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Sofie

Berlin,Germany

1939

Jürgen and Karl came home for a week’s vacation in June that year. I’d seen Jürgen for a few days around Adele’s funeral, but we were both so soaked in grief I’d barely looked at him then. This trip was different. In all those months we spent apart, Gisela learned to crawl and be terrified of strangers—she now cried whenever Jürgen tried to pick her up. And over those months apart, Jürgen changed too.

He was quiet, spending long hours alone in his study even though he was supposed to be taking a break. After a few days of this, I stood in front of his desk. He looked up from a blueprint and his gaze was hollow.

“We need to go for a walk and enjoy this beautiful summer day,” I said flatly, propping my hand on my hip. “I am going to put Gisela in the stroller. I’ll see you outside in a moment.”

He didn’t even try to argue. He heard in my tone that I would not be deterred. We began to walk toward the park, and when we reached it, I motioned toward a shaded bench beneath a large linden tree. There we sat side by side, and I turned Gisela around to face us. She eyed Jürgen warily.

“This last year has been very difficult, but the technology is more marvelous than even I dreamed it could be. The next prototype is the A4. This rocket will launch vertically, straight up like this.” Slowly, almost dreamily, he raised his hand. “It will ascend at an angle we’ve calculated with incredible precision—every movement stabilized and guided by a finely tuned gyroscope. After maybe a minute, the propulsion ends. Now this rocket is somewhere in the order of sixty miles straight up. Maybe it even comes near the edge of space. Isn’t that remarkable?”

“Sixty miles—”

“But this is just the culmination point,” he interrupted, his expression twisting until he looked disgusted. “Because now it starts its descent, and it travels just above the speed of sound. Do you know what that means?” I shook my head, but he didn’t seem to notice. He brought his hand down sharply into a fist on the other side of his lap, then snapped it open, exposing his palm. “The accuracy and range will be beyond anything the world has ever seen. And the missile travels faster than the sound it produces, so there is no warning at all—certainly no time for an air raid siren. Say we launch this from the border, as a family in France or Poland or Belgium or Switzerland sits in their kitchen eating their breakfast. That family is gonebefore they ever knew something was coming for them. The mother has no time to scream to the father thatshe’s going to get the baby. The father has no time to push his son into the cellar to save his life.”

Jürgen had always insisted he didn’t remember anything about the morning his family died. He had been lying to me, or at least avoiding a painful truth.

“You were eating breakfast when the bomb hit your house?” I asked gently.

Jürgen suddenly sat up, as if shaking off the memory.

“My point is that scenario I just described to you would seem like a fanciful nightmare to most people, but it’s almost within reach.”

“We just have to keep playing the game,” I said. “Remember? Listen for the music. Ignore the dissonant notes?”

“So I build these bombs and let someone else care about where they land?”

“That’s what you have to do.”

“When I’m refining the design of a booster or I’m tinkering with the engineers or I’m planning a test launch, I don’t think about that theoretical family eating their breakfast. Sometimes I even manage to forget that the sum of all the moving parts is a weapon. But as soon as the work stops, that family is allI can think about.”

I looked to Gisela. She was kicking her legs impatiently, craning her neck to look behind her, eager to continue the journey through the park.

“We both know you don’t have a choice. The cost of anything but perfect compliance would simply be too high.”

He slid his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close, planting a gentle kiss above my ear.

“I’m just following orders. I’m doing what I have to do to stay alive. To keep my family safe,” he murmured.

“Exactly,” I said.

“That’s what I tell myself a hundred times a day, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if that theoretical family eating their breakfast would be satisfied by those excuses. Should we really prioritize the safety of our family over the safety of theirs, Sofie? And does the equation change if, one day in the not-too-distant future, we’re prioritizing the safety of our family over hundreds or thousandsof families who might find themselves the target of one of my rockets?”

I turned to stare at him. Our faces were so close I could feel his shaky breath against my lips.

“I don’t know what to say,” I whispered, stricken.

“I don’t know what the answers are either,” he whispered back. “But we have a moral obligation to ask ourselves these questions.”

And it was clear, from the torment in his eyes, he’d been confronting that truth for some time.

Lydia and Karl invited us to join them for dinner the evening before Karl and Jürgen were to return to Peenemünde. While the staff prepared the meal, the nannies supervised the children as they played in a paddling pool in the gardens. Lydia, heavily pregnant with another set of twins, looked exhausted but smiled wearily as she handed us each a glass of champagne.