I lean forward in my chair, trying to sort it all out. “You mean, Mr. Brouwer hadn’t been hiding the families?”

“Oh, he had. For a time. While I was being arrested and praying to God they weren’t found, the house was getting ransacked. Brouwer’s mother came flying out. Told the Krauts to check their files. Said the ‘dirty Jews’ had forced themselves in, and she’d proudly turned them over just a week prior.”

My hands rise to my neck, where fear and revulsion are gathering, a solid mass.

“See, late that night…” Voice gone thick, Arie pauses. He throws back more booze, and it occurs to me that the liquid fire has been burning a pathway for his words. He wipes his mouth and his attention affixes on a distant view. “There I was, going nuts over whether Thea’s family was alive or dead, when my cell door swung open. I was expecting thugs to come soften me up. Only it was a Sturmbannführer—an SS major turned Gestapo. Bastard named Ziegler. I wasn’t about to confess a thing, but then a guard brought in a little girl. She was hunched up, sniffling from crying. And my heart just about stopped, because she was Thea. A five-year-old version of her.”

I’m motionless in my seat, picturing the terrified child. Arie’s niece. Of all the things I might foresee, this wasn’t among them.

“Ziegler says there’s good news. That my family had been imprisoned nearby, waiting transport to a camp—fortuitous, he called it. And how he’d arranged for me to see them. I hadn’t a clue what to make of that till a guard put a step stool under a barred window.”

At the sudden welling of Arie’s eyes, dread courses through me.

“Down in the courtyard, they were marched out into the lights, lined up against a wall—Thea and Jacob, his brother’s family, their boys grown. When I saw the soldiers with their rifles, I started shouting for Thea, trying to yell through the glass that I was there. She couldn’t hear me, of course. Then a soldier blindfolded her and the others, and…and I…”

Arie’s neck muscles go taut. He brings his trembling flask to his lips before discovering it empty, and his knuckles blanch. I sense his urge to scream, to hurl the flask at the wall. His effort to keep from crumbling threatens to undo me.

My tears come in a burning rush. Unable to stay away, I move to sit on the bed facing him. For a moment, as we’d done countless times while the rest of the world slept, we say nothing amid the candlelight and lingering scent of gin. Gently I reach for the flask, the way I used to for Papa, and Arie lets me take it. Only then do I notice the quaking of my own hands.