The New Year began with little hope that 1942 would bring peace, prosperity, or anything else one usually wished for on the holiday. For all the hardships the German people endured, the Jews suffered far worse as the fate of their departed friends remained uncertain and still more constraints upon their lives were imposed. Jews were forbidden to sell their personal property without official permission from the Reich. They were banned from all public baths and forbidden to buy firewood, newspapers, and periodicals. The pace of deportations increased, but the Jews were now marched to the Grunewald station at night, presumably to reduce the number of witnesses. Instead of passenger carriages, the deportees were now crowded into cars used to transport goods or cattle. Sara and Natan had observed a pattern in the most recent transport lists, which seemed overwhelmingly comprised of the elderly and the bedridden. As the Gestapo cleared out hospitals and sanatoriums for the aged, Arvid and Natan surmised that the Nazis wanted to keep healthy young Jews in Berlin so they would be available for conscripted labor, but Mildred and Sara worried that the Nazis were targeting the old and the sick because they were helpless and weak, less likely to fight back and reduce the efficiency of the deportation process. Perhaps both possibilities were true.
What had become of the deported Jews after they left Berlin remained an ominous question. At first, some Jews had sent letters to friends in the capital from ghettos in Litzmannstadt, Minsk, Kaunas, and Riga to say that they had arrived safely but desperately needed food and warm clothes, but before long the flow of letters slowed to a trickle and then ceased. Why would the deportees be forbidden to write home? Complaints and strategic information could be censored. Why cut off communications entirely?
By the middle of February, Mildred knew of no one who had heard from a departed Jewish friend in weeks, and letters sent to the resettlement sites were often returned stamped “Addressee Deceased” or “Address Unknown.” Rumors swept through Berlin like snow crystals carried aloft in the cold February winds, whispering that the Jews had died in typhus epidemics or had been murdered outright. The rumors were as ephemeral as snow crystals too, for few Berliners remarked upon their absent neighbors at all. Many people were no doubt afraid to say anything rather than risk appearing disloyal to the Reich. Others were glad to be rid of the Jews and to benefit from the redistribution of the property they had left behind—vacated homes given as rewards to party members, furs and jewels sold in special shops at a fraction of their value. It seemed to Mildred, however, that the vast majority of Germans responded to the plight of the Jews as they had for more than a decade, with profound indifference. As long as they and theirs were exempt from persecution, why should they care what happened to strangers?
Their unfathomable lack of empathy and compassion rendered Mildred heartsick, bewildered, and afraid.
In mid-February, Harro came across documents at Luftwaffe headquarters that chillingly, meticulously revealed a sudden and drastic worsening of Reich policy toward the Jews. According to a conference transcript Harro glimpsed on a superior officer’s desk, on January 20, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and thirteen other high-ranking officials had met at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Harro could not have stolen a copy of the transcript without raising the alarm, but he studied it swiftly, intently, when it was left briefly unattended on his superior officer’s desk. What he saw was enough to convince him that within the past year, Adolf Hitler had authorized a plan to deliberately and methodically annihilate eleven million European Jews. The purpose of the Wannsee Conference had not been to debate whether such a heinous program of mass murder should be undertaken, for that had already been decided, but how to implement it.
As horrifying as Harro’s conclusions were, nothing he described contradicted what the Nazis had done elsewhere to Communists, to labor unionists, to Polish politicians, to Soviet prisoners of war, to Jews in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe. And yet somehow, Mildred could not quite believe it—that was to say, she knew it was true, and yet her brain rejected it as impossible. Representatives from the highest levels of the Nazi Party and the Reich government had convened in a Wannsee villa in order to create a bureaucracy to commit genocide. They had probably sipped coffee and passed around neatly typed documents filled with charts and graphs and statistics, all very rational and logical—and yet every man at that table had to be completely mad or irredeemably evil to engage so readily in preparations for mass murder.
Winter passed in exhaustion and dread, a perpetual storm of horrifying revelations from the Luftwaffe and the Economics Ministry, the terror of nightly air raids, the struggle to find enough at the markets to feed herself and Arvid and have enough left over to share with Jewish friends, the inability to ever feel truly warm and comfortable since there was never enough fuel.
“You’re too thin for a woman in your condition,” Arvid told her one evening as he cut his own potato in half and placed the larger portion on Mildred’s plate. “You need to eat more, for you and the baby.”
“Darling, you’re just as hungry as I am.” She tried to return the potato to his plate, but he refused it, and frowned kindly at her until she ate every last bite. The truth was that she was worried. Her appetite had not returned after the wretched early nausea passed, and her abdomen did not seem as full and round as it ought to have been by then. Sometimes she felt a dull ache on the right side of her pelvis, and rarely, although still enough to concern her, she discovered a light spotting of blood in her underwear after walking or doing housework.
At the end of February, concerned by unusual symptoms and worried that stress and malnutrition were affecting her unborn child, Mildred made an appointment with a gynecologist. He and the nurse said very little during the examination, but after the doctor left and Mildred dressed, something about the nurse’s brisk, cheerful manner and inability to make eye contact told her something was very wrong.
The nurse escorted Mildred to the waiting room to fetch Arvid, whose hopeful smile faltered when he saw the tears in her eyes. Hand in hand, they followed the nurse to the doctor’s office to receive the diagnosis.
“You have an ectopic pregnancy,” the doctor told her gently. The embryo had implanted in her right fallopian tube. There would be no child. The condition was potentially fatal to Mildred and surgery would be required to remove the tissue. The operation would almost certainly render her unable to conceive again.
Devastated, Mildred broke down in sobs, weeping and trembling in Arvid’s arms. She felt him shaking too, heard the frisson of grief in his voice when he thanked the doctor and scheduled the surgery and helped her into her coat and scarf and out of the office and home.
Due to wartime circumstances the operation could not take place until the end of March. Her symptoms worsened dangerously throughout the delay, and afterward, due to stress or exhaustion or poor nutrition or unrelenting grief or all of these, her recovery was prolonged and difficult. In April, Arvid begged her to get out of the beleaguered city, to convalesce in the calm serenity of the countryside. He knew the ideal retreat—Schloss Elmau, a sanatorium and artists’ colony nestled in the sublime alpine valley of the Wettersteingebirge near Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. His late uncle Adolf von Harnack had often summered there.
“I’ll visit you in May,” Arvid promised, tears in his eyes as they kissed in parting. “By then you’ll be healthy and strong again, I promise.”
After he had gone, she surrendered herself to the beauty of the mountains and forests, taking comfort from the kindness of the solicitous staff, rebuilding her strength with rest and nourishing food, feeling her strain gradually ease as the days passed blessedly free of air raid sirens and falling bombs. She distracted herself with the pleasant company of other convalescents, with hours spent engaged in lectures by distinguished professors or musical programs and literary discussions. She spent at least a few hours every day in restful solitude, in a chair overlooking a glorious mountain peak or a sparkling crystal lake, losing herself in the poetry of Goethe, her familiar touchstone when the world’s burdens lay too heavily upon her shoulders.
This was the Germany Mildred loved, the Germany she was willing to risk her life to save. She would not abandon it to the abyss, not while she had any strength left, not while any chance remained that their cause could prevail.
Chapter Fifty-six
May–July 1942
Sara
When Mildred returned to Berlin in May, Sara dressed as Annemarie Hannemann, slipped out the back door of her ghetto tenement, bought a bouquet from a florist shop Jews were not permitted to frequent, and walked along streets from which Jews were banned in order to visit her friend at home.
Mildred looked well, as well as Sara imagined anyone could in her place. Her face had lost its gaunt angularity and her skin had a fresh, soft glow, but an ineffable sadness permeated her usual warm, gentle manner. Sara’s heart ached for her, and she wished she knew what to say, what to do, how to bring her comfort. Perhaps it was enough for Mildred to know that she was loved, and that her friends would do anything to take away her pain, if only they could.
“What I want most, now that I’ve recovered, is to get back to work,” Mildred told her. “I have this awful sense that we’re running out of time, that soon we’ll reach a point of no return where every last good thing about Germany will be forever lost, beyond redemption.”
Out of consideration for Mildred’s grief, Sara restrained a bitter retort. She believed Germany had passed that point when the Nazis devised their Final Solution, but as long as Mildred needed to believe that her adopted homeland could be saved from itself, Sara would not snuff out her hopes.
The harsh winter had demoralized everyone, but it seemed to Sara that spring brought relief and renewed hope to the Aryans, a lifting of spirits that eluded the Jews. Even so, although their fanatical devotion to the Führer surged as he confronted Churchill and Roosevelt, most Berliners remained deeply ambivalent about the war with the Soviet Union. They had not forgiven their leaders for allowing their beloved soldiers to suffer on the Russian front throughout that punishing winter, nor had they forgotten the broken promise that foreign bombers would never breach their city’s defenses. Terrifying air raids had become almost commonplace. Thunder and death rained down from the skies by night, and in the morning, Berliners emerged from their homes and shelters to find rescue workers pulling mangled corpses from smoldering ruins.
The resistance took advantage of the blackouts, meeting at discreet spots to collect antifascist flyers and leaflets and venturing out into the darkness to distribute them throughout the city. They usually traveled in pairs or small groups, pretending to be girlfriends enjoying a daring night out, linking arms and chatting animatedly as they walked along. A casual onlooker would never guess that their purses were stuffed with treasonous materials. Or a young man and woman would pretend to be a couple in love, holding hands, ducking into shadowed doorways for an embrace, their pockets and sleeves stuffed with pamphlets, which they slipped into mailboxes when no one was looking. In the mornings, exasperated green-uniformed city police would be ordered to fan out through the city to collect every last leaflet and scrape the antifascist flyers from the walls.
Once Sara was standing watch while her partner, a handsome Romanian Communist she knew only as Andrei, pasted an antifascist flyer over a Nazi propaganda poster. Suddenly she heard footsteps approaching. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered, and before she knew it, Andrei had shoved the bundle of flyers and the paste pot into an alley and had swept her into a passionate embrace. Sara clung to Andrei, returning his kiss as a pair of storm troopers passed and disappeared around the corner, snickering and making rude remarks under their breath. Andrei immediately released her and apologized profusely. She assured him somewhat dazedly that it was perfectly fine, rather good thinking on his part.
Natan did not like for Sara to venture out at night. “At least leave yourJudensternat home and go out as Annemarie,” he urged, and she agreed. The yellow star was too conspicuous anyway. If only she could get ration coupons in Annemarie’s name, she would never wear the star again, but it was Sara Weitz who must go to the shops after hours and wait in line and hope for a withered potato or head of cabbage to cook into something vaguely nourishing for herself and her brother.
She and Natan debated going underground, but pretending to be Annemarie occasionally was as deep as she dared go. They would starve unless someone sheltered them and brought them food, but anyone caught hiding Jews would pay for their selflessness with their lives. Escape was a better option. Jews were forbidden to emigrate, but Natan was working his contacts in the Communist underground and foreign press and hoped to get them both smuggled out of the country before winter. Sara did not care where they went, as long as it was beyond the borders of the Reich. Eventually, somehow, they would make their way to Geneva and their family would be reunited at last.
“If we can’t be somewhere safe, I’m glad the two of us are together,” Sara told Natan one evening over a meal of cabbage, onion, and apples fried in the last of the olive oil. “I couldn’t survive one day alone in this hell without you.”
