The officer appeared to soften at this. Out of respect for Arvid’s high rank in the Economics Ministry, he agreed to take the matter up with his superior, but for the present, Frau Harnack must remain in prison. When Inge begged him to permit her mother her paints, easel, and brushes, the officer hesitated, but eventually agreed.
The next day, they returned to the prison to visit Mutti Clara and plead her case to any official who would see them. After four days, Mildred, Falk, and Inge remained in Thuringia, but Arvid was obliged to return to the ministry. He continued to work from his office for his mother’s release, calling in favors, finding advocates in the Nazi hierarchy for whom the Harnack name still carried weight. Finally, after a harrowing fortnight, Mutti Clara was released on the condition that she leave Jena. She reluctantly consented, and even more reluctantly, her children decided to admit her to a sanatorium for the aged in the countryside for her own safety.
Soon after Mutti Clara was settled in her new home—temporarily, they all hoped—Mildred received word that her applications for the Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships had been rejected.
“I’m sorry,Liebling,” said Arvid, embracing her. “They’re fools not to recognize your genius.”
Despite her crushing disappointment, Mildred had to laugh. “How could I ever leave such a sweet and loyal husband?” she asked, kissing him.
Arvid managed a halfhearted smile, but as the days passed, she sometimes caught him watching her, guilt and torment in his eyes. “I cannot bear that you’re subjecting yourself to an ominous future for my sake,” he told her once, and the next Saturday, as they walked through the Tiergarten with the Heath family, he again asked Donald to persuade Mildred to return to the United States.
“If you can’t convince her, I don’t know why you think I could,” Donald said, while Louise reached out and squeezed Mildred’s hand in sympathy.
A few days later, when Arvid returned home from work, he took a thick envelope from his attaché case and gave it to Mildred. “Keep this with you at all times,” he said, not quite meeting her gaze.
“What is it?”
“I booked you passage from Hamburg to New York with United States Lines.”
“Arvid, no,” she protested, tossing the envelope on the table and planting her hands on her hips.
“Mildred, listen. It’s good on any of their ships, at any time. I’m not sending you away tomorrow, but should it ever become necessary, I want you to be able to leave Germany at a moment’s notice.”
“Where’syourticket?” she asked, already sure he had not purchased one for himself. When he shook his head sadly, she studied him for a long moment in silence before agreeing to keep the envelope in her purse.
She could not imagine using the ticket. How could she ever leave her beloved Arvid behind to an uncertain fate? If she fled to the United States, the Gestapo would immediately suspect him of disloyalty to the Reich and place him under close scrutiny, jeopardizing his job in the ministry, his work with the resistance, his very life. She could not abandon him to that. They would go together or not at all.
Chapter Forty-seven
November 1939–March 1940
Sara
Sara and Natan received one letter from their parents at the apartment in Friedenau letting them know they had arrived safely and assuring them of their love, understanding, and gratitude. Without mentioning their destination by name, they urged Sara and Natan to join them there soon.
In reply, Natan wrote a letter addressed to Wilhelm, purportedly from Adam Kuckhoff, reminding him of their meeting on September 5—Sara’s birthday—and the theatrical production they had discussed. “Kuckhoff” hoped he was still interested in producing a new biographical play about Ludwig van Beethoven, and if so, he should respond by return mail at his earliest convenience.
Adam took wry pleasure in his role in the subterfuge, and it was not long until Greta presented Sara with another letter from her parents, albeit in Wilhelm’s handwriting and bearing his signature. He was eager to produce the play, he had written, and the enclosed cheque should be considered his first investment. Perhaps Kuckhoff would consider perfecting the play in Geneva before introducing it to Berlin’s more discriminating audiences.
Their improvised code evolved as they sent letters back and forth. Natan was called the playwright, Sara the stage manager. Their parents were the Swiss investors, Amalie their secretary, her children their staff. It was a necessary artifice, frustrating in its obliqueness. Although sometimes Sara and Natan could not puzzle out what their parents meant by a certain theatrical metaphor, they were grateful to have any communication at all. Natan once joked that the more they wrote about their nonexistent Beethoven biography, the more he liked the idea. “Kuckhoff and I should go in on it together,” he said, “especially if Mutti and Papa are willing to fund it.”
The money their parents sent had become essential. Sara had no paying work, and Natan’s freelance, pseudonymous journalism assignments had diminished as his contacts in the German press became too apprehensive to employ an incognito Jew. Sara had sold off pieces of the family silver as her mother had instructed, but her frequent visits to pawnshops drew unwanted attention. Inevitably, a proprietor would realize that she was Jewish, size up her desperation, and offer her a small fraction of what an Aryan would have expected to receive for the same items. She hated to let precious family heirlooms go for a few marks and an earful of insults. As long as the Swiss investors continued to fund Kuckhoff’s play, she would not have to.
“Adam and I are grateful for your help,” Sara told Greta one afternoon when she came by to babysit little Ule, a slight but strong boy of almost two years. Greta had added translation to her freelance editing jobs, and between that, her resistance work, and tending Ule, she toiled almost every waking hour. “We know what risks you’re taking for our sake, not only with our correspondence but simply by associating with us.”
Greta gazed heavenward and shook her head. “I’m not going to give up my Jewish friends just because Hitler says I should.”
“Perhaps you should, for your own safety. Most of my Aryan friends have cut off contact with me.”
“That’s their loss.” Greta kissed Ule’s cheek and fixed Sara with a look of fond resolve. “Do you know how hard it is to find a reliable babysitter these days? I’m not giving up Ule’s favorite without a fight.”
Smiling, Sara resolved to put her faithless friends out of mind. Greta at least would never abandon her. Sara had witnessed her generosity to other Jews too often to believe her capable of it. She gave free English lessons to Jewish families awaiting visas to Great Britain and the United States. Before the war, she had traveled to London to help sort out thorny Jewish immigration issues and to meet with colleagues in British trade unions, marshaling their support and soliciting donations for Jewish relief. She and Adam—and the Harnacks too—saved portions of their rations to share with Jewish neighbors whose allotments were never enough to assuage their hunger. Greta’s instinctive acts of kindness, her refusal to learn hatred and exclusion, gave Sara hope.
Sara gathered hope wherever she could find it, from her friends’ perilous generosity, from antifascist graffiti that sprang up overnight on buildings and railways cars, and from rare, startling subversive acts that disrupted the Nazi myth of a GermanVolkunited in solidarity behind Hitler. In September, bombs were detonated outside the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz and the Air Ministry. In November, the office of Hitler’s personal photographer was vandalized, the shop windows where portraits of the Führer were displayed shattered. No one in Sara’s resistance circle was responsible, prompting Natan to note, “This proves we’re not alone.”
Hope, however slender the thread, sustained Sara as winter descended, for as the days grew colder and the nights longer, the blackout became more oppressive, more isolating. Crime soared in the darkness—prostitution, murders, thefts, rapes. To make navigating the city at night less hazardous, curbs, street corners, crossings, steps, and sidewalk obstructions were marked with phosphorescent paint, and arrows indicating the way to air raid shelters were painted on walls. Pedestrians carried electric torches screened with the necessary filters and wore phosphorescent badges on their lapels to avoid colliding with one another. Even so, accidents soared throughout Berlin. People making their way home from work in the darkness tumbled into gutters or tripped over cracks in the sidewalk. With vehicle headlights reduced to screened rectangular openings no larger than five by eight centimeters, traffic moved through the city at a crawl, other cars and trucks barely visible as narrow slits of headlights, pedestrians entirely obscured. Drivers became disoriented without familiar landmarks and street signs, running off the road or crashing into one another. Trains sped past dimmed warning signals and plowed into the backs of other railcars. As the death toll rose, officials insisted that matters were well in hand and the German people only needed time to get used to the new conditions. Sara avoided the worst of the hazards by staying indoors after twilight, but she worried about Natan, who ignored the curfew imposed on Jews and kept his own schedule as he always had.
In December, despite the blackout and rationing, despite the gloom and depression and uneasy expectation that British bombs might fall upon the cities or fighting break out along the western front, most Germans began preparing for Christmas. Sara had always felt somewhat estranged from the Christian majority during their festive season, but that year was more isolating than any she remembered. She observed her fellow Berliners hauling homeTannenbäume, putting up candles and wreaths, and singing carols with forced good cheer as the Reich scheduled Christmas concerts and pageants to improve morale. High-ranking Nazis made a show of visiting the troops on the front lines, to shake hands or to share a holiday feast.
