The German Wife(51)
“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?”
“Truthfully, Sofie, it would be a relief,” he admitted, staring down into his wine. His shoulders were stiff, his expression taut. In the time that passed since he took that “miracle” job, my husband had aged. There were fine lines around his eyes and bags beneath them.
“Has it not been going well?”
“Hitler is rebuilding the German military. It will be public knowledge soon.” I gasped in shock. “Otto says that Hitler expects the world will sit idly by, and then the remilitarization will snowball. The rocket program has made incredible gains, but that only means that if they asked us to weaponize the technology, we could do so in just a few years. I’ve been trying to figure out how to extract myself for some time, but it’s not going to be easy,” he admitted, dropping his voice to a whisper. “They need me too much. They’ll never let me walk away. We’d have to do this quickly and quietly. If you’re serious about this—”
“I am,” I blurted.
Our eyes locked over the wine. He nodded.
“Saturday. We’ll pick a border, find the back roads, and pretend we’re just going for a drive.”
“This Saturday?”
“If we’re doing this, we need to do it right away.”
“Okay,” I breathed, my heart rate accelerating.
“Talk to Mayim tomorrow. I’ll talk to Adele. Other than that, we cannot breathe a word of it.”
23
Lizzie
Huntsville, Alabama
1950
Calvin was leaning against the kitchen door, looking up at the ceiling, as if he were praying for patience. This conversation was one I could not afford for my brother to overhear, so I waited until Henry was in bed before I confronted Calvin about Gail’s suspicions.
“So? Is it true?” I asked. “Was Jürgen Rhodes in the SS?”
“Lizzie, sweetheart, you know I can’t talk to you about this,” Cal said, but he avoided my eyes as he spoke.
“My God,” I whispered, my mouth going dry. “He lives on Sauerkraut Hill with the rest of them, doesn’t he? There’s an SS officer living two blocks away from us? Free in our community?”
“Even I don’t know for sure,” Calvin said flatly. “But yes, when Newsome admitted he’d seen evidence a senior scientist was in the SS, it was Jürgen he was referring to.”
“This is an outrage!”
“Lizzie. Don’t fly off the handle.”
“Even you said in the beginning that it wasn’t right—”
“I should never have said anything to you about any of this! It just never occurred to me that we’d end up living in the same community as these men,” Calvin said.
“Because you knew it was dangerous!”
“I was nervous in the beginning, yes. But when it comes to Jürgen, I’m certain that the good he can do for this country far outweighs any risk he might have posed.”
“Calvin, you have an SS officer working with American Jews!” I gasped. “Do you really think he’s suddenly decided they are worthy of drawing breath after all?”
“Jürgen works closely with Eli Klein and I’ve never seen him speak to that man with anything but the utmost respect. Trust me when I say that man has no interest at all in anything outside of rocketry and his family.”
“Men like that don’t change, Calvin,” I whispered. My voice thickened with emotion as confused tears sprang to my eyes. Calvin gently touched my upper arm, his gaze steady.
“War is brutal, Lizzie. Even if the rumors are true, there’s possibly a whole background and context we can never understand.”
“War is brutal because of men like that. This war didn’t start itself—Nazis started it. Nazis perpetuated it. Nazis murdered millions of innocent people. There is no doubt at all who the villains are here.”
We both heard movement in the hallway then. Cal and I stared at one another in alarm. Then he spun and pulled the door open. Henry was standing there, frowning.
“I thought you went to bed,” I blurted. I could not have sounded guiltier if I tried.
“I just wanted a glass of milk,” Henry said defensively. He moved slowly, opening the refrigerator, pouring the milk, putting the bottle back into the fridge. As he was leaving the room, he shot me a pointed look.