Einstein Among Shadows

Journal Entry – February 2, 1936 – Brussels

A thin frost has clung to the iron rails outside my apartment window all morning. The city moves beneath a veil of cold, silent mist, muffling even the clatter of the trams. I watch from the desk in my small room, papers scattered and forgotten, as the Belgian winter folds over the rooftops. These days I find myself writing less about physics and more about people.

Brussels has become a junction of secrets. Whispers of scientists in hiding, of academics fleeing the Reich, pass through cafés like contraband. And I, Einstein, once only burdened by the infinities of space-time, am now tangled in a web of moral urgency. The silence around me is oppressive, not from tranquility, but from waiting — as though the city is holding its breath.

Yesterday, I met with Élise Lemaitre again, a young physicist from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She had fled from Cologne after the SS interrogated her department. Her only crime: working with a Jewish colleague on experimental optics. Now, she helps us coordinate a clandestine network. Her courage is luminous. In her, I glimpse the idealism of youth, sharpened by fear but not broken.

We met at the Royal Library, pretending to study 17th-century manuscripts while exchanging coded lists of names. I’ve become a courier of minds, smuggling scholars across borders with words and forged affiliations. A German mathematician, a Czech linguist, two Polish chemists — all vanished from university rosters, resurfacing as “assistants” or “visiting researchers” in safe cities.

The Belgians are cautious. Too many eyes here, too much sympathy in high places for the fascists. But still, pockets of resistance endure. At the Maison des Sciences, we have converted a forgotten storage room into a temporary lab. Equipment is sparse, but the ideas are not. There, Élise and I are working on a new paper — not because I believe in publication right now, but because theory is a refuge. In equations, no race, no politics, only symmetry and truth.

Late last night, a letter arrived from Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. He writes in careful script, hinting at mounting pressure in Denmark. He asks if I still believe in “quantum humanity,” his gentle joke — the notion that in every collapsed system, a new uncertainty offers a sliver of hope. I do not write back immediately. I do not know how to answer. The world’s wave function feels perilously close to measurement.

But this morning, after the tea had gone cold, I picked up my pen again. I wrote:

“Dear Niels,

Even among shadows, there is the principle of superposition. I believe we have not yet collapsed entirely. Our entanglement with humanity — flawed and beautiful — must persist. In the meantime, I will remain here, silent, but active.”

The ink bled a little in the cold air, but I folded it anyway and sealed it with wax. I will ask Élise to send it through the usual channels.

The frost has now begun to melt on the windows. Outside, a child in a wool coat kicks through the slush, unaware of the stakes adults carry like lead in their hearts. I wonder what future he will inherit — whether he will study gravitation in peaceful lecture halls or flee with equations in his coat lining.

The silence continues. But it is not submission. It is preparation.

— A.E.

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