He was annoyed, but when tears filled my eyes, he sighed heavily and reached for me. I relaxed immediately, sinking into the comfort of his arms.

“I thought you felt the same way I do about the Nazis,” he said.

“I do. I was just hoping that if I engineered a chance to see Karl, he would tell me more about this job.”

“Well, did he?”

“I never got the chance to speak to him.”

“I’ve tried to call him a few times.”

“You did?” He hadn’t mentioned this, but I knew Jürgen felt guilty that he couldn’t support us, so I hated to force him to talk about it.

“Young people are looking for work to try to support their families—no one has the capacity to study these days. What happens if there’s no work for me in the new academic year?”

“I can’t even let myself think about that,” I said. Jürgen had been working toward his doctorate when my brother broke the news that we needed to generate our own income, and although he’d been forced to abandon his studies, he was quickly employed to teach. Just a few years later, though, things were different. Six million Germans were out of work in a severely depressed economy. If Jürgen lost that job, he’d be unlikely to find another.

“Karl has been so busy that I haven’t managed to catch him on the phone, and he no longer has time to attend our meetings,” Jürgen admitted. Karl and Jürgen were both founding members of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel, and they spent their Saturday mornings tinkering with homemade rockets at an abandoned dump outside of Berlin. Their dream was to design a rocket that would take man to the moon, a prospect so absurd I struggled to understand why Jürgen even entertained it. “That’s what concerns me, Sofie. Karl is consumed by his work with the Party these days. I can’t imagine any position he knows of would be one I’d be interested in.”

“You think the job is with the Nazis?” I said, heart sinking.

“I fear it is, yes.”

“The fervor tonight shocked me. I don’t know what happens to this country if those men find their way to power.”

“There are some who believe the Nazis set that fire in the Reichstag, you know.”

“Wasn’t it the Dutchman?”

“A mentally unwell Dutchman, with a loose association to an independent communist party in his home country, was somehow able to single-handedly destroy Germany’s parliament building?” Jürgen asked wryly.