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13
Sofie
Berlin,Germany
1933
A few days after the election results were announced, I took the children to visit Jürgen’s great-aunt Adele. As I opened the gate between our courtyards, Laura was on my hip, chewing on her fist and drooling all over my shoulder. Georg ran ahead, stopping to inspect some chamomile blossoming along the edge of a garden bed. He bent to pick a bunch, then, clutching the stems tightly in his chubby fist, toddled along in front of me, making a beeline for the entrance to Adele’s apartment. When we found her setting up morning tea at the eat-in table in her kitchen, Georg ran toward her to show her the flowers.
“Oma!” he greeted her. Georg had seen Adele most every day of his life—but every time we stepped into her house, he seemed surprised to find her there. “Flower. Blue flower.”
“These arewhiteflowers, Georg,” she said. Adele made a great show of taking the makeshift posy and inhaling the scent as if it were a rose. She rested the bouquet on the table, then scooped my daughter from my hip and promptly pressed a hard ginger cookie into her hand. “Chew on that. It’ll help with those sore gums.”
I had no idea how old Adele was. She said it was impolite to ask, and if anyone tried to, she refused to answer. She was Jürgen’s late grandmother’s eldest sister, and he guessed that she was in her late seventies or maybe early eighties. Adele religiously wore a hat outside even in the winter, and her face was surprisingly smooth. Her long white hair was invariably wound into a bun or, for special occasions, elaborate braids.
Like Mayim, she was a part of the circle of our little family. Adele adored Mayim and Jürgen, and she all but worshipped my children. Her feelings for me were obviously more complicated.
“Why Sofie?” I overheard her ask Jürgen when he and I first started dating. “She’s spoiled. Shallow.”
“She’s wonderful,” Jürgen said simply, and although that warmed me, the knowledge that Adele did not approve of our relationship hung over our courtship in the early years.
Jürgen was seven when his family home in Freiburg was bombed in the dying days of the Great War. His parents and infant sister, Ilsa, perished. Adele was in Berlin, on the other side of Germany, grieving the loss of her own family—both of her sons and her beloved husband, Alfred, were all killed at the front. “Three miserable telegrams over three miserable months, and then I was alone,” she told me.
But then a fourth telegram arrived. This one was from a friend of Jürgen’s parents, and it informed Adele that Jürgen had been orphaned and she was the only family they could find who might care for him. Adele’s sister, Jürgen’s grandmother, passed years before, and until that telegram arrived, Adele didn’t realize her nephew had married and had a family of his own.
Still, she had her driver take her to collect Jürgen the next day—ten long hours in a car, traversing the country. She had cared for him ever since. Even now that he was an adult with a family of his own, she still sometimes babied him.
Over the years, I’d made some kind of peace with Adele’s reluctance to embrace me. I’d also made peace with the reality that I had an obligation to care for her anyway. She had been a godsend to my husband, and that meant I was going to do my best to be a godsend to her, whether she liked it or not.
“How are you?” I asked her, and she rolled her eyes at me, as if the very question were absurd.
“Just fine,” she said, quickly turning her attention to Laura. She tickled Laura’s cheek, and my daughter gave a grin, opening her mouth so wide that the inflamed buds of her new teeth were visible on her lower gum. “Where’s our Mayim today?”
“She seemed anxious. I suggested she go visit with her parents.”
“Ah, that is good,” Adele said, nodding in satisfaction but also surprise, as if it were a great miracle that I’d done something that pleased her. “She needs them, and they need her as we wait to see what the great buffoon is going to do to this country.”
I walked around the table to fill her kettle with water. Once I’d set it on the stove, I turned back to try to reassure her with words I didn’t quite believe myself.
“We’ll probably be back at the polls before we know it and common sense will prevail. We just have to be calm and patient.”
“Don’t you dare come into my house and speak to me like I’m a senile old fool, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes.” Adele gently rested Laura on a rug on the floor beside Georg, then dropped herself heavily into a chair at the kitchen table as she shot me a sharp look. “Even if there were another election tomorrow, those Nazis wouldn’t honor the results. They started as thugs in 1920 and they have done nothing but stir up instability ever since. I am old enough to know that history is not an archive—it is a crystal ball. People don’t change, and political parties change even less than that. From the Party’s very inception, its intent has been clear. They plan to segregate Jews from Aryan society and to strip them of their rights.”
“We just have to stay calm and keep level heads,” I repeated. I had plenty of practice ignoring Adele’s rants and her tendency toward hasty judgment. “There isn’t anything we can do about it now anyway.”
Adele sighed wearily, then turned her attention back to the children, seated on the rug beside her.
“I only care for the sake of you young people, you know. Hopefully God will take me soon and I can be with Alfred and our boys, but you and these babies have a lot of living left to do, and so does Mayim and her family. I just can’t see how a man like Hitler can bring anything but chaos, especially for the Jews.”
“We could talk about this all day and we still won’t solve it. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”
“Actually, there are some other unpleasant matters that you and I must discuss,” Adele said. Then she tilted her head at me. “I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to talk alone. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your artwork and furniture vaporizing over the last six months. I know things are tough for you and Jürgen. He tells me that you are determined to hold on to your family home, and I understand that better than most.”
Like me, Adele had grown up in a family of considerable wealth, and Alfred made a comfortable living for them both. But Adele unexpectedly found herself with a young child to care for right when the hyperinflation crisis began.
She laid off her personal staff, and when that wasn’t enough to stabilize her financial situation, she remodeled, converting her family’s expansive ancestral home into apartments. She kept the smallest of these for herself and Jürgen and rented out the rest. Her apartment now comprised only the back part of the ground floor of her building. Her front living room was a studio apartment occupied by an elderly Bavarian couple, and her entryway and stairwell were common space for all of her tenants.
Adele was left with her original kitchen, a bathroom, and her bedroom—and most importantly, private access to her courtyard. She converted that space into something of a miniature farm, keeping chickens and rabbits, and a small collection of fruit trees, berries and vegetables growing in boxes and tubs. Adele had a network of widowed friends all across the city, and in the worst times, I’d watched a seemingly endless stream of silver-haired women visiting each day, leaving with a basket of produce. I once saw Adele’s best friend, Martha Breuer, holding a box as she waited for the trolley. As I approached her, one slender gray ear appeared from the top.
