the study, or at the kitchen table, writing, revising drafts, and debating the best phrase for a particular concept.
It was absorbing, grueling, important work, but it did not come without conflict. It took a few weeks, but Greta eventually realized that the cause of Dr. Murphy’s unexplained illness was alcohol. He always appeared perfectly sober when his wife was around, but when she was abroad visiting family and friends in County Cork, Greta would arrive in the morning to find him already intoxicated. And yet he concealed it well, never drinking in front of her and Daphne or producing inferior work. Often Greta and Daphne conferred worriedly about what, if anything, they should do, if they should confront him respectfully, if they should tell Mrs. Murphy. In the end they reluctantly concluded that Mrs. Murphy surely already knew, and if Dr. Murphy could refrain from drinking when she was present, he must still be in control. So they said nothing and pretended not to notice his bloodshot eyes, the faint slurring of his consonants. Greta found silence and pretense deeply unsatisfying, but she did not know what else to do.
Their frequent disagreements about the text, on the other hand, were impossible to ignore. Dr. Murphy prided himself on his eloquence, and with good reason, for Greta herself envied his ability to turn a phrase. But it irritated her when he would return a page to her, one he had written and she had painstakingly edited, with complaints that she had altered it too much.
“You’ve coarsened the language,” he protested, pointing to one phrase and then another.
“No, I restored its original roughness,” she retorted. “You polished it too much, made it too pretty.”
“But this is vulgar!”
“Yes, exactly as it was in Hitler’s original.”
On other occasions, as he read over her drafts, he would shake his head and mutter under his breath until she clenched her teeth in irritation as she awaited his verdict. “You have to do this over,” he would say, indignant. “It borders on incoherence.”
“Just like the source,” she replied sharply. “The readers should see for themselves how convoluted his arguments are. It’s wrong—reprehensible, even—to make him seem more rational than he is. That’s Goebbels’s job, not mine.”
In those moments she knew Dr. Murphy was just as annoyed with her as she was with him. Sometimes he would listen to her and let something that offended his standards for good English stand, but ultimately it was his book and his name that would be on the cover, and he had the last word.
Greta chose her battles wisely and stood firm when she knew the integrity of the work depended upon it. She won more arguments than she lost.
The work continued throughout the autumn and into the winter. As Germany’s Jews found their lives increasingly constricted, as Protestant pastors were arrested for protesting the Aryan Laws, as Jehovah’s Witnesses were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, Greta wrote, edited, and revised with greater urgency. Nothing she would ever write would be more important than this.
They had to make the truth known, the truth that no one in England or America wanted to believe, the truth that Hitler’s Games had obscured. And time was running out.
Chapter Thirty-seven
December 1936–January 1937
Sara
Dieter had played such a small role in what had emerged as the most important aspects of Sara’s life that when he was finally, truly gone, her days passed almost as they always had, unchanged but for the small knot of pain and anger that tightened in her chest whenever a stray thought drifted his way.
It was a small mercy that this happened less often as time went by.
She knew she was better off without someone so ethically malleable. She also knew that she was fortunate to have discovered Dieter’s fatal flaw before they married rather than afterward. The truth was she grieved the loss of her doctorate more.
Sara had taken Mildred’s advice and had assembled the necessary documents so she could transfer to a university abroad, eventually, someday. She continued to study and work on her dissertation, which was nearly complete, and she also began a new research project, an analysis of female archetypes in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Increasingly, however, she filled her hours assisting Natan with his investigative journalism, meeting with the study group, and surreptitiously distributing Greta’s leaflets on campus and in nearby cafés and bookshops frequented by students, where thanks to her age she could easily blend in, not only as a student but as an