Sofie
Jürgen and I talked until after midnight that night, trying to consider every possibility. Which border might we run for? How would we make sure we didn’t arouse suspicion, especially with Dietger keeping such a close watch on us? What would Adele do? She would encourage us to flee without her—but we were anxious about leaving her behind. Would there be consequences for her?
There were too many questions we couldn’t answer, and with Jürgen’s eyes red from fatigue, we decided we’d sleep on it. I tossed and turned, asking myself a million variations of are we really going to do this? The last time I looked at the alarm clock, it was 2:33 a.m.
I was roused from sleep less than half an hour later by a thumping from the front door, the sound loud enough that the windows in our room rattled. Bleary-eyed and bewildered, I rolled toward Jürgen and shook him.
“What’s going on?”
He groaned as he pushed himself upright, then slipped his glasses on, looked at the alarm clock, and turned back to me.
“A knock at the door at this hour can only mean one thing, my love.”
We stared at one another in the dim light. My heart was pounding against my chest, static ringing in my ears.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he whispered. “I’m assuming you haven’t either.”
“Mayim,” I choked out, closing my eyes.
“We need to answer the door before the children wake up.”
I pulled on my housecoat and followed Jürgen down the stairs, my heart racing so fast I felt light-headed. When we reached the ground floor, he reached for the handle and I caught his elbow.
“We can’t just let them take her!” I cried, belatedly panicking as I imagined Mayim being dragged out into the night. Jürgen hesitated, glancing between me and the door. The thumping returned.
“Open up!” someone shouted.
“I’m sorry, Sofie,” Jürgen whispered, voice breaking. “We can’t not answer.”
Above us, a floorboard creaked. I looked up to find Mayim on the landing above us.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Go into the closet in Laura’s room!” I whispered fiercely. We could tell them Mayim wasn’t home...tell them only our little girl was in that room... Maybe they’d believe us? Surely it was worth a shot. We had to do something. “Hide! Please!”
Mayim gasped, and a sudden terror crossed her face, but she didn’t move.
“If I hide in there, Laura may wake up and see them take me!” she whispered back. She pursed her lips, then closed her eyes and whispered weakly, “I can’t let that happen.”
“Sofie...” Jürgen said. I looked at him, and his gaze was calm. “I’m sorry, my love. We can’t hide her. We just can’t.”
I looked upstairs again to see Mayim walking away, but she returned just a second later, pulling on her coat, her chin high and her eyes clear.
“But she hasn’t done anything wrong!” I cried as Jürgen threw open the door to reveal a group of men on the doorstep.
The Gestapo did not wear a uniform—they worked by stealth. These men could have just been a social group out for a late-night stroll but for the murder in their expressions. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw Dietger hovering on the sidewalk behind them.
“Jürgen Rhodes?” the man at the front said. Jürgen nodded silently. “You need to come with us.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“But—wait. What?” I choked out, stepping forward. Jürgen looked at me in alarm. Then he shook his head and shot me a frantic look as I took a step closer. I pressed a hand to my mouth, suddenly terrified I was going to be sick.
“Can I change?” Jürgen asked the men, motioning down at his nightclothes.
“This isn’t a social visit!” the man snapped. Jürgen didn’t resist, not even as the men led him out the front door and into the night. I took a step forward into the empty doorway.
The streetlight glowed outside, bringing just enough light that I saw my husband pushed into the back seat of a black car. I watched until the car drove away, and the street was suddenly quiet again. I might have dreamed the whole thing, except that I was shaking from head to toe, and Dietger was still standing right outside the low stone wall between my front garden and the sidewalk.
Through my tears, I met his eyes. We had been neighbors for years, and we were at least friendly. He gave me a sad look, then slowly shook his head, as if he were personally disappointed in me.
“Where are they taking him?” I asked him hoarsely.
Instead of answering, he turned and walked slowly across the road, back to his house.
I paced in the foyer for a while, frantic and sobbing.
“I don’t know what to do,” I blurted, after a while.
“Could you call Lydia and Karl?” Mayim suggested. She was also crying, but lingering on the stairwell landing, as if the front door represented a threat to her physical safety.
I felt bad for waking Lydia and Karl, but to my surprise, there was no answer. I called again with the same result.
“Maybe they went away?” Mayim suggested, but I stared at her, then back to the phone, frowning.
“But I phoned Lydia after I picked Georg up from school yesterday, remember?” I slumped, shaking my head. “We were supposed to have morning tea at her house tomorrow—today. They must be home.”
“What else can we do?”
“We have to wait,” I choked out, and that was what we did. But every time I looked at the clock, I was surprised to find how little time had passed.
Eventually, Mayim and I shifted to the sitting room, and the sun began to breach the horizon, golden rays of light slowly filtering through the drapes. Mayim rose and made us some strong coffee in preparation for the children waking up. We sat together on the sofa and sipped the bitter brew.
“You thought they were here for me,” she said after a while.
“It seemed the only obvious reason for their visit.”
“You need Jürgen’s job more than you need me,” she said stiffly. “I’d rather stay at my parents’ apartment than to watch Jürgen dragged from your house by the Gestapo on my account.”
“Last night, Jürgen and I talked about leaving.”
“Leaving...his job?” she said, eyebrows lifting.
“Leaving Germany. All of us. Him, me, you...maybe even Adele.”
“Adele would never leave. She was born in that house—she wants to die in that house.”
“I know,” I laughed weakly, through my tears. Adele had trained us all so well—we each understood exactly what she wanted for the end of her life. “We were going to ask her anyway.”
But then I paused, considering the sequence of these events. Jürgen was so convinced they’d never let him leave. That was exactly why we intended to go quickly and quietly.
“It was after you went to bed,” I told Mayim, trying to join the pieces of the puzzle. “We were in the study. The door was locked. No one could have heard us.”
“Maybe Dietger was sitting outside?” she said. “Near the window?”
“We were in the corner, in the armchairs. The window was closed.”
I rose and walked back across the hall to the study. I had no idea what a listening device might look like—but if there was a microphone in his room, surely I’d be able to find it? Mayim came to help, but after we searched every nook and cranny, we found nothing.
“Isn’t it starting to feel like they have eyes and ears everywhere?” Mayim whispered when we finally gave up and dropped our exhausted bodies back into chairs in the living room. “Nowhere is safe now. Not even our own home. And when we can’t understand how they are surveilling us, we can’t do a thing to avoid it.”
We sat in silence for a long while after that. The sun rose all the way over the horizon. The coffee left in the pot had long gone cold.
“Mama,” Georg said. I turned to find him standing in the doorway, eyeing Mayim warily. She and I shared a sad glance, and I rose from the sofa.
“I’ll help you dress for school, Georg,” I said, my throat tight. I hated to take him back to that place, but there was no alternative.
Not yet, and maybe not ever.
Lydia’s nanny was at the school gate dropping off Hans.
“Has Mrs. zu Schiller been called away?” I asked her lightly. She shook her head.
“No, she’s at home.”
“There was a family emergency and I tried to call last night,” I said hesitantly. The nanny looked at me uncertainly.
“There’s a handset near my rooms. I’d have heard the phone if it rang.”
“Would you mind asking her to call me when you get home?”
“Of course.”
I sat by the phone in Jürgen’s study, waiting for Lydia to ring. Mayim brought me more coffee, then took Laura outside to play in the courtyard. I stared at the window at the front of the room, trying to figure out how Dietger might have heard us.
“Mayim said they’ve taken Jürgen?” Adele cried, bursting into the study without warning. I startled, and she crouched in front of me, cupping my face in her rough palms. “Oh my Lord, Sofie. I’m so sorry, treasure. I’m so sorry. Do you have any idea what this is about?”
“We...” I looked around the room, suddenly too scared to give voice to my suspicions, no longer even trusting the sanctuary of my home. “I don’t know,” I croaked.
Adele pulled me into an embrace, holding me hard up against her thin body with surprising strength. She released me, then rose.
“Is there anyone you can call? Those zu Schiller friends, perhaps?”
“I...I tried to call last night,” I said. “They didn’t answer. I asked Lydia’s nanny to have them call me.”
“Call her now,” Adele said abruptly. It didn’t occur to me to disobey her. I reached for the handset and dialed. This time, an answer came within a few rings.
“This is the zu Schiller residence,” the housekeeper said.
“Hello, it’s Sofie von Meyer Rhodes,” I said. Then I cleared my throat and asked, “Is Lydia at home?”
There was an awkward pause before the housekeeper said stiffly, “Mrs. zu Schiller is unavailable.”
“She’s expecting me for tea this morning...” I said weakly.
“Mrs. zu Schiller is unavailable, Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes,” she repeated firmly. “That includes for your morning tea, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll speak to Karl, then?”
“He is at Kummersdorf, of course.”
“Did you have some phone trouble recently?” I whispered, closing my eyes.
At this, she paused. Then she said thoughtfully, “It’s the strangest thing. Both of the phones had been unplugged. I only realized this morning when I was dusting. It must have been one of the children.”
The children hadn’t touched those phones. It had been Lydia or Karl, because they knew I’d be calling at an indecent hour.
There was a quiet knock at the front door just before noon.
Adele rushed to answer it, but Mayim and I followed at a safe distance. Jürgen was there, alone. One of his eyes was purple and swollen almost shut and he was visibly disheveled, but it seemed he’d suffered no other serious injuries. Adele embraced him, murmuring prayers of gratitude to God. Then she stepped aside, making room for me. I threw my arms around his neck and wept. He stood still and silent, his hands against my back, his breathing steady and calm.
But when I pulled away, I saw the miserable way he glanced between Mayim and me, and I knew this wasn’t over yet. Aunt Adele turned away and was facing the hallway toward the kitchen as if she couldn’t bear for us to see her cry, but her voice was thick with tears.
“I expect you’ll need coffee.”
“That would be wonderful. And we’ll take it in the courtyard, thank you, Aunt Adele,” Jürgen said quietly. Adele and Mayim whispered as they walked down the hallway, leaving me alone with my husband.
“The courtyard?” I said, protesting. “You need to rest.”
“I am tired,” he admitted, which seemed the understatement of the century. Even so, he forced a smile. “The sunlight on my face will help to wake me up.”
We sat on the wrought iron chairs in the courtyard. Mayim brought a tray out and set it up in front of us, with rye bread and Adele’s black currant jam, and coffee so strong I could smell it as she stepped out of the back door.
Once she was gone, Jürgen slipped his arm around my shoulders and drew in a deep breath, as if he were breathing me in.
“They knew we were talking about leaving. That’s why they took me. My options are limited but simple. I’m alive and I work for the rocket program...or...” He broke off and I swallowed hard. “It’s like I said last night. They need me too much to let me walk away.”
Jürgen released me gently and poured himself a cup of coffee. He sipped it gingerly, then touched his swollen eye socket, wincing.
“They said it sends the wrong message to the public if a senior employee like me associates with Jews.”
“Well,” I said, trying to stay calm. “We can just—”
“Sofie, she has to go. We have to erase her from our lives. That’s what they said.” His voice sharpened with disgust. “Erase her. She’s like your sister, and that means she’s like my sister. She’s a part of our family.”
“We can’t,” I choked out, stricken.
“We’ll be an example to the public one way or another. Do you understand what that means? It means if we aren’t an example of how to shun a Jewish friend, we’ll be an example of what happens to people who don’t. I don’t know how we survive if I lose this job, let alone if...”
“I wondered about the timing of this,” I whispered. “Mayim thought maybe Dietger was outside the window.”
“They repeated back to me what you and I said last night,” Jürgen said. “There’s no way Dietger would have heard us so clearly if he was outside. It was as though the Gestapo were in the room with us.”
“I checked the study this morning,” I said, shaking my head. “Surely if there was a microphone in there, we’d be able to see it?”
“Maybe not,” Jürgen said hesitantly. He glanced at me. “There was talk at Kummersdorf about a weapons designer who went rogue. They say he was caught because of a passive listening device in his office. The Gestapo were supposedly sitting in the next building listening to every word he said. I never took the rumors seriously until last night. Secret listening devices? So small that a person wouldn’t even notice them, so small that they can’t even be found? The very idea seems so fanciful. I figured the rumor was just more propaganda. It would suit the Gestapo for people to think they could hear us even in the privacy of our offices or our homes too.”
“But...there is no sign of a device in that room. Could they really have invented invisible microphones that don’t even need electricity? There must be another explanation.”
“If you told an electronics engineer that I have reasonably reliable rockets firing on a regular basis, he’d probably say that’s absurd. For all we know, someone else working for Army Ordnance has designed passive microphones that really could be hidden in plain sight. We have to act as if it’s true.”
“We have to assume they can hear everything we say? Everywhere we go?”
“It’s probably safe out here,” he whispered. “Maybe there are ways we can cover the sound of our whispers inside, but we’ll have to be careful. We’ll never know which rooms they are listening in on...” He motioned toward Adele’s building next door. “Or even which homes.”
“Dietger was there when you were taken last night,” I said, my throat tight. The existence of such a technology might explain his mystical ability to stick his nose in everyone’s business. I felt physically ill. “I tried to call Lydia after the Gestapo took you. I didn’t know what else to do. She didn’t answer, and this morning their housekeeper told me they unplugged their phones last night.”
Jürgen and I stared at one another, connecting the dots in the only way that made any sense.
“They knew you’d be calling,” Jürgen said finally.
“You were friends with Karl and I was friends with Lydia long before you and I even started dating,” I said. “If we can’t trust them, who can we trust?”
The answer was in my husband’s eyes. Moving forward, we would have to trust no one outside of our family.
“What do we do about Mayim?” he asked.
I could never bring myself to send Mayim away, but she couldn’t stay. We couldn’t allow our children to be brainwashed, but we had no choice other than to allow our children to be brainwashed.
I couldn’t join my thoughts together in a way that made sense.
“My love,” Jürgen said suddenly. I turned to him, and he gave me a gentle smile. The skin around his swollen eye crinkled. “Leave it with me, will you? Let me think on it.”
He went inside to take a nap after that. Mayim retreated to Adele’s house with Laura, and I went next door to join them. Adele made me sickly sweet, milky tea, and every time I finished a cup, she refilled it. In the end, we sat in near silence, but for the sound of Laura’s chatter as she pottered around. I nursed that final cup of tea in my hands, too full to drink it but drawing comfort from the warmth.
When Jürgen woke he joined us, and he insisted I go home for a nap too. And when I roused again, I slipped out of the bedroom and into the living room, where I found Jürgen and Mayim sitting across from one another on the sofas. Mayim was crying, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.
“I had already decided to leave, Sofie,” she said.
“But how will you survive?” I asked, stricken.
“I’m strong. My family is strong,” she said, her voice breaking. “Besides, we don’t have a choice. You know that’s true, even if you wish it wasn’t.”
In the foyer less than an hour later, I stood opposite my best friend, staring into her eyes.
“I’m going to be okay,” Mayim insisted. But she was pale, and I knew that she did not believe that any more than I did. I had been increasingly aware that she and her family were in danger. Until that moment in the foyer, I fooled myself that as long as she was in our house, she was safe.
But I had become someone who would sit at a dinner party and crack jokes about pork knuckle when a man spoke of Mayim and her family as vermin. I was someone who would let my child read anti-Semitic books.
I was someone who would let my best friend be sent away, even as our country turned its back on her.
She was in danger, and I was a part of the problem, not the solution. I just didn’t know how to fix any part of that without risking Jürgen’s life.
It was an impossible, unbearable position.
“I don’t know how to get through the day without you,” I blurted.
“Me either,” she whispered unevenly. “That is something we are both going to have to figure out.”
“I want my children to be like you,” I said, hot tears rolling onto my cheeks. “I wanted you to help me shape them to be better people. I don’t know how to be a good mother without your help.”
“Nonsense.” She pressed a hand to my chest, flattening it over my heart. “It’s all here, Sofie. You’re already a better mother than you know.”
We were both sobbing now, each of us increasingly distressed. We’d been children together, and then we’d navigated adolescence, and those first brave steps into adulthood at finishing school, and then she’d been by my side when I married Jürgen and had my children.
Undeserving of her love though I knew myself to be, I was certain I was every bit as important to Mayim as she was to me. That was part of the wonder of her—that she loved me dearly, despite my flaws.
“Sofie,” Jürgen said. He had taken her bags to the car and was waiting to drive her to her parents’ apartment. He gave me a helpless look. “Mayim and I need to go.”
I threw my arms around her one last time and I whispered fiercely in her ear, “Go to Moshe. Go to Poland.” She stiffened, and I choked on a sob. I dropped my voice further, until I knew she had to strain to hear me. “Please. Please. Adele was right. Germany is not safe for you anymore. It hasn’t been safe for a long time.”
Adele came across that night and cooked dinner for us. I knew that the sausages and mashed potatoes would have been salty and buttery and delicious, but I pushed the food around my plate, too distraught to eat. Georg and Laura were unsettled too, each protesting at feigned outrages I was too depressed to acknowledge. When Laura threw a piece of sausage at Jürgen, seemingly without provocation, he pushed his chair back and said sternly, “Upstairs. Now. Both of you.”
The children were visibly startled by their mild-mannered father, and they marched obediently upstairs with Jürgen close behind. The minute Adele and I were alone, I burst into tears. She came around the table to sit beside me and rested her hand over mine.
“You get tonight to sulk, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes. But tomorrow, you get up, you get out of bed, and you carry on. It’s not always the strongest trees that survive the storm. Sometimes it’s the trees that bend with the wind. And you, my treasure, find yourself right in a hurricane.” She dropped her voice to the barest of whispers, so faint I had to strain to hear her even though her lips were against my ear as she added, “They insist you become a Nazi, so you pretend to be the best damned Nazi you can be. You will always know deep down inside what is true and what is right and they cannot touch your heart. But you have no choice now about the facade you present. Your husband and your children are counting on you to play the game.” She pushed back her chair and said firmly, “You just need a strong cup of tea and some sugar. Everything is going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
It didn’t feel like everything was going to be fine, not that night, and not the next morning, when Jürgen and I went through every room of the house, purging mementos of Mayim, erasing her from our lives as we had been instructed to do. I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of the photos and the letters and the birthday cards, so Jürgen did it for me, burning them in the fireplace in the living room, right beside the spot where she liked to sit and read. I kept the knit blanket. It would be my comfort item now, to bring me a different kind of warmth when the world had turned so cold.
Georg said he was happy that Mayim was gone, but I could feel his grief, even if he didn’t know how to make sense of it. He’d wake in the night calling for her, and I’d rush in to find him crying in his sleep. I promised myself that when all of it was over, I’d take him away to the country and I’d undo all of the damage those years were doing to his soul. In truth, I had no idea if that kind of healing was even possible. Isn’t an adult just a child, shaped by experience? How does a person learn not to hate, when that hate has been imprinted upon them from such a young age?
Laura’s grief was as uncompromising as mine at first. “I only want to eat Mayim’s food,” she told me stubbornly, and then it was “I only want Mayim to bathe me” and “I only want Mayim to dress me.” Worst of all was “No, Mama! I only want Mayim’s cuddles,” after she’d scraped her knee one day. But she was five years old, and five-year-olds are, if nothing else, adaptable.
In time, Laura stopped asking for Mayim, and Georg stopped calling out for her at night, and as relieved as I was, it was like losing her all over again.