“Otto did the deal with the SS—we rent the prisoners off them at a discount. We had the first shipment of workers from the camps a few weeks ago, but they were…” He trailed off, then stopped. I was startled by his choice of words—shipment, as if the prisoners were a resource one could send around the country in boxes. The silence stretched, and all I could hear was my pulse in my ears.

“What?” I prompted him urgently.

“I don’t want to talk about this with you,” Jürgen whispered.

“Tell me,” I pressed. “Tell me what was wrong with them.”

All of those rumors I’d heard on the streets of Berlin were flying through my mind. I’d suspected all along that the Jews in those places were in terrible danger. Did Jürgen know for sure?

“The prisoners are not being well cared for and that’s all you need to know.”

The point of pulling the blankets over our heads was to muffle our conversation, but we didn’t need to bother that night. Jürgen’s voice was so faint that even right beside him, I had to strain to make out each word. It was clear that he was deeply troubled by this development but wanted to protect me from the worst of what he knew and what he’d seen, as he always did.

I couldn’t bury my head in the sand. Whatever he was involved in, I was a part of too.

“Just men?” I asked. I shifted closer to him, suddenly feeling very cold, despite the suffocating blanket over our faces.

“No.”

I closed my eyes and an image of Mayim flashed before me, her face vivid, as if I’d only seen her that morning.

“You haven’t seen Mayim, though?” I had to know.

“The camps are huge, Sofie. Tens of thousands of prisoners in some.”

“Do you think she’s in one of those camps?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered. Jürgen folded the blanket back down, exposing our faces to the cool air in the hotel room. I turned toward him.

“Tell me the truth,” I whispered.

“I would only be guessing.”

“I don’t care.”

I pulled the blanket up again, and Jürgen whispered, “Most of the Jews are imprisoned in ghettos now.”

“That’s better than a camp, I suppose. She would be okay there?”

“Of course, my love.”

38

Lizzie

Huntsville, Alabama
1950

It was hot that night and I couldn’t sleep. I kept reliving the hurt on Sofie Rhodes’s face when I clued her in to what a raging gossip Avril Walters was.

I felt better having visited her. I knew I’d been rude—obnoxious, even. I’d intended to be. It seemed that until I figured out what was going on with my brother, the best way for everything to settle back down was for Sofie Rhodes to stay the hell away from us.