“Of course,” Natan said as he raced upstairs. Sara hurried after him, her breath emerging as faint white puffs. When she caught up with him, he was fitting a second key in the door of the spare room, which was as dusty and crowded with old furniture as it had been on their last visit. Single file, they climbed the narrow staircase to the attic, where Natan shoved aside the bookcase covering the low, hidden door. Ducking his head, he entered, and she followed quickly after.
“Take as much as you can comfortably carry,” he instructed as he led the way to the large closet they had stocked as a pantry. “We have time for three trips, but then I want to get back on the road.”
Nodding agreement, she stood out of the way as he opened the pantry door—revealing empty shelves, a layer of dust, nothing more.
They both stood there for a moment, staring into the pantry. “What the hell,” Natan muttered, closing the door and opening it again. It was still empty, of course, and he muttered a curse at his own foolishness. Backing away, he interlaced his fingers and rested them on top of his head. “Is there another pantry I don’t know of?”
Sara struggled to think. “I—there’s a linen closet next to the bathroom.”
She barely had the words out before Natan hurried past her and down the narrow hall. Trailing behind, she found him staring into the smaller closet, once full of spare linens and sanitary items, empty now except for a small package of toilet paper. “Take this,” Natan said shortly, snatching it up and tossing it to her.
She quickly left the toilet paper by the exit and met him back at the pantry, where he was straining to reach into the depths of the top shelf. He found a small sack of rice, two tins of sardines, and a bottle of olive oil, which he passed to her, and which she left by the exit. They then began a sweep of the entire hiding place, searching every closet, every drawer, beneath the beds, everywhere. There were still sheets on the mattresses and spare clothing in the wardrobes, but they found no more food, no supplies, no money, although they knew their father had left a lockbox of Reichsmarks and gold coins in his bureau. Even the soft pillows and thick comforters Sara and her mother had arranged upon the beds were gone.
Natan stripped a sheet from one of the mattresses and told her to use it as a sack and fill it with her spare clothing. He did the same with his own clothes and some things of their father’s that should fit him. They worked swiftly, without speaking, but Sara felt a rising panic as they gathered all that might be useful and left the hiding place, taking care to replace the bookcase and lock all the doors behind them.
Once outside, they ran to the truck, threw their salvaged belongings inside, and climbed into their seats, expecting any moment for someone to order them to halt. Sara’s heart pounded with alarm as she started the engine. When she threw the truck into gear and pulled away, she thought she saw a curtain in a window twitch, but she did not slow the truck long enough to take a second look.
They sped off, across the bridge and away.
“Who—” Sara began, her voice trembling. “It must have been someone on the staff. No one else knew about our hiding place.”
“Of course. Papa and Mutti would have told us if they had moved our supplies.”
“But Wilhelm and Amalie said most of the servants have been with the family for generations. They trusted them completely.”
“Someone obviously didn’t deserve their trust.” He rubbed at his jaw, glowering out the window. “People change. They become greedy or afraid. They become Nazis, out of convenience or conviction.”
“Maybe whoever it was meant us no harm. Maybe they were hungry and thought we weren’t ever coming back.”
“Maybe,” said Natan. “Maybe if we had knocked on the front door and explained the situation, they would have apologized, fixed us a hot meal, and, while we ate, loaded up the truck with everything they had taken. Or maybe they would have called the Gestapo to report two Jews driving a stolen truck, breaking into Baron von Riechmann’s castle and robbing the place blind.”
Sara pressed her lips together and nodded, a bitter taste in her mouth. Natan was right. They could not trust anyone at Schloss Federle anymore. They had lost not only their supplies but also their hiding place of last resort, and with it the reassurance of knowing that if Berlin became too dangerous, if Jews were banned from every last block in the city, one last sanctuary remained.
Now that too had been taken from them. They could never return, and they had nowhere else to go.
Chapter Fifty-one
February–June 1941
Greta
Air raids upon Berlin diminished in the bleak, icy early months of the year, but in March the Royal Air Force resumed its attacks, jolting Greta and Adam out of bed, sending them racing down the hall to snatch up Ule and descend to the basement shelter, hearts pounding, ears straining for the roar of bombers over the thudding of antiaircraft fire.
By early morning, workers had cordoned off damaged areas and were clearing away debris, quickly and efficiently, as if to maintain the illusion that the capital was impervious. Jewish passersby were often conscripted to haul away debris, along with forced laborers from Poland brought to Germany to work on Albert Speer’s grandiose Germania architecture projects. They were not prisoners of war, not enemy soldiers, but ordinary citizens enslaved by the Reich. Although most Berliners averted their gaze, it was impossible to miss their squalid camps poorly concealed behind high walls and barbed wire. Whenever Greta encountered the prisoners as they were marched to and from their work sites, she was horrified anew by their tattered clothing, their bleak expressions, their emaciated frames.
The loss of apartment buildings to British bombs and Hitler’s dream of a glorious new Reich capital created a housing crisis in Berlin. As always, the Jews were forced to give way. After a flurry of new laws were passed, they lost their few remaining rights as tenants and were forced intoJudenhäuser, “Jew houses,” run-down buildings in the least desirable areas of the city. Two Jews per room was the standard rule, regularly exceeded, as Jewish households already within the ghetto were required to take in the homeless. In late winter, Sara and Natan were ordered to accept a couple with a three-year-old daughter. The siblings took the bedroom, the young family made their beds in the living room, and they all shared the kitchen and bath, trying as best they could to stay out of one another’s way. The constant presence of strangers in their home obliged Sara and Natan to be more discreet about their resistance activities, but they did not abandon their work. The need was too great, Sara told Greta wearily, and the alternative—surrender, acceptance of oppression—was too unbearable to contemplate.
As spring arrived, Arvid, Harro, and their contacts within other ministries continued to gather evidence that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was imminent. In mid-April, Erdberg told Adam and Arvid that his superiors wanted him to establish radio contact between their resistance group and Moscow in the event that war cut off other channels of communication.
At first, Arvid refused. They had not a single trained radio operator in their group. Radio signals could be traced to their source, compromising their entire network. If through accident or betrayal they were found in possession of the equipment, the punishment was summary execution. Greta agreed with Arvid, deeply skeptical that radio communications could be established securely or that it would be worth the risk. But Harro strongly supported the idea, and eventually he and Erdberg wore Arvid down, although Arvid flatly rejected Erdberg’s request that he become the radio operator. “I’ll encode the messages,” he said, “but you’ll have to find someone else to transmit them.”
Greta saw him glance at Mildred as he spoke, and she knew he was concerned for her safety, not his own. Eventually the role went to sculptor Kurt Schumacher, a longtime member of Harro’s resistance circle and former student of Libertas’s artist father. Erdberg promised to supply the equipment as soon as it could be smuggled from Moscow.
One evening in early May, Adam returned home from a clandestine meeting with Arvid and Erdberg, his expression tense and troubled. “Moscow has sent two transmitters by diplomatic pouch,” he said. “Erdberg would like you to receive one of them the day after tomorrow at the Thielplatz Untergrundbahn station.”
Greta’s heart thudded. “He asked for me by name?”
Adam nodded.
