Life is eternal; there are laws
To keep the living treasure’s cause
With which the worlds are rife.
She was engrossed in translating Goethe when the prison chaplain came to her cell at daybreak. As Reverend Poelchau entered, she saw herself reflected in his shocked expression and realized how completely imprisonment had transformed her. She had withered, aged beyond her forty years. Illness and hunger had chiseled her thin, and her once thick blond hair had gone brittle and white. Her shoulders were bent, her breathing labored.
She invited him to sit. He offered her a Bible in English, which she accepted. She expected him to urge her to pray or to confess her sins so she could face her Creator with an unblemished conscience, but instead he began to converse with her, easily and kindly. They discussed the Bible, Goethe, and her literary work, almost as if they were two acquaintances passing time at a bus stop rather than a woman who was about to die and her spiritual counsel.
Then his expression turned sorrowful. “Frau Harnack,” he said gently, “I regret to inform you, since I believe you have not yet been told, that your husband has preceded you in death.”
She felt a stabbing pain in her chest. For a moment her vision blurred with tears, and then they spilled over, trickling down her cheeks. She had long feared he was dead, but now all hope that he lived was truly lost. “How?” she said hoarsely. “When?”
“He was hanged here at Plötzensee on the evening of December twenty-second.”
Mildred’s head spun. Her beloved husband had been gone for almost two months. Even as she had been pleading to be allowed to see him for Christmas, it had already been too late, and no one had told her. “Was he alone?” she asked, because she could not bear to ask if he had suffered.
“Harro Schulze-Boysen, Kurt Schumacher, and John Graudenz were hanged within minutes of your husband. About an hour later, Horst Heilmann, Hans Coppi, Kurt Schulze, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, and Elizabeth Schumacher were executed by guillotine.”
Unbidden, Mildred’s hand went to her throat. She knew decapitation was considered more humane because death came swiftly, a suitable method for women and youths. Military men were usually accorded an honorable death by firing squad, but apparently that had been denied Harro. Hanging was regarded as the most degrading form of execution, one last cruel, malicious gesture from their Nazi tormentors.
She would face the guillotine. It was only a matter of hours now.
“Your husband was not alone in the hours leading up to his death, either,” Reverend Poelchau continued. “I was with him.”
Arvid had spent his last day writing letters to his family and reading Plato’sDefense of Socrates, the minister told her. He had asked Reverend Poelchau to read the story of the birth of Jesus from the Book of Luke, which his father had recited to the family every Christmas. Then he requested to hear the “Prologue in Heaven” from Goethe’sFaust, which the minister spoke from memory. In his final moments, he asked the chaplain to join him in singing Bortniansky’s hymn “Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe.”
“I pray to the power of love,” Mildred murmured.
“Dr. Harnack did believe in the power of love,” the minister said. “He went to his death bravely and heartened by his belief that your life would be spared.”
She was grateful he had had that last comfort, false though it had proven to be.
Reverend Poelchau glanced over his shoulder to confirm they were not being observed through the cell door, then reached into the breast pocket of his coat and took out a small packet and an orange, so colorful and bright in the dim light of the drab cell that she blinked. “From Inge,” he said, placing the packet on the table before her and handing her the orange. She took it, marveling at its brilliant hue, its full, round perfection. She lifted it to her face, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, then set it on the table so that she could open the packet, uttering a small cry of joy when she beheld several family photographs. She studied each one lovingly, but when she came to one of her mother, her eyes filled with tears and she kissed the photo over and over. Then she set it facedown on the table, picked up her pencil, and wrote carefully on the back, “The face of my mother expresses everything that I want to say at this moment. This face was with me all through these last months. 16.II.43.”
She peeled the orange slowly, reluctant to spoil its beauty, and ate it, savoring its sweetness.
Reverend Poelchau left soon thereafter, but he promised to return at the appointed hour. Alone once more, grieving for her lost love, for her own too swiftly passing life, she opened the Bible the minister had given her and turned to 1 Corinthians 13. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal,” she softly read aloud the familiar verses. “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
She closed the Bible and held it for a moment, contemplating the scripture. Then she set the Bible aside and resumed her translation of Goethe. She would leave a note for the minister with her books, ask him to send them to Mutti Clara.
The day passed, and night descended.
At twilight, a silver-haired man the guards called the shoemaker was let into Mildred’s cell. His expression impassive, he searched her mouth for gold fillings, found none, and cut her hair short to bare her neck for the blade. She shivered, unused to the cold air on her scalp and neck. The shoemaker departed and a guard brought her a pair of wooden clogs and a coarse, sleeveless, open-necked smock. He ordered her to put them on; she obeyed, though her hands shook so badly she struggled to pull the smock over her head.
Another guard arrived, handcuffed her wrists behind her back, and grasped her bony elbow to steer her from her cell. Flanking her, the two guards led her down the corridor to the exit, then outside and across the courtyard to the execution shed.
Her throat constricted; her mouth went dry. She stumbled on a cobblestone but a guard seized her by the upper arm and kept her on her feet. This was where Arvid died, she realized as they ushered her into the execution chamber. Reverend Poelchau stood just inside the doorway; he held her gaze and nodded to remind her that he was there for her, not for the Reich. She swallowed hard and nodded back, hardly able to bear so much compassion and pity after months of cold indifference.
Her gaze darted around the room, heart thudding in her chest. Half of the chamber was concealed by a black curtain. Several officials sat at a table to her right. One stood and read aloud from a paper, but her ears rang and she could not quite make out his words. She grasped that the men at the table were confirming her identity and acting as witnesses as her death sentence was read aloud.
Somehow even then she could not quite believe that this was how her life would end.
The official set down his paper and turned to a man clad in a long black coat, white gloves, and tall black hat. “Executioner,” he intoned, “do your duty.”
The black curtain was pulled aside to reveal a stark white chamber. There were two arched windows on the far wall covered with blackout curtains. In front of them, an iron beam with eight sharp meat hooks was fixed into the ceiling; a wave of grief washed over her, for she knew Arvid had been hanged from one of them.
On the right stood the guillotine, all gleaming brass and polished wood.
