler expects the world will sit idly by, and then the remilitarization will snowball. The rocket program has made incredible gains, but that only means that if they asked us to weaponize the technology, we could do so in just a few years. I’ve been trying to figure out how to extract myself for some time, but it’s not going to be easy,” he admitted, dropping his voice to a whisper. “They need me too much. They’ll never let me walk away. We’d have to do this quickly and quietly. If you’re serious about this—”
“I am,” I blurted.
Our eyes locked over the wine. He nodded.
“Saturday. We’ll pick a border, find the back roads, and pretend we’re just going for a drive.”
“This Saturday?”
“If we’re doing this, we need to do it right away.”
“Okay,” I breathed, my heart rate accelerating.
“Talk to Mayim tomorrow. I’ll talk to Adele. Other than that, we cannot breathe a word of it.”
23
Lizzie
Huntsville, Alabama
1950
Calvin was leaning against the kitchen door, looking up at the ceiling, as if he were praying for patience. This conversation was one I could not afford for my brother to overhear, so I waited until Henry was in bed before I confronted Calvin about Gail’s suspicions.
“So? Is it true?” I asked. “Was Jürgen Rhodes in the SS?”