“That, and I wanted to see your face when you sat down to breakfast.” He gestured to a chair. “So sit.”
Bemused, she obeyed. Turning his back to shield the cupboard from her view, Natan withdrew a plate and set it before her with a flourish. Upon it were a half a loaf of rye bread and a gorgeous red apple.
“Natan!” Sara gasped. “Where did you—how—”
“A gift from my Swiss friend.” Grinning, he sat down across from her and rested his arms on the table. “Just a taste of things to come.”
With a moan of pleasure, Sara tore off a chunk of the bread and devoured it. “You mean—”
“He promises to have false papers and train tickets to Zurich for us by the end of June.”
“Oh, Natan, that’s wonderful!”
“So we just have to hold on a little while longer.” He nudged the plate closer to her. “That’s all yours, by the way. I already had mine.”
It was the best morning Sara had known in a very long time.
That night she stayed in, unwilling to test her luck two nights in a row, certain that the SS would be on alert and eager to make examples of any Jews caught out after curfew. The next morning, Natan again woke first, but when Sara joined him for a meager breakfast of ersatz coffee and rye bread saved from the previous day’s generous loaf, his expression was grave. “Someone bombed the exhibition last night.”
“What?”
“They’ve kept it out of the papers, but a friend of a friend heard the explosions go off. Was this Schulze-Boysen’s work?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s reckless, but if he were going to blow something up, he’d discuss it with the group first, and choose a more valuable target. How badly was it damaged?”
Natan did not know. They agreed to check their separate sources and meet later to share what they learned. Sara hoped that the loathsome exhibition had been completely destroyed.
Unfortunately, Greta and Mildred soon informed her that this was not so. An incendiary device had been set off at the entrance and cloth soaked in phosphorus had been set aflame elsewhere in an attempt to burn down the building, but although a few people had been injured and part of the exhibit had been burned, the fire had not spread, the damage was quickly repaired, and the exhibition had opened on time that morning as if nothing had happened. Greta and Adam had been among the first to enter, and they had noted only a few faint scorch marks on the walls. “People are speculating that the Jews attacked the exhibit because they can’t stand the truth,” said Greta, disgusted.
“Was it someone from our circle?” Sara asked.
“We have no idea who was responsible,” said Mildred. “Let’s hope the Gestapo doesn’t either.”
Four days after the bombing, Natan’s sources warned him that the Gestapo had raided several locations in the city and had arrested five Jews, three half-Jews, and four Aryans suspected of carrying out the plot. Investigators had determined that the bombs had been manufactured at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which led them to Herbert Baum, an engineer at Siemens accused of being the cell’s ringleader. “A conspiracy of Jews and Communists, exactly as the Nazis suspected,” Natan said. “This feeds perfectly into their propaganda narrative. They’ve snatched triumph out of the ashes of humiliation.”
More arrests followed as the investigation continued, but although Harro seemed untroubled, others in their circle became increasingly apprehensive. Sara was among those who worried that the Baum cell’s bombing and their group’sZettelklebeaktioncould become conflated, even though their resistance circles did not overlap. She had never been particularly close to Harro, but she observed mutual friends distance themselves from him. Sometimes, too, she overheard angry grumbling about his recklessness, his willingness to risk all of their lives for little gain.
Then, on June 4, two weeks before the bombing suspects were scheduled to go on trial, Chief of Reich Security Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich—creator of the Einsatzgruppen and architect of the Final Solution—was assassinated in Prague.
The resistance welcomed the news, but Arvid’s sources warned that although the two events had occurred 350 kilometers apart, many prominent Nazi officials worried that the Lustgarten bombing had exposed a dangerous breakdown in absolute authority, a show of defiance that had emboldened Heydrich’s killers. Every Jew in Berlin was a potential assassin. “I for one do not wish to be shot in the belly by some twenty-two-year-oldOstjudelike one of those perpetrators of the attack against the anti-Soviet exhibition,” Goebbels had reportedly grumbled to a colleague at the Propaganda Ministry.
“There will be reprisals,” Arvid cautioned. “Watch your backs.”
Within hours, they learned that the reprisals had already begun. Radio reception from Czechoslovakia was sporadic, but Mildred had been monitoring one faint, distant station operated by a Czech resistance cell. Before it fell silent, a desperate operator had reported that more than thirteen thousand Czechs had been arrested, and the entire population of the village of Lidice had been massacred after Gestapo agents incorrectly concluded that the assassins were hiding there. Sara offered to help Mildred regain the signal, but although they took turns at the shortwave painstakingly scanning the airwaves and listening intently until their ears rang from the static, their attempts were fruitless. They were so intent on their work that they did not realize Sara had broken curfew until Arvid returned home from the ministry.
“I should go,” Sara said, bolting to her feet.
“You can stay,” Mildred offered. “Have supper with us and spend the night.”
“I don’t want my brother to worry, and it’s too dangerous. If anyone finds me here, you’d be in a great deal of trouble.”
“There are other things here that would get us in even more trouble,” said Arvid, gesturing to the radio.
“I’m not wearing theJudensternand I have my false papers,” said Sara. “If I’m stopped on my way home, no one will know that I’m breaking curfew.”
Mildred smiled. “In that case, no one will know that you’re breaking curfew if you’re found here.”
Sara wavered a moment longer before agreeing to stay. Natan knew she kept erratic hours and would not worry unless she went missing for more than a day. The Harnacks’ quiet, pleasant apartment offered a welcome respite from the noise and the smells and the tangible fear of the ghetto, and she was not quite ready to abandon the search for the Czech radio signal.
