Sofie
Georg’s first day at Grundschule had arrived. Mayim stayed home with Laura so we could walk him to school on our own. At the front door, she bent to kiss his cheek.
“Have a great first day, Georg,” she said. He beamed at her, revealing his two missing front teeth—a gap that caused certain sounds to escape with a lisp. He threw his arms around Mayim’s neck.
“I’ll tell you everything tonight, Mayim. I promise.”
“I know you will, little buddy,” she laughed, squeezing him tightly. Laura came running down the stairs, almost tripping on her feet, then launched herself at Georg in a forceful embrace.
“Have a good day,” she said, squeezing her eyes closed as she hugged him. Georg hugged her back, and they stood like that just for a second. Mayim and I exchanged quiet smiles. When Laura released her brother, she took Mayim’s hand.Then, almost overcome with emotion, she shifted to stand behind Mayim’s leg. Her gaze fell to the floor as she mumbled, “Goodbye, Georg.”
Georg raised his chin and drew in a deep breath as if bracing himself, then said bravely, “Goodbye, Laura.”
I reached for Georg’s hand as we stepped onto the sidewalk outside our house, but he either didn’t notice, or was reluctant to hold hands with his mother now that he was a “big kid.” That stung. It seemed like one minute I was shaking with nerves while holding my newborn for the first time, the next we were walking to school.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“No, Mama,” he said. “Hans and me are going to have so much fun.” Hans was a year older than Georg and already at school, but the boys were the best of friends.
Lydia was waiting at the school gate with Hans. The boys ran toward one another, meeting with a duet of excited chatter and cheering, then ran through the gate into the playground without even saying goodbye.
Shocked tears sprang to my eyes. Lydia laughed gently as she patted me on the shoulder.
“The first day is the hardest, Sofie, but there’s no need to fret. These teachers will take your baby boy and transform him! He will leave this place well on his way to becoming a strong German man—the kind of man who will do this nation proud.”
I looked into the schoolyard, hoping to catch one last glimpse of Georg. An icy chill ran down my spine as my gaze landed on the flag of the Reich, blowing gently in the breeze above the playground.
We soon found a new rhythm to our days, our routine now based around Georg’s school hours.
“I wish I could take him,” Mayim said suddenly one morning as I was pulling on my shoes at the front door, trying to make up some lost time because we were running late. I forced a smile.
“He’ll be able to walk on his own soon anyway.”
Berlin offered only hostility to a woman like Mayim, and that meant it was not safe for my children to be out with her. Besides, Georg was a fledgling part of the school community, and we were all anxious about what the other children and parents would say if they knew about Mayim. I could picture the crowd of parents at the gate hearing her Hebrew name and recoiling in shock. It was awkward and awful, but Mayim and I both knew that it was best she stay home.
Over the summer, Mayim, Adele, and I liked to sit in the courtyard after the children were in bed. We’d share a glass of wine, willing to endure the buzz of mosquitoes for the company and the chance of a cool evening breeze. On one of these evenings, Adele brought over strawberries from her garden, cut into thick slices and macerated with fine sugar. It was still warm that night, but to my great amusement, Mayim wrapped herself in her knit blanket anyway.
“Laura would be jealous if she knew,” she said, helping herself to a strawberry.
“Laura need not be jealous,” Adele said dismissively. “I saved my best strawberries for the children as I always do.”
Mayim and I shared a smile. I stretched out my legs and rested my head against the wall behind me, casting my gaze over the silhouettes of the trees and the buildings behind us as the golden sun dipped behind them.
“No Jürgen again tonight?” Adele said. I could hear the disapproval in her voice. “So he’s working the weekend, then. You need to help him find some balance.”
“And how do you propose I do that, Aunt Adele?” I asked, swallowing a sigh. She wasn’t wrong. Jürgen was sleeping on the couch at his office more and more.
“Did you hear about Mrs. Haas?” Adele asked us grimly, referring to one of her widowed friends. “Gestapo. They took her a few nights ago. She was no more engaged in activities disloyal to the Reich than I am a pumpkin. She was fighting with Walter Berner. He lives upstairs from her, remember? He just didn’t like the way her dog barked at night. It seems clear that he called in a tip to the Gestapo out of spite, and now that poor, fragile old woman is in a concentration camp somewhere.”
Mayim and I exchanged a glance over Adele’s assessment of Mrs. Haas as fragile and old, given the woman was probably at least ten years younger than Adele. Even so, the thought of the Gestapo dragging her from her home left me ill.
“Aunt Adele...” I dropped my voice. “You shouldn’t speculate like that. You never know when someone is listening.” The courtyard was relatively safe, surrounded by other courtyards, and I couldn’t hear any movement, so I assumed they were empty. But beyond the courtyards were windows, and who knew who might be behind them?
“I’ll speculate all I want, Sofie,” Adele said, looking down her nose at me. “What are they going to do—arrest me for pointing out the blindingly obvious?”
“You really do need to keep your voice down,” Mayim whispered, her tone slightly panicked. Adele sighed, then nodded.
“Yes, okay. Thank you, Mayim.”
“Every night before I go to bed, I review every interaction from that day and ask myself—did I do anything that might be perceived as disloyal?” Mayim said softly, startling me. “Some nights I can’t sleep because I worry that I might have accidentally said something to draw attention to myself—to cause trouble for us all.”
“I hate that you have to live like that,” I whispered, throat tight.
“The calculus is different for you, Mayim,” Adele said gently. “And you have your whole life ahead of you. This is no way to live. Have you thought about that? What your future will look like?”
“I think about it every day.”
Adele took a deep sip of her wine. “I don’t say this lightly, but you need to leave Germany. I think of you as I think of our Sofie, as the granddaughter God forgot to give me—albeit a rather less aggravating version.”
“Thanks, Aunt Adele,” I said wryly. She winked to let me know she was joking, but quickly sobered, as did I. “But...where would the Nussbaums even go?”
Adele looked at Mayim, her gaze intense.
“Can you and your parents not simply go to Krakow with Moshe?”
“It is not simple, Miss Adele,” Mayim replied. “My passport says I’m Polish, but I have never lived anywhere but here. Besides, my father can’t just go to Poland. Even if he could secure a visa, he couldn’t handle the train ride with his back. Things in Berlin are uncomfortable, but I am fortunate that I have you and Jürgen and Sofie and the children.”
“And you,” Adele said, turning her attention to me. “Have you thought about what will happen if they insist that you ask Mayim to leave?”
“It is not illegal to have a Jewish best friend,” I said stiffly.
“Sofie.” She sighed impatiently. “The time may come when it is indeed illegal.”
“I hate that we’re even discussing this,” I whispered.
“Not discussing it would be worse,” Adele said abruptly. “We need to face the facts.” She turned to Mayim. “You know I am not wealthy, but between all of us, we could find the money for your father’s visa.”
“Truly, thank you,” Mayim said miserably. “But that’s really not the problem at all.”
“Please, Mayim,” Adele urged. “Please try to think of a way. It feels like the danger comes closer to this house every single sunrise. I can barely sleep at night worrying for you all.”
Later, Adele excused herself to retire, and after she’d closed the little gate in the fence between our courtyards, Mayim asked me, “Is she right?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. After a pause, I blurted, “Mayim, I’m so scared for you. And your parents. Germany doesn’t feel safe anymore.”
Mayim looked away from me, toward the fading red-gold sunlight that framed the apartment building behind us. I heard the sniffles she tried to hide, and I reached to squeeze her forearm. She turned back to me, her cheeks wet with tears.
“How much worse is this going to get before it gets better?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just don’t know.”
After a few months at school, Georg was proud to bring home his first satchel of readers to practice at home.
“Shall I read them with you?” I offered, as I finished dressing Laura after her bath. Georg gasped in horror.
“These are special home readers. Only for me and Mayim.”
I kissed him good-night and watched as he walked to his bedroom, holding Mayim’s hand. I tucked Laura into her bed, and then went downstairs to make tea for me and Mayim. When she joined me in the sitting room a few minutes later, the color was gone from her face. She sat opposite me and rested Georg’s satchel on the coffee table between us.
“Open it,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.
I opened the satchel and withdrew the books. On the cover of the first was an image of a street parade. Most of the adults and children were giving the salute, and no less than eight swastika banners and flags were displayed in the scene. I made a sound of surprise, and Mayim reached forward, her movements jerky as she withdrew the rest of the books to spread them side by side.
I reached to pick the next one up, Children, What Do You Know about the Führer? I leafed through the pages, watching a fiction unfold about a benevolent Hitler who was restoring the Fatherland to glory. The second book was called The Crossbreed, and while the cover was of a cute puppy, I only had to skim the first few pages to realize it was a simplistic parable discouraging relationships between Aryans and Jews.
By the time I picked up the third picture book, my hands were shaking.
It was called Never Trust a Fox on the Green Heath and Never Trust a Jew by His Oath. On the first page, a handsome Aryan man was depicted beside a rotund, coarse man ostensibly representing the Jews.
When I looked up, Mayim was weeping.
“Please tell me you didn’t read these to him, Mayim,” I whispered sickly.
“He wanted that one,” she choked out, pointing to the last book. “He liked the cover best. I managed to convince him we should read one of his own books and he was easily distracted, but that won’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’s going to realize that the Jews he’s learning about are the same as the Jew in his house.”
“I’ll talk to him—” I started to say, but her eyes widened in alarm.
“And tell him what?” she said. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Tell him that the Führer is wrong? That Jews aren’t the enemy? You can’t say those things to him. If he repeats them at school, you’ll have a visit from the Gestapo.”
“But I can’t just let him think that this is okay,” I whispered back.
Mayim choked on a sob. “He must have spoken about me in class. His teacher told him to make sure I read them with him. She was trying to make a point.”
I was only grateful that Jürgen was coming home that night. He’d warned me he would be late, but I waited up for him.
“What is it?” he asked, taking one look at my face.
“We need to talk,” I said grimly.
“Can we talk as I take a bath?” he asked tiredly. He waved a hand down over his rumpled suit, and then scrubbed his palm over the bristly growth on his cheeks. “It’s hot as hell out there and it’s been days since I washed. It’s been a long week.”
I followed him into the bathroom and explained what had happened.
“We can’t say anything,” Jürgen said abruptly.
I stopped pacing and frowned at him, surprised by his tone.
“But—maybe we just need to look at other schools? Maybe—”
“Almost every schoolteacher is now a member of the National Socialist Teachers League. The newspaper said it’s over 95 percent.”
“The papers lie!” I hissed. I knew that better than anyone. The press was an arm of the Department of Propaganda—controlled down to the font the newspapers were printed in.
“Maybe the papers lie about some things, but not about this. The curriculum has been standardized across public and private schools. We could move Georg to any school in the country but this isn’t going away.”
“So we’re supposed to accept that he’ll be brainwashed by this nonsense?”
Jürgen sighed as he stepped into the bath. He scooped water up to wash his face, then rested his head against the tiled wall behind him.
“All right-minded German parents are trapped, just as we are,” Jürgen said tiredly. “I don’t even think we have a right to complain. The cage we’re trapped in is at least a gilded one.”
“Sooner or later, he’s going to realize that Mayim is Jewish. His teacher is going to make sure of it.”
We stared at one another in the harsh light of the bathroom. Jürgen closed his eyes again.
“I know,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I just don’t know what to do about it.”
Later, I stretched out on my luxurious mattress in the beautiful house I’d been so desperate to keep, but I had never felt less comfortable.
Just a few weeks later, Georg seemed to sink into a funk, and he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. After several days of trying to cheer him up, I called Lydia to see if she or Hans could shed any light.
“It’s to be expected,” she said sadly.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Hans said the boys have been teasing him about...” She paused, and then her tone sharpened. “Sofie. You know.”
“Mayim?” I whispered.
“You can’t harbor a Jew in your house and not expect the other children to notice.”
“We aren’t harboring anyone. It’s perfectly legal for her to be here.”
“Children are more perceptive than we realize sometimes,” she said. “Look, why don’t you come around tomorrow morning for tea and we can discuss it? I hate that your boy is unhappy, and it’s been so long since we caught up. I’m sure we can figure this out.”
It had been a while since I saw Lydia. All of our old friends were increasingly engaged in Nazi party activities, and I’d found myself withdrawing more and more. I was desperate to help Georg, though, so we agreed that I’d meet Lydia at her home the following day.
But as soon as I hung up the phone, a burst of frustration and anger overtook me. I picked up the handset and dialed Jürgen’s direct line.
“I need you to come home tonight.”
“I can’t,” he said automatically. His team were preparing for yet another test launch and there seemed to be no time in his schedule for anything else. “There’s this panel giving us some trouble—”
“I think Georg is being bullied at school and I’m so sick of dealing with every little thing in this family on my own. I need you to come home tonight.”
“Okay,” Jürgen sighed. “Okay.”
“Good,” I snapped, but by the time Jürgen walked through the front door, my impatience with him had burned out. I pulled him close and kissed his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” he said. “I know you’re carrying the load of the family. I don’t thank you enough for that.”
“I’m worried about Georg. Lydia said some of the boys may have been teasing him about Mayim.”
“Ah,” Jürgen said, wincing. Then he sighed heavily. “I’ll put him to bed tonight and talk to him, man-to-man.”
For the first time in a long time, the six of us were home for a meal. We sat at the end of the long dining table in the formal dining room, Laura happily tucked between Adele and Mayim, Georg beside me opposite them, and Jürgen at the head of the table.
I was struck by the warmth that burned in my chest at the simple pleasure of us all being together around a table spread with good food. Adele served juicy slices of roast chicken, while Mayim and I began to dish out the vegetables. But when she tried to ladle carrots onto Georg’s plate, he pushed the spoon away aggressively. His expression was sullen, and he refused to look at her.
“What’s wrong, little buddy?” she asked him gently. “Aren’t you feeling well?”
“Georg,” I said, surprised. “You love carrots.”
He looked up, then around the table, his eyes filling with tears as he flicked his gaze between me and Jürgen and Adele. I noticed then that he was going to some lengths to avoid looking at Mayim, dropping his eyes to the table every time they might pass her.
“I don’t want carrots either,” Laura said, as if she sensed a chance to avoid her vegetables.
“Everyone is having carrots,” Jürgen said firmly, but then Georg burst into noisy sobs, pushed his chair back, and ran from the room. Mayim and I exchanged startled glances, as Jürgen also pushed his chair away from the table. “Let me talk to him.”
I left Laura with Adele and Mayim and followed Jürgen and Georg down the hallway, but lurked outside Georg’s bedroom, out of sight.
“What is it, Georg?” Jürgen asked softly.
“Papa,” Georg said hoarsely. “Is it true? Is Mayim a dirty Jew?”
There was a long pause. I could hear my pulse in my ears as I waited for Jürgen to respond.
“Please don’t use those words,” Jürgen said carefully. “But yes, it is true that Mayim is Jewish. Why are you worried about that, Georg?”
“Mrs. Muller says that the Jews are the enemies of the Führer. Is she going to hurt us?”
“Of course she won’t hurt us!” Jürgen said, flustered and frustrated.
“But the boys say that if she’s in our house she will steal our money and make us sick.” Georg gave a shuddering sob. “Papa, Hans won’t play with me at school because he said I have dirty Jew germs. He said we might even die!”
“That’s silly, Georg. You know that Mayim isn’t dangerous.”
“But Hans said—”
“I know what Hans said,” Jürgen said abruptly. I could almost hear the cogs of my husband’s mind turning. To defend Mayim was to invite trouble from the Gestapo. To not defend Mayim was to fracture our family. He paused, then called helplessly, “Sofie?”
I came around the corner and joined him in the room. Jürgen was seated at the end of Georg’s bed. I sat beside Georg’s pillow. He sat up and threw his arms around me, suddenly weeping anew.
“Mama,” I heard him whimper. “I don’t want Mayim to give me carrots anymore.”
I wrapped my arm around him and looked over his head at Jürgen. My husband’s shoulders slumped as he stared down at the carpet.
We gave Georg the option to return to the table to eat his carrots. He told us he just wanted to go to bed. Tears in my eyes, I kissed him good-night and let him have his way. By the time we emerged from Georg’s room, Mayim was in her own room, and her door was closed.
“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.”