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The colors of the flames were reflected in the sheen of tears in his eyes as he watched the rocket’s flare. Jürgen’s expression suggested he might have been staring into hell itself.
An instinct sounded. Was he going to refuse to join the SS? Surely not. It would be an act of suicide—
A chill ran down my spine.
What if that was the point?
We were both more than a little tipsy by the time we tumbled into bed, and for the first time in months, we held one another. After a while, Jürgen lifted the blanket over our heads. It had been so long since we’d seen each other, longer since we’d been through this routine, but the act of hiding beneath the blankets was so ingrained in our relationship—as intimate as making love. I took no solace in the action, not that night. We were about to have the conversation I’d been dreading all evening.
“You have to do it,” I said. Jürgen remained silent. “Why wouldthisbe the line you refuse to cross? After everything we’ve done?” I drew in a breath. “Is it true that the war is almost over anyway? Hitler is losing?”
The papers suggested the opposite, of course. Victory was within reach, and if our troops were pulling back, this was simply for “strategic reasons.” But I learned to make the ordinary folk of Berlin my bellwether, and whispers on the streets were that the war was all but lost.
“It is only a matter of time,” Jürgen admitted. “And when Germany capitulates, the world will see what we’ve done across the Reich. The SS has been the driver for so much of the cruelty. I’ve made more than my share of mistakes in this war, but aligning myself with those bastards cannot be one of them.”
I pondered this, my heart sinking. Of course the SS would be targets—they’d been the architects of the concentration camps.
“So you think if you decline the invitation to join the SS, you’ll fare better when the Allies arrive,” I surmised.
“Can you really be so naive?” he whispered fiercely. “One way or another, I’m as good as dead. I am the technical manager of a program built on forced labor, Sofie. The rockets are nightmarish enough—they’ve almost certainly resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. But the Mittelwerk operation is an abomination. I’ll hang.” His voice broke as he added weakly, “Ishouldhang.”
“But you were only following orders,” I whispered. “You aren’t responsible for whatever has gone wrong at Mittelwerk. Are you?”
He sighed then, a miserable, resigned sound that almost broke my heart.
“This isn’t a conversation you have under a blanket,” I whispered, tearing up suddenly. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”
I pulled the blanket back down and sat up. Jürgen sat up too, and we stared at each other in the dim light. He pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting as if he were in physical pain.
“Where else can we have the conversation, Sofie?” he mouthed. I started to cry, and he reached to cup my cheek. “We have to talk about this.”
I pressed my mouth against his ear and whispered tearfully, “But maybe not when we’re so tired and emotional. Maybe not when we’re both half-drunk.”
He sighed as he nodded, and we stretched out side by side, staring up at the roof. Neither one of us slept much.
At breakfast the next morning, Jürgen and I sat with Lydia and Karl. I saw the tight smile she pinned to her face when she glanced at the medal, already fixed around Jürgen’s neck. Her gaze immediately skimmed to Karl’s bare neck, and she pursed her lips. Otto and Helene soon joined us. Otto was wearing his Knight’s Cross around his neck, a matching pair with Helene’s Mother’s Cross.
The chefs had prepared a celebratory breakfast for us all—thick slices of salty wild boar bacon, heavy rye bread spread thick with cultured butter. Best of all was the coffee—real coffee, the first I’d had in years, as it had been impossible to find in Berlin during the war. I drank the first cup so fast, I scalded the roof of my mouth.
“Yesterday was an especially successful day with the rockets,” Otto announced, beaming as he devoured his meal. “One of the V-2s we launched from Zeeland landed on a cinema in Antwerp. It was completely full at the time! Our early intelligence suggests five hundred enemies may have been destroyed.”
A resounding cheer went up from the breakfast diners, but I was doing the calculation in my mind—an ordinary Thursday afternoon. A cinema, for God’s sakes. A cinema couldn’t possibly have been full of soldiers. Why are we celebrating the death of hundreds of civilians?I clapped even though I felt sick.
I looked at Jürgen. He cheered with the rest of them, but his eyes were hollow, as if part of him had already died.
“We need to stop here for the night,” Jürgen said abruptly. At breakfast, he asked Lydia if our children could stay at her home for a few extra nights so he and I could share some extra time together. Now we were midway through the five-hour drive from Castle Varlar to his villa in Nordhausen and I was startled at the sudden change in plans.
“Why? Are you unwell?”
He ignored me, turning the car into the parking lot of an historic, stone-walled hotel in Kassel. Something about his steely silence warned me to leave the question hanging, so I didn’t ask again.
Soon, we were alone, with black-washed wooden floorboards beneath our feet and exposed beams across the sloped ceiling above us. A large bed sat in the center of the room, with soft white pillows and layers of thick blankets. Huge, wood-framed windows washed the room in silver-blue light, reflected off the snow on a nearby rooftop. On any other day, at any other stage of my life, I’d have been delighted by the scene.
“They will bring dinner for us later,” Jürgen said, as he sat on the bed and stretched his legs out. He patted the mattress beside him and added gently, “Come here, my love.”
“Why did you do this?” I asked, as I crawled up onto the bed next to him. He immediately pulled me close, and I reclined, my ear to his chest.
“A random room in a random hotel that evenIdidn’t know I was going to book seemed our best chance at privacy.”
