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“Excellent. Good girl,” Adele said, nodding in admiration, and I felt a flush of pleasure. “A thousand will do nicely.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Perhaps Mayim can buy some favor with the consulate staff when she goes to request the endorsement.”
“She and Levi need to leave, don’t they?” I whispered. Adele nodded.
“Mayim will notleave Levi to fend for himself, and I understand that too.”
We waited weeks for news. Every now and again, I’d whisper to Adele for an update, but she would whisper back fiercely, “Don’t you think I’d have told you if I’d heard anything?”
I went to check on Adele one morning and found her waiting at her kitchen table, sipping a cup of tea. We greeted one another as we always would, and then she pointed to a note she’d scrawled on a piece of paper.
Mayim has tried everything without success. There are rumors that those in her position will be deported soon but Poland will not grant them entry. I don’t know what’s going to happen. All we can do is pray.
“There’s really nothing more we can do?” I mouthed. Adele shook her head sadly and motioned toward her fireplace. I tore up the note and dropped it into the fireplace, watching as the flames curled the strips of paper and turned them into ash.
If you’d asked me before that day, I might have said I was accustomed to hopelessness. But knowing that my friend was in such desperate straits and realizing there wasnochoice I could make to help her, I discovered there were depths of hopelessness I’d never before experienced.
Gisela was especially unsettled that night in early November. I was up and down trying to nurse her back to sleep, becoming more frustrated with every new cry. Eventually, I gave up on sleep and moved with her to the sitting room.
Just as I settled, I was startled by the sound of breaking glass and shouting on the street. I froze in place, telling myself I had nothing to worry about. If there was any sign of trouble, Dietger would have the Gestapo or the SA here in minutes. If I just waited patiently, I’d hear the fuss die down.
But instead came more shouting, many voices now, and then the sound of screaming in the distance—someone pleading for help, the tinkle and crunch of more glass breaking, and then more and morescreaming.
I reached for the light switch, my hands shaking so hard by then that I almost knocked the thing over. The light went out, and now the sitting room was almost dark, the dim glow of the streetlights falling in lines across the room through gaps around the drapes. Gisela grizzled and I shushed her, jiggling her in my arms both to expend some of my anxiety and to rock her back to sleep. The sounds of movement were closer—now heavy boots against the sidewalk, many boots, not just a handful of troublemakers as I’d first imagined.
Then came shouts and cheers, and was that a hint of smoke in the air?
I was alone in the house with the children. I’d resented Jürgen’s absence more times than I could count, but that night, I almost hated him for it, even though I knew that he loathed the distance every bit as much as I did.
I slipped from the sitting room, back up the stairs to settle Gisela in her bedroom, but then returned to the ground floor. I tried peeking around the drapes but couldn’t quite figure out what the activity was—not until my eyes adjusted and I recognized the Brownshirts outside my window. This was government-sanctioned chaos.
I hoped Adele was somehow sleeping through the noise—it was possible; she’d been so exhausted lately. The smoke in the air grew stronger as the crowd expanded and their rowdiness expanded with it. Had our national tinderbox finally been set?
Suddenly I realized that just beyond the low hedge at the front of my house, Dietger was in his coat, talking to an SA officer. I walked briskly to the foyer and pulled a coat over my nightclothes, then quietly opened the front door. Dietger looked up at me in alarm.
“Sofie, tonight is notthe night to be out,” he said stiffly, glancing along the street, as if he was keeping watch for danger.
“What’s happening?” I asked, wrapping the coat tighter around myself. Now that I was outside, I could hear the distant sounds of sirens and gunshots. The chaos seemed to be coming from every direction. It sounded like the end of the world.
“Don’t worry,” Dietger assured me calmly. “Aryan homes are perfectly safe—the police will ensure it.”
“Safe from what?”
“The Jews murdered a German diplomat in Paris. What you are hearing is a necessary retaliation.”
Had sleep deprivation driven me insane, or did that make no sense? In the distance, the wail of sirens and the sounds of gunshots and the tinkling of glass crashing to the ground continued.
“Paris,” I repeated, fumbling to make sense of it all. “German Jews murdered someone in Paris?”
“That’s right.”
“But...what’sthisall about, then?” I asked numbly.
Dietger waved his arms, vaguely motioning toward the street. His gaze was hard.
“The Führer has decided that extreme measures must be taken.”
