“Mildred could go, but it’s not so simple for me,” said Greta. “I would have to get immigration papers, and there are quotas and a very long line ahead of me. Even if I could get a student visa—somehow, if someone at the University of Wisconsin would do a favor for an alumna—eventually it would run out and I’d have to come home.” She stopped herself before blurting out that she could not bear to leave Adam, or to be even farther from her aging parents in Frankfurt an der Oder, or to abandon the resistance network when it had barely begun and by every indication was becoming more crucial every day.
Clara fixed her gaze firmly on Mildred. “Just you, then, Mildred. You’re an American. Come home.”
Mildred shook her head. “I can’t leave Arvid.”
“Convince him to come with you.”
“He wouldn’t. His family is here, his work—”
“Then come without him. I know you don’t want to leave him, but he would want you to be safe.”
“He would,” Greta interjected, not because she wanted Mildred to go, but because it was true.
“It’s not his decision, but mine,” said Mildred. “Clara, I know the answer seems so obvious—we should get out now before things get worse. But some of us feel we have to stay to keep an eye on developments.”
Greta nodded. How could they flee? How could they abandon Germany to evil men who were determined to destroy everything good about it?
Clara took a deep, shaky breath and told them she understood. “This isn’t goodbye,” she vowed, embracing each of them in turn. “We’ll meet again, in better days.”
Greta wanted to believe her, but better days seemed very far away.
Chapter Thirty-three
June–September 1935
Sara
A few weeks after Dieter arrived in Australia, he sent Sara a gift—a boomerang, a graceful curve of smooth dark wood, polished to a high sheen and painted with black geometric designs that Sara guessed were tribal insignia. He had enclosed a letter in the package, contrite, imploring, full of apologies and explanations. He was no Nazi, he insisted, and if Sara knew him at all she ought to know that. He was wrong to have worn the swastika pin for the sake of diplomacy in business and he would never wear it again, even if it cost him his last commission. Better to lose his job than Sara’s respect.
“Even your favorite instructor had to join the National Socialist Teachers League to keep her job,” Dieter wrote. “If you could forgive Frau Harnack, then surely you can forgive me.”
If they had not been separated by almost ten thousand miles, Sara would have retorted that Mildred had joined the league only with great reluctance after agonizing over the consequences. Dieter had willingly pinned that swastika to his lapel to convince clients he was a Nazi in order to make sales. His motives and complicity and Mildred’s were nothing alike. The only reason Sara would ever want to see Dieter again would be to tell him so, and to return his ill-considered gift—and the engagement ring.
She could not bear to wait until he returned from Australia to settle the matter once and for all. She mailed him a heartfelt letter breaking off their engagement, trying as best she could to be gentle and kind. Then she carefully tucked the ring and the boomerang in a box—only those, it would have been spiteful to return every gift he had given her through the years—and set out for Dieter’s apartment.
His mother answered the knock, pursing her mouth and narrowing her eyes as her gaze traveled from Sara’s face to the box in her arms. “What’s this about?” she asked.
“Would you please see that Dieter gets this?” As Frau Koch accepted the parcel, she added, “Please keep it somewhere safe. It’s... valuable.”
A faint triumphant gleam lit up Frau Koch’s eyes. “Does this mean what I hope it means?”
“I don’t know what you hope.”
“Then it’s true. He finally ended it.”
Sara saw no reason to clarify the finer points of their breakup. “The marriage is off, yes.”
“Praise God!” Frau Koch clutched the box to her chest and gazed heavenward. “This is an answer to a poor mother’s prayers.”
“Yes, well—” Sara forced a tight smile and stepped away from the door. “Goodbye.”
“He’s better off with his own kind,” Frau Koch called after her as she left. “You both are.”
Sara broke the news to her family the next time they gathered for Shabbat. Wilhelm and the girls were off at the Riechmann ancestral estate in Minden-Lübbecke, but her parents and siblings absorbed the news with obvious relief. Everyone expressed their sympathy in careful phrases, but no one seemed surprised or regretful.
Soon thereafter, Amalie tremulously made a far more upsetting announcement: She, Wilhelm, and their daughters were leaving Germany indefinitely.
“But why?” their father protested.
