The German Wife(101)
Jürgen was the next to receive his medal, and when he was invited to the podium, I watched him closely. He had been quiet and pensive by my side until they called his name. He played the role so well, he momentarily looked like a different man as he stood—a stony, cruel version of the man I’d loved for my entire adult life.
He barked the victory salute back at the official, his gaze firm and his muscles tense. But once he’d returned to his seat beside me, and when the lights in that room went down and the curtain again opened, the burst of flame from another rocket lit up over the lawn. I dragged my eyes from the rocket so that I could watch Jürgen’s reaction to it.
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 would this be 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, “I should hang.”
“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.