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Sofie

Berlin,Germany

1933

I was home that night later than I’d expected, and as I let myself inside, I hoped Jürgen would be in bed asleep. I wasn’t ready to face his questions about why my dinner with Lydia lasted six hours.

I knew Mayim would be awake, listening for the children from the sitting room. Georg was almost three, and Laura was eight months old. They both slept poorly, but Mayim often read until the small hours anyway and helped with the children overnight. This was one of the magic aspects to having my best friend living under my roof. Mayim was more than just a houseguest to my children—more even than a quasi aunt. She was almost like a third parent to them, a vital and much-loved part of our family structure.

I found her curled up in one of the armchairs in the formal sitting room, reading by the glow of a lamp. The blanket over her lap was her own creation, a jumble of colors knit from yarn left over from her many other projects. As she often did, she had the fire roaring. I kicked off my pumps as I entered the room and breathed a sigh of relief as my tired feet hit the cool floorboards. The sole of my left shoe was badly worn, and a blister was forming.

I could scarcely believe that I couldn’t even afford to repair a shoe. My whole life changed in a single afternoon three years ago, a few months after my father died of a stroke during a business trip to New York. My brother Heinrich was twenty-six years older, and little more than a stranger. But as the eldest, Heinrich inherited the von Meyer estate, and it fell to him to break the news that my generous monthly stipend would be no more. Father mortgaged every family property to the hilt, including the city villa—the home he’d gifted Jürgen and me for our wedding. Heinrich agreed that we could keep our house—but only on the condition that we assumed the mortgage for it too.

I’d never wanted for any material things, and I assumed that would always be the case. It turned out our father was much better at presenting a facade of extreme wealth than he was at managing the modest wealth he did possess, once upon a time.

“How was it?” Mayim asked, as she closed her book and looked up at me. I dropped into the chair opposite her and struggled to put the right words together.

It had been a shocking few months in Berlin. First came the destruction of our parliament building, the Reichstag—then a series of communist attacks across the nation were only narrowly averted. I’d pored over the details of the planned terror campaign in the newspaper: bombs hidden under bridges and in train stations, women and children used as human shields, the execution of swaths of public officials, poison in the Berlin water supply.

Even through all of that, I had never once been as terrified as I was at the rally I just attended with Lydia.

“There was a lot of passionate analysis of the problems we face as a nation, a lot of hints about who’s to really blame.”

“Who might that be?” Mayim said lightly, but I could hear the tightness in her words.

“They managed to be hateful toward the Jews for hours on end without saying the wordJeweven once.”

“They adjust their rhetoric depending on where the rally is being held. In the country, they can say what they really mean. But we’re in the cosmopolitan city, so I suppose here they know to hide their hate beneath a veneer of respectability.”

By the end of the rally, I’d felt physically ill, and that sensation surged all over again as I sat in my living room and thought about what I’d heard.

“AVolksgemeinschaftis possible!” one speaker thundered, as he painted the image of a Germanpeople’s community,which sounded almost Utopian until he followed it up with references to the racial purity it would be built upon. Another looked to the past and found a villain he didn’t need to name. “The Treaty of Versailles was designed only to cripple us! We were stabbed in the back by those who agreed to it.” We all knew this was a clear reference to the long-standing conspiracy theory that Germany had not reallylost the Great War, but that our brave soldiers were betrayed by those at home, mostly Jews, who fomented unrest and undermined the war effort.

Another man spoke in generalities—rattling off a long list of the challenges we faced as a nation, from economic woes to the ever-increasing political instability—and then he simply shrugged and said, “Germany should be for Germans. We shall bear our national misfortune no longer.” That use of the wordmisfortunestruck an uncomfortable chord. I’d seen it on the Nazi posters around the city, usually beneath a crude, offensive caricature of a Jew.

“People seemed enthralled, Mayim. Like they were under a spell,” I said uneasily. “It was a flashy affair—almost like a concert, with an orchestra and a choir and boundless enthusiasm and passion. I just don’t understand how a bit of music and some theatrical speeches could turn a crowd like that into a bunch of raging anti-Semites.”

A flicker of uncertainty crossed Mayim’s face. We had been best friends since before we even started at elementary school—our families once residing in side-by-side, twin mansions in Potsdam. I knew her well enough to know she had something to say.

“Speak your mind,” I prompted. Mayim sighed impatiently.

“You have no idea how anti-Semitic this country really is, Sofie. You can’t understand it the way my family does.”

“Your family is my family,” I said. I was a late-in-life surprise for my mother, who gave birth to me when she was forty-eight years old. Anna von Meyer had no interest in starting all over again nine years after her fifth son, so she generally left my care to my nannies. My family was cold and formal, so I much preferred spending time at Mayim’s house, with her lovely warm mother and her jovial, kind father. Even Mayim’s little brother, Moshe, had always annoyed and amused me.

“You’re my best friend in the whole world—a sister if not by blood, then by choice. But you can’tknow what it’s really like to live your whole life under the shadow of hate. To wake up every morning knowing that there’s a large portion of your own countrymen who would sooner see you gone. You’ve seen the big, openly aggressive moments—but you don’t notice the way people look at me when I’m on the trolley car. You might notice the No Jews sign in the windows of some stores, but don’t hear the undertone in the grocer’s tone when he counts my change, or the casual way people joke about me and my family, sometimes right in front of our faces. You said it was like the crowd tonight had been turned into raging anti-Semites by the rally, yes?” I nodded slowly and she shrugged. “All Hitler and his ilk are doing is connecting with something that has always been there.”

I knew that in other countries, even Poland, where Mayim’s mother was born, many Jews lived in Jewish Quarters or Districts. It was different in Germany. In my country, especially in Berlin, Jews lived and studied and worked alongside everyone else, so much so that I often had no idea if a person was or wasn’t Jewish unless their surname gave it away. For the first time, it occurred to me that perhaps our integrated society also gave cover to subtle incidents of bigotry. Even Lydia sometimes made those silly, casual remarks about the Jews.

“What about people like Lydia and Karl?” I asked hesitantly. “You and Lydia are friends.”

“Lydia and Iwerefriends,” Mayim said quietly. “I hardly see her these days. I highly doubt she or Karl have been spending much time socializing with anyone with a surname likeNussbaumsince they joined the Party.”

That was the other great shock, and one I still couldn’t make sense of: Lydia and Karl had joined the Nazi party.

“But why?” I’d blurted when they told me, too surprised to temper my reaction.