Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Sara gathered hope wherever she could find it, from her friends’ perilous generosity, from antifascist graffiti that sprang up overnight on buildings and railways cars, and from rare, startling subversive acts that disrupted the Nazi myth of a German Volk united in solidarity behind Hitler. In September, bombs were detonated outside the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz and the Air Ministry. In November, the office of Hitler’s personal photographer was vandalized, the shop windows where portraits of the Führer were displayed shattered. No one in Sara’s resistance circle was responsible, prompting Natan to note, “This proves we’re not alone.”

  Hope, however slender the thread, sustained Sara as winter descended, for as the days grew colder and the nights longer, the blackout became more oppressive, more isolating. Crime soared in the darkness—prostitution, murders, thefts, rapes. To make navigating the city at night less hazardous, curbs, street corners, crossings, steps, and sidewalk obstructions were marked with phosphorescent paint, and arrows indicating the way to air raid shelters were painted on walls. Pedestrians carried electric torches screened with the necessary filters and wore phosphorescent badges on their lapels to avoid colliding with one another. Even so, accidents soared throughout Berlin. People making their way home from work in the darkness tumbled into gutters or tripped over cracks in the sidewalk. With vehicle headlights reduced to screened rectangular openings no larger than five by eight centimeters, traffic moved through the city at a crawl, other cars and trucks barely visible as narrow slits of headlights, pedestrians entirely obscured. Drivers became disoriented without familiar landmarks and street signs, running off the road or crashing into one another. Trains sped past dimmed warning signals and plowed into the backs of other railcars. As the death toll rose, officials insisted that matters were well in hand and the German people only needed time to get used to the new conditions. Sara avoided the worst of the hazards by staying indoors after twilight, but she worried about Natan, who ignored the curfew imposed on Jews and kept his own schedule as he always had.

  In December, despite the blackout and rationing, despite the gloom and depression and uneasy expectation that British bombs might fall upon the cities or fighting break out along the western front, most Germans began preparing for Christmas. Sara had always felt somewhat estranged from the Christian majority during their festive season, but that year was more isolating than any she remembered. She observed her fellow Berliners hauling home Tannenbäume, putting up candles and wreaths, and singing carols with forced good cheer as the Reich scheduled Christmas concerts and pageants to improve morale. High-ranking Nazis made a show of visiting the troops on the front lines, to shake hands or to share a holiday feast.

  Such displays of patriotism seemed to please most Berliners, but Sara was careful to keep her expression impassive when she overheard grumbling about other Nazi intrusions upon the holiday. Rationing and the scarcity of goods made shopping for gifts frustrating, if not impossible, and devout Christians took offense at wrapping paper printed with swastikas and Christmas carols revised to include Nazi themes. Sara too was taken aback when she first heard the updated version of the beloved “Stille Nacht”:

  Silent night, holy night,

  All is calm, all is bright.

  Adolf Hitler is Germany’s star,

  Showing us greatness and glory afar.

  Bringing us Germans the might.

  Bringing us Germans the might!

  The most ardent Nazis did not celebrate Christmas at all that year, but a newly contrived holiday called Julfest, a time to reflect upon one’s Aryan ancestors and honor soldiers who had sacrificed their lives in service to the Fatherland. As a Jew, Sara found it all strange and surreal and menacing. She could only imagine how it felt to those German Christians who still revered Jesus more than Hitler.

  She woke on the first morning of 1940 to find a fresh blanket of snow covering Berlin, soft and white and clean, concealing all its recent ugliness, restoring the charm and beauty she recalled from winters past. She ached with longing for her parents and sister, for their home in the Grunewald, for family suppers and her nieces’ laughter and Amalie’s beautiful music rising from the piano.

  When Natan found her staring out the window with tears in her eyes, he seized her by the hands and pulled her up from her chair. “Bundle up,” he ordered. “We’re going out. Leave your identification card here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m your older brother and I said so.”

  Dutiful, curious, she put on her warm coat, boots, hat, and mittens and followed him outside, along sidewalks that storekeepers were busily clearing of slush. “Where are we going?” she asked when they reached the entrance to the Untergrundbahn.

  “You’ll find out.”

  Although he gave her no hints, she could make an educated guess based upon the direction they were traveling, and her suspicions were confirmed when he gestured for her to get out at the Bahnhof Zoo. “Natan, no,” she said, even as she followed him outside.

  “Why not?”

  “Because—” She lowered her voice as she hurried to keep up with him. “Because Jews aren’t allowed in the Tiergarten.”

  “Who’s going to know? It’s not like we’re wearing a sign.”

  Somehow they always know, Sara thought, but as they caught sight of the bare-limbed, snow-covered trees just ahead, a knot of resolve in her chest hardened and she strode ahead.

  “Not so fierce,” Natan said, muffling laughter. “You’re just an ordinary German Fraulein enjoying a New Year’s Day stroll, remember?”

  Sara took a deep breath and let her shoulders relax.

  Snow and ice had transformed the Tiergarten into a magical realm of stark beauty. Together Sara and Natan walked the snowy paths, breathing deeply the crisp, cold air, jumping out of the way as a group of young boys rushed past pulling a toboggan. Smiling, Sara closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky as a gust of wind blew a shower of snow down from the treetops. “Do you remember when you taught me to ski?” she asked her brother. Grinning, he nodded, and one reminiscence prompted another, until her cheeks ached from smiling.

  All was joyous until they passed a group of Nazi soldiers at rest, smoking and passing a flask back and forth, rifles slung idly over their shoulders. Abruptly the spell was broken. “Let’s go home,” Sara murmured, clutching her brother’s sleeve.

  “Why, are you too cold? Do you want my scarf?”

  She took a step backward, her gaze fixed on the soldiers. “No, let’s just go.”

  He looked as if he might argue, but something in her expression stopped him. “All right,” he said, slinging an arm casually over her shoulders and turning her away from the soldiers. “We’ll come back another time.”

  Sara doubted they ever would.

  As January passed, bitter cold descended upon Berlin, the worst Sara could remember. For days on end, daytime temperatures struggled to rise above −5°C, plunging even deeper in the night. Canals, ponds, and lakes froze over, and when one heavy snowfall after another buried the city—one storm dumped almost a meter within eight hours—and high winds carved the snow into deep drifts, travel became so difficult it was rarely worth the attempt. Strict snow removal policies were enacted for homeowners, and work teams of Hitler Youth, drafted citizens, and conscripted Jews were assigned to clear sidewalks, roads, and public thoroughfares. Despite these efforts, it was almost impossible to keep up with the snow, which fell almost without respite upon the beleaguered residents.

  Sara thought rationing was bad enough when there were things to buy, but as winter dragged on, shortages of food and fuel made difficult circumstances nearly unendurable. Frozen canals prevented coal barges from reaching the city, and when shipments managed to arrive by rail, they sold out almost before merchants had time to announce they had restocked. Schools were instructed to return all coal over a fortnight’s supply to their distributors so that it could be made available for the public, while churches were ordered to
surrender all of their coal supplies and make do without heat until the crisis passed. Factories engaged in war production were promised an adequate supply, but others received none. Sara and Natan adapted by heating only the living room and wearing thick layers of clothing indoors, but then municipal authorities mandated the shutdown of all domestic central heating boilers so that hot water was available only on weekends. To be cold and hungry and anxious, and then to be unable to enjoy the comfort and necessity of a hot shower—it was a terrible blow.

  Natan and Sara were creative in their attempts to stay warm, braving the cold streets to seek out the few heated public places where Jews were still permitted. One bleak February day, they walked to a hotel where they intended to order two cups of ersatz coffee and sip slowly in a discreet corner of the lobby. “See that?” Natan said, nudging her until she glanced up at one of the ubiquitous placards that had been posted all over the city: Niemand hungert oder friert in Deutschland! “No one goes hungry or freezes in Germany, so we have nothing to worry about.”

  “Good to know,” Sara managed to say, clenching her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.

  It was the coldest winter in northern Germany for more than a century, but eventually it too, like all things, yielded to the inexorable force of time. In the first week of March, their icebound world began to thaw, flooding gutters with meltwater and creating icicles, some more than a meter in length, hanging precariously from eaves and rooftops. The sunlight on Sara’s face created the illusion of spring even when the temperatures lingered only a few degrees above freezing. She craved fresh vegetables and fruit, and the first time she glimpsed a few scrawny sticks of asparagus and rhubarb at the bottom of a bin when she was permitted to enter the market at the end of the day, she snatched them up and triumphantly handed over her ration cards and Reichsmarks as if the handful of vegetables would suffice for a feast.

  She longed for a small patch of earth to cultivate, and although it was risky to draw attention to herself, she considered suggesting to their landlord that the concrete in the sunniest part of their building’s courtyard be removed so that it could be made into a community garden. But before she could, she and Natan returned home from a walk to discover a notice tacked to their apartment door.

  Natan snatched it down and read it in silence, his frown deepening.

  “What is it?” Sara asked, afraid to know.

  He unlocked the door, motioned for her to enter, and waited until they were safely inside before he answered. “We’ve been evicted.” He crumpled the notice into a ball and threw it toward the empty coal scuttle. “Another Aryan family lost their home to Speer’s construction projects. They need our apartment, and we can go to hell.”

  “Where will we go, really?” asked Sara, her voice small and anxious like that of a much younger girl. When her brother looked at her bleakly without saying a word, she knew the answer.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  March–June 1940

  Greta

  As the harsh winter relented and the icebound city thawed, the oppressive sense that Berlin was under siege began to lift. If not for the blackout, the rationing, the antiaircraft weapons on the rooftops of strategic buildings, and the absence of millions of young men who had been called into military service, one could almost forget that Germany was at war. Or so it felt to Aryans, sighing with relief as they shed layers of clothing and opened windows to fresh spring breezes. Greta suspected Jews felt increasingly tense and frightened as their existence in Germany grew more precarious day by day.

  Greta’s trip to London had yielded positive results, not only generous donations to Jewish relief efforts but also the priceless gift of increased support for Jewish immigration to Great Britain. While there, she had visited a favorite bookstore and had been thrilled to discover James Murphy’s translation of Mein Kampf on the shelf. She wondered how Daphne had managed to get the carbon copy of the manuscript out of Germany, and she fervently hoped that the translation would serve as a warning to anyone who still doubted Hitler’s sinister motives. She wished everyone in the American government would study it well.

  In the third week of March, when only a few stubborn, ice-crusted snowbanks lingered in the shadiest parts of the Tiergarten, Greta took Ule with her to meet a young couple in Neukölln for an English lesson. They were discouragingly low on the British emigration list, but both husband and wife were apt pupils, grasping idiom as deftly as if they had been studying the language for years. But when she reached their apartment building, their brass nameplate was missing from the list at the entrance, and inside, no one responded when she knocked upon their door.

  “Lazar?” she called out, knocking again. “Jutta?” Still nothing.

  Uneasy, she considered what to do. The couple had never missed a lesson before, and it was rather late in the morning for them to have overslept, especially since they had an infant son. She pressed her ear to the door, but no one stirred within.

  At a sudden sound behind her, she turned to find a woman about ten years older than herself peering out from another apartment farther down the hallway. “Are you looking for the Gittelmans?” she asked, frowning slightly as she eyed Greta and little Ule, who tugged on his mother’s hand in his impatience to go inside and play.

  “Yes,” said Greta. “They were expecting me. Would you know if they’ve gone out for the day?”

  “They’ve gone for good.” The woman folded her thick arms across her chest. “They moved out two days ago. Scurried out before dawn carrying everything they owned.”

  Greta’s heart sank. “Did they leave a forwarding address?”

  “Not with me. You could ask around the ghetto. Where else would they have gone?” The woman shrugged. “They weren’t bad neighbors, even though they were Jews. Maybe it’s for the best. This way the boy can grow up among his own kind.”

  Greta felt her expression freeze in place. “Thanks for your help.” Before Ule could protest, she led him down the hall and away, ignoring the curious stare the neighbor gave her in passing.

  That evening when she told Adam what had happened, he sighed, torn between sympathy and impatience. “I hate to see you break your heart over and over again,” he said.

  “What would you have me do, simply stop caring?”

  “As if you could,” he said. “Just remember that assisting a few Jews here and there won’t solve the real problem. The only way we’re going to stop the suffering once and for all is to overthrow Hitler and bring down the Reich.”

  “I don’t see why we have to abandon one effort to serve the other.” Why must he belittle her work? What she could do, she did. “People need food and hope now. You can’t expect them to wait until the Nazis are brought down. They’ll starve first.”

  “I understand that, but we have to stay focused on our main objective. We can’t afford distractions.”

  Bristling, she turned away before she said something she regretted. In recent months, Adam and John Sieg had developed the profoundly annoying habit of dismissing her contributions to the resistance as inconsequential, and that was when they acknowledged her at all. For years she had written and edited flyers, translated documents, typed and copied, arranged meetings, and acted as a courier, risking her freedom and her life as much as any man. Yet from the time of Ule’s birth, they had increasingly excluded her, shutting themselves away in Adam’s study instead of holding their meetings in the living room as they once had. When she protested, they explained that they could no longer speak freely in front of Ule, since children often innocently repeated anything they overheard. When she suggested leaving him with a neighbor, they objected, insisting that this would draw attention to their meetings. They had an excuse for everything.

  One evening when they were alone, she confronted Adam about his infuriating transformation. “Do you remember what you told me when I returned from London years ago?” she asked. “You said a woman of my intelligence should not be relegated to mere clerical work, but that I could and
must contribute more.”

  “That was then, but now—” Adam inclined his head toward the room where their son slept. “Now it’s better that you not know too much, for your sake and Ule’s, in case our circle is betrayed.”

  “If we’re discovered, the Gestapo would never believe I’m innocent.” Greta gestured to the desk where translations and drafts of flyers were neatly sorted in locked drawers, out of sight but not out of reach, her handwriting on every page. She indicated the bookcases along the walls, where beside Adam’s scripts and novels and her own cherished volumes sat dozens of banned books entrusted to them by nervous friends who had purged their own shelves of illicit literature. “I’m already involved up to my neck. There’s no point in shutting me out.”

  Adam was a fool if he believed being a woman and a mother gave her some natural immunity against Nazi violence. Did the Nazis spare Jewish women? Communist women? The wives of their political enemies? Even before the Night of the Long Knives, women had paid the price for their own insurgence as well as that of their husbands. Why pretend otherwise?

  “We bear all the risks the men do, but our opinions matter half as much,” Greta complained to Mildred a few days later while they washed and dried the supper dishes in the Harnacks’ tiny kitchenette. Arvid had invited the Kuckhoffs over, but although they discussed politics and strategy as equals over the meal, afterward the men went to the living room to continue the conversation while the women cleared the table and tidied up. “They want to shield me from their resistance activities because I’m a mother. If they believe the Gestapo could search our apartment and not immediately know that I’m as guilty as they are, they’re fooling themselves. And it’s precisely because I am a mother that I’m committed to the resistance. I have to make the world better for Ule. Did you know that next month, participation in the Hitler Youth becomes compulsory for all boys aged ten through eighteen?”