“Henrik is at a Hitlerjugend camp?” Onkel Albrecht had asked, stunned.
Tante Matilda snatched up the letter. “But we told your brother—”
“He sent Dieter and Willi and he writes that he couldn’t see us having an objection to sending Henrik, too.”
Marie watched as her aunt lurched to standing, leaning heavily on the table with both her hands to brace herself. “Telephone your brother right now.”
“But, Matilda, the cost of calling Germany—”
“I want him out, Albrecht! I read the papers just like you do. I know Hitler’s consolidating power. And then there are other stories. Marta Bleiberg wrote me last month. She said it’s not a good time to be Jewish back at home. They’re thinking about trying to immigrate to New York, but they’re worried about interrupting the boys’ schooling. Adele Tager said that people are being very careful who and what they speak about. I don’t want our son anywhere near any of this. Bring him home, Albrecht,” Tante Matilda finished in a whisper, but there had been no mistaking the force there.
Henrik had arrived on their doorstep a week later, sour-faced and sullen, and Marie had watched for the next six years as Hitler grasped for more power, more glory for Germany. All of the speeches Marie had listened to at her last CPGB meeting had left her with no illusions about the willingness of a man in power to cut a path of destruction in order to satisfy his own vanity. After Chamberlain’s deadline passed at eleven o’clock, there would be no turning back.
She cleared her throat. “May I put the radio on?”
“Where is Henrik?” asked his father, folding the edge of his paper down to peer over the top of his spectacles.
Tante Matilda’s lips thinned again, so Marie knew her aunt had also heard her cousin fumble with the lock and stumble into the flat around two that morning.
Onkel Albrecht sighed. “I’ll wake our son. I cannot imagine anyone sleeping through this morning.”
Marie turned the dial of the large radio inside the polished walnut cabinet that stood in the corner of the room.
“Not too loud,” said her aunt immediately, as though that would somehow make the next few minutes better.
Dutifully, Marie turned the volume dial down just as the doorbell rang. She jumped, but Tante Matilda put her hand up. “Calm, calm, mein Liebchen. I will answer it.”
Marie sank down into a seat, her hands folded in her lap to keep them from trembling as the last prayers of the church service being broadcast finished. Just two minutes until the deadline.
The drawing room door swung open and a rumpled Henrik shuffled in.
“You look terrible,” said Marie automatically.
He scowled at her. “Where’s Mutter?”
“She just went to answer the door,” said Marie, peering closer at him. “You almost slept through a war.”
“I wasn’t sleeping, I was just resting my eyes,” said Henrik, dramatically dropping onto the end of the sofa not occupied by his mother’s abandoned knitting.
“Marie,” called Tante Matilda, “your friends are here.”
Nora and Hazel burst into the room, their hats still perched on their heads although they’d shed their coats between the front door and the sitting room. Her aunt followed them, a pleasant smile fixed on her face.
Marie shot up out of her chair and hugged them each. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Miss Walcott, Mrs. Carey, it is always a pleasure to see you,” said Onkel Albrecht, switching to English out of courtesy to their guests.
“And you, Mr. Müller. I hope you don’t think us rude to come crashing in like this,” said Nora.
“Not at all,” said Onkel Albrecht. “We’re grateful you took care of Marie on Friday.”
“Nathaniel is with his mother this weekend, so I rang Nora up and told her that if there was one place we should be this morning, it’s with you,” said Hazel. “Luckily she was already halfway out the door to a cab, ready to come collect me and loop back around to Bloomsbury. I hope you don’t mind.”
“What happened on Friday?” asked Henrik.
“Nothing,” said Marie.
Her cousin narrowed his eyes, but Marie ignored him, not wanting to revisit the humiliation. It had not been the first time she’d felt anger directed at her because of her nationality. It was simply the first time her friends had seen it.
“Are you sure that—”
But Tante Matilda was cut off by Prime Minister Chamberlain’s voice crackling over the radio.
“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street. This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.”
Marie’s gaze swept around the room. Tante Matilda and Onkel Albrecht gripped each other’s hands, eyes fixed on the radio as though praying Chamberlain would take it all back. Nora wore a grim look of resignation, and Hazel—Hazel was actually tearing up. Only Henrik seemed to be unaffected by the prime minister’s words, which held all their lives in the balance. He sat with a leg hitched up over the arm of the sofa, as rumpled and unimpressed as a nineteenth-century fop.
“I have to tell you now,” the prime minister’s broadcast continued, “that no such undertaking has been received and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.”
A presenter came on then, but slowly Onkel Albrecht rose to switch off the radio, his hand hesitating over the dial before turning back around to face his wife.
“Mein Liebchen,” he started as tears began to roll down her face.
“You said it would not happen again,” Marie’s aunt said in German. “You said that if we moved here we would have a new life and no more war.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say,” Onkel Albrecht murmured.
“Twenty-six years, Albrecht!” Tante Matilda’s voice rose. “Twenty-six! Now you know what’s going to happen to us. We’re enemies. They’ll send us away to those horrid camps they put people in like during the last war.”
Marie’s gaze cut over to her friends, both of whom stared dutifully at their hands, knowing they were witnessing a fight between husband and wife even if they couldn’t understand the language. She knew she should herd them off to her room or out of the house entirely, but she was rooted to the spot.
What will happen to me? Will I be allowed to stay? I don’t even know if I would recognize the house in Leopoldstrasse after all these years. What are we going to do?
Her breath came short and fast, and she pressed a hand to her chest over her frantically beating heart. This was Britain, a people of manners and honors and codes, yet the scars of the last war were deep. Everyone had sent their sons and brothers, husbands and cousins to fight, and so few of them returned. Marie saw the reminders every day. Veterans begging on the streets, some missing limbs or wearing half masks to hide the scars on their faces. The men who dropped their regiment casually into conversation to show they’d done their part for king and country. The furrowed brows as people calculated her age and realized that while she couldn’t possibly have been born before the last war, they still didn’t trust her.