“You get tonight to sulk, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes. But tomorrow, you get up, you get out of bed, and you carry on. It’s not always the strongest trees that survive the storm. Sometimes it’s the trees that bend with the wind. And you, my treasure, find yourself right in a hurricane.” She dropped her voice to the barest of whispers, so faint I had to strain to hear her even though her lips were against my ear as she added, “They insist you become a Nazi, so you pretend to be the best damned Nazi you can be. You will always know deep down inside what is true and what is right and they cannot touch your heart. But you have no choice now about the facade you present. Your husband and your children are counting on you to play the game.” She pushed back her chair and said firmly, “You just need a strong cup of tea and some sugar. Everything is going to be just fine. You’ll see.”

It didn’t feel like everything was going to be fine, not that night, and not the next morning, when Jürgen and I went through every room of the house, purging mementos of Mayim, erasing her from our lives as we had been instructed to do. I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of the photos and the letters and the birthday cards, so Jürgen did it for me, burning them in the fireplace in the living room, right beside the spot where she liked to sit and read. I kept the knit blanket. It would be my comfort item now, to bring me a different kind of warmth when the world had turned so cold.

Georg said he was happy that Mayim was gone, but I could feel his grief, even if he didn’t know how to make sense of it. He’d wake in the night calling for her, and I’d rush in to find him crying in his sleep. I promised myself that when all of it was over, I’d take him away to the country and I’d undo all of the damage those years were doing to his soul. In truth, I had no idea if that kind of healing was even possible. Isn’t an adult just a child, shaped by experience? How does a person learn not to hate, when that hate has been imprinted upon them from such a young age?

Laura’s grief was as uncompromising as mine at first. “I only want to eat Mayim’s food,” she told me stubbornly, and then it was “I only want Mayim to bathe me” and “I only want Mayim to dress me.” Worst of all was “No, Mama! I only want Mayim’s cuddles,” after she’d scraped her knee one day. But she was five years old, and five-year-olds are, if nothing else, adaptable.