She knew before the doctors confirmed it that she had lost the child. She imagined that she had felt the tiny soul leaving her, letting go with a gentle, wistful sigh as if to say it had already learned enough of the world to know it dared not linger.
She wept until she had no more tears left. She nodded mutely when the doctors assured her that she was in good health, if a bit underweight, and that once she regained her strength, there was no reason why they should not try again to conceive. No reason, Mildred thought, except that she had tried and failed for many years with nothing to show for it but disappointment and heartbreak.
After she was discharged from the hospital, Arvid urged her to recover her health at some quiet retreat in the countryside. When she demurred, Falk and Inge chimed in too, until eventually, exhausted and grieving, she consented.
She spent her thirty-eighth birthday at a spa in Marienbad, taking the cure of the celebrated mineral springs, finding comfort for her broken heart in easy walks through forests and gardens, soothing her sorrow with the poetry of Goethe. The food was fresh, plentiful, and nourishing, and at night her sleep was undisturbed by sirens and bombs.
In the last week of September, Mildred returned to Berlin, healing but carrying a sorrow so deep and constant it felt infused into her very bones. Arvid offered tender embraces and loving words and evaded her questions about the resistance work he had carried out in her absence.
“Don’t shut me out,” she finally told him, thinking of Greta. She wanted to work. She needed purpose. If she could not nurture her own child, at least she could make the world better for other women’s children.
Acquiescing, Arvid told her about several curious and foreboding reports he had seen in the Economics Ministry and the Luftwaffe’s ongoing merciless pounding of London. Then he hesitated. “There’s something else,” he said, taking her hand. “While you were away, I had an interesting visitor—the third secretary of the Soviet embassy, Alexander Erdberg.”
“An alias and a cover, I assume.”
Arvid nodded. “He claimed to be a friend of Alexander Hirschfeld, and he wants me to help him as I once helped Hirschfeld.”
“Hirschfeld was a trusted friend long before he asked you to provide him with intelligence,” Mildred pointed out. “How do you know this Erdberg can be trusted? You haven’t heard from the Soviets in years, not since Stalin’s purge began. Why would Moscow contact you now?”
For the same reason any other nation wanted intelligence from the Reich, Arvid explained, because Hitler could not be trusted and his unchecked ambition threatened to engulf the continent. Arvid had investigated Erdberg thoroughly and had confirmed that he was not an agent provocateur. Mindful of the purges that had claimed the lives of friends and acquaintances who once worked at the Soviet embassy, at first Arvid had declined, but eventually he had agreed to help them. Disinterested idealism was his only motive. He refused their offers of payment, and made it clear that he did not share their ideology. His only desire was to bring down Hitler and the Reich. If providing intelligence to the Soviets would help him accomplish that goal, then he would do it.
Mildred muffled a sigh. Once again, Arvid was not seeking her permission, but informing her of the way things would be. “Be careful,” she said. She hoped this Alexander Erdberg would prove worthy of his trust.
At the end of September, as bombs hammered London and the British relentlessly attacked German ports in order to delay the invasion of the British Isles, Arvid provided his new Soviet contact with his first intelligence report.
In defiance of the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, and contrary to the prevailing opinion that Hitler would never risk a two-front war, Nazi high command was secretly devising a plan to attack the Soviet Union.
Chapter Fifty
October 1940–January 1941
Sara
As a courier, Sara often did not know the contents of the documents she carried between members of the resistance circle, but one October afternoon, Arvid invited her to read his latest intelligence report before she delivered it to a secluded dead drop in the University of Berlin library.
“If you’re caught with this, the punishment will be severe,” Arvid said as he handed her the typewritten page. “You deserve to know why you’re risking your life.”
Her heart thudded at the reminder of the danger, but of course she read the report. She would suffer the consequences either way, so she might as well satisfy her curiosity.
An officer of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht had told Arvid that by early 1941, Germany would be prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union. The campaign’s objective was to advance to a line from the port of Archangel in northern Russia to the port of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Creating a vassal state from captured territory would bring most of the Soviet population and economic resources under control of the Reich. As an important preliminary measure, the German military would occupy Romania. The officer had hinted that preparations for the incursion into that country would require a postponement of the invasion of Great Britain.
Sara’s thoughts raced as she slipped the report into a secret pouch in her old student satchel. In late September, Germany, Italy, and Japan had signed a pact agreeing to assist one another if any of the three were attacked by a country not involved in the current conflicts. One article specifically stated that the Tripartite Pact did not affect the political status existing between any of their countries and the Soviet Union, but Hitler’s invasion plans revealed how tenuous relations between Germany and the USSR truly were. If Stalin knew Hitler already intended to betray him, he might abandon the nonaggression pact of 1939, which, unbeknownst to him, Germany had already violated. The Soviets would almost certainly cut off the steady flow of raw materials from the Soviet Union into Germany rather than sustain the production of war materiel that might be turned against them. Perhaps—however improbable it seemed—the Soviets might even form an alliance with Great Britain in order to defeat Germany.
Sara knew the Harnacks had already provided copies of the report to their contacts at the embassies of the Soviet Union and the United States, but she had no idea who would come for the copy she left at the dead drop. Could it be someone she had known from her student days, a former classmate or professor? It seemed so long ago that she had studied there, that she had dreamed of earning her doctorate and winning a fellowship to study in the United States. Her life had turned out nothing like she had imagined it when she passed through the front gates of the university on her first day as a student, so thrilled, so hopeful, so full of anticipation for all that she would learn and do.
By now the students she had studied with had all moved on, graduated or forced out like herself. There were only a handful of people who might recognize her on campus, but she blended in so well that it was unlikely anyone would notice her. And if someone did suspect she was a Jew wandering about where she was forbidden, she would show them the false identity papers the Kuckhoffs had procured for her. They showed that she was Annemarie Hannemann, a student from Frankfurt, with all the rights and privileges accorded to any other Aryan citizen of the Reich.
But no one would catch her. Sara walked with purpose, as if her thoughts were fixed on important matters and she belonged exactly where she was. No one ever questioned her. Sometimes a few young men tried to catch her eye or chat her up, but she offered only polite smiles and quiet demurrals in reply. How lovely it might be to enjoy a brief flirtation with a handsome stranger, like any other young woman could—somewhere else in a time of peace, but not in Berlin in 1940, not when one was a Jew in the resistance, not when it was impossible to tell at a glance who was an inveterate Nazi, who was a friend, and who was aMitläufer, one of the vast number of Germans who went along with the Reich’s atrocities, not actively persecuting anyone but refusing to intervene on behalf of the oppressed.
Was Dieter still aMitläufer, Sara wondered, or had he fully assimilated into the Reich for the sake of his precious business? He might be dead for all she knew. Bombs had fallen in the neighborhood where he and his mother had lived, though not on their apartment building. Or he could have been conscripted, and might be encamped somewhere in conquered France or lying in a battlefield grave. Unsettled, she pushed the images aside. She did not want to brood over Dieter’s fate, or to think of him at all. If he ever spared a thought for her, it could only be to pray that no one remembered he had once been engaged to a Jew.
Thus far the British bombers had spared the block where Sara and Natan moved after being evicted from the apartment in Friedenau. The cramped studio they shared was on Grenadierstrasse on the eastern edge of the ghetto, a dilapidated building already overcrowded with poor Aryans and immigrants from elsewhere in the Reich. They resented their new Jewish neighbors, who were usually better educated, more cultured, better dressed, and profoundly disconsolate, as if they considered themselves too good for the place. Never mind that most of the Jews were unemployed and constantly hungry from subsisting on much smaller rations. Never mind that they were all poor now, all threatened by the same British bombs.
Whenever the air raid sirens wailed, the German residents made a mad rush for the shelter in the cellar, but Jews were forbidden to enter. Instead Sara, Natan, and a few dozen others descended to the ground floor and waited out the terrifying hours in the central hallway, bracing themselves against the walls, avoiding the windows at either end, covering their heads with their arms when the roar of British planes intensified.
“We should paint ‘Jews Here’ on the roof so that the British know to drop their bombs elsewhere,” Natan said wearily the morning after a long, harrowing, sleepless night in mid-October. “Why should they kill us? We hate the Nazis even more than they do.”
“I don’t think that would help,” Sara replied, stifling a yawn, trying to ignore the gnawing ache in her empty stomach. “The Americans painted ‘USA’ on the roof of their embassy, but they still have to put out fires when incendiaries land in their gardens.”
