Greta choked out a laugh, a wild, strangled sound. “Oh, in that case we’re perfectly safe. They’ll never find us with only our name and phone number.”
“It might buy us time.”
“Not enough to make any difference. There are a million ways the Gestapo can find us knowing only our surname. We’re in the phone directory, for God’s sake.” Another thought struck her. “Will Kent be clever enough to figure it out?”
“I’ve never met the man, but I would expect so.”
“After he discovers the error the hard way by knocking on the wrong front door.” Greta sighed and clasped a hand to her forehead. “At least they didn’t give Arvid’s last name.”
“Yes, that’s good,” said Adam, but when their eyes met, the depthless regret she glimpsed there told her what he could not bear to say aloud.
If any member of their resistance network was discovered, they would all be compromised.
As dangerous as it was to be in radio contact with Moscow, Greta understood that severing ties would cost the resistance their most important remaining contact with the outside world—and the situation in Germany had become so desperate that they needed all the help they could get. Every day Arvid and Harro discovered official reports of shocking abuse and mass murders of Jews and Communists in the conquered territories of the Soviet Union, but they suspected this was only a glimpse of even greater horrors not yet disclosed. German Jews were being resettled in the east by the thousands, and the few letters from deportees Greta had received indicated that they had been crowded into ghettos and concentration camps. Although the letters were vague and sparsely detailed to pass the censors, the writers described hardships and hunger, and begged for food and warm clothing. She’d immediately sent several parcels, but she never heard if they had been received.
Greta feared that the deported German Jews, wherever they were, suffered conditions as appalling as those of the foreign conscripted workers in Berlin. The laborers toiling upon Albert Speer’s Germania construction projects, and the thousands more who had been brought in from defeated territories to work in other industries, suffered increasingly worse hardships as the autumn days grew colder and winter approached. A few blocks away from John Sieg’s Neukölln apartment, the National Cash Register compound at 181–189 Sonnenallee had been converted to a munitions plant, with a factory at one end and rough barracks at the other. The crude structures housed slave laborers from France, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, including numerous Jews and many women. Whenever Sieg passed the site, he witnessed prisoners clad in rags, freezing, starving, enduring beatings. When the guards were not watching, some compassionate residents of Neukölln found gaps in the fences and passed the prisoners potatoes and bread, warm gloves and soap. Sieg gave them flyers with encouraging messages translated into Polish by his wife, Sophie. But although Greta admired them for offering what comfort they could, their efforts seemed hopelessly inadequate to the enormous need.
To do anything on a larger scale, the resistance needed outside help. That meant continuing to provide information to the Soviets, despite the risks.
Soon thereafter, when “Kent” arrived in Berlin, Greta heard about it only after the fact. Ignoring his instructions, Kent had phoned the Schulze-Boysen residence first and asked to meet with Harro. Libertas had met him at an Untergrundbahn station, and after confirming his identity, had brought him home to meet her husband. For more than four hours, Harro had provided him with detailed military information, including the location of Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia; the Wehrmacht’s plans to invade the Caucasus in order to access Soviet oil reserves; Germany’s preparations for chemical warfare; and information about aircraft productions and battlefield casualties. He also had revealed that the German military faced severe fuel shortages and their supply lines were stretched dangerously thin. Afterward, Kent had returned to Brussels to transmit Harro’s information to Moscow.
“I have a confession,” Greta said after Libertas finished her report. They were sitting side by side in the old wooden chairs on the roof of the Kuckhoffs’ apartment building, wrapped in blankets to fend off the cool air of late autumn. “I’m relieved Kent contacted you and Harro instead of me and Adam.”
“He must have heard we have excellent cognac,” Libertas said lightly, but her teasing smile soon faded. “I hope our work makes a difference. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Harro’s descriptions of the atrocities were bad enough, but the films I see at work, the photos—”
“What films?” In early November, Libertas had taken a new job as a scriptwriter and press agent in the Deutsche Kulturfilm-Zentrale, the better to acquire information for the resistance. Kulturfilm had been founded after the Great War to produce educational German documentaries, but in 1940 it had been placed under Goebbels’s direct control and now mostly churned out Nazi propaganda. “What photos?”
“Images of atrocities. Some taken by Kulturfilm staff, others by soldiers on leave. If the world could see what I’ve seen, every civilized nation on earth would declare war on Germany and put this horror to an end.”
“What have you seen?”
Libertas shot her a challenging look. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Greta felt a denial form on her lips, but she forced herself to nod.
“Come by my office tomorrow and I’ll show you. Don’t bring Ule, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The next morning, Greta dressed in her best dark blue suit, left Ule with Erika, and went to the Kulturfilm office, wondering how Libertas would explain her visit to her superiors and justify showing her films and photos that Greta presumed were strictly confidential. She dreaded the sights that awaited her there, and yet she felt a compelling responsibility to pay witness to them, to share Libertas’s burden. She knew how exhausting it was to carry a painful secret alone.
When she arrived, she gave her name to the receptionist in the lobby, and soon Libertas appeared, dressed in a smart rust-colored suit, smiling and cheerfully greeting colleagues in passing. She welcomed Greta with a kiss on the cheek, linked her arm through hers, and led her off to the elevator, chatting animatedly as if they were off on a shopping trip.
Libertas’s façade fell as soon as they were alone in her office. She closed and locked the door, drew the blinds, and retrieved a file from a tall cabinet near the window. “These aren’t official records,” she said. “No one else at Kulturfilm or within the Reich hierarchy even knows this file exists. If they did, they would order it destroyed, and I’d probably be shot if I couldn’t talk my way out of it. Soldiers were strictly forbidden to take photos of these events, but—” She shrugged and added sardonically, “Many did anyway. They’re proud of their service to the Reich and want to preserve it for posterity.”
Greta fixed her gaze on the file as Libertas opened it, suddenly apprehensive. “The Nazis document their deeds to the point of obsession. Why would they forbid this?”
“You’ll see.”
Libertas turned photos faceup on her desktop, one after another, snapshots from the front—soldiers holding pistols to other men’s heads, torturing victims bound to chairs, smiling arm in arm as they stood before open graves filled with bloody corpses, pulling bayonets from victims whose faces were still contorted in pain, one horror after another after another—
Greta staggered back, pressing a hand to her mouth, dizzy with nausea. “My God,” she breathed, when she could speak. “Those poor people! How can you bear it?”
“Most days I can scarcely hold myself together.” Libertas’s voice was strangely flat as she gathered up the photos and returned them to the file. “I spared you the pictures of murdered children, the dead babies.”
“How—” Greta’s breath caught in her throat. “How did you manage to get these?”
“Most were given to me by the soldiers themselves—young, gray-haired, and every age in between.” Shaking her head, Libertas gathered up the photos and returned the file to the cabinet. “They’re eager to brag about their adventures at the front when a pretty young thing flutters her eyelashes and acts impressed. They pull out their photos, and with a little flattery, a little flirtation, I convince them to let me make copies. We have all the necessary equipment—” She gestured vaguely toward the wall separating them from the rest of the department. “They assume—even though such photos are officiallyverboten—that I want them for the Kulturfilm archives or for a Reich propaganda film.”
“Instead you’re creating your own archive.”
