The German Wife(34)
“Oh, no nannies this time. Better if it’s just us, I think,” Lydia said lightly.
“You know very well that Mayim is not our nanny, Lydia,” I snapped. “Do you have a problem with her?”
“Of course not,” Lydia said, laughing easily, as if I were foolish to ask. “I’d prefer we keep it a small group, that’s all.”
Karl and Jürgen now worked closely together and there seemed no easy way to extract myself from my friendship with Lydia, even after a dinner party that removed any doubt.
I’d been anxious about the dinner for weeks. Lydia assured me we needed new dresses for the occasion, and while I was grateful to be able to visit the dressmaker without worrying about the cost, her insistence only reminded me what a milestone this event would be. The rocket program was almost two years old and the tiny team that once comprised only Jürgen and Karl had grown to dozens of men. This would be the first social gathering of the most senior of the staff with their wives—and most importantly, Jürgen and Karl’s boss, Otto Werner.
“Well, aren’t you a vision?” Jürgen said, when I joined him in the foyer. He had been paid a huge bonus when the rocket program successfully launched a small prototype the previous summer, and he’d given me every cent. I saved some in the safe in Jürgen’s office and gave the rest to Mayim, and she convinced her parents to take it. After Levi lost his civil service job, he found work in a quarry—but within a few months, he badly injured his back. Now he couldn’t work at all—some days, the injury left him bedbound. The family had been surviving on Moshe’s scant wages from his part-time bakery job before school, as well as help from the Reichsvertretung, the Jewish self-help charity. Jürgen and I agreed that we would give them every Reichsmark we could spare.
I admired the fit of Jürgen’s double-breasted silver-gray suit, and the tight knot of his navy-and-white polka-dot tie. He scooped a gray hat from the rack, then extended his elbow toward me.
“Shall we?”
But then the children appeared on the landing, dutifully coming downstairs to say goodbye. Georg was five and looking forward to entering the Grundschule elementary school program in the summer. Laura, at three, had a striking combination of my auburn hair and Jürgen’s thick waves, his bright blue eyes and my petite nose.
“Mama, you look so pretty,” Georg told me, eyes wide. The morning of the party, I’d been to the salon and had my hair set, and I’d purchased a new lipstick. I was touched that my little boy noticed the extra effort.
“Thank you, treasure.”
“Laura has some lipstick too?” Laura asked hopefully. Mayim, who joined us in the foyer, hid a smile as she extended a hand. Laura ran unsteadily down the last set of stairs to take it.
“Maybe you can try some of mine on after we have dinner,” Mayim told her. Laura gasped in delight as they waved us off.
I was nervous about meeting Otto. He wasn’t just Jürgen and Karl’s boss and a manager with the program—he was also a senior member of the Nazi party. Otto’s wife, Helene, would be in attendance too, as well as the other senior staff from the Kummersdorf program...and our neighbors Dietger and Anne Schneider, who lived across the road from us.
Dietger had recently been appointed the official Nazi Blockleiter—our neighborhood block warden. He was the perfect choice. He had always been the neighborhood gossip, and the authority that came with the role only amplified his keen observation skills. I had no idea how he kept abreast of the business of the entire neighborhood, but if a window was smashed, he knew how it happened, seemingly before the owner did. If a husband and wife had an argument, he knew who was at fault and who had been wronged. It was because of Dietger that Jürgen, Mayim, and I realized we had no choice but to adopt the now-standard greeting—the Hitler salute. Another neighbor from around the corner, Leopold Braunbeck, refused to give Dietger the salute. By the next morning, Leopold was imprisoned in one of the horrid concentration camps the Nazis had set up to punish their political enemies. It was months before Leopold was released, and when he came home, he was a quiet, compliant shadow of his former self.
Maybe once upon a time, we’d have said a variation on hello or good day a handful of times each day, but now we were absurd parrots, greeting every person we encountered with a Heil Hitler.
Dietger’s remarkable ability to keep track of the neighborhood’s business was deeply unnerving. In the beginning, I dared to mention this to some of the neighbors, and we all agreed we were feeling more than a little paranoid. But over time, as none of us could figure out how he knew so much about our private lives, we realized it wasn’t even safe to speculate. A call from a Blockleiter to the Gestapo guaranteed trouble, usually starting with a knock at your front door in the middle of the night.
Our second-story bedroom window opened to the street, and I’d heard some of those overnight visits. First came the roar of an engine, then the sound of hard-soled boots on the pavement and men scurrying like rats. Even if I didn’t hear the thumping on the door and the cries of protest as people were dragged from their homes, I often heard the car speeding away. Dietger was always there, seemingly delighted at the cascading fallout from his phone calls.
“What should I expect tonight?” I asked Jürgen, as he drove us to the party in his new Daimler 15. I pressed my hands over my stomach, trying to quell the nervous butterflies. Jürgen’s entire life had changed with that new job—he now worked from sunup to sunset, six or even seven days a week, out at Kummersdorf, a forty-minute drive from Berlin. But while I’d been a firsthand witness to the changes in wider Berlin society, I felt so removed from Jürgen’s work life.