Then, in late June, Mildred received a letter from another American friend.
It was only her second letter from Martha since the Dodds had returned to the United States, a reply to Mildred’s letting her know that Boris had been recalled to Moscow under suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis. “You’re a dear to be concerned,” Martha had written, “but I’m sure Boris is fine. Last month I received a letter from him, dated April 29 and sent from Moscow. It was very warm and affectionate, and he had lots of nice things to say about our last meeting in Berlin. He spoke of our eternal love, which, I have to say, was very flattering but impossible, because—Are you sitting down?—I’m going to be married!”
Mildred was so startled she had to start over at the beginning and read the letter again.
She had not misunderstood. Soon after Martha arrived in New York, she had met Alfred Stern—tall, handsome, ten years older than she, and wonderfully wealthy thanks to a generous divorce settlement he had received from his defunct marriage to a Sears Roebuck heiress. After a whirlwind romance, Alfred had proposed and Martha had accepted. They planned a large celebration at the family farm in Round Hill, Virginia, on September 4, and Mildred and Arvid were very welcome to attend if they could possibly make it.
“I suppose I must tell Boris,” Martha wrote, with a trace of chagrin. “What an awful letter that will be to write, nearly as bad as it would be to receive!”
Mildred felt more than a little chagrined herself. Apparently Arvid had been right all along about her friend’s fickle heart. She hoped his judgment was equally sound about Donald Heath, and that the embassy’s new first secretary would prove to be as shrewdly intelligent, cautious, and deserving of their trust as he seemed. Their lives depended on it.
Chapter Forty-one
March–September 1938
Sara
For Austria’s Jews, theAnschlussbecame a swiftly unfolding nightmare.
In the aftermath of the annexation, the Nazis immediately imposed the same restrictions upon Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables that they had honed to cruel perfection in Germany.Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, one hatred. Jewish shops and businesses were looted, the proprietors hauled out to the sidewalks and beaten. Throughout Austria, the front windows of Jewish-owned stores and restaurants were marked in yellow paint,Judeand the Star of David, warning Aryans to avoid them. In Austrian cities, Jews were forced to scrub city streets; laborers, lawyers, and clerks toiled on their hands and knees with coarse brushes and buckets of soapy water under the watchful gaze of armed storm troopers and hundreds of curious onlookers. In Vienna, Jewish actresses were made to scrub public toilets.
Sara and her family followed the news from Austria with a cold, sinking dread that outwardly might have appeared stoic. All of it was horrifying, none of it unexpected. To Sara the rumors spreading through the Jewish community and the reports in the Jewish press bore a grotesque veneer of familiarity. Everything that was happening to the Austrian Jews—the public humiliations, the loss of rights, the chilling certainty that any passing Aryan could inflict whatever violence they wanted upon you and the authorities would do nothing—had been a part of their daily lives for years.
By late spring, the hiding place at Schloss Federle was nearly complete, five rooms in the attic of the west wing accessible only by a narrow staircase leading from a spare room used to store old furniture, some of which was dusted off and hauled upstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky stocked a large closet with canned and dried food and other necessities, purchased in modest amounts over time to avoid drawing attention. Sara’s father and Natan rerouted pipes to provide running water for a sink, shower, and toilet. Though the dormer windows faced the forest, Sara and her mother covered them with heavy blackout curtains, and made up the beds and put down rugs, not only for comfort, but to muffle their footsteps.
They did all of the work themselves. They could not risk entrusting their secret to contractors, strangers who might betray them later out of carelessness or malice. The household staff, whose integrity and loyalty Wilhelm swore was secure, treated their suddenly more frequent visits as perfectly unremarkable and pretended not to notice the sporadic bursts of activity in the castle’s least-used wing.
“We may never need to spend a single night here,” Sara’s father told her mother. “Let us hope our hard work will prove unnecessary.”
Her mother smiled wanly and agreed.
Then, in late June, Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky suddenly changed their plans. Germany had become too dangerous for Hans and Ruth, they told Sara’s parents. Since Mr. Dodd and his family no longer resided at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, the children were not safe even in their own home. Friends in Great Britain had agreed to take them in, and although the thought of splitting up the family was hardly bearable, it would be a relief to have the children out of harm’s way. And perhaps the family would not be separated for long. On March 1, two Aryan partners had officially taken over Jacquier and Securius, releasing Mr. Panofsky from his commitments to the bank. With nothing to hold them in Berlin any longer, they planned to emigrate to Great Britain as soon as it could be arranged. They had reached the top of the waiting list and it was only a matter of time until they were granted visas. The Panofskys reconciled themselves to the hard fact that as a condition of their emigration, they must relinquish nearly everything they possessed to the Reich and start over in a strange country with almost nothing.
“You’ve made the right decision,” Sara’s mother told Mrs. Panofsky, embracing her as she fought back tears. “One couldn’t take such young children into hiding. They need to run and play and go to school.”
“You should leave too,” Mr. Panofsky urged Sara’s father. “Nothing here is worth sacrificing your lives. Leave everything behind if you must, but get out before the door closes.”
To Sara, it seemed the door was already barely ajar, open only wide enough for children like Hans and Ruth to slip through. The Weitzes had completed the emigration forms and filled out more as new regulations required. They were on waiting lists for Switzerland, Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. In the meantime, they had little choice but to keep their heads down in public, plan their escape to Schloss Federle if they were forced to go into hiding, and hope for the best.
And in the quiet shadows, Sara and Natan would continue the work of the resistance, although they privately agreed it seemed increasingly unlikely that Hitler would be brought down from within.
One evening in September, Sara went to the Harnacks’ apartment for a meeting of the progressive study group. Mildred met her at the door, her face pale, stricken, her eyes red-rimmed. Immediately Sara assumed something terrible had happened to Arvid, but when she asked, Mildred pressed her lips together, shook her head, and gestured toward the living room. Anxious, Sara joined the other students, and in a quick exchange of whispers she learned that no one knew why Mildred was upset, although everyone in that room had good reason to be.
When the last student had arrived, Mildred took her usual chair at the top of the circle. “I apologize for my distress, and for worrying you,” she said, lowering her gaze. “Arvid and I are fine, but I’ve had distressing news from America. An author I deeply admire, a friend—” She took a deep, steadying breath. “It grieves me to say that two days ago, Thomas Wolfe passed away.”
The cause was miliary tuberculosis, Mildred told them, her voice catching in her throat. He had died a few weeks before his thirty-eighth birthday.
Even those who had not met Wolfe when he had visited Berlin were shocked and saddened by the news. Abandoning the evening’s assigned reading, they instead contemplated Wolfe’s work, the transformation of his understanding of the Nazis over time, the tragedy of a profound voice silenced too soon. That led them to sober reflections upon other voices that had fallen silent, lost to emigration, imprisonment, or death. Those who remained, determined to speak out through allegory or in the underground press, often found themselves muffled by censorship or drowned out by the loud, angry voices preaching intolerance and hate.
Earlier that month, the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg had once again been a showcase for such vitriol. Excerpts from Hitler’s speeches and descriptions of the rapturous cheers of his audience had appeared in German newspapers, but the students were skeptical of the Nazi-controlled press and urged Sara to share her impressions. As in years past, she had attended the rally to help Natan cover the events for theJudische Nachrichtenblattand the underground press, and her fellow students hung on her every word as she described what she had witnessed. A rumble of disgust followed her account of Hitler’s closing speech at the rally, in which he had attacked the president of Czechoslovakia and denounced what he called the oppression and humiliation of nearly three and a half million ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland, a suppressed minority placed by the Treaty of Versailles “at the mercy of an alien power they hate.”
Karl Behrens glowered. “Can there be any doubt that Hitler intends to invade the Sudetenland next?”
“Time will tell,” Mildred said simply, and although the group exchanged uneasy glances, no one urged her to say more. Sara understood why Mildred did not disclose whatever her husband might have confided to her about a potential invasion. Although everyone in the study group was antifascist, not all were members of the resistance.
After the meeting, Mildred drew Sara aside as the other students packed up their books and left the apartment, singly and in pairs several minutes apart, to avoid suspicion. “Arvid recently came across disturbing information about Hitler’s construction plans for Berlin,” Mildred told Sara as soon as they were alone.
“There’s nothing about that project thatisn’tdisturbing,” Sara replied. Within the past year, Hitler had spoken of reconstructing Berlin as the capital of the new Grossdeutsches Reich, the Aryan race, and civilization itself. “These buildings of ours should not be conceived for the year 1940,” he had proclaimed in one public speech, “no, no, not for the year 2000, but like the cathedrals of our past, they shall stretch into the millennia of the future.” It was said that Hitler’s chief architect took him quite literally and intended to design this new German world capital so that it would be more beautiful and awe-inspiring than Paris and Vienna when it was newly complete, and as glorious as the ruins of Athens and Rome when Berlin too had experienced centuries of decay. The idea that Nazis would be in power long enough to sculpt the landscape of Berlin for even a decade filled Sara with revulsion, but to the Nazis, their Thousand-Year Reich was already a certainty.
