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“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 notdefend 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 couldhave 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?”
