“I’m so sorry to drag you away from whatever it was you were doing,” I said, reaching to shake his hand.
“No problem at all, Dr. Cohen,” he said, flashing a quick smile. “It sounds interesting.”
“Blumenthal,” I corrected, realizing I’d finally reached a decision on the question of my name. It was Blumenthal on most everything official anyway, but I’d gone by Cohen conversationally out of deference to Greg. And my mother’s insistence that women who kept their own names or who hyphenated weren’t truly invested in their marriages. “And Beth, if you don’t mind,” I added.
“James,” he said, accepting my handshake. “So, given the parameters of what you have, this is going to be quite a hunt.”
“I figured as much,” I said.
“Without a last name, I can’t verify that we can find anything of use, but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“I’m willing to give it a shot,” I said. “I think it will mean a lot to my dad if we just try.”
“It’s not hopeless,” he said. “You’d be amazed at how much can be found with a shred of information, a fistful of determination, and a dollop of luck.”
I smiled at the optimism that reminded me so much of Gwen. “You sound like a baker,” I said as he escorted me to one of the study rooms. It was equipped with several sleek desktop computers and a large table perfect for spreading out documents.
“I make some of the finest focaccia in Southern California,” he said with a wink as he fired up a machine.
“A bold claim, sir,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. I’d never made focaccia, but it couldn’t be that big of a challenge after my mother’s challah.
“Fortune rarely favors the faint of heart,” he said. The machine had booted up, and I waited as he entered his credentials and navigated through several databases. We searched for women named Margarethe born in Germany between 1918 and 1922, and thousands of records were returned. We filtered the searches to exclude those who had died before early 1945, the last year we knew she was alive, which eliminated a decent number, but not enough to consider the field narrowed in any respect. We looked at hundreds of the entries for Margarethe, but nothing seemed to mesh quite properly with Dad’s story.
“What if her name wasn’t even Margarethe? What if she gave Dad a false name to protect him?”
“Then that makes our job here exponentially harder,” he said. I exhaled and rubbed my temples. He patted my hand. “Harder, but not impossible. I’ve found more with less, so just keep the faith.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RELUCTANT RETREAT
MAX
December 16, 1944
Hürtgen Forest, Germany
After nearly three months of slaughter, the brass finally conceded that there was no taking the territory from the Germans. We’d lost thousands of lives during the invasion of Normandy and the days after, but though the sacrifice was great, we could see that each step farther on those beaches was taking us a step closer to liberating France. There was nothing gained from three months in the Death Factory of Hürtgen Forest aside from irrevocably broken souls. We could have continued slogging on amid the shattered trees, but in my bones I knew they needed us elsewhere. I could only hope we’d have better luck at making advances, wherever it was we were going.
It had been almost three months since I’d seen Margarethe. Each day since our tryst in the woods, I went to the clearing to give her supplies. I prayed she’d leave a note or something to indicate she’d been there. I occasionally took the supplies in a pack from a deceased soldier—there were plenty to be had—and left them in plain sight in various spots in the forest in hopes that she would find them. They were always waiting undisturbed the following day. My only consolation was that it was possible she’d found a safer place to hide Jonas.
I worried for Jonas and Heide too. I hoped the battle that churned around them hadn’t claimed them in the middle of his convalescence, but mainly I thought of Margarethe. I didn’t even know if she’d made it back home after our afternoon together. I would have died happy if that sweet hour had been my last, but it shouldn’t have been hers.
It was the last day I’d be able to look for Margarethe, and I knew that if I didn’t find her, she’d be lost to me forever. That very thought bore through my soul as cruelly as a German bullet. I went to the clearing. I felt my heart hammer against my rib cage when I noticed a female form hiding in the bushes.
Heide.
She looked terrified but seemed to relax as I approached. She didn’t trust me fully, but she knew I posed less of a threat to her than any other soldier—American or German.
“F-for you,” she stuttered, handing me an envelope with her shaking hand.
It was simply labeled Max in a perfect formal script.
“She wants you to be safe,” Heide said in stilted English. “You must be very careful, please.”
“I will,” I promised, pronouncing my words carefully for her benefit. “Why couldn’t she come?”
“Her husband—is a very bad man,” Heide said, growing paler as if the words would somehow summon him where we stood.
“Husband?” I said, disbelieving.
“Yes.” Heide’s face scrunched up in frustration at her lack of vocabulary. “You please not think bad of her. She was young. She had no choice.”
“No,” I said solemnly. “Never.”
“Read her letter. Be safe for her.”
“Yes. How is Jonas?” I added as an afterthought, embarrassed I hadn’t thought to ask sooner.
“Better, I think. Still sore. Slow.”
“Are you safe?” I asked.
“Do not worry. You go. I will worry for Jonas. I must go.” As if to punctuate her words, the boom of artillery shattered the relative quiet of the woods.
I returned to camp, the unopened letter in my pocket. The site was chaos as the army prepared to move the remaining troops to another area on the front. We hadn’t been told where we were going, and it didn’t seem the higher-ups knew all that much more than we did. They did what they could to act like everything was orderly for the sake of the younger men, but no one was terribly convinced by the charade. Trying to look absorbed in official business, I opened Margarethe’s letter and secured the page to a clipboard. Her careful script looked as though it belonged on the page of a Shakespearean folio.
My dearest Max,
If you are reading this, Heide has found you, and that makes me a very happy woman. I wish the world had granted us more time together, and I hope deep in my heart that we may yet have a chance to be together. I pray my work to end the war is enough to absolve me of being born on the wrong side of it, but only time will tell. I will try to find you again if ever I can, but such a thing will not be easy. My husband is a powerful man, and I cannot risk him learning what I’ve been doing. More than my life would be at risk. I am being watched constantly as it is, and I fear that his reprisal would be brutal if he knew even the merest details of my work, let alone of our time together. Please know, your sweetness and kindness will remain one of the fondest memories of my life. No matter what happens, I will carry you in my heart always. Win this war, my darling. For all our sakes.