But no one would catch her. Sara walked with purpose, as if her thoughts were fixed on important matters and she belonged exactly where she was. No one ever questioned her. Sometimes a few young men tried to catch her eye or chat her up, but she offered only polite smiles and quiet demurrals in reply. How lovely it might be to enjoy a brief flirtation with a handsome stranger, like any other young woman could—somewhere else in a time of peace, but not in Berlin in 1940, not when one was a Jew in the resistance, not when it was impossible to tell at a glance who was an inveterate Nazi, who was a friend, and who was a Mitläufer, one of the vast number of Germans who went along with the Reich’s atrocities, not actively persecuting anyone but refusing to intervene on behalf of the oppressed.
Was Dieter still a Mitläufer, Sara wondered, or had he fully assimilated into the Reich for the sake of his precious business? He might be dead for all she knew. Bombs had fallen in the neighborhood where he and his mother had lived, though not on their apartment building. Or he could have been conscripted, and might be encamped somewhere in conquered France or lying in a battlefield grave. Unsettled, she pushed the images aside. She did not want to brood over Dieter’s fate, or to think of him at all. If he ever spared a thought for her, it could only be to pray that no one remembered he had once been engaged to a Jew.
Thus far the British bombers had spared the block where Sara and Natan moved after being evicted from the apartment in Friedenau. The cramped studio they shared was on Grenadierstrasse on the eastern edge of the ghetto, a dilapidated building already overcrowded with poor Aryans and immigrants from elsewhere in the Reich. They resented their new Jewish neighbors, who were usually better educated, more cultured, better dressed, and profoundly disconsolate, as if they considered themselves too good for the place. Never mind that most of the Jews were unemployed and constantly hungry from subsisting on much smaller rations. Never mind that they were all poor now, all threatened by the same British bombs.
Whenever the air raid sirens wailed, the German residents made a mad rush for the shelter in the cellar, but Jews were forbidden to enter. Instead Sara, Natan, and a few dozen others descended to the ground floor and waited out the terrifying hours in the central hallway, bracing themselves against the walls, avoiding the windows at either end, covering their heads with their arms when the roar of British planes intensified.
“We should paint ‘Jews Here’ on the roof so that the British know to drop their bombs elsewhere,” Natan said wearily the morning after a long, harrowing, sleepless night in mid-October. “Why should they kill us? We hate the Nazis even more than they do.”
“I don’t think that would help,” Sara replied, stifling a yawn, trying to ignore the gnawing ache in her empty stomach. “The Americans painted ‘USA’ on the roof of their embassy, but they still have to put out fires when incendiaries land in their gardens.”
“In their gardens,” Natan said, raising a finger for emphasis, “not on their roof.”
Sara managed a wan laugh. “I still say your signal is a very bad idea. If the British don’t bomb us, the Luftwaffe will.”
As autumn passed into a winter of long nights, overcast skies, and frigid cold, Berlin’s air raid sirens blared almost every night, interrupting sleep and sending terrified residents scrambling for shelter. In September the RAF bombed the capital about four times every week, but in October the number of raids dropped slightly, and in November Berlin was struck only eight times. But although the frequency of attacks had diminished, they were no less destructive—on both sides, for the German defenses had improved dramatically and had brought down many British planes. By the first snowfall of December, almost every district in Berlin had been struck at least once. The Reichstag building, the Propaganda Ministry, the criminal courts at Moabit, the Berlin Zoo, and the palace at Charlottenburg all had sustained damage. So many factories, military sites, and railroads had been destroyed that Sara sustained a faint hope that the German military would be immobilized and the war would grind to a halt. But it was a small flame, quickly extinguished when she observed how swiftly the Nazis cleared away the rubble and made repairs.
In the last week of December, when Sara stopped by the Harnacks’ apartment on a courier run, Mildred told her that a few days before, Hitler had signed a secret directive officially ordering the attack on the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa called for the German military to crush the Soviet Union in a swift, decisive campaign before the war upon Britain was concluded. Preparations were to be completed by May 15, 1941.
Sara felt a stirring of hope and fear. “Arvid and Harro have said that a two-front war would be disastrous for Hitler.”
“It could be,” said Mildred guardedly, “but if Germany defeats the Soviet Union and assimilates their resources and materiel, it will be disastrous for Great Britain.”
“And for us,” said Sara, meaning the resistance, the Jews, every enemy of the Reich.
“And the United States,” said Mildred. “They’ll be forced to fight in the end. I only wish they would see that and intervene now. The sooner they do, the more lives will be saved, I’m sure of it.”
Sara understood Mildred’s frustration. The Harnacks had been passing military and economic secrets to the U.S. government for years, apparently to no avail. They could only hope that plans were developing behind the scenes, that the risks they took were not for nothing.
In January, as bitter cold enveloped northern Germany, Harro Schulze-Boysen and the rest of the executive staff were transferred to the Luftwaffe’s wartime headquarters in Wildpark-Werder near Potsdam. His new post gave Harro access to confidential information about the Axis air forces as well as secret diplomatic and military reports from German consulates and embassies. Within his first few days, he learned that the Luftwaffe was planning photographic reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory, and he also met several experts on the Soviet Union who had recently been reassigned from the Air Ministry to Göring’s operations planning staff. Soon thereafter, Arvid learned that the German high command had ordered the Military Economic Department to prepare a map of Soviet industrial flights. If Hitler’s secret Directive Number 21 was not evidence enough, these activities proved that Operation Barbarossa was real and under way.
Thanks to the resistance, the Soviet Union would be forewarned. It would have months to prepare, and when the German attack finally came in spring, the Soviet defenses would utterly overwhelm the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. With its military crushed, the Reich would fall.
But spring was months away, and as persecution of Jews made their lives unbearable and food and fuel grew scarce even for Aryans, Sara began to worry that she and Natan might not make it through the winter. Their ghetto apartment was old and poorly insulated, so even though it was small—merely one bedroom where Sara slept, a living room where Natan made his bed on the sofa, and a kitchenette comprised of a sink, an icebox, a small cupboard, and a hot plate—they could never keep it tolerably warm. Real coffee had disappeared from markets long before, but as in the previous winter, meat, fresh vegetables, and even salt and pepper became scarce. Sara spent her days waiting impatiently, stomach growling, for the appointed hour when Jews were permitted to shop, then set off with her shopping basket praying that she would find enough left on the shelves to put together a meal. She went from shop to shop searching for potatoes and carrots and bread, enduring long queues and anxious pushy crowds. There was never enough for everyone. Sara always had more ration coupons left over than there was food to buy.
She was always tired, always thinking of food, of how she might turn yesterday’s potato peelings into a broth that would sustain them through the day. Natan never complained, but his eyes glittered from hunger and his face had become gaunt. She knew from the way her clothes hung loosely upon her that she had become too thin as well. Once Natan brought home a piece of cheese, a gift from a friend, scarcely enough for a sandwich and yet she cried out from joy.
“Enough is enough,” he said, his expression
hardening. “Tomorrow I’ll go to Schloss Federle and bring back enough supplies to see us through the winter.”
Sara’s mouth watered at the memory of the sacks of rice and beans, the bottles of oil, the cans of fruits and vegetables and everything else they had put away so carefully in the attic of the west wing. “But what if we have to go into hiding?” she asked, instinctively lowering her voice.
“Once we do, we won’t be able to help the resistance or claim our immigration visas if our turn comes. As long as any hope remains, we’ll take our chances out here. Agreed?”
Wordlessly, Sara nodded. For the same reason, she could not simply disappear into Annemarie Hannemann’s identity and wait out the Reich disguised as an Aryan, as she assumed other Jews who had managed to get false papers had done. Unfortunately, the source who had provided her papers had been arrested before he could make any for Natan.
“We stocked enough supplies to feed two families for several months,” Natan reminded her. “Now that it’s just the two of us, we could stretch that out for a year, maybe two.”
“Or longer,” said Sara. But maybe they would not have to. If Arvid and Harro were right, and Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the spring, the war could be over by summer.
Natan intended to make the trip to Schloss Federle alone, but Sara insisted on accompanying him. Not only that, she would drive. “Annemarie Hannemann still has her license,” she pointed out. “We only need a good excuse for her to be out on the roads using up her fuel ration.”
Early the next morning when they went to the auto repair shop, they discovered that despite the best efforts of Natan’s mechanic friend, their parents’ luxurious car was gone. The previous March, the army had ordered all but a tiny fraction of car owners to surrender their vehicles’ batteries, and a few months later a salvage crew had confiscated the rest for the war effort. Nervous, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke, Natan’s friend offered to let them borrow a tow truck for a few hours, but only that one time.
Natan accepted before his friend could change his mind. After pulling a mechanic’s coveralls over her clothes and tucking her long dark hair up into a cap, Sara climbed into the driver’s seat and familiarized herself with the controls. Natan took the seat beside her, slouching low, ready to drop to the floor if a military convoy passed. They should be fine if they kept moving, but if they were stopped and questioned, they would say that Annemarie Hannemann was on a call for her father’s repair shop, and Natan was a conscripted Jewish worker ordered to help her with the heavy lifting. Even as she agreed to her brother’s hastily constructed cover story, Sara knew it would never hold up under questioning.
“Just drive carefully,” said Natan as she steered the truck from the garage onto the street. “Don’t give anyone any reason to pull us over.”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. She had not driven her parents’ car in more than two years and had never driven anything like the tow truck. Her heart pounded as they made their way out of the city, but the roads were clear of snow and there was little traffic thanks to gas rationing. Even so, she did not breathe easily until they reached the countryside, the thick forests and rolling hills covered in soft white snow exactly as she remembered from winters past, beautiful and enduring, untouched by the war.
They reached Minden-Lübbecke without incident. As they approached the Riechmann estate and Sara caught sight of the familiar white stone and golden stucco walls through the bare-limbed trees, she was flooded by such an intense feeling of relief and safe homecoming that she almost wept. None of the servants came out to meet the truck as they crossed the stone bridge over the broad, encircling moat, but Sara and Natan were not surprised. No one was expecting them, and the day was sunny but bitterly cold, with a sharp wind that stung the skin and sent snow ghosting across the roads. Wilhelm had closed down the east and west wings and several rooms in the main building to conserve fuel while the house was unoccupied. He and Amalie had retained the core household staff, but other employees had been dismissed, or had been taken in the draft, or had left for more lucrative jobs in the wartime economy. Natan had a key, so if no one glanced out the windows and spotted the very conspicuous tow truck parked in the circular drive, he and Sara might be able to slip in and out of the west wing with food and supplies without anyone knowing.
“What would you like for supper tonight?” Sara asked Natan as they walked through the ankle-deep drifts covering the cobblestone path that led from the driveway around the west wing to the rear entrance.
Natan groaned and clutched his stomach with one hand as he dug the key from his pocket with the other. “Anything. Everything,” he said, unlocking the door. “Roast potatoes swimming in butter. Fresh bread. Canned peaches. Hot tea with honey.”
Sara’s stomach rumbled as she followed him inside. “The bread will take too long to rise for me to bake a loaf tonight, but I promise you’ll have some for your breakfast tomorrow.”
He sighed in anticipation as they carefully locked the door behind them and wiped their shoes on the mat. The stairwell was cold and dark, and when Natan tested the switch, the overhead light failed to come on. “I guess they’ve shut off the power completely. The water too, probably.”
“They’ll turn them back on if we go into hiding, right?”
“Of course,” Natan said as he raced upstairs. Sara hurried after him, her breath emerging as faint white puffs. When she caught up with him, he was fitting a second key in the door of the spare room, which was as dusty and crowded with old furniture as it had been on their last visit. Single file, they climbed the narrow staircase to the attic, where Natan shoved aside the bookcase covering the low, hidden door. Ducking his head, he entered, and she followed quickly after.
“Take as much as you can comfortably carry,” he instructed as he led the way to the large closet they had stocked as a pantry. “We have time for three trips, but then I want to get back on the road.”
Nodding agreement, she stood out of the way as he opened the pantry door—revealing empty shelves, a layer of dust, nothing more.
They both stood there for a moment, staring into the pantry. “What the hell,” Natan muttered, closing the door and opening it again. It was still empty, of course, and he muttered a curse at his own foolishness. Backing away, he interlaced his fingers and rested them on top of his head. “Is there another pantry I don’t know of?”
Sara struggled to think. “I—there’s a linen closet next to the bathroom.”
She barely had the words out before Natan hurried past her and down the narrow hall. Trailing behind, she found him staring into the smaller closet, once full of spare linens and sanitary items, empty now except for a small package of toilet paper. “Take this,” Natan said shortly, snatching it up and tossing it to her.
She quickly left the toilet paper by the exit and met him back at the pantry, where he was straining to reach into the depths of the top shelf. He found a small sack of rice, two tins of sardines, and a bottle of olive oil, which he passed to her, and which she left by the exit. They then began a sweep of the entire hiding place, searching every closet, every drawer, beneath the beds, everywhere. There were still sheets on the mattresses and spare clothing in the wardrobes, but they found no more food, no supplies, no money, although they knew their father had left a lockbox of Reichsmarks and gold coins in his bureau. Even the soft pillows and thick comforters Sara and her mother had arranged upon the beds were gone.
Natan stripped a sheet from one of the mattresses and told her to use it as a sack and fill it with her spare clothing. He did the same with his own clothes and some things of their father’s that should fit him. They worked swiftly, without speaking, but Sara felt a rising panic as they gathered all that might be useful and left the hiding place, taking care to replace the bookcase and lock all the doors behind them.
Once outside, they ran to the truck, threw their salvaged belongings inside, and climbed into their seats, expecting any moment for someone to ord
er them to halt. Sara’s heart pounded with alarm as she started the engine. When she threw the truck into gear and pulled away, she thought she saw a curtain in a window twitch, but she did not slow the truck long enough to take a second look.
They sped off, across the bridge and away.
“Who—” Sara began, her voice trembling. “It must have been someone on the staff. No one else knew about our hiding place.”
“Of course. Papa and Mutti would have told us if they had moved our supplies.”
“But Wilhelm and Amalie said most of the servants have been with the family for generations. They trusted them completely.”
“Someone obviously didn’t deserve their trust.” He rubbed at his jaw, glowering out the window. “People change. They become greedy or afraid. They become Nazis, out of convenience or conviction.”
“Maybe whoever it was meant us no harm. Maybe they were hungry and thought we weren’t ever coming back.”
“Maybe,” said Natan. “Maybe if we had knocked on the front door and explained the situation, they would have apologized, fixed us a hot meal, and, while we ate, loaded up the truck with everything they had taken. Or maybe they would have called the Gestapo to report two Jews driving a stolen truck, breaking into Baron von Riechmann’s castle and robbing the place blind.”
Sara pressed her lips together and nodded, a bitter taste in her mouth. Natan was right. They could not trust anyone at Schloss Federle anymore. They had lost not only their supplies but also their hiding place of last resort, and with it the reassurance of knowing that if Berlin became too dangerous, if Jews were banned from every last block in the city, one last sanctuary remained.
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