“This Nazi sideshow is dangerously effective,” Harro warned. “We know it’s all lies and distortion, but the vast majority of viewers have been conditioned to believe anything Goebbels tells them. We have to undermine the credibility of the exhibition before it becomes fixed in the public mind as proven fact.”
“How do you propose we do that?” asked Adam.
“A sticker campaign. Nothing could be easier. We have a rubber stamp set and wax stickers. All we need is a powerful, concise slogan to convey our message. We’ll post stickers throughout the city, on walls, telephone booths, public transport, and especially over the posters advertising the exhibition.”
A few nods and murmurs of approval went up from the group, but Sara saw Arvid and Adam exchange looks of exasperation.
“Protests of this sort can be counterproductive,” said the playwright Günther Weisenborn, who had joined Goebbels’s Reich Broadcasting Company in July 1940 and within a year had worked his way into the company’s innermost circles. “It would draw more attention to the exhibition while doing nothing to prevent people from seeing it.”
“We’d be making an important statement,” said Harro. “We’d show the Nazis and the public that the voice of opposition has not fallen silent in Germany.”
“Our lives are worth much more than a statement,” said Arvid. “You’re asking us to take a substantial risk for little potential gain.”
Back and forth the argument went, with Harro insisting that they could not allow the lies of “The Soviet Paradise” to go unchallenged, and Arvid, Adam, and several others remaining adamantly opposed. Eventually Harro declared that he was determined to carry out the Zettelklebeaktion alone if necessary. Arvid and Adam realized they would never dissuade him, but they refused to give the operation their blessing.
As the meeting broke up, Harro invited anyone who wanted to help to accompany him to plan strategy. Several of the younger members of the group left the apartment with him, including the radio operator Hans Coppi and his wife—and Sara. Harro’s operation seemed no riskier than the leafleting campaigns she regularly undertook, and she knew how to maneuver safely in the blackout. If their stickers convinced one wavering Berliner to become more skeptical or if they gave the Nazis even a moment of disquiet, it would be worth it.
Within a day, a young couple in Harro’s resistance group printed up hundreds of stickers, a mocking echo of Goebbels’s promotional ads for the exhibition:
Permanent Installation
The NAZI PARADISE
War Hunger Lies Gestapo
How Much Longer?
On the night of May 17, Sara and the other volunteers met Harro at the designated spot in an alley a block away from the Lustgarten. Clad in his Luftwaffe uniform and carrying his pistol, Harro divided them into teams, assigned them to zones, and distributed bundles of stickers. Sara partnered with her friend Liane Berkowitz, the nineteen-year-old half-Jewish daughter of a Russian Jewish symphony conductor and a famed singing teacher. After receiving their assignment from their team leaders, the groups dispersed through the city, moving out in concentric circles with the exhibition hall in the center, stealthily plastering their stickers on walls, windows, street signs, and any other highly visible surface, taking special care to lavish them upon posters advertising the exhibition.
Dawn was still several hours away when Sara and Liane placed the last of their stickers in the area between Kurfürstendamm and Uhlandstrasse, checked in with their team leader, and bade each other farewell and good luck. Sara hurried home, a rush of excitement and accomplishment hastening her steps. Exhaustion overcame her only after she slipped quietly through the front door and found Natan sleeping on the living room sofa. He had planned to meet with a journalist from Zürich earlier that evening, she recalled, someone with contacts in the Swiss government who might be able to get them out of Germany. Perhaps he would have good news to share in the morning.
“You were busy last night,” Natan remarked when Sara finally emerged from her bedroom just after ten o’clock. “The police are so overwhelmed that they’re rounding up Jews to help scrape stickers off a square mile of the city around the Lustgarten.”
“Is that why you’re still home?” Sara teased as she poured herself a cup of ersatz coffee. After many failed attempts, Natan had hit upon a concoction that was surprisingly palatable. “You didn’t want to find yourself in a crew and undo all my hard work?”
“That, and I wanted to see your face when you sat down to breakfast.” He gestured to a chair. “So sit.”
Bemused, she obeyed. Turning his back to shield the cupboard from her view, Natan withdrew a plate and set it before her with a flourish. Upon it were a half a loaf of rye bread and a gorgeous red apple.
“Natan!” Sara gasped. “Where did you—how—”
“A gift from my Swiss friend.” Grinning, he sat down across from her and rested his arms on the table. “Just a taste of things to come.”
With a moan of pleasure, Sara tore off a chunk of the bread and devoured it. “You mean—”
“He promises to have false papers and train tickets to Zurich for us by the end of June.”
“Oh, Natan, that’s wonderful!”
“So we just have to hold on a little while longer.” He nudged the plate closer to her. “That’s all yours, by the way. I already had mine.”
It was the best morning Sara had known in a very long time.
That night she stayed in, unwilling to test her luck two nights in a row, certain that the SS would be on alert and eager to make examples of any Jews caught out after curfew. The next morning, Natan again woke first, but when Sara joined him for a meager breakfast of ersatz coffee and rye bread saved from the previous day’s generous loaf, his expression was grave. “Someone bombed the exhibition last night.”
“What?”
“They’ve kept it out of the papers, but a friend of a friend heard the explosions go off. Was this Schulze-Boysen’s work?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s reckless, but if he were going to blow something up, he’d discuss it with the group first, and choose a more valuable target. How badly was it damaged?”
Natan did not know. They agreed to check their separate sources and meet later to share what they learned. Sara hoped that the loathsome exhibition had been completely destroyed.
Unfortunately, Greta and Mildred soon informed her that this was not so. An incendiary device had been set off at the entrance and cloth soaked in phosphorus had been set aflame elsewhere in an attempt to burn down the building, but although a few people had been injured and part of the exhibit had been burned, the fire had not spread, the damage was quickly repaired, and the exhibition had opened on time that morning as if nothing had happened. Greta and Adam had been among the first to enter, and they had noted only a few faint scorch marks on the walls. “People are speculating that the Jews attacked the exhibit because they can’t stand the truth,” said Greta, disgusted.
“Was it someone from our circle?” Sara asked.
“We have no idea who was responsible,” said Mildred. “Let’s hope the Gestapo doesn’t either.”
Four days after the bombing, Natan’s sources warned him that the Gestapo had raided several locations in the city and had arrested five Jews, three half-Jews, and four Aryans suspected of carrying out the plot. Investigators had determined that the bombs had been manufactured at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which led them to Herbert Baum, an engineer at Siemens accused of being the cell’s ringleader. “A conspiracy of Jews and Communists, exactly as the Nazis suspected,” Natan said. “This feeds perfectly into their propaganda narrative. They’ve snatched triumph out of the ashes of humiliation.”
More arrests followed as the investigation continued, but although Harro seemed untroubled, others in their circle became increasingly apprehensive. Sara was among those who worried that the Baum cell’s bombing and their group’s Zettelklebeaktion could become conflated, even though their resistanc
e circles did not overlap. She had never been particularly close to Harro, but she observed mutual friends distance themselves from him. Sometimes, too, she overheard angry grumbling about his recklessness, his willingness to risk all of their lives for little gain.
Then, on June 4, two weeks before the bombing suspects were scheduled to go on trial, Chief of Reich Security Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich—creator of the Einsatzgruppen and architect of the Final Solution—was assassinated in Prague.
The resistance welcomed the news, but Arvid’s sources warned that although the two events had occurred 350 kilometers apart, many prominent Nazi officials worried that the Lustgarten bombing had exposed a dangerous breakdown in absolute authority, a show of defiance that had emboldened Heydrich’s killers. Every Jew in Berlin was a potential assassin. “I for one do not wish to be shot in the belly by some twenty-two-year-old Ostjude like one of those perpetrators of the attack against the anti-Soviet exhibition,” Goebbels had reportedly grumbled to a colleague at the Propaganda Ministry.
“There will be reprisals,” Arvid cautioned. “Watch your backs.”
Within hours, they learned that the reprisals had already begun. Radio reception from Czechoslovakia was sporadic, but Mildred had been monitoring one faint, distant station operated by a Czech resistance cell. Before it fell silent, a desperate operator had reported that more than thirteen thousand Czechs had been arrested, and the entire population of the village of Lidice had been massacred after Gestapo agents incorrectly concluded that the assassins were hiding there. Sara offered to help Mildred regain the signal, but although they took turns at the shortwave painstakingly scanning the airwaves and listening intently until their ears rang from the static, their attempts were fruitless. They were so intent on their work that they did not realize Sara had broken curfew until Arvid returned home from the ministry.
“I should go,” Sara said, bolting to her feet.
“You can stay,” Mildred offered. “Have supper with us and spend the night.”
“I don’t want my brother to worry, and it’s too dangerous. If anyone finds me here, you’d be in a great deal of trouble.”
“There are other things here that would get us in even more trouble,” said Arvid, gesturing to the radio.
“I’m not wearing the Judenstern and I have my false papers,” said Sara. “If I’m stopped on my way home, no one will know that I’m breaking curfew.”
Mildred smiled. “In that case, no one will know that you’re breaking curfew if you’re found here.”
Sara wavered a moment longer before agreeing to stay. Natan knew she kept erratic hours and would not worry unless she went missing for more than a day. The Harnacks’ quiet, pleasant apartment offered a welcome respite from the noise and the smells and the tangible fear of the ghetto, and she was not quite ready to abandon the search for the Czech radio signal.
She and Mildred tried again after supper, but eventually, too exhausted to continue, they gave up and went to bed. Sara slept well on the sofa in the spare bedroom the Harnacks used as an office, but she rose early and set out for home as soon as she finished helping Mildred wash and dry the breakfast dishes.
It was not yet eight o’clock as she quickly made her way through the city toward the ghetto. The morning air was cool and misty, fragrant with the scents of cut grass and dew and fresh blossoms. Shopkeepers swept the sidewalks in front of their stores, clerks and secretaries hurried past on the way to their offices, and paperboys called out the headlines of the morning editions. There had been no air raids the night before, so the mood on the streets was one of relief and thankfulness beneath the routine of the start of another workday.
The mood shifted the closer Sara came to the ghetto. It always did, as the buildings grew more crowded and decrepit and the Judenstern appeared in greater numbers, but this morning she sensed something else, as if an alarm pealed just beyond the range of her hearing. Quickening her pace, she turned onto her own street and discovered trucks parked to block the alleys and intersections, and SS officers pounding on front doors and forcing their way inside and hauling out men wearing the Judenstern. She heard women screaming and men shouting and children wailing, and without breaking stride she turned left to cross the street and left again to go back the way she had come and did not stop until she was back among the shopkeepers and clerks preparing for another ordinary day.
Lightheaded and terrified, she boarded a streetcar and rode toward Friedenau, her thoughts racing as she made her way to the Kuckhoffs’ flat. Greta answered her knock, took one look at her face, and settled her on the sofa, and before Sara knew it she was holding a hot cup of tea. The rattle of the cup against the saucer told her she was shaking.
After Sara described what she had seen, Greta told her that she must not go home until whatever was happening was over.
“I didn’t see Natan,” Sara said, her voice breaking.
“Did you see any SS going into your building?” Greta asked, her gaze intent.
Sara shook her head.
“Then for now let’s hope for the best. Your brother is exceptionally clever. He probably slipped out the back door five minutes before the SS trucks arrived on the block.”
Sara allowed a small smile. “He is rather wily.”
She stayed at the Kuckhoffs’ apartment all day, trying to make herself useful by playing with Ule so Greta could work on a translation project. In the late afternoon, when Adam returned from a meeting at Kulturfilm that Libertas had set up with some film producers, he insisted upon accompanying her home.
When they reached the ghetto, the trucks were gone, the streets subdued. Adam escorted her into the tenement and upstairs to her flat, where they found the door hanging ajar, a chair overturned, books and papers scattered on the living room floor. The rooms were silent.
Sara pressed a hand to her mouth to hold back a sob. Adam left for a moment, and distantly she heard him knock on a neighbor’s door. She walked through the tiny flat again in a daze, searching even though she knew her brother was not there, could not be there, or she would have seen him, he would have called out to her and asked her where she had been.
Adam soon returned. “The woman across the hall says the Gestapo raided the entire block,” he said. “They arrested more than two hundred men. Your brother was among them.”
Sara nodded, set the chair upright, and sank down upon it.
“Come home with me,” Adam urged. “You shouldn’t be alone. Arvid and Harro can work their contacts and we’ll find out where Natan was taken.”
“I can’t go. Natan might come back. Someone might send word and I might need to go to him.”
“You could leave a note.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t leave your name and address for the SS to find.”
“Just say you went to consult the dramaturge about the Beethoven play. Natan will understand, but no one else will.”
She hesitated, but again she refused. She had to stay in case Natan needed her. When Adam persisted, she agreed to come see him and Greta first thing in the morning, to let them know she was all right and to hear whatever Arvid and Harro had learned from their contacts.
Natan did not come home that night, nor did she receive any word from him. In the morning she washed and dressed, head throbbing from worry. She would have crawled back into bed in despair except for her promise to Adam.
When she reached the Kuckhoffs’ flat, she found Mildred and Arvid waiting for her with Greta and Adam, and she was suddenly very afraid.
Greta led her to the sofa. Mildred sat beside her and took her hand. Greta offered her tea and breakfast. The thought of food made her feel faintly ill, but she accepted the tea—real tea, sweetened with sugar. She sipped it gingerly, as if it might suddenly vanish.
Arvid pulled up a chair and gently explained that in response to Heydrich’s assassination and the bombing of the exhibition, Goebbels had convinced Hitler to increase the pace of deportations as a preventative measure. The G
estapo had immediately ordered the arrests of somewhere between 250 and 500 Jewish men. Natan’s name had been on the list.
“The men were transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin,” said Arvid.
Sara nodded. She knew the name. Sachsenhausen had replaced KZ Oranienburg, where Natan had served his sentence for violating the Editors Law. As dreadful as Sachsenhausen surely was, at least Natan had not returned to the horrible place that still haunted his nightmares.
“Do you think I’ll be permitted to visit him?” she asked, looking around the circle of friends regarding her so gravely. Mildred’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “If not, could I send him food or clothing or blankets?” She had no food to send, but she would get some, somehow.
“Sara.” Arvid leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, his expression grim and sorrowful. “Upon their arrival, half of the prisoners were shot. The others were transported to other camps, Auschwitz or Mauthausen.”
Sara pressed a hand to her stomach. Auschwitz was in Poland, Mauthausen in Austria. Both were hundreds of kilometers from Berlin. “Do you know where Natan went?”
“I’m so sorry, Sara,” said Mildred, voice breaking. “Natan was among those killed at Sachsenhausen.”
A dull roaring filled Sara’s ears. She had known Natan was dead the moment she entered the flat and saw them looking at her with grief and sorrow and rage. She had known, but she had pretended not to, because until someone said the words aloud, the possibility remained that they would never need to be said.
Mildred and Greta begged her not to go back to her apartment. Earlier that morning, an order had gone out to round up the families of the men taken the day before and to transport them immediately to the east. Sara must not be home when the SS came looking for her.
“I won’t stay long,” she told them. She had to go back. She and Natan had pared down their belongings with every move, but she still kept a few precious mementos that she could not bear to leave behind. She had nothing else left of her brother. She must save his photos, his journals. The Nazis could not take her memories along with everything else they had stolen from her.
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