“From the time the law went into effect through the day my brother was arrested, his byline doesn’t appear in the paper even once,” Sara added, encouraged by Herr Mandelbaum’s studious frown as he examined Meinholz’s letter. She clasped her hands together in her lap, silently willing him to help her. She had to find someone to take Natan’s case. A legal challenge was his last and best hope for release, if he yet lived. Natan was forbidden visitors and his only letter had been smuggled out six weeks before, so all they had left was hope—
Sara’s heart cinched as Mandelbaum sighed, shook his head, and returned the affidavit. “I’m sorry, Fraulein Weitz, but as you surely know, as a Jew I’m forbidden to practice law anymore. I could be arrested merely for advising you.”
Tears of frustration and disappointment threatened, but Sara kept her voice steady. “Then why did you agree to meet with me?”
“Out of respect for your father.” Chagrin clouded his expression. “I suggest you retain an Aryan lawyer.”
“I’ve tried.” Even longtime friends of the family had declined the case.
Mandelbaum studied her in silence for a moment, then took up a pen, tore his letterhead from a piece of creamy ivory stationery, and jotted down three names and addresses. “These gentlemen might be able to help you,” he said, holding out the page. “Even if they can’t represent your brother, they may be able to arrange for your family to visit him.” Sara rose and took the list by the torn edge, but he held on to it a moment longer. “Don’t show anyone this paper, and don’t say I referred you.”
“I won’t,” Sara promised. With a nod, he released the paper and she slipped it into her bag. Soon she was outside his garden gate stifling a groan of anguish and outrage. Another favor called in for nothing, another meeting that brought her brother no closer to freedom. Even the list in her bag was essentially meaningless. What could these Aryan lawyers—strangers—do for Natan that Wilhelm, with all of his aristocratic and military connections, had been unable to accomplish? It was thanks to Wilhelm that the family knew Natan had been arrested while browsing in a Charlottenburg bookshop, that he had spent five weeks in Columbia Haus, a once obsolete military prison near the Tempelhof airfield recently reopened to accommodate the vast overflow of prisoners from the Gestapo’s overcrowded jails. Rumors told that the guards at Columbia Haus specialized in torture and interrogation, and that after every last confession was brutally wrung from their captives, those who survived were shipped off to concentration camps to serve out their sentences. As if to confirm every horror the family imagined, in due course Natan had been transferred to Konzentrationslager Oranienburg, a concentration camp just north of Berlin for political prisoners, homosexuals, and other “undesirables.”
The Brownshirts had established KZ Oranienburg in a defunct brewery more than a year before, but after the SA was wiped out in Hitler’s purge, control of the camp had passed to the SS. Prisoners were forced to perform hard labor for the local council, and nearly every day they were marched through the town to and from the worksites. Many times Sara and Amalie had traveled to the town bearing letters and parcels of food and clothing that they hoped to pass to Natan, but although they peered through the fences into the camp perimeter and searched the rows of thin, bedraggled men as they were marched under guard through the center of Oranienburg, they never once glimpsed their beloved brother. They feared that Natan was dead or that he had been transferred to one of the so-called wild camps rumored to exist in the countryside, where anarchy reigned and enemies of the Reich were tortured or killed on a whim, but Wilhelm’s friends in the Wehrmacht confirmed that Natan was in Oranienburg and promised to do what they could to see that he was well treated. Sara’s mother was frantic, her father haggard and aging beyond his years. No assurances could ease their suffering. Only Natan’s release would do that.
Thoughts churning, Sara walked down the sidewalk, clutching her bag to her side. Even if she ran all the way to campus she would arrive too late for her afternoon class. She decided to go to Natan’s apartment instead, nagged by the faint hope that she might find something there she had overlooked before, something that would convince the Nazis to release her brother at once.
She paused at a curb to let traffic pass. Glancing to her right through the buildings and vehicles, she glimpsed the green of the Tiergarten a few blocks away and realized she was near Herr Panofsky’s beautiful home, where in better days he had hosted lovely parties for his employees and their families. How clever he was to have leased his home to the American ambassador. Even though Panofsky was wealthy, cultured, and powerful, the exact sort of Jew that the Nazis despised most, the Gestapo dared not harass his family, not with such an illustrious tenant there to observe and report on every indignity.
Suddenly, inspiration struck.
All around her, other pedestrians surged forward, carrying her across the street in their current, but her thoughts lingered upon Tiergartenstrasse 27a and the ingenious shield Mr. Panofsky had erected around his home and family. Perhaps she too could contrive a way to convince the Gestapo that even if Natan had committed a crime, it would be in their best interest to leave him alone.
Mildred Harnack would help her. Her influential acquaintance at the American embassy, George Messersmith, had left Germany in May to accept the post of ambassador to Austria, but Ambassador Dodd had hired Mildred to type and edit the manuscript for his history of the Old South and she was close friends with his daughter. Perhaps she could persuade the ambassador to make inquiries on Natan’s behalf, as embassy officials had done for numerous Americans and foreign correspondents whom the Nazis had unjustly arrested. Natan was not an American citizen, but if the Americans took up his cause, perhaps the Nazis would release him rather than risk worsening Germany’s already strained relations with the United States.
As she turned toward Neukölln, Sara felt her spirits rise for the first time since Natan had been arrested. Mildred would convince the ambassador to help them. She would persuade the ambassador, and the ambassador would persuade the Nazis, and Natan would come home to his family, safe and sound. This was Sara’s last hope. What might happen if it failed was too terrible to contemplate.
Chapter Twenty-seven
August–December 1934
Martha
A year and a month into her father’s tenure as ambassador, Martha could not mistake the signs of his increasing pessimism as the United States remained firmly isolationist contrary to the best interests of America and of the world. Time and again he wrote to his superiors at the State Department warning them of Hitler’s ravenous ambitions, but it seemed that all he accomplished was to give his enemies within the diplomatic corps evidence that he was philosophically unsuited for his post and ought to be replaced.
Sometimes Martha suspected her father might welcome that, especially on days when his efforts seemed especially futile and he contemplated asking for leave so he might visit Stoneleigh, his beloved 385-acre farm in Round Hill, Virginia. Although the rest of the family much preferred the comforts and modern conveniences of their Chicago brownstone, rustic Stoneleigh was the home of her father’s heart. As autumn approached, Martha knew he yearned to be harvesting Pippin and Cortland apples from his thriving orchards, or driving his two dozen Guernsey heifers out to graze in the pastures, or riding one of his four horses through the gently rolling Appalachians.
Martha could not give him that, but whenever he sank too far into despondency, she would pull him away from his desk and invite him for a stroll through the Tiergarten. Once or twice a week they walked together, and as they admired the late summer flowers of August and then the first autumnal tints of September, he acknowledged his increasing frustration with his colleagues in Washington and his revulsion for his counterparts in Berlin.
“It’s humiliating to be obliged to shake hands with known and confessed murderers,” he told her. “Murderers, moreover, who are plotting for war.”
Martha’s heart quickened. “Do you really think so?”
Her father nodded soberly. “There’s ample evidence that the Reich government is preparing for a massive struggle. It’s only a question of time. The German military is arming and drilling more than a million and a half men, all of whom are constantly indoctrinated in the belief that continental Europe must be subordinated to them.”
Martha took her father’s arm. “You’re the president’s eyes and ears in Berlin. Why won’t the State Department heed your warnings?”
“They fervently hope I’m wrong and can’t bear to admit I may be right. Congress wants us to stay out of any European conflicts, and so does the majority of the American people. As for me, I’m convinced we must abandon our isolationism, and I’ve written to Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to tell him so.”
“I hope he’ll listen.”
“I hope so too, but I have grave doubts.” Her father heaved a sigh and patted her hand. “I’m afraid I must resign myself to the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.”
Martha knew her father was hardly “doing nothing.” In addition to continuously briefing Washington about the irrefutable signs of impending conflict and advocating for Americans who ran afoul of the Reich, he also helped persecuted Jews, in the limited fashion his office permitted. Mildred frequently asked him to facilitate a Jewish friend’s visa application or emigration to a more hospitable European nation, but one afternoon she approached Martha with a more unusual request. A Jewish journalist, the brother of one of her students, had been arrested more than three months before for violating the Editors Law and was being held in KZ Oranienburg. He had not been able to obtain legal counsel, and his family’s anxious pleas for visiting rights had been rejected.
“Has he been convicted of anything?” Martha asked.
“He hasn’t even been granted a trial,” said Mildred. “Do you think you could ask your father to intercede on his behalf? His sister is one of my favorite students and a dear friend. You’ve met her—Sara Weitz.”
