Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  She embraced her friends, kissed them, and clung to them, closing her eyes and committing to memory their voices, their scents, the way they felt in her arms. “I hope we meet again in better days,” she told them, and then she left.

  Alone in the tenement flat, she gathered her most precious belongings, her few remaining valuables, clothing, shoes, a coat—Annemarie Hannemann’s, not Sara Weitz’s. She packed a small suitcase and put on her dark gray suit, the one Natan teasingly called her “secretary disguise.” Had called. Would call no more.

  She inhaled deeply, steeling herself. She would let her heart fall apart into broken shards later. Now she had to escape.

  The last thing she did before leaving the tenement was to slip her ration card beneath the door of a kindly neighbor with several children. Whether she failed or succeeded, she would not need it again.

  She slipped out the rear entrance, watchful and wary, choosing a circuitous route, deftly leaving the ghetto behind. In the east where the German Jews had been resettled, she had heard that there were walls around the ghettos, allowing no one in or out. Perhaps one day the Nazis would build walls around Berlin’s ghetto, if there were any Jews left to wall in. She intended to be gone long before then.

  For their mutual protection, Natan had never told her the name of his Swiss friend. If he had, Sara could have begged him to hide her until he could obtain the forged documents and tickets to Zurich he had promised. Mildred’s contacts had left Germany long ago. Wilhelm, Amalie, and her parents were doing all they could from abroad, but they had been thwarted at every turn. Sara could think of only one other person who might be able to help her.

  She remembered the way to Dieter’s workplace as if she had last visited weeks before rather than years. If his leave had ended and he had already returned to France, she was undone. She could not sit quietly in her flat until the Gestapo came for her, and she would not incriminate her friends by asking them to shelter her.

  Dieter would not recognize the name Sara gave to the receptionist, but she was counting on curiosity to prompt him to come see who it was who claimed to have an appointment.

  His face blanched from shock at the sight of her, but he quickly recovered and ushered her into his office. “Did you change your mind about the ring?” he asked, closing the door. “I have it here. It’s yours if you want it.”

  “I’m going to ask much more from you than that,” she replied. “Does your company still have a branch office in Basel?”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  August–September 1942

  Greta

  Greta was overcome with relief when Adam received a letter from Wilhelm von Riechmann with important news regarding their biographical play about Beethoven. The Swiss investors had welcomed the stage manager to Geneva, and while they were distraught to learn that the playwright had withdrawn from the production, they were deeply grateful that the stage manager had delivered the news in person.

  After so many months of corresponding in code, Greta understood at once that Sara had arrived safely in Geneva and had reunited with her family, with one heartbreaking and irreparable absence.

  Sara had left Berlin too suddenly to give her friends more than the barest sketch of her erstwhile fiancé’s arrangement to send his new employee Annemarie Hannemann to Basel to facilitate a shipment of chocolate and cheese. Greta suspected that Dieter had helped her not because he had suddenly turned against the Reich, but because he had loved Sara once and wanted to atone for the ways he had failed her. It was unfortunate that he was a Mitläufer. He evidently possessed skills that would have been useful to the resistance.

  As the summer ripened, Greta, Adam, and their friends continued their clandestine activities with heightened apprehension. The Gestapo arrested an average of fifty Berliners a day. Most arrests were provoked by civilian denunciations, but the result was the same: imprisonment at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, solitary confinement in a cold basement cell, inedible food, and harsh interrogations that began with simple questions but escalated to violence if the officers did not like what they heard. Sometimes, after weeks of relentless questioning apparently designed to drive the prisoners mad, they might suddenly be informed that they were free to go, without ever learning the charges against them or receiving a trial. More often, when the investigating officers believed the prisoner was involved with the resistance or was withholding vital information, they would commence Verschärfte Vernehmung—“enhanced interrogation.” When this did not result in death, it inevitably left the subject broken in body and mind.

  Everyone in their circle was mindful of the dangers—even Harro, whose bravado had convinced Greta that he was impervious to worry. But despite the risks, they could not abandon their cause, not when everything depended upon bringing down the Reich. They all had friends and loved ones in the military—Adam’s eldest son, Armin-Gerd, had recently been drafted—and the sooner Hitler was deposed and the Nazis were forced from power, the greater the likelihood they would survive.

  And so their work continued.

  Although they had not heard from Kent or anyone else from the Brussels outpost in months, they continued to collect intelligence for Moscow, which Arvid painstakingly encoded and Hans Coppi transmitted. After the Wehrmacht launched a second offensive across southern Russia toward the oilfields of the Caucasus precisely as Arvid and Harro had predicted, the Soviets became even more eager for their reports. In early August, Moscow sent two German Communists disguised as soldiers on furlough to Berlin with a new, more powerful transmitter for their group. Mildred arranged a safe house for them along their route in Bad Saarow, about seventy-fives miles southeast of Berlin, and when they finally reached the capital, they stayed with Elizabeth Schumacher. Greta never met them, but afterward, Mildred told her that just as Hirschfeld and Erdberg had done, they too urged their group to abandon their resistance and relief efforts and concentrate on gathering intelligence.

  “We don’t work for them,” said Greta, bristling. “We collaborate with the Soviets because it’s in our best interest, but we aren’t here to do Moscow’s bidding.”

  “I’ll be sure to have Arvid put that into his next report,” Mildred teased.

  “I wish you would,” said Greta, and she was only half joking. Their group was deeply invested in helping the Jews and other victims of the Reich. They were not going to give that up just because the Soviets complained it distracted them from more important work. Greta, especially, was becoming more committed to exposing injustice and atrocities, although she did not always receive unanimous support from the group.

  Earlier that summer, Libertas had used her connections at the Kulturfilm center to get Adam a job directing a documentary about the Nazis’ ambitious construction projects in the Polish city of Poznań, which Hitler envisioned as a new, majestic gateway to Germany from the east. He intended to have the Royal Castle remodeled as his personal palace, but not far from the depots where tons of rare marble were being shipped to the city, groups of Jewish and Catholic Poles were regularly marched out, lined up before mass graves, and shot. The filming provided Adam with a cover under which he secretly forged contacts for the resistance and collected evidence for Libertas’s war crimes archive.

  On one occasion, Greta managed to get permission to visit him in Poznań, and she was horrified by what she saw. The city was under martial law, and executions were carried out for the smallest infractions or cases of insubordination, with notices of the death sentences posted on a kiosk in a public square as a warning to others. A brave young woman escorted Greta to a hospital where more than one thousand patients had been slaughtered soon after the invasion. From a safe distance, she pointed out Fort VII, officially known as Konzentrationslager Posen, the first concentration camp established in occupied Poland. Prisoners held in the nineteenth-century fortress were kept in cold, dark, overcrowded cells, sleeping on the stone floor or piles of rotting straw. Women’s cells were belowground and often flooded a half
meter deep. Food was abysmal, diseases and pestilence rampant. One of the guards’ favorite means of torture was the “Stairway of Death,” a steep concrete staircase on a hill outside one of the buildings. Prisoners were forced to run up and down the staircase carrying a heavy stone, but sometimes when they reached the top, a bored guard would kick them back down. Arbitrary killings were epidemic, but bullets were inefficient, so SS chemists were experimenting with gas.

  Shocked and sickened, upon her return to Berlin, Greta immediately wrote a report describing the inhumane treatment of Jews and Poles in Poznań. After presenting it to her resistance circle, she asked for their help printing copies and distributing them throughout the capital.

  Everyone was outraged by what she had learned, and the experiments with gas sparked an intense discussion. In the end, however, Arvid reluctantly said, “This is good reporting, Greta, but we cannot publish it.”

  “The Nazis are committing mass murder of civilians,” she protested. “We must get the word out.”

  “It’s impossible.” He sighed, removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “Very few people have access to this information. It would be too easy for the Gestapo to trace this report back to you or to Adam, and then to us. Distributing this report would expose us immediately.”

  Greta tried to persuade him, but his mind was made up, and his resolve influenced the others. Silently fuming, she acquiesced, and when Mildred urged her to add her report to Libertas’s atrocities archive, she pretended to be satisfied with that. She was absolutely certain that if Harro or Günther had presented such incriminating information and had asked for the group to publish it, Arvid would have consented.

  For several days thereafter, she privately brooded over the matter—until August 23, when the German armed forces launched a massive bombing campaign against Stalingrad. More than one thousand tons of bombs were dropped, nearly thirty thousand prisoners were captured, and, according to military estimates, more than forty thousand people were killed in the city. German high command expressed optimism that Stalingrad would fall within a few days. Studying Adam’s maps, Greta agonized over what it would mean for the resistance if the Soviet Union were defeated before the end of summer.

  And yet somehow Stalingrad defied the onslaught.

  The city still had not surrendered more than a week later, on August 31, as Greta prepared to welcome Adam home for a brief visit in honor of his birthday. She had planned a small party, just Greta and Ule, Adam’s mother, and his first two wives, the sisters Marie and Gertrud. What a strange gathering it would seem to an outsider, she reflected as she finished preparing the meal. If only Armin-Gerd had been able to get a furlough, the family would have been complete.

  When Adam finally arrived home, they all hurried to the door to meet him. Weary from his journey, he gladly returned their embraces, sweeping Ule up in his arms, kissing him and growling like a bear until Ule shrieked with laughter. But while everyone made merry, Greta perceived the tension in the lines around his eyes, the strain in his voice.

  After their guests departed and they put Ule to bed, Greta took Adam’s hand and led him to the sofa, where he lay down, groaned wearily, and rested his head upon her lap. Stroking his hair, Greta allowed him a few moments to gather his thoughts before she asked him what was wrong.

  “Harro disappeared from his office today.”

  Greta’s heart plummeted. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “I phoned him at his Potsdam office today and was told that he was out. So I called Libertas at her office, and she was acting rather high-strung, even for her. She said that earlier today, his secretary told her that Harro had been ordered to report to his superior officer at once, something about an urgent courier mission to the front. Harro promptly hurried off, leaving his hat, his gloves, and his insignia on his desk. He never returned for them.”

  “Wouldn’t he need them on his mission—the hat and the insignia, at least?”

  “One would think.”

  “That’s very strange,” said Greta, apprehensive. “Why don’t I call Libertas now at home and see if she’s heard anything more?”

  When Adam agreed, she rang Libertas’s Charlottenburg residence and spoke with her housekeeper, who reported that Frau Schulze-Boysen was at dinner and was unable to come to the phone. Greta said she would call back tomorrow and hung up.

  “She’s home and safe,” Greta said as she resumed her place on the sofa. “And she’s apparently not too upset to entertain dinner guests.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” murmured Adam, already half asleep.

  The next day, Greta waited until midmorning and called Libertas at her office, only to be told that she was on a film site all day and unreachable by phone. In the afternoon, Adam went out to meet Arvid and Günther about resistance matters, and when he returned, he reported that Günther had seen Harro two days before at Wannsee for a sailing party. He had seemed perfectly at ease, not at all as if he suspected the Gestapo was breathing down his neck. Arvid urged them to remain calm and watchful, and to carry on at work and home as if nothing was amiss. It was entirely likely that Harro had indeed been sent off on an important mission for the Luftwaffe, and that his secretary had been mistaken about Harro’s forgotten belongings, worrying Libertas unnecessarily.

  Greta agreed that the simplest, least sinister explanation was probably the correct one, and yet she felt a rising sense of unease. She wished Adam could extend his visit home, but he was expected at the Kulturfilm office in Prague, and if he suddenly canceled, it would alert anyone who might be observing them.

  “Call me as soon as you hear from Libertas,” Adam urged as she folded his clothes and set them on the bed for him to pack into his suitcase.

  “I will.” She inhaled deeply, steadying her nerves. Libertas could be capricious and impulsive, but she knew Greta and Adam were worried about Harro’s sudden departure from his office. Although it was reassuring to know that Libertas was hosting dinner parties and working at film shoots, which she would not have done if she were terrified for her husband, it was inexplicably thoughtless of her not to return their messages. “You must call me if you hear from Harro.”

  “Agreed.” He took a carefully folded shirt from her hands, dropped it into his suitcase, and took her in his arms. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but this job is important.”

  “I know.” They needed the money, and if he dropped out, Kulturfilm would never give him another assignment, no matter how many strings Libertas pulled.

  “Do you know what I’ve been thinking of all morning?” Adam said, stroking her hair. “Hamburg, the Internationaler Theaterkongresse, and the beautiful, clever French girl I fell in love with there.”

  Greta smiled. “I had forgotten that you thought I was French.”

  He kissed her. “I want to go back there with you. When this film is done, we’ll leave Ule with my mother and spend a holiday in Hamburg revisiting all our favorite places.”

  “I do have very fond memories of that hotel.”

  “As do I.” He kissed her again, long and full. “Let’s do it. Let’s just take a few days to pretend we’re an ordinary couple in love enjoying a holiday.”

  She shook her head at him, amused. “Very well. It’s a date.”

  He grinned. “Good. Now I have to run or I’ll miss my train.” He kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Take care of my boy. And yourself.”

  He snatched up his suitcase, put on his hat, and threw her a grin over his shoulder on his way out the door. Just then, Ule called out sleepily from his bed. “Oh, Ule’s awake,” Greta said, turning toward the sound. “Can you spare a minute to kiss him goodbye?”

  But when she turned back, Adam was gone, and the door had already closed between them.

  Part Four

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  September–November 1942

  Mildred and Greta

  Although the United States’s entry into the war and the German army’s failure to capture St
alingrad had given Mildred and Arvid new hope that it was only a matter of time before the Reich fell, they were exhausted, their nerves strained from constant vigilance. When Egmont and Anneliese Zechlin invited them along on a two-week holiday at the resort town of Preila, they gladly accepted, grateful to escape the stress and danger of Berlin for a little while.

  On September 5, a day before their friends, Mildred and Arvid arrived at Preila on the Kurische Nehrung between the Curonian Lagoon and the Baltic Sea. Soothed by the sounds of the waves and the refreshing breezes, they settled into one bedroom of their rented cottage, a charming little place with blue shutters and lovely views of the lagoon. Later they strolled hand in hand across the narrow spit of land to admire the sunset over the Baltic.

  Mildred sighed as she gazed across the water. “Sweden is so close,” she said, her eyes on the distant horizon. “Perhaps instead of returning to Berlin, we should hire a boat to take us there. Wouldn’t it be a relief to wait out the war in a neutral country?”

  “I can’t leave. My work is too important to the resistance.” Arvid raised her hand to his lips. “Yours is too, but I value your safety far more. I wish you would return to America.”

  “Not without you,” she said. “We go together or not at all.”

  He sighed, rueful. “You’ve become so stubborn. I blame Greta. She’s a bad influence.”

  Mildred laughed and kissed him.

  The next day, they met Egmont and Anneliese at the boat landing in Nidden, and after the Zechlins unpacked at the cottage, they strolled down Preila’s main street together, chatting and enjoying the fresh sea breezes. After supper at a charming bistro, they resumed their walk, and in the seclusion of the remote elk marshes, their conversation turned to the war and what might follow. Arvid and Egmont agreed that it was essential to oust Hitler before the Allies defeated Germany in order to preserve German sovereignty. “Otherwise we will be at the mercy of whatever country invades us first,” Arvid said, but his last words were drowned out by a deep roll of thunder. Another swiftly followed, and the conversation abruptly ended as they raced back to the cottage steps ahead of a heavy downpour.