The German Wife(18)
“Karl has been so busy that I haven’t managed to catch him on the phone, and he no longer has time to attend our meetings,” Jürgen admitted. Karl and Jürgen were both founding members of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel, and they spent their Saturday mornings tinkering with homemade rockets at an abandoned dump outside of Berlin. Their dream was to design a rocket that would take man to the moon, a prospect so absurd I struggled to understand why Jürgen even entertained it. “That’s what concerns me, Sofie. Karl is consumed by his work with the Party these days. I can’t imagine any position he knows of would be one I’d be interested in.”
“You think the job is with the Nazis?” I said, heart sinking.
“I fear it is, yes.”
“The fervor tonight shocked me. I don’t know what happens to this country if those men find their way to power.”
“There are some who believe the Nazis set that fire in the Reichstag, you know.”
“Wasn’t it the Dutchman?”
“A mentally unwell Dutchman, with a loose association to an independent communist party in his home country, was somehow able to single-handedly destroy Germany’s parliament building?” Jürgen asked wryly.
“To think that the only thing standing between those dreadful terror attacks planned against this city was the SA.” The Sturmabteilung was one of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wings. They were also known as Brownshirts, named for their uniform, and they’d been instrumental in uncovering a mass terrorist threat the previous week. It terrified me to think we were days away from catastrophe and the only thing that saved us was one of the Nazi paramilitary organizations.
“The Nazis have yet to release a single shred of evidence about those terror attacks, even though they promised they would immediately. I think we have to at least consider the possibility that the terror plot wasn’t real.”
“But the papers say—”
“This is my point, my love,” Jürgen interrupted me. “The papers say what the Nazis want them to say, now that the Reichstag Fire decree enables them to control what’s published. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that some unstable man supposedly commits an act of terrorism and by sunset the next day the government has discovered some fantastic plot to upend life as we know it, arrested most of their opponents, and passed a decree overriding our constitutional protections? If they really do have this overwhelming evidence, why would they need a right to arrest and detain their opposition indefinitely, without so much as a trial? And why would they need to end the free press or end our right to personal privacy? In the context of some of the things those men have said in the past, this Nazi power grab leaves me feeling anxious.”
“Surely even the Nazis wouldn’t lie about such serious, world-changing events,” I said uncertainly. “If those reports were fiction, how could we trust anything politicians say ever again? We couldn’t.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Sofie. What worries me most is that in fraught economic times like these, with men starving to death on the streets, people cast their votes impulsively, out of desperation instead of reason and compassion. The Nazis know this, and they purposefully present a powerful front—that’s why they love to hold military parades. That’s what I fear the announcements about the terror plots were designed to do—to stir up more uncertainty and then to paint themselves as the only solution.”
I’d been feeling anxious about the future for a long while, but that was the first night my worries kept me awake until dawn. And I was right to worry. A few weeks later, when the election results were announced, we learned that 44 percent of Germans had voted for the Nazi party. Joining forces with the Workers’ Party, they easily formed a majority in the parliament.
The Nazis were no longer a fringe party, no longer hovering on the edge of the German political system. Now they were at the very center of it, and from there, they could shape it as they pleased.
11
Lizzie
Dallam County, Texas
1935
“Is Mother ready?” Henry called. “Let’s go!” He only saw Betsy at church now, and he didn’t want to waste a minute of his only chance to be with her.
“She’s over at the tree,” I muttered as I peered at myself in the hall mirror, turning this way and that to see myself from all angles. I’d lost some weight that year and my dresses hung on me like sacks, so Mother took in one of her old dresses for me to wear for my Sunday outfit. It was an older style, stiff cotton with little black buttons down the front of the bodice, leading to a heavy flared skirt.
“Go get her, sis,” Henry said, pleading. “You know I hate going over there.”
“So do I,” I said pointedly. There was something unnerving about the way Mother held herself on Sunday mornings when she visited that bench. She often sat slumped and melancholy, as if her grief were still fresh but she had to condense it down into a single hour each week. Elsie had been lost for more than twenty-five years. That Mother was still so sad after all that time never failed to confuse Henry and me.
Henry glanced down at his watch and then sighed impatiently and left the house. I heard movement from Mother and Daddy’s bedroom, so I walked quickly down the hall, knocked, and pushed the door open, holding my breath while I waited to see how Dad was that day. Ever since Henry borrowed that money, the pattern of his good days and bad days reversed. It was as if he’d suffered a terrible injury that left him with a permanent disability—only the injury wasn’t to his body, but to his pride.