Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Now that too had been taken from them. They could never return, and they had nowhere else to go.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  February–June 1941

  Greta

  Air raids upon Berlin diminished in the bleak, icy early months of the year, but in March the Royal Air Force resumed its attacks, jolting Greta and Adam out of bed, sending them racing down the hall to snatch up Ule and descend to the basement shelter, hearts pounding, ears straining for the roar of bombers over the thudding of antiaircraft fire.

  By early morning, workers had cordoned off damaged areas and were clearing away debris, quickly and efficiently, as if to maintain the illusion that the capital was impervious. Jewish passersby were often conscripted to haul away debris, along with forced laborers from Poland brought to Germany to work on Albert Speer’s grandiose Germania architecture projects. They were not prisoners of war, not enemy soldiers, but ordinary citizens enslaved by the Reich. Although most Berliners averted their gaze, it was impossible to miss their squalid camps poorly concealed behind high walls and barbed wire. Whenever Greta encountered the prisoners as they were marched to and from their work sites, she was horrified anew by their tattered clothing, their bleak expressions, their emaciated frames.

  The loss of apartment buildings to British bombs and Hitler’s dream of a glorious new Reich capital created a housing crisis in Berlin. As always, the Jews were forced to give way. After a flurry of new laws were passed, they lost their few remaining rights as tenants and were forced into Judenhäuser, “Jew houses,” run-down buildings in the least desirable areas of the city. Two Jews per room was the standard rule, regularly exceeded, as Jewish households already within the ghetto were required to take in the homeless. In late winter, Sara and Natan were ordered to accept a couple with a three-year-old daughter. The siblings took the bedroom, the young family made their beds in the living room, and they all shared the kitchen and bath, trying as best they could to stay out of one another’s way. The constant presence of strangers in their home obliged Sara and Natan to be more discreet about their resistance activities, but they did not abandon their work. The need was too great, Sara told Greta wearily, and the alternative—surrender, acceptance of oppression—was too unbearable to contemplate.

  As spring arrived, Arvid, Harro, and their contacts within other ministries continued to gather evidence that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was imminent. In mid-April, Erdberg told Adam and Arvid that his superiors wanted him to establish radio contact between their resistance group and Moscow in the event that war cut off other channels of communication.

  At first, Arvid refused. They had not a single trained radio operator in their group. Radio signals could be traced to their source, compromising their entire network. If through accident or betrayal they were found in possession of the equipment, the punishment was summary execution. Greta agreed with Arvid, deeply skeptical that radio communications could be established securely or that it would be worth the risk. But Harro strongly supported the idea, and eventually he and Erdberg wore Arvid down, although Arvid flatly rejected Erdberg’s request that he become the radio operator. “I’ll encode the messages,” he said, “but you’ll have to find someone else to transmit them.”

  Greta saw him glance at Mildred as he spoke, and she knew he was concerned for her safety, not his own. Eventually the role went to sculptor Kurt Schumacher, a longtime member of Harro’s resistance circle and former student of Libertas’s artist father. Erdberg promised to supply the equipment as soon as it could be smuggled from Moscow.

  One evening in early May, Adam returned home from a clandestine meeting with Arvid and Erdberg, his expression tense and troubled. “Moscow has sent two transmitters by diplomatic pouch,” he said. “Erdberg would like you to receive one of them the day after tomorrow at the Thielplatz Untergrundbahn station.”

  Greta’s heart thudded. “He asked for me by name?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Why me?”

  “Because he trusts you, because he believes a woman would be less suspicious. The radio is built into a suitcase, so he’ll simply hand it off to you, and you’ll deliver it to Schumacher’s apartment.”

  Very simple indeed, Greta thought angrily. Adam regularly excluded her from meetings in their own home for her dubious protection, and now he wanted her to do this? “Let’s be honest here,” she said, her voice tight. “When I fetch this suitcase, I’m sticking my head into the noose.”

  “Greta—”

  “It’s not safe. You know that as well as I do. Did Erdberg pick me because I’m less suspicious or because I’m more expendable?”

  “My God, what a question.” Adam took her by the shoulders. “Do you think you’re expendable to me or to Ule?”

  Maybe not to them, but she could not say the same for Erdberg. “I’m not convinced that this scheme makes any sense. Do we have enough sources to warrant direct radio contact? Can these transmissions be made safely? Those are two simple questions, and I deserve honest answers.”

  “Of course we have enough sources, and every detail of the intelligence they provide is essential to bringing down the Reich. Kurt Schumacher and his wife accepted the risk of keeping the transmitter, so that’s no concern of yours. However, every moment you spend arguing means less time for technical training and practice.”

  Stung, Greta reproached him with a look but said no more. She had demanded to be entrusted with responsibilities, and if she refused now they would never ask again. Kurt Schumacher’s wife had accepted great risk, presumably without complaint. How could she do any less?

  Two days later, at a few minutes after one o’clock, Greta met Erdberg at the Thielplatz Untergrundbahn station. As promised, she found him seated on the bench nearest the newsstand, ostensibly engrossed in Der Stürmer although she had no doubt he was fully aware of his surroundings. He glanced up at her approach, folded the newspaper, and set it on the bench beside him. She wondered if the paper contained a secret message for another contact to pick up as soon as he left.

  “How delightful to see you again,” he said when she joined him, rising, kissing her cheek as if they were old friends. He picked up the suitcase and offered her his arm, and after the barest hesitation, she took it. He made cordial conversation as he escorted her out of the station, but although his cheerful, relaxed demeanor eased some of her anxiety, her heart thumped when she glimpsed a pair of SS men approaching from the opposite direction, then four more clustered in front of a café across the street. She would have stopped short at the sight of a gleaming black Gestapo staff car parked at the curb, except that Erdberg propelled her steadily forward.

  “We’ll make the handoff at the corner,” he murmured. “I’ll set down the suitcase to check my watch, I’ll give you a kiss goodbye, you’ll pick up the suitcase, then I’ll head north and you head east.”

  “Let’s walk one more block. This one is crawling with SS.”

  “The next block could be worse.” He gave her a sidelong look, and whatever he glimpsed made him reconsider. “Very well. One more block.”

  Greta nodded, stoking her courage as they waited at the curb to cross the street. The next block was more crowded with pedestrians, but there were fewer SS men among them. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “At the next alley.”

  She spotted it ahead, two storefronts away. With a slight pressure on her arm, he steered her toward it, but he took the turn too sharply and slammed the suitcase on the brick corner of the building. The impact knocked the handle from his grasp and the suitcase fell to the pavement with a thud and a tinkle of glass.

  Passersby shot curious looks their way. Greta’s breath caught in her throat as Erdberg released her arm and seized the suitcase in both hands. With a jerk of his head, he signaled for her to follow him into the alley, and she immediately obeyed. “I think it’s broken,” she said shakily. “I heard glass shatter.”

  He gave the suitca
se a quick once-over. “It looks fine to me.” He glanced into the depths of the alley and back to the street. “Change of plans. Take this home and test it. Keep it safe and hidden, someplace close so you can bring it to the shelter if the sirens go off.”

  “That wasn’t our agreement. I’m supposed to take it to the operator.”

  “Not yet. If it is broken, as you believe, I’ll need you to return it to me for repairs. If it’s working, you can deliver it as originally planned.”

  “I can’t keep this at home,” she whispered fiercely. “I have a child.”

  “Then for his sake, don’t get caught.” Erdberg smiled and backed toward the sidewalk. “Please tell your husband that I’m taking his play Till Eulenspiegel with me on my next trip to Russia. Perhaps I’ll find a theater company to stage it.”

  Astonished, Greta could only gape at him as he turned and strode from the alley without looking back. She picked up the suitcase and followed, but by the time she reached the sidewalk, he had disappeared.

  Trembling with fear and anger, she hurried home only to find the apartment empty. After a heartbeat of stark terror she remembered that Adam had taken Ule to the zoo.

  She shoved the suitcase into a closet behind some long coats, closed the door, and sank down upon the sofa. A sob escaped her throat, and before she could restrain them, hot tears spilled over. She had brought this dangerous thing into their home, against her better judgment, because what else could she have done? If the SS found it, she and Adam would be shot, and Ule—what would become of Ule? No doubt he would be given to some childless Aryan family to raise as their own, to bring up as a proper little Nazi.

  She choked back her sobs and forced herself to take deep, steadying breaths until she stopped shaking.

  That was how Adam found her an hour later when he and Ule came home, windswept and smiling. One glance and Adam sent Ule off to his room to play. “What happened?” he asked, and she gestured to the closet. He opened the door, found the suitcase, and turned to her, his expression stormy. “Why is this here?”

  “Because our man in Moscow said so.” She told him about Erdberg’s clumsy mishap during the handoff. “I should have insisted that he take it back to his embassy and test it himself, but it all happened so fast. I had no choice but to bring the radio home. I couldn’t abandon it in the alley.”

  Grimacing, Adam ran a hand over his jaw. “Let’s see if it works, and if it does, I’ll deliver it to Schumacher tonight.” After checking to make sure the front door was locked, he retrieved the suitcase and carefully opened it on the living room floor. “A manual,” he said, taking out a thin booklet.

  “I suppose that’s Moscow’s idea of technical training.” Greta drew closer as he turned the pages, glancing between the manual and the device built into the suitcase. It was a transmitter-receiver, and according to the book’s diagrams and instructions, it had a range of up to six hundred miles and a battery that lasted two hours between recharges. That was, of course, when the radio functioned. As Adam established after clearing away some unidentifiable shards of broken glass, this one did not.

  They waited for Erdberg to inform them how to return the radio, but when he did not contact them, Greta consulted Arvid, who arranged for her to hide it in a shed in Spandau until Edberg could retrieve it. Greta’s apprehensions lifted the moment the incriminating suitcase was out of her home, but a few days later when Adam told her the device had been repaired, she summoned up her courage and volunteered to collect it. The second handoff went flawlessly. Suitcase in hand, Greta took a circuitous route to the Schumachers’ flat, delivered the radio to Kurt, and went home, almost giddy from relief.

  That night, Adam kissed her tenderly and praised her for handling her part of the operation so well, and he assured her that her services would not be required for the second radio. Hans Coppi, the passionate young Communist who had agreed to take charge of it, would receive it directly from Erdberg. “This was a dangerous job, darling, but well worth the risk,” Adam said. “These radios are going to be more essential than we realized.”

  “Because of the invasion?”

  “Yes, and because soon the Soviets will be our group’s only foreign contact. Donald Heath is leaving Berlin. The U.S. State Department is transferring him to Santiago, Chile.”

  “What?” Greta exclaimed. “That’s insane. He’s the Americans’ best and most informed analyst of the Reich in Germany. Why would they send him to South America when his expertise is badly needed here?”

  Adam had no answer, and neither did Arvid or Mildred. Mildred took the Heath family’s departure especially hard, for she and Louise Heath had become dear friends. Greta’s heart went out to Mildred. With each American acquaintance who left Berlin, her homeland surely seemed more distant yet.

  With the loss of their only remaining contact within the United States government, the Soviets seemed to be the group’s last hope. When Adam told Greta that Kurt Schumacher and Hans Coppi were working steadily to establish radio contact with Moscow, she was glad that she had not let fear keep her from doing her part.

  In early June, even as Arvid and Harro were gathering reams of evidence that Operation Barbarossa would launch within the month, the group suffered another setback—Schumacher was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Not only would he be forced to fight for the regime he despised, not only had they lost their radio operator, but they must persist in their work knowing that their success could cause their comrade’s death. Nor was he the only friend whose life their work put in jeopardy. Arvid’s younger brother Falk had been drafted by the Wehrmacht and was stationed in Chemnitz in Saxony, directly in line of a potential Soviet counteroffensive.

  In the second week of June, Adam brought Greta another assignment. Harro knew the orders for the German attack upon the Soviet Union, the railroads that would be struck crippling blows, the plan for the advance, town by town. “It’s too dangerous to put this down on paper,” he said. “If a single page fell into the wrong hands, the Gestapo would know that the resistance has infiltrated the highest levels of the military. I need you to memorize the names of these Russian villages and repeat the list to certain comrades, until they too have it by heart.”

  Greta agreed. All her years as a diligent student had prepared her well for precisely this sort of task. But try though she might, the names of the towns would not stay fixed in her brain. She thought of the German military massing in the east, of the innocent people, women and children, who had no idea that a vast army was poised to strike and that their villages were in its sights.

  After she had struggled for hours to memorize the information, a knock on the door startled her out of the fog of toil. Pulling the curtain over the map of the Soviet Union Adam had hung on the wall, she went to answer, only to find Adam welcoming Libertas Schulze-Boysen inside.

  “Adam thought you might need a study partner,” she said brightly, “and since thanks to Goebbels I’m currently unemployed, I volunteered.”

  Greta managed a rueful smile. The Reich had been so outraged by The Mortal Storm and Escape that the minister of propaganda had ordered the studio’s Berlin office closed and had banned all MGM films throughout the Reich. Fortunately, Libertas did not need a steady paycheck.

  “Things aren’t going well,” Greta admitted.

  “Not to worry.” Libertas took a small brown paper sack from her purse and gave it a little shake. “This will fuel our success.”

  As Libertas opened the sack, Greta detected a faint rich, nutty aroma. “Coffee,” she marveled, bending closer and inhaling deeply. “Real coffee. How? There hasn’t been real coffee in Berlin in over a year.”

  “Not so. You only need to know where to look and whom to ask. Shall I make us some?”

  She did not need to ask twice. Soon Greta was savoring her first delicious cup of coffee in ages, studying the map with Libertas, steadily fixing the endangered Russian towns’ names in her memory. Fueled by caffeine and urgency, she stayed up hours after her encoura
ging tutor left for the night, but eventually dropped wearily into bed beside Adam. After a few hours’ sleep, she rose the next morning, indulged in another precious cup of coffee, and recited the list perfectly, every last Russian syllable of it.

  She took Ule in hand and spent the day calling on the designated members of their circle, repeating the towns’ names until each contact knew them by heart. Although the spring days were lengthening, it was nearly twilight by the time she returned home, just in time to place the blackout curtains, but too late to put together anything but a hasty meal of bread, cheese, and some sliced Mettwurst for supper.

  Greta had just finished tidying the kitchen when Libertas again knocked on their door. “How did it go today?” she asked Greta, tilting her pretty blond head and regarding her expectantly.

  “Better than I expected,” admitted Greta, wiping her hands on her apron. “Messages delivered and received with no mishaps, no misunderstandings.”

  “You can’t ask for better than that. Even so—” Libertas smiled mischievously and took a bottle of cognac from her purse. “I thought you might want a little something to settle your nerves.”

  “Libertas, you angel,” exclaimed Greta. “Have you been raiding your grandfather’s castle?”

  “Very droll, darling. Are you as thirsty as you are witty?”

  “I’ll get three glasses,” said Adam, bounding out of his chair.

  “No you won’t,” Libertas declared, offering him her most charming smile, which was irresistible. “You’ll fetch us two glasses, and then you’ll sit right back down in that chair and study your lines or whatever it was you were doing while Greta—who has already had quite a day—was cleaning up after serving you a good meal.”

  Greta expected Adam to glower and sulk, but to her amusement, he shrugged, abashed, and retrieved two glasses from the kitchen.

  “It’s such a lovely night,” said Libertas, turning to Greta. “Shall we drink outside?”