“Ah, Daughter,” he said with a sad and heavy voice. “You have asked the question that now is plaguing all true believers in this country we love so deeply. Honestly, I just don’t know. I have been wrestling with it for years already. Such wrong is being done—what is to be the response of God’s people? What would Jesus do if he were here among us?”

He paused and sighed deeply again.

“I saw our friend Aaron Abrahams an hour ago,” he said. “He is angry, Sabina.”

“Not at you, Papa?”

“Oh no—at the Nazis.”

“What happened?”

“I went to his house. The windows had been broken and were boarded up. I knocked. When he appeared he did not even greet me.

“‘Go away, Heinrich,’ he said. ‘Go away! For your own good, for your family!’

“I tried to talk to him. I asked if I could come in. He wouldn’t even let me through the door.

“‘Go, Heinrich! You are in danger—you must not be seen,’ he said. ‘You must forget you even know me.’

“I told him that was impossible, that he was our friend—and more than a friend.

“‘Go away, Heinrich,’ he repeated a third time. ‘I no longer exist for you!’ And with that he closed the door in my face and would not answer it to my further knocking.”

“Papa—that is terrible!”

“Yes, it is. I fear dreadful times are coming. Some may choose anger as their response. Perhaps under such circumstances it is right. But in truth, my daughter, I just do not know. What would the Master himself do?”

“What are you going to do, Papa?”

“I have no answers to these questions, Sabina,” he said at length. “I just don’t know.”

48 The Red of the Rose

48

The Red of the Rose

The morning following the party at the Schmundt villa, Thaddeus and Matthew McCallum took coffee alone in their rooms. Heidi brought them a tray of coffee and small white Brötchen, leaving it outside their door with a light knock. By the time they were up and about, the baron’s harvesters were busy in the fields, Sabina and her father in the garden. It was late in the morning before they saw their host. The baron summoned their guests to join them in the family dining room shortly before noon after he and his daughter returned from the garden. Heidi was busily laying the table with sliced bread, cheeses, meats, butter, and jams. The smell of fresh coffee filled the room.

“I thought perhaps we might enjoy a light Kaffee Trinken together and then have dinner later, say around two-thirty,” he said.

“That sounds fine, Baron,” replied Thaddeus.