Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Sara knew none of that mattered unless they could convince another country to accept them. The most desirable nations subjected would-be immigrants to arduous application processes, requiring German Jews to provide detailed information about themselves and their family, extracted with great difficulty from physicians, banks, and the German police. The United States was particularly difficult to enter, for potential immigrants must provide affidavits from American citizens willing to become their sponsors. They also had to secure a place on the waiting list within the quota permitted for each country of origin, and with thousands of German Jews desperate to escape to America, the competition was fierce. The uncertainty obliged them to apply to several different countries at once, creating an exhausting and expensive bureaucratic snarl with no guarantee of success.

  From his contacts in the international press, Natan had learned that the United States, Canada, and Great Britain were reluctant to increase their quotas and allow more impoverished people to flood their shores when they were already struggling with unprecedented unemployment, poverty, and widespread hunger due to the Great Depression. He had heard rumors that the number of German Jews allowed to enter the United States was actually far below what the quota stipulated. “Antisemitism isn’t exclusive to Germany,” he had told Sara the previous autumn, little guessing how crushed and bewildered his offhand remark had rendered her. Her entire academic career had been devoted to American and English literature. Every American she had ever met had been kind and generous, although it was true that she hadn’t met very many. Even so, she could not bear to think that the country she had admired from afar for so many years, a country founded on liberty and religious freedom, would reject her and her family simply because they were Jews.

  The next morning dawned sunny and clear, with a sparkling white blanket of snow covering the landscape outside Sara’s window. Smiling at the muffled laughter of the children as they played somewhere downstairs, she quickly washed, dressed warmly, and hurried to the dining room where the families were gathering. After breakfast, Sara’s parents offered to show Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky and Mr. Panofsky’s mother around the grounds while Natan and Sara took the children sledding. Natan, caught off guard, looked so wary that Sara had to laugh, but the children were fairly bouncing in their chairs from excitement, so he smiled and agreed.

  After an hour outside in the clear, crisp winter air, Sara knew her brother did not regret being conscripted to entertain the children rather than spending the day clattering away on his typewriter. The nearest hills were either too tame for Hans or too steep for Ruth, so instead of racing downhill, Sara pulled Ruth on one sled while Natan pulled Hans on the other, escorting them on their own tour of the estate, over the bridge and into the woods, singing and laughing, pausing to study the tracks forest creatures had left in the snow. They deduced from the paths traced through the drifts that the older set had made the rounds of the orangery, the greenhouse, the stables and indoor riding arena, and the gardener’s cottage before returning indoors to a warm fire.

  Late in the morning, Sara and Natan hauled the children up a long, gentle rise and paused at the top to catch their breath and to admire the view of the entire Riechmann estate spread out below all around them.

  “See that man down there?” Natan said, his cheeks red from cold as he knelt between the two sleds and pointed to a frozen pond at the northern edge of the forest, fed by the same creek as the moat. “That fellow is Mr. Albrecht, the groundskeeper. He’s clearing the ice for us so we can skate after lunch.”

  Hans let out a cheer and Ruth clapped her mittened hands together in delight. Then Natan’s last words sank in and both children suddenly realized they were hungry. Her own stomach rumbling, Sara swung Ruth’s sled around and followed the trail Natan broke through the drifts down the slope, careful not to let the children’s sleds get away from them.

  The children’s grandmother met them at the back door and quickly ushered them indoors, smiling as she noted their rosy cheeks and shining eyes. As she helped them out of their coats, boots, mittens, and scarves, Natan quickly shrugged off his own winter gear and hurried away, whistling, no doubt intent on typing a few paragraphs before lunch. As the elder Mrs. Panofsky took charge of her grandchildren, Sara hung up her things and went upstairs to change, rubbing her hands together to warm them.

  Just as she passed the library, she heard Mr. Panofsky say, “But are you certain the staff is absolutely loyal?”

  Curious, she paused in the doorway and found Mr. Panofsky and her father seated in adjacent chairs before the fireplace. As she entered, they looked up and immediately fell silent. “Is something wrong, Mr. Panofsky?” she asked. “Do you need help from the staff?”

  After the barest hesitation, he smiled and patted his stomach. “Only lunch,” he replied. “Our tour of the estate left me with a hearty appetite.”

  “Sledding with the children had the same effect on me. I’m sure lunch will be ready soon, but if there’s anything you need in the meantime—”

  “Thank you, child,” her father broke in, shaking his head wryly at his friend. “Rest assured, Frau Osthaus would never allow a guest to starve between meals.”

  Satisfied that nothing was amiss, Sara excused herself and continued upstairs to her room.

  Later, after lunch, while Mrs. Panofsky bundled up the children for ice skating and Natan stole away to his room to write, Sara curled up on a sofa in the drawing room with a new novel, a blanket, and a steaming cup of tea. Midway through the first chapter, she glanced outside the window and saw her father and Mr. Panofsky trudging through the snow away from the house. Mystified, she watched them until they disappeared behind a stand of fir trees. They were heading too far north to be going to meet the children at the skating pond, and the only outbuildings that lay before them were the stables and the riding arena, which Mr. Panofsky had already seen. Perhaps they wanted to ride, Sara thought, although it seemed unlikely, as her father had not sat a horse since he was wounded in the leg in the Great War.

  At supper the two gentlemen said nothing about their excursion, but instead joked about a contentious game of chess that they claimed had consumed the better part of the afternoon. Taken aback, Sara did not contradict the falsehood, but she could not help watching them more closely afterward.

  As the days passed, full of playful romps in the snow with the children, quiet snowshoe hikes through the woods, leisurely afternoons with games and books, and so many delicious meals that Sara was not sure her skirts would fit by the time they returned to Berlin, her father and Mr. Panofsky often slipped away on their own, with no explanation for anyone. Nor did their wives ever mention their absences or wonder aloud where their husbands had disappeared to.

  On the last day of their country idyll, Sara came upon the gentlemen at the riding arena just as she was leading Amalie’s horse back to the stable. She caught them by surprise at the foot of the staircase, either on their way up to the offices on the second floor or descending from above. “Papa?” she interrupted, suddenly, inexplicably anxious. “What are you doing here?”

  “Another tour,” Mr. Panofsky said. “Your father promised to show me everything and I intend to take him at his word.”

  Her father nodded agreement, but then both men simply stood there, smiling politely, apparently unwilling to speak or move until she departed. “Well,” she said uncertainly, “enjoy yourselves.”

  They assured her they would, and she tugged gently on the horse’s lead and continued on to the stables, wondering.

  Later, after supper, she managed to get her brother alone and asked him if he had noticed their father and Mr. Panofsky behaving strangely. “Actually,” he said, rubbing at his jaw, “yesterday I was trying to edit a story but my concentration kept being broken by this strange banging sound. I traced it to its source and found them upstairs in the attic, stomping on the floors and peering out of the windows.”

  Quickly she told him what she had observed over the previous fe
w days. “Have they gone mad?” she asked.

  “No,” he said slowly. “I think they’re entirely sane.”

  Jerking his head to indicate that she should follow him, he strode off to the library, where they found the two gentlemen poring over a map of Europe spread out upon the broad oak desk, various objects holding down the curling corners.

  “Papa,” said Natan as they entered, a hint of exasperation in the endearment, “when are you going to tell us what you’re planning? Does Mutti know? Does Wilhelm?”

  The older men looked up, startled, but then their father straightened, resigned. “It was Wilhelm’s idea,” he said. “And of course both your mother and Mrs. Panofsky know.”

  “And you didn’t think to enlist my help?”

  “We didn’t want Sara to worry, and we knew you would tell her.” Sighing, their father nodded in her direction. “As you clearly have already done.”

  “He hasn’t told me anything,” Sara said, instinctively rushing to her brother’s defense, although she had only the vaguest idea what she was defending him against.

  “Sara didn’t need me to tell her. She’s the one who noticed you two acting suspiciously.”

  “What is going on?” Sara asked, although suddenly she was sure she knew.

  “We’re evaluating several locations on the estate for their suitability as a hiding place for our family and the Panofskys,” came her father’s reluctant confession.

  “Just in case,” Mr. Panofsky hastened to add. “Nothing has been decided. We haven’t given up hope that we will be able to emigrate.”

  “But failing that,” her father said, “if the worst should befall us, we want to be prepared to go into hiding.”

  Sara stared at them, heart thudding. “If the worst should befall us,” she echoed. “How much worse could it possibly get?”

  As all three men regarded her bleakly, her throat constricted, choking off the desperate questions she was suddenly too afraid to ask.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  March–August 1937

  Greta

  In early spring, Greta and Adam celebrated the publication of his novel, Der Deutsche von Bayencourt, adapted from an antiwar play he had written in the early 1920s. The story, set from late July to early October 1914, featured a German-born farmer living in France whose loyalties were tested in the midst of the Great War. When a German patrol became stranded near his village, the farmer, torn between his German patriotism and loyalty to his French neighbors, offered the soldiers refuge. After the French authorities discovered what he had done, he was arrested, tried, and executed. The farmer’s son, a pacifist, denounced his father’s sentence, declaring that the nation’s real enemies were the warmongers and profiteers on both sides of the conflict who fomented “the boundless horror of this war.”

  Greta thought it was a brilliant work, deftly and subtly crafted, a compelling entreaty for social justice in the guise of a suspenseful war drama. Even so, she was surprised when Rowohlt offered to publish it, because the novel’s prevailing theme—that one’s ethical obligations could conflict with one’s loyalties to the state—would surely provoke outrage from Nazi censors. Greta understood that Adam saw the publication of his novel as an act of resistance, a way to sharpen his readers’ political awareness and focus their gaze. She wondered whether Rowohlt had published the book because of its subversive themes or in spite of them.

  Adam and Greta had prepared themselves for a backlash when the novel appeared on bookstore shelves, so they were guardedly pleased by glowing early reviews and steadily rising sales. To their astonishment, positive reviews also appeared in intensely partisan Nazi newspapers and cultural journals, but Adam’s delight soon gave way to ire. “These fascists see Bernard’s choice as a patriotic sacrifice for the Fatherland and completely ignore his son’s calls for peace,” he complained, crumpling up a newspaper and shoving it aside. “They call it my masterwork, but they’ve completely missed the point.”

  “Isn’t it better that way?” asked Greta. “Otherwise they might have thrown you into a concentration camp to punish you for seditious writings.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, distracted and upset. “But will everyone miss the point?”

  “No, darling.” She placed her hands on his face and turned his gaze to meet hers. “They’ll understand that your novel is a plea for decency and humanity in times of horror. The Nazis see only a story about the Great War. The vast majority of readers will know you’re also writing about our times.”

  Her words seemed to comfort him, but when producers began inquiring about the film rights, he proceeded with a wariness that swerved toward the bellicose. Adam had seen how Joseph Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, and others had transformed innocuous and even antifascist source material into propaganda for the Third Reich. “I refuse to allow anyone to twist my novel into a cheap piece of melodrama whose sole purpose is to justify declaring war on France,” he grumbled.

  “Then don’t sell the rights,” she told him. “You don’t need the money. The novel is selling well, you have other work, and more opportunities will come. It’s your book and they can’t take it from you by force.”

  If only Greta could have said the same for the book that had consumed so much of her own time and effort, a book she considered even more important to the resistance.

  With her help, Dr. Murphy had completed the translation of Mein Kampf on schedule and with growing confidence that it would transform the way Great Britain and the United States regarded the Nazi threat. Together he and Greta meticulously polished the final version, and then waited eagerly while Daphne typed it up and made a carbon copy. Then, in early April, just as they were preparing to submit the manuscript for publication, the Ministry of Propaganda informed Dr. Murphy that the book had been canceled. They ordered him to gather all his manuscripts, drafts, and notes and surrender them to the ministry immediately.

  “They offered no explanation,” Dr. Murphy said hoarsely after he broke the devastating news. His hands trembled and he repeatedly glanced down the hall to his bedroom, where Greta and Daphne suspected he kept a bottle hidden beneath a floorboard. “Perhaps they finally realized what we’ve known all along, that Hitler’s vile, racist pronouncements will turn the world against him.”

  Heartsick, Greta sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands, struggling to compose herself. “We don’t have to obey,” she finally said. “No German publisher would defy Goebbels’s orders, but you could smuggle the manuscript to London or Edinburgh and publish it there.”

  “No other publisher would touch it as long as Eher Verlag owns the copyright. The legal challenges would keep the book tied up in the courts for years. And if we don’t give the ministry what they’ve asked for, they may demand that I repay the advance, and it’s already spent.” He heaved a sigh and ran a hand over his face, his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Greta, but it’s over.”

  In silence they gathered up the pristine version of the final manuscript, their handwritten notes, the marked-up drafts, every scrap. Greta did not notice until the loathsome task was nearly complete that at some point Dr. Murphy had quietly slipped off to his bedroom and had shut the door, leaving the work to her and Daphne.

  “Should we draw straws to decide which of us gets to deliver this?” Greta asked bitterly when all the evidence of their months of toil was neatly packaged and ready to go.

  “I’ll take it on my way home,” said Daphne. “It’s not far out of my way. Besides, I’m afraid that if you run into Goebbels, you might slap him.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Greta retorted. “What do you think they’re going to do with all this? File it? Burn it?”

  “File it,” said Daphne, hefting the box and balancing it on her hip. “Burn the sacred utterings of their Führer? Never.”

  They fell silent for a moment, listening for any sound from Dr. Murphy’s bedroom that might suggest he was on the phone with the publisher or the ministry or his lawyers fighting to
proceed with the book. When only silence followed, Greta held open the door for Daphne and followed her out of the apartment, doubting she would ever return. It was not until later that evening that she realized she should have shared a more meaningful farewell with Daphne, for it was unlikely they would see each other again.

  But a few days later, as she was heating up some soup for her supper, Greta answered a knock on her door to find Daphne standing in the hall. “Do you have a moment?” she asked, glancing furtively over her shoulder, clutching her bag tightly to her side.

  Greta nodded and beckoned her inside, guessing that she had come directly from Dr. Murphy’s. As soon as Greta closed and locked the door behind her, Daphne took a deep breath and blurted, “The orders were to give them all manuscripts, drafts, and notes. They said nothing about carbon copies.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  Daphne nodded and patted her bag, her eyes wide and frightened. “I forgot that it was in my typewriter case. What should I do with it?”

  “Does Dr. Murphy know you have it?”

  “I don’t know. I believe Mrs. Murphy saw me put it in my bag. She said nothing to me, but she might have told him.”

  Greta’s thoughts raced. “Do you have a safe place to hide it?” Her heart sank a bit when Daphne said she had an ideal place, because Greta would have liked to have taken charge of it herself. In rapid whispers, they agreed to say nothing of the carbon copy to anyone, not even Dr. Murphy, but to keep it hidden away until an opportunity to publish came along. If Daphne returned to England, she would take it with her; if her hiding place became compromised, she would give the copy to Greta.

  Although the book was no closer to appearing on bookstore shelves, simply knowing that the manuscript existed raised Greta’s spirits. It was difficult keeping such an important secret from Adam, and that, coupled with her disappointment over the canceled publication and the loss of her job, had rendered her unusually tearful and moody. She had been feeling increasingly tired and out of sorts, easily nauseated and lightheaded. Mildred urged her to get out in the sunlight and eat more fresh vegetables and greens, but while walks through the Tiergarten with her attentive friend did make her feel better, the very thought of vegetables turned her stomach. On most days, all she could keep down was plain bread and yogurt.