The phone rang, the shrill sound jarring my frayed nerves, and I ran so fast to the study to answer it that I almost tripped over my feet.

“Hello?” I blurted into the handset.

“Hello, my love,” he said. He sounded exhausted, but more than that, he sounded defeated.

“Hello,” I whispered, tears filling my eyes. There were so many things I wanted to say to him that weren’t safe to say, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to explain to me what he’d been through either. “Are you well?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He didn’t sound fine at all—his words were thick and a little slurred, as if his mouth were injured. His tone was heavy with dread too. “I have great news to share.”

“You do?”

“I’ve been invited to join the SS,” he said. There was no mistaking that he was crying now, and I gave up trying to contain my tears. Who cared if they heard us now? “I’ve been awarded the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer. It is a great honor.” This was a high rank—the equivalent of major in the Wehrmacht. I wondered why our plan failed, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it.

“Can we visit you this weekend?”

“I don’t want the children to see me like this,” he whispered brokenly.

“Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll wait a few weeks.”

When I took the children to visit Jürgen at Nordhausen a few weekends later, there was still a green shadow on his jaw and a purple haze around both of his eyes. He’d warned me he still wasn’t himself, but he’d grown impatient to see us.

“Papa,” Georg said stiffly. “What happened to you?”

“Ah, silly old thing I am,” Jürgen said dismissively, as he reached a hand to touch his face. “I fell down the stairs working late one night.”

The girls accepted the lie easily. They each hugged Jürgen, then ran ahead to take their bags into the villa. Georg remained standing by my car, staring at us.

“I know you were in trouble,” he said. “I could tell from the way Mrs. zu Schiller was acting while Mama was away. And then you both come home looking like this.” Even after some weeks, Jürgen and I were both rail thin. I was still struggling to eat normally. Even my stomach was traumatized by the experience. “Papa, I’m not a fool. It’s obvious you were beaten. You were both arrested, weren’t you?”

“I am a clumsy fool and your mother was away attending to family business,” Jürgen said dismissively.

“But—”

Jürgen raised his chin and adopted a tone that left no room for argument. “You’ve been raised to respect your elders,” he barked. “Collect your things and go into the house, and I don’t want to hear this nonsense in front of your sisters.”