Winter passed in exhaustion and dread, a perpetual storm of horrifying revelations from the Luftwaffe and the Economics Ministry, the terror of nightly air raids, the struggle to find enough at the markets to feed herself and Arvid and have enough left over to share with Jewish friends, the inability to ever feel truly warm and comfortable since there was never enough fuel.
“You’re too thin for a woman in your condition,” Arvid told her one evening as he cut his own potato in half and placed the larger portion on Mildred’s plate. “You need to eat more, for you and the baby.”
“Darling, you’re just as hungry as I am.” She tried to return the potato to his plate, but he refused it, and frowned kindly at her until she ate every last bite. The truth was that she was worried. Her appetite had not returned after the wretched early nausea passed, and her abdomen did not seem as full and round as it ought to have been by then. Sometimes she felt a dull ache on the right side of her pelvis, and rarely, although still enough to concern her, she discovered a light spotting of blood in her underwear after walking or doing housework.
At the end of February, concerned by unusual symptoms and worried that stress and malnutrition were affecting her unborn child, Mildred made an appointment with a gynecologist. He and the nurse said very little during the examination, but after the doctor left and Mildred dressed, something about the nurse’s brisk, cheerful manner and inability to make eye contact told her something was very wrong.
The nurse escorted Mildred to the waiting room to fetch Arvid, whose hopeful smile faltered when he saw the tears in her eyes. Hand in hand, they followed the nurse to the doctor’s office to receive the diagnosis.
“You have an ectopic pregnancy,” the doctor told her gently. The embryo had implanted in her right fallopian tube. There would be no child. The condition was potentially fatal to Mildred and surgery would be required to remove the tissue. The operation would almost certainly render her unable to conceive again.
Devastated, Mildred broke down in sobs, weeping and trembling in Arvid’s arms. She felt him shaking too, heard the frisson of grief in his voice when he thanked the doctor and scheduled the surgery and helped her into her coat and scarf and out of the office and home.
Due to wartime circumstances the operation could not take place until the end of March. Her symptoms worsened dangerously throughout the delay, and afterward, due to stress or exhaustion or poor nutrition or unrelenting grief or all of these, her recovery was prolonged and difficult. In April, Arvid begged her to get out of the beleaguered city, to convalesce in the calm serenity of the countryside. He knew the ideal retreat—Schloss Elmau, a sanatorium and artists’ colony nestled in the sublime alpine valley of the Wettersteingebirge near Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. His late uncle Adolf von Harnack had often summered there.
“I’ll visit you in May,” Arvid promised, tears in his eyes as they kissed in parting. “By then you’ll be healthy and strong again, I promise.”
After he had gone, she surrendered herself to the beauty of the mountains and forests, taking comfort from the kindness of the solicitous staff, rebuilding her strength with rest and nourishing food, feeling her strain gradually ease as the days passed blessedly free of air raid sirens and falling bombs. She distracted herself with the pleasant company of other convalescents, with hours spent engaged in lectures by distinguished professors or musical programs and literary discussions. She spent at least a few hours every day in restful solitude, in a chair overlooking a glorious mountain peak or a sparkling crystal lake, losing herself in the poetry of Goethe, her familiar touchstone when the world’s burdens lay too heavily upon her shoulders.
This was the Germany Mildred loved, the Germany she was willing to risk her life to save. She would not abandon it to the abyss, not while she had any strength left, not while any chance remained that their cause could prevail.
Chapter Fifty-six
May–July 1942
Sara
When Mildred returned to Berlin in May, Sara dressed as Annemarie Hannemann, slipped out the back door of her ghetto tenement, bought a bouquet from a florist shop Jews were not permitted to frequent, and walked along streets from which Jews were banned in order to visit her friend at home.
Mildred looked well, as well as Sara imagined anyone could in her place. Her face had lost its gaunt angularity and her skin had a fresh, soft glow, but an ineffable sadness permeated her usual warm, gentle manner. Sara’s heart ached for her, and she wished she knew what to say, what to do, how to bring her comfort. Perhaps it was enough for Mildred to know that she was loved, and that her friends would do anything to take away her pain, if only they could.
“What I want most, now that I’ve recovered, is to get back to work,” Mildred told her. “I have this awful sense that we’re running out of time, that soon we’ll reach a point of no return where every last good thing about Germany will be forever lost, beyond redemption.”
Out of consideration for Mildred’s grief, Sara restrained a bitter retort. She believed Germany had passed that point when the Nazis devised their Final Solution, but as long as Mildred needed to believe that her adopted homeland could be saved from itself, Sara would not snuff out her hopes.
The harsh winter had demoralized everyone, but it seemed to Sara that spring brought relief and renewed hope to the Aryans, a lifting of spirits that eluded the Jews. Even so, although their fanatical devotion to the Führer surged as he confronted Churchill and Roosevelt, most Berliners remained deeply ambivalent about the war with the Soviet Union. They had not forgiven their leaders for allowing their beloved soldiers to suffer on the Russian front throughout that punishing winter, nor had they forgotten the broken promise that foreign bombers would never breach their city’s defenses. Terrifying air raids had become almost commonplace. Thunder and death rained down from the skies by night, and in the morning, Berliners emerged from their homes and shelters to find rescue workers pulling mangled corpses from smoldering ruins.
The resistance took advantage of the blackouts, meeting at discreet spots to collect antifascist flyers and leaflets and venturing out into the darkness to distribute them throughout the city. They usually traveled in pairs or small groups, pretending to be girlfriends enjoying a daring night out, linking arms and chatting animatedly as they walked along. A casual onlooker would never guess that their purses were stuffed with treasonous materials. Or a young man and woman would pretend to be a couple in love, holding hands, ducking into shadowed doorways for an embrace, their pockets and sleeves stuffed with pamphlets, which they slipped into mailboxes when no one was looking. In the mornings, exasperated green-uniformed city police would be ordered to fan out through the city to collect every last leaflet and scrape the antifascist flyers from the walls.
Once Sara was standing watch while her partner, a handsome Romanian Communist she knew only as Andrei, pasted an antifascist flyer over a Nazi propaganda poster. Suddenly she heard footsteps approaching. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered, and before she knew it, Andrei had shoved the bundle of flyers and the paste pot into an alley and had swept her into a passionate embrace. Sara clung to Andrei, returning his kiss as a pair of storm troopers passed and disappeared around the corner, snickering and making rude remarks under their breath. Andrei immediately released her and apologized profusely. She assured him somewhat dazedly that it was perfectly fine, rather good thinking on his part.
Natan did not like for Sara to venture out at night. “At least leave your Judenstern at home and go out as Annemarie,” he urged, and she agreed. The yellow star was too conspicuous anyway. If only she could get ration coupons in Annemarie’s name, she would never wear the star again, but it was Sara Weitz who must go to the shops after hours and wait in line and hope for a withered potato or head of cabbage to cook into something vaguely nourishing for herself and her brother.
She and Natan debated going underground, but pretending to be Annemarie occasionally was as deep as she dared go. They would starve unless
someone sheltered them and brought them food, but anyone caught hiding Jews would pay for their selflessness with their lives. Escape was a better option. Jews were forbidden to emigrate, but Natan was working his contacts in the Communist underground and foreign press and hoped to get them both smuggled out of the country before winter. Sara did not care where they went, as long as it was beyond the borders of the Reich. Eventually, somehow, they would make their way to Geneva and their family would be reunited at last.
“If we can’t be somewhere safe, I’m glad the two of us are together,” Sara told Natan one evening over a meal of cabbage, onion, and apples fried in the last of the olive oil. “I couldn’t survive one day alone in this hell without you.”
For a moment Natan was rendered speechless, but then he grinned. “I love you too, baby sister,” he said, reaching across the table to ruffle her hair.
One important objective of the nighttime pamphleting raids was to foment the people’s disapproval of the unpopular Soviet war, challenging the infallibility of the Reich, shattering the myth of one German Volk unified in support of the Führer. Sara and her comrades realized they were making progress when the Propaganda Ministry launched a campaign to bolster public support. In addition to the usual proclamations and posters, Goebbels arranged a cultural exhibition ironically titled “The Soviet Paradise.” A long, one-story, starkly neoclassical building was constructed on the Lustgarten and filled with dioramas and exhibits meant to educate the German people about the “poverty, misery, depravity, and need” of daily life in the Soviet Union.
On the second day of the exhibition, Sara, as Annamarie Hannemann, attended with Mildred, Greta, and their husbands, joining a vast throng of men and women wandering the aisles, some with children in tow. Each visitor was given a booklet describing the various displays—a full-scale replica of a Russian cobbler’s squalid hovel, or the cramped, filthy flat of a Moscow factory worker. The guidebook began with a lengthy treatise explaining how Marxism and Bolshevism, ideologies devised by Jews, had led to the deaths of millions from political executions and starvation. “Further proof that the Soviet state belongs to the Jews is the fact that the people are ruthlessly sacrificed for the goals of the Jewish world revolution,” the author declared, at which point Sara stopped reading in disgust.
Enormous picture panels lined the walls, depicting life in the Soviet Union as grim, cheerless, and colorless, a miserable existence in muddy, decrepit villages beneath gray, sunless skies. Half-empty bottles of liquor were scattered around images of Stalin and Lenin to emphasize the people’s hopelessness and sloth. In a large, darkened room, a fifteen-minute film played continuously; Libertas, who had seen rough cuts at the Deutsche Kulturfilm-Zentrale, had warned her friends that it was not for the faint of heart, but Sara steeled herself and took a seat in the back between Greta and Mildred. The film claimed to show the gruesome scenes German troops had encountered as they marched into the Soviet Union—filthy, emaciated orphans begging for scraps; desecrated churches; drunkards still clutching their bottles as they sprawled in the dirt beside rusted plows and fallow fields; town squares littered with the bloody corpses of massacred civilians. “Where once stood prosperous villages,” the narrator intoned, “today the gray misery of the collective farm predominates. This is where the Soviet peasant lives as a slave.”
“I’d like hard evidence that those atrocities were committed by the retreating Red Army and not the Germans on their advance,” Greta murmured acidly as they left the room, sickened and angry. “After viewing that, no one will wonder why Germany went to war with the Soviet Union.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Mildred replied in an undertone. “Germany had to betray its erstwhile enemy to save the Soviet people.”
“Yes, to save them so that the Einsatzgruppen could kill them.”
Nervous, Sara glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one had overheard. All around them, curious, interested sightseers looked from guidebooks to displays, wincing sometimes if their gaze fell upon an especially grisly image, but revealing little of the shock and revulsion and skepticism Sara felt. A cold prickle ran down the back of her neck, and she was suddenly aware that she was surrounded by enemies. An impulse to flee seized her, but she fought it, knowing that panic would betray her and bring them all down upon her like hounds cornering a fox.
Taking shallow, steady breaths to calm herself, she stayed close to Mildred and Greta as they rounded a corner and came upon a large display illustrating the SS response to Soviet partisans. Mildred gasped and Sara felt her throat constricting as her gaze traveled from one gruesome image of death to another—blindfolded men before firing squads, knees buckling, smoke forever frozen in midair at the ends of the rifles. Bodies piled in mass graves. Young women dangling limply from ropes knotted about their necks—
Sickened, Sara pressed a hand to her mouth, closed her eyes, and backed away. Her eyes flew open when she bumped into someone and nearly fell, but a man caught her by the elbow and kept her on her feet. “Are you unwell, Fraulein?” he inquired, but she yanked her arm free and hurried away, pushing through the crowd until she reached a quiet aisle almost hidden behind a kiosk displaying the same booklets offered at the front entrance. Blinking away tears, catching her breath, she pretended to browse when suddenly a voice murmured an apology and a hand reached past to grasp a booklet. With a start, Sara turned and discovered a familiar pair of blue eyes staring into hers, shocked and disbelieving.
“My God, Sara,” said Dieter. “I thought it was you, when I saw you in the crowd—I can’t believe you’re here. All this time I haven’t known if you were alive or dead, if you were still in Berlin or if you had been—”
“I’m still here.” Sara clutched her purse tightly to her side and ducked around the kiosk and into the aisle behind it, searching the crowd for her friends. Dieter was wearing a crisp military uniform and he leaned heavily upon a cane, but otherwise he was almost unchanged, except for the strain around his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, lowering his voice, drawing closer. “You know Jews aren’t allowed in the Lustgarten. Do you want to be hauled off and shot?”
“Are you going to turn me in?”
“Of course not.” He spared a quick glance over his shoulder. “Are you all right? I mean, have you been all right?”
“I’m still alive.” She gestured to his uniform. “And you? I see you’ve joined the army.”
“Drafted.” He grimaced and adjusted his stance, leaning heavily upon the cane with both hands. “When they heard what I did for a living, they pulled me from the infantry and sent me to France attached to a procurement division, acquiring food and other goods to ship back to the Reich.”
“Robbing the French to feed the Germans, then.”
“You’re not wrong, but we have plenty of hungry people here at home, and orders are orders.”
With effort, she held back more accusations. “What happened?” she asked instead, indicating his leg.
“Some mad Frenchman drove a truck at high speed through the front wall of our office building. He killed two men, injured four, including me.” He managed a grim smile. “At least I got two weeks’ leave out of it, enough time to visit my mother and check in on the business.”
“What happened to the mad Frenchman?”
Dieter’s smiled faded. “He was killed on impact.” His gaze traveled to the left breast of her sweater, where he surely noted the absence of the Judenstern. “Sara, you’re not safe here. Have you gone underground?”
“Think about how you’re dressed, and then ask yourself why I should trust you enough to tell you anything.”
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but at least—” He dug around in his shirt pocket and brought out a small velvet pouch. “At least let me help you. Take this. It’s yours, it always has been. You can sell it or use it as a bribe.”
As he held out the pouch to her, she clasped her hands behind her back, certain it held the diamond
engagement ring she had returned to his mother while he was in Australia. “You’ve been carrying that around all this time?”
“Only when I’m in Berlin.”
They stood there for a long moment in silence, eyes locked, his hand with the ring extended toward her. Finally she sighed and said, “You know I can’t accept it.”
“Don’t be stubborn,” he said, but his hand fell to his side. “It might save your life someday.”
She shook her head, but before she could speak again, Mildred and Greta appeared in the aisle behind Dieter. “There you are,” Mildred cried, relieved. “We thought we’d lost you.”
“We decided we’ve had enough fun for one day,” said Greta, eyeing Dieter suspiciously as she stepped around him and tucked Sara’s hand in the crook of her elbow. “Time to go. Our fellows are waiting.”
“Sara, wait,” Dieter implored. “Where can I find you?”
“You can’t,” Sara said as Greta led her away. “Don’t try.”
They hurried to meet Adam and Arvid at the exit, where they had stationed themselves in case Sara passed or was dragged out by storm troopers.
“He knows your name,” said Mildred as they left the exhibition.
“Yes,” Sara replied shakily. “I knew him . . . quite well, before.”
“Will he report you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?” asked Arvid. “Your life may depend on it.”
Greta scowled at him, but Sara knew he did not mean to frighten her. “He won’t,” she said, more firmly, and she was suddenly sure of it.
Before they went their separate ways, they conferred quietly, disheartened by all they had witnessed. They agreed that the exhibition probably would convince a great many Berliners that the Reich’s attack upon the Soviet Union had been justified, and that the ongoing war, as costly and destructive as it was, deserved the staunch support of the German people.
A few days later, after Harro, Libertas, and others had toured the exhibition, several members of the group met at the Harnacks’ apartment to discuss if the resistance should respond, and how.
Resistance Women Page 54