“I’m so sorry, Sara,” said Mildred, voice breaking. “Natan was among those killed at Sachsenhausen.”
A dull roaring filled Sara’s ears. She had known Natan was dead the moment she entered the flat and saw them looking at her with grief and sorrow and rage. She had known, but she had pretended not to, because until someone said the words aloud, the possibility remained that they would never need to be said.
Mildred and Greta begged her not to go back to her apartment. Earlier that morning, an order had gone out to round up the families of the men taken the day before and to transport them immediately to the east. Sara must not be home when the SS came looking for her.
“I won’t stay long,” she told them. She had to go back. She and Natan had pared down their belongings with every move, but she still kept a few precious mementos that she could not bear to leave behind. She had nothing else left of her brother. She must save his photos, his journals. The Nazis could not take her memories along with everything else they had stolen from her.
She embraced her friends, kissed them, and clung to them, closing her eyes and committing to memory their voices, their scents, the way they felt in her arms. “I hope we meet again in better days,” she told them, and then she left.
Alone in the tenement flat, she gathered her most precious belongings, her few remaining valuables, clothing, shoes, a coat—Annemarie Hannemann’s, not Sara Weitz’s. She packed a small suitcase and put on her dark gray suit, the one Natan teasingly called her “secretary disguise.” Had called. Would call no more.
She inhaled deeply, steeling herself. She would let her heart fall apart into broken shards later. Now she had to escape.
The last thing she did before leaving the tenement was to slip her ration card beneath the door of a kindly neighbor with several children. Whether she failed or succeeded, she would not need it again.
She slipped out the rear entrance, watchful and wary, choosing a circuitous route, deftly leaving the ghetto behind. In the east where the German Jews had been resettled, she had heard that there were walls around the ghettos, allowing no one in or out. Perhaps one day the Nazis would build walls around Berlin’s ghetto, if there were any Jews left to wall in. She intended to be gone long before then.
For their mutual protection, Natan had never told her the name of his Swiss friend. If he had, Sara could have begged him to hide her until he could obtain the forged documents and tickets to Zurich he had promised. Mildred’s contacts had left Germany long ago. Wilhelm, Amalie, and her parents were doing all they could from abroad, but they had been thwarted at every turn. Sara could think of only one other person who might be able to help her.
She remembered the way to Dieter’s workplace as if she had last visited weeks before rather than years. If his leave had ended and he had already returned to France, she was undone. She could not sit quietly in her flat until the Gestapo came for her, and she would not incriminate her friends by asking them to shelter her.
Dieter would not recognize the name Sara gave to the receptionist, but she was counting on curiosity to prompt him to come see who it was who claimed to have an appointment.
His face blanched from shock at the sight of her, but he quickly recovered and ushered her into his office. “Did you change your mind about the ring?” he asked, closing the door. “I have it here. It’s yours if you want it.”
“I’m going to ask much more from you than that,” she replied. “Does your company still have a branch office in Basel?”
Chapter Fifty-seven
August–September 1942
Greta
Greta was overcome with relief when Adam received a letter from Wilhelm von Riechmann with important news regarding their biographical play about Beethoven. The Swiss investors had welcomed the stage manager to Geneva, and while they were distraught to learn that the playwright had withdrawn from the production, they were deeply grateful that the stage manager had delivered the news in person.
After so many months of corresponding in code, Greta understood at once that Sara had arrived safely in Geneva and had reunited with her family, with one heartbreaking and irreparable absence.
Sara had left Berlin too suddenly to give her friends more than the barest sketch of her erstwhile fiancé’s arrangement to send his new employee Annemarie Hannemann to Basel to facilitate a shipment of chocolate and cheese. Greta suspected that Dieter had helped her not because he had suddenly turned against the Reich, but because he had loved Sara once and wanted to atone for the ways he had failed her. It was unfortunate that he was aMitläufer. He evidently possessed skills that would have been useful to the resistance.
As the summer ripened, Greta, Adam, and their friends continued their clandestine activities with heightened apprehension. The Gestapo arrested an average of fifty Berliners a day. Most arrests were provoked by civilian denunciations, but the result was the same: imprisonment at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, solitary confinement in a cold basement cell, inedible food, and harsh interrogations that began with simple questions but escalated to violence if the officers did not like what they heard. Sometimes, after weeks of relentless questioning apparently designed to drive the prisoners mad, they might suddenly be informed that they were free to go, without ever learning the charges against them or receiving a trial. More often, when the investigating officers believed the prisoner was involved with the resistance or was withholding vital information, they would commenceVerschärfte Vernehmung—“enhanced interrogation.” When this did not result in death, it inevitably left the subject broken in body and mind.
Everyone in their circle was mindful of the dangers—even Harro, whose bravado had convinced Greta that he was impervious to worry. But despite the risks, they could not abandon their cause, not when everything depended upon bringing down the Reich. They all had friends and loved ones in the military—Adam’s eldest son, Armin-Gerd, had recently been drafted—and the sooner Hitler was deposed and the Nazis were forced from power, the greater the likelihood they would survive.
And so their work continued.
Although they had not heard from Kent or anyone else from the Brussels outpost in months, they continued to collect intelligence for Moscow, which Arvid painstakingly encoded and Hans Coppi transmitted. After the Wehrmacht launched a second offensive across southern Russia toward the oilfields of the Caucasus precisely as Arvid and Harro had predicted, the Soviets became even more eager for their reports. In early August, Moscow sent two German Communists disguised as soldiers on furlough to Berlin with a new, more powerful transmitter for their group. Mildred arranged a safe house for them along their route in Bad Saarow, about seventy-fives miles southeast of Berlin, and when they finally reached the capital, they stayed with Elizabeth Schumacher. Greta never met them, but afterward, Mildred told her that just as Hirschfeld and Erdberg had done, they too urged their group to abandon their resistance and relief efforts and concentrate on gathering intelligence.
“We don’t work for them,” said Greta, bristling. “We collaborate with the Soviets because it’s in our best interest, but we aren’t here to do Moscow’s bidding.”
“I’ll be sure to have Arvid put that into his next report,” Mildred teased.
“I wish you would,” said Greta, and she was only half joking. Their group was deeply invested in helping the Jews and other victims of the Reich. They were not going to give that up just because the Soviets complained it distracted them from more important work. Greta, especially, was becoming more committed to exposing injustice and atrocities, although she did not always receive unanimous support from the group.
Earlier that summer, Libertas had used her connections at the Kulturfilm center to get Adam a job directing a documentary about the Nazis’ ambitious construction projects in the Polish city of Poznan, which Hitler envisioned as a new, majestic gateway to Germany from the east. He intended to have the Royal Castle remodeled as his personal palace, but not far from the depots where tons of rare marble were being shipped to the city, groups of Jewish and Catholic Poles were regularly marched out, lined up before mass graves, and shot. The filming provided Adam with a cover under which he secretly forged contacts for the resistance and collected evidence for Libertas’s war crimes archive.
On one occasion, Greta managed to get permission to visit him in Poznan, and she was horrified by what she saw. The city was under martial law, and executions were carried out for the smallest infractions or cases of insubordination, with notices of the death sentences posted on a kiosk in a public square as a warning to others. A brave young woman escorted Greta to a hospital where more than one thousand patients had been slaughtered soon after the invasion. From a safe distance, she pointed out Fort VII, officially known as Konzentrationslager Posen, the first concentration camp established in occupied Poland. Prisoners held in the nineteenth-century fortress were kept in cold, dark, overcrowded cells, sleeping on the stone floor or piles of rotting straw. Women’s cells were belowground and often flooded a half meter deep. Food was abysmal, diseases and pestilence rampant. One of the guards’ favorite means of torture was the “Stairway of Death,” a steep concrete staircase on a hill outside one of the buildings. Prisoners were forced to run up and down the staircase carrying a heavy stone, but sometimes when they reached the top, a bored guard would kick them back down. Arbitrary killings were epidemic, but bullets were inefficient, so SS chemists were experimenting with gas.
Shocked and sickened, upon her return to Berlin, Greta immediately wrote a report describing the inhumane treatment of Jews and Poles in Poznan. After presenting it to her resistance circle, she asked for their help printing copies and distributing them throughout the capital.
