The first officer gave his consent, and the second followed her to the phone and listened carefully as she called her mother and explained that she was under arrest and needed her to come for her grandson.
“Will you be all right?” her mother asked, panic in her voice. “Where’s Adam?”
“I don’t know,” Greta replied, just as the second officer grabbed the phone from her hand and hung up.
As slowly as she dared, Greta packed Ule’s little knapsack, washed his face and hands, hugged him fiercely, and led him downstairs to the kindergarten. “May Ule wait here until his grandmother arrives?” she asked the teacher. “It may be awhile. She’s coming from Frankfurt an der Oder.”
“Of course,” the teacher replied, concern evident in her tone, though she smiled as she held out her hand to Ule. “Is something wrong?”
The officers had lingered in the foyer, but now Greta heard them approaching. “I’m under arrest,” she murmured. “If any of my friends come by asking for me, tell them to run.”
Just then the second officer seized her tightly by the arm. “Frau Kuckhoff is mentally ill,” he said. “We’re taking her to an institution. This nonsense she’s speaking is a symptom of the disease. Forget you heard it. Forget we were here.”
The teacher’s expression tensed and she edged backward, pulling Ule behind her. Greta’s last sight of her son was of his sweet face peering up at her from behind his teacher’s skirt, his dark eyes confused and shining with unshed tears. “Ule, darling, I love you,” she cried as the officers hauled her away.
They put her in the back of a truck, windowless and stifling. Alone, she buried her head in her hands and fought back tears as they jolted along, the frequent stops and starts telling her they had not left the city. All too soon the truck halted and the engine shut down. Two armed guards in brown military uniforms threw open the back and hauled her out, while the first officer ordered them to take her inside. A quick, frantic glance revealed that she was at the police headquarters at Alexanderplatz. Prodded along by the butt of a rifle, she stumbled through the front doors and down a long hallway. She caught fleeting glimpses of people she knew—Elizabeth Schumacher, Erika von Brockdorff—but not Adam or Mildred or Arvid or the Schulze-Boysens or—
But even without her closest friends, there were too many familiar faces, ashen and tear-streaked or stoic or angry, for it not to be certain that their circle had been compromised.
And yet Adam was in Prague, far from all of this. Perhaps the Gestapo did not know. Perhaps one of their friends had been able to get a message to him in time, shouting a warning into the phone while storm troopers broke down their door. Or perhaps her mother had called him before she hurried to Berlin for Ule.
Greta could only hope that word had reached him in time.
Two weeks after Mildred’s arrest, she was taken to a large, dark room where she was fingerprinted and photographed, her head held rigidly in a neck brace as they took her photo from the front, in profile, and at three-quarters. By then, the long, harrowing days of endless harsh interrogations without food or water and the agonizing nights of cold, loneliness, and fear had already ravaged her. She had lost weight; the brown prison dress she had been issued on her first day hung from her bent shoulders like a loose shroud. She ached all over from lying on the hard bench in her cell beneath the single barred window, and her flesh was sore and bruised from the slaps and beatings she received under questioning. She was constantly exhausted, her sleep repeatedly interrupted by the discomfort of the cold bench, the screams of other prisoners, nightmares. She felt alternately feverish and chilled, and her chest rattled when she coughed. She was denied medicine, books, visits from loved ones. She had no idea if her family knew where she was.
The only time she saw other prisoners was when she was dragged from her cell to the interrogation room or to the prison yard for her ten minutes of daily exercise. That was how she knew Libertas and Harro were confined to theHausgefängnis, also Adam Kuckhoff and John Sieg, Hans Coppi and Kurt Schumacher. For a while she saw Hilde Coppi nearly every day in the yard, carefully walking with the others, her hands resting upon her rounded abdomen, but then she disappeared; Mildred fervently hoped that she had been released on account of her pregnancy. She never saw Greta, but she once glimpsed Wolfgang Havemann, Arvid’s stepnephew. She knew Arvid was near, and she often begged the guards to let her see him, if only for a moment, or at least to tell her which cell was his. They ignored her. The SS officers conducting her interrogations offered to give her time alone with Arvid if she would only make a full confession—such a small thing, really, since they already knew she was guilty—and answer their questions, so many questions about Arvid, the Kuckhoffs, the Schulze-Boysens, the Soviet calling himself Kent and the Soviet intelligence outpost in Brussels and on and on. Increasingly despondent, she responded to every query with denials. She knew nothing of any resistance group. She was a wife and a teacher. Yes, she was an American, but she had no connection to the United States government. Yes, she had been friends with Ambassador Dodd’s daughter and other American diplomats and their wives, but those had been innocent friendships, and her American acquaintances had all left Germany long before.
Once, after a particularly intense interrogation, so violent that she had to be carried from the room on a stretcher, she was left for a few minutes in a hallway, lying in a blur of pain and despair, unable to rise or even open her eyes. Thinking her insensible, the guards and officers conversed in passing, and so she learned that more than one hundred members of their group had been rounded up. Most of the women, including Greta, were being held in the prison at Alexanderplatz, but Libertas remained at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, confined in relative comfort in an open cell because of her aristocratic rank and noble connections.
Weeks later, the guard who brought Mildred her supper—a cup of coffee, two pieces of bread spread with margarine—informed her that Arvid and Adam had finally broken under torture in the Stalin Room, stretched between four beds, wrenched by calf clamps, tormented by thumbscrews. “Your husband wept like a child,” he gloated, “but it was Kuckhoff who gave up his friends, John Sieg and Adolf Grimme.”
“Who?” Mildred murmured, feigning puzzlement as she forced herself to finish the stale bread. Muttering curses, the guard snatched the tin plate from her hands and struck her upside the head with it. She crumpled, blinded by pain, and over the ringing in her ears she heard him stride from the cell, slam the door, and turn the key.
As her body steadily weakened, her ten minutes of daily exercise in the prison yard became both a respite from the grim isolation of her cell and an ordeal. A guard would take her from her cell and lead her from theHausgefängnisto a pair of heavy iron doors leading to the central courtyard. When the doors opened with a clang of metal, for a moment she would be riveted in place, caressed by sunlight and a sudden rush of cool, fresh air. “No talking,” the guard would remind her as he shoved her into the open yard, where other prisoners walked slowly around the perimeter of the gravel courtyard. She was not permitted to fall in step with them, but could only tread a diagonal path between two corners of the high encircling walls, alone. She wondered about the other prisoners. They were not allowed to speak to her, nor she to them. Once, one brave woman dared offer her sympathetic glances, so Mildred took a chance and whispered her name and cell number and begged the woman to remember her.
Ten minutes each day was all she had to walk and breathe beneath an open sky and to remind herself that she was human. By the time her stiff, aching limbs loosened up and she fell into a comfortable rhythm, she would be ordered back to her cell.
An interrogator let slip that she and her friends would be tried, but he did not say when, nor did he explain the charges against her, nor was she permitted to meet with an attorney. She could not imagine who would be brave or foolhardy enough to represent them.
In mid-November, a guard banged on her cell door, startling her out of a wistful reverie—hiking around Lake Mendota in Wisconsin on a late autumn afternoon, her hand in Arvid’s, the brilliantly colored leaves dancing overhead as breezes tossed the boughs.
“You see how good behavior is rewarded here,” the guard said, entering her cell carrying a small box. “Just think of how much more we could do for you if you would cooperate.”
Deliberately, she looked away. He set the box on the floor and nudged it toward her with the side of his boot. She waited for him to leave before she rose unsteadily, went to the box, and peered inside. There was food, bread and cheese and hard sausage and an apple. There was a letter from Arvid’s mother. And there was a note from Falk, hastily written from the look of it. “Dear Mildred,” he had scrawled in pencil on a scrap of paper, “I was just with our beloved Arvid. We both send you heartfelt greetings and kisses. Your loyal brother-in-law, Falk.”
A tear trickled down her cheek, and she absently wiped it away with the back of her hand. She was not forgotten. Her beloved Arvid was still alive. Surely Arvid’s family was doing all they could to get them released.
But as swiftly as her hopes had risen, they plummeted. She and Greta had observed Nazi mass trials with Clara Leiser, and she knew the verdicts were often predetermined. What chance did they have of an acquittal? Whatever the specific charges against them were, the best outcome they could hope for was life imprisonment.
In the days that followed, she reread Mutti Clara’s letter and Falk’s note so often that the paper became as soft as cloth, but their kindness was not enough to alleviate her suffering. Illness, hunger, isolation, and brutal treatment at the hands of the Gestapo had worn her down to a thin shadow. One night, just as she was drifting off to sleep, a man passed outside her door and hoarsely whispered that John Sieg had hanged himself in his cell rather than betray any of his friends. Once Mildred would have recoiled from the thought of taking her own life, but after more than two months of unendurable horror, she felt death beckoning her. Her strength was faltering, and she knew from the rattle in her chest that she was unlikely to survive a lengthy incarceration. She had withstood interrogation thus far, but if the Gestapo subjected her to the same torture Arvid and Adam had suffered in the Stalin Room, how long could she hold on?
Perhaps it would be wiser and braver to take her own life before she could be forced to reveal the names of her friends.
One morning in late November, or so she believed, having lost track, she woke coughing up blood. The guard took her to the infirmary, which smelled of bleach and iron and seemed too brightly lit for her feeble eyes. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a stainless-steel basin and was shocked to see a haggard old woman staring bleakly back at her.
She cringed as moans of anguish came from an adjacent room where the doctor was examining another patient. She caught sight of a tray on the counter beside the sink, upon which several objects were arranged—wooden tongue depressors, a stethoscope, a container of sewing pins. She stared at the latter, perplexed by the apparent incongruity, focusing on that in an attempt to block out the distressing sounds from the other room. What purpose would sewing pins serve here? she wondered, and suddenly she realized what purpose theycouldserve.
Summoning her strength, she bolted from her chair, reached the counter in two strides, snatched up the pins, and shoved a handful into her throat. She heard the guard shout as she closed her eyes and tried to swallow, but then a hand closed tightly around her shoulder and another seized her throat, and then they were prying her jaw open. Frantic, she thrashed and tried to wrench herself free. Her elbow connected with something that gave way with a strange, sickening crunch followed by a howl of pain, then two men had her on the floor, on her side, with hands squeezing her throat to prevent her from swallowing and two more holding open her mouth and slapping the back of her head until most of the pins tumbled out, fingers plunging into her mouth to sweep the last few free. A boot connected with her rib cage, once, and again, and again.
