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37
Sofie
Berlin,Germany
1941
It was Jürgen’s idea to buy a country house, midway between the Peenemünde facility and Berlin. The distance was taking a toll on us all. I agreed we should consider it—but just a few days later, he called to tell me he’d spoken to a Realtor and they’d already found the perfect property: a fully furnished home right on the lake at Tollensesee, ten kilometers from the small city of Neubrandenburg. It would take Jürgen about two hours by car to reach the house—time he felt he could spare as often as twice a month. From Berlin, it would take me just a little longer.
“Could youreallytake a weekend off that often?” I asked him, skeptically.
“Not the whole weekend,” he admitted. “But if I worked there during the day, I’m certain I could make this work. And when a whole weekend isn’t practical, at the very least, we could have Saturday night together and I could come back here early Sunday morning.”
Just a few weeks later, I made the drive for the first time. Laura had turned ten and, after years of anticipation, was now a member of the Young Girls’ League. She and Georg were both on camps that weekend, so it was just me and Gisela, alone in the car as we traveled out of the city. I still wasn’t convinced by this country-house idea, but we’d gone ahead anyway—purely because Jürgen seemed so desperate to do it.
The house was a simple, half-timbered A-frame. The support beams were left exposed and were painted dark gray, the panels between them a soft cream. The roof was a thick thatching. It was modest but I loved it anyway, and more than that, I loved what the house represented.
Family time.Pure, unburdened family time—something we’d been desperately short on for years.
The house was surrounded by trees, although I’d seen on the drive that there were other homes nearby. There was a small clearing off to one side of the house, but beyond that and the driveway, we could have been in the middle of nowhere. And right in front of the house was a private jetty, stretching out into the water, perfect for fishing or as a platform for launching a boat or even an excited child on a hot summer’s day.
“Well?” Jürgen said, as he opened the front door and approached me. The tension I was by then used to in his face had eased, the tight set of his shoulders relaxed. I had a feeling that miracle had only happened in the last few minutes, since he too had arrived at the lake house.
“I love it,” I said.
That night, I put Gisela to bed while Jürgen set up a fire in the little clearing beside the house. He dragged chairs out from the dining room table and we sat beside one another, enjoying the bottle of wine the Realtor left for us as a housewarming gift.
The house might one day have listening devices, if it didn’t already, and I supposed there was always the possibility of someone in the woods, trying to listen in. But here, by the fire, we were far enough away from the trees and the house that we could be confident no one would hear us.
Despite this, Jürgen remained silent. He sipped his wine, and he sighed, long, contented sighs. And after a while, I started to sigh too—as if we were both breathing out years of tension. I began to enjoy the sounds of owls in the woods and the crackling fire, to breathe it all in, to feel that peace unwinding tension I’d forgotten could be unwound. Beside me, Jürgen’s gaze was focused higher. After a while, I followed it, and found him staring up at the white-blue glow of the full moon.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Many things,” he said, his voice husky.
“Such as?”
He glanced at me and smiled.
“You. The children. Work. The moon.”
“Always the moon,” I said softly.
“When I was a little boy and I went to live with Adele, I promised myself I’d never forget my family,” he said quietly. “I remember sitting in that car with her, utterly terrified, deciding that I’d hold their memories so close that I’d never lose them. Then time began to pass, and one by one, the memories slipped away. Now I only remember a handful of things... How ordinary it was as we ate breakfast together. The air raid siren and the panic as my mother went to get the baby and my father shoved me into the cellar—then nothing, until I woke up in the hospital. I do remember the night before. I stayed up late with my father, staring at the moon with this terrible telescope he’d constructed himself. He was an amateur astronomer, obsessed with the moon. He told me that night that he hoped man would reach it in my lifetime.”
“You’ve never told me any of that,” I said, stunned. “You always said you didn’t remember anything.”
“You’ve always been so much more outgoing than me, Sofie. I’ve had to share parts of myself with you over the years that were hard to expose—but those memories of my family were just too precious, and part of what made them so was that they were only mine.”
“Why tell me now?”
“I’ve been thinking about those memories a lot lately. It brings me comfort that I don’t remember much about my parents. After all, no real sense of who they were means no way to know how they’d have felt about the work I’m doing now.”
He said this casually but I heard the pain behind his words, and it left me stricken.
“Jürgen...”
“Name a European city you love and German rockets may one day wipe it off the face of the earth.”
