She nodded, her jaw set firmly. She offered no farewell.
I longed to kiss her. To tell her how much I loved her and how well I would take care of her.
Instead, I let her pass and continue on her way.
A week later, a letter was delivered to my bunk covered in Margarethe’s familiar script. It hadn’t gone through the post, so I had no idea who had left the note. Hastily, I tore into the envelope, praying it spoke of her safe arrival in France.
Max,
By the time you read this letter, I will be gone. Someone else who needed your government’s protection far more than I do has taken my place. Know that I am safe and well. I will do all I can to find you before long. I will keep our child safe for you in hopes that we can raise her to be a force for good in a world given to evil. Forgive me, darling. I will find you when the long night ends and we are all returned to the light.
All my love,
Margarethe
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BACK TO BATTLE
JOHANNA
July 5, 1943
Berlin, Germany
Once again, we stood in our tiny bedroom in our little cottage on the lake, and I had to play the dutiful wife sending her husband to war. Harald was summoned to report for his new assignment, just three weeks after Ansel made the offer. Though he was ghostly pale and winced when he walked more than twenty paces, the doctors cleared him for duty. No doubt they’d been ordered to do so. Harald was ashen faced as he donned his new uniform, and my cheeks matched the starched linen of his shirt.
“Perhaps you can effect change from within. Maybe some of these men are more reasonable than we fear.” It was a grasping hope—like trying to cling to blades of grass in a hurricane—but it was the closest thing to comfort I could offer him.
“Your optimism seems to have given way to foolishness, Liebchen,” he said as he buttoned the calves of his pants that fit snugly inside the requisite jackboots. “They are nothing but meat-headed thugs with only enough brainpower to march over innocent people.”
He spoke the unvarnished truth, and I admired him too much to refute it.
“All the same, there isn’t much choice.” I busied my hands folding a spare shirt and adding it to his case, for fear I’d begin wringing them and make this all the worse for him. “Do what you must to survive, Harald. Just do all you can to come home to me.”
“There’s the sensible girl I know and love. A glimmer of candor.” He pulled on the gleaming black boots, though he never looked directly at them. He stood, and I barely recognized the man I married. Gone was the man of grace and elegance, and in his place stood a man who was dressed to be part of the war machine. The uniforms were designed to be sleek and evoke a sort of nobility. The effect on Harald, a man who wore nobility as gracefully as a bespoke suit, was just heavy and brutish.
“I’m just sorry it has to be this way,” I said, unable to look at him as he adjusted his various pins and medals. “You ought to be back in the classroom doing what you were born to do.”
“That’s the last place they want me,” he said. “I’m as dangerous to them in the classroom as the Allies are to them in a tank. They’ve given me this position to keep an eye on me and to keep me under their boot.”
“Better under their boot than in front of a firing squad,” I said, mustering the courage to look up. “Just get through this and we can set about mending what these brutes have done after the war is over.”
“As you say,” he replied, examining his uniformed reflection in a mirror, grimacing. “Though God knows what will be left to mend. At some point, even the most skilled tailor will abandon tattered trousers to the scrap heap.”
“Germany is still worth saving, my love. She isn’t ready for the scrap heap just yet.”
“I pray nightly that you’re right, Liebchen. If that is true, then there is still hope. Where there is hope, there can still be peace.”
I smoothed the shoulders of his uniform and kissed his freshly shaved cheek that still smelled of the spice and leather of his good soap. He wasn’t a soldier; he was a poet. A philosopher. He had as much business being sent to war as a cabinetmaker being sent to design airplane engines.
As I kissed him goodbye, I could see tears looming in the corners of his eyes. He didn’t need to speak to tell me what caused his heart to ache in this moment. It had been defensible in his mind to serve in the Wehrmacht. No matter who was in power politically, Germany was still worth defending. But to be part of Hitler’s SS guard, as he was now, was tantamount to wholesale approval of the Führer’s politics and methods. He was now forced to abandon his principles to save his very life.
“Don’t forget who you are, Harald,” I said. “You’re a good man.”
“We’ll see how long they allow that to last, Liebchen.”
The one blessing about Harald’s new assignment was that he was able to come home most nights, though rarely in time for dinner. He’d taken to casting off his uniform at the door, unwilling to pollute more of the house than the entryway with it, falling into bed for a few hours of restless sleep, then stumbling back out to the entryway to dress and return to work at first light. I could feel him growing leaner as I held him in my arms each night. The layer of flesh over his ribs grew more meager with each passing day, but there was no convincing him to take a meal when he returned home, nor even a proper breakfast in the morning before he left.
“He refused my fried eggs and good sausage this morning,” Mama said, shaking her head. “It was almost as good as a breakfast before the war. I had thought certainly it would tempt him.”
Mama fretted about him every morning over coffee, lamenting that he wouldn’t accept so much as a slice of toast with butter and jam before he left. It was the same refrain each morning, and while she only echoed the sentiments of my heart, to hear her speak them aloud did nothing to ease my worries. It only served to make me feel more useless in finding a solution to them.
“Eat the eggs, save the sausage,” I ordered. After a month of his service, I no longer had the heart to commiserate with her on the matter. “I’m going into the office.”
She looked at the clock on the wall. Not quite seven in the morning. To Mama’s credit, she swallowed her rebuke at the hour. The long days I was putting in were scarcely less demanding than Harald’s. The office was the only place where my mind could take proper refuge from the distress I felt about Harald and the state of the war in general, or whether I even felt I wanted Germany to win it. She clicked her teeth around her censure and tucked into the eggs I’d refused.
I stowed my bicycle at the entrance of the office. It was so early that there was no hum of activity. Only the soft footsteps of the cleaning crew who had come to ensure the facility was gleaming before the arrival of the commanding officers and a few mechanics who worked the earliest shifts. Louisa was the only other member of the senior staff on site. Her eyes widened a moment upon seeing me, but she bit back any derisive comment she might have had. Perhaps she knew Harald was serving again and understood my need for refuge in my work. Perhaps she’d grown a tad kinder over the course of the war. In either case, I wasn’t going to risk encouraging her barbed tongue by taking notice of the change in her demeanor.