Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Mildred slept peacefully that night in the shelter of Arvid’s embrace, but when she woke in the morning, she was alone.

  Bright sunshine streamed through the curtains, but beneath the sweet melody of birdsong she heard voices, low and urgent. Stealing to the window, she drew back a corner of the curtain, just enough to glimpse Arvid and Egmont in the yard talking to four men on the other side of the gate.

  Trepidation stirred, but the men were dressed in suits and hats, not uniforms, so she supposed they could be other vacationers out for a stroll. She quickly washed and dressed, and when she went to the living room, she found Anneliese observing the men through the front window. “That man in the center showed a badge,” she said, her pretty features drawn together in worry. “Who do you think they are? What could they want?”

  “I have no idea,” Mildred replied. At that moment, the strangers passed through the front gate and followed Arvid and Egmont up the path to the cottage. Anneliese let the curtain fall, and she and Mildred instinctively drew away from the door.

  Arvid calmly led the group into the cottage, but Mildred’s heart plummeted to see the strain in his expression. “These gentlemen say they are from the police alien registration office.”

  One officer frowned thinly as he scanned the room. “We’ve been ordered to tell Oberregierungsrat Harnack that he is needed immediately at the Economics Ministry.”

  “They could have just sent a wire,” said Anneliese, indignant.

  Arvid held Mildred’s gaze. “I’m sorry, darling, but I must accompany these gentlemen back to Berlin. You should just go ahead with the plans we made when we were admiring the sunset the other night.”

  Mildred’s throat constricted, but she nodded.

  “Perhaps I was not clear,” said the officer in charge. “Frau Harnack is required too.”

  “My wife does not work at the ministry,” said Arvid. “Why should she have to cut her holiday short?”

  “Frau Harnack can remain with us,” said Egmont, smiling pleasantly. “None of us have had our coffee, and I’m sure these officers would enjoy a cup. Anneliese, darling, would you make some? We can all drink and talk this over.”

  Anneliese nodded and darted off.

  “You have ten minutes if you wish to pack,” the officer told Arvid and Mildred.

  Two other officers accompanied them to their bedroom, so they could not speak freely. Blinking back tears, Mildred slowly removed her clothes from the wardrobe, folded them, and placed them into her suitcase. Arvid finished packing first, but he lingered, giving her steady, reassuring looks whenever she glanced his way.

  She smelled coffee brewing as she and Arvid returned to the living room, followed closely by the officers. They were Gestapo; they had to be.

  “This is all a misunderstanding,” Egmont said, looking from Arvid to Mildred and back, forcing a reassuring smile. “I’ll meet with the director of the Foreign Studies Department at the university and he’ll get this matter sorted out.”

  Arvid thanked him with a nod.

  “Oberregierungsrat Harnack,” the officer in charge said sharply, “you are expected at the ministry at once.”

  Suitcase in hand, Mildred followed Arvid to the door. She threw a glance over her shoulder to Anneliese, who stood in the kitchen doorway watching her helplessly, tears in her eyes.

  “Wait,” said Egmont, bolting forward. “My wife and I cannot possibly enjoy our holiday knowing our friends’ has been spoiled. We’ll come with you.”

  “Professor Zechlin,” the officer in charge retorted, “you are too intelligent not to know what is going on here. I am under orders to handle this matter as quietly as possible. You have already interfered too much. I hereby inform you that you are to remain silent about everything you have seen and heard. Otherwise we will arrest you as well.’’ He turned to Anneliese. “Frau Zechlin, the same applies to you.”

  “The Harnacks are distinguished scholars,” Egmont protested. “You cannot prevent me from notifying the university of this outrage.’’

  “This is my final warning, Professor. You are strictly forbidden to tell anyone what has happened here. Any calls you attempt to make will be intercepted.”

  Egmont looked as if he would say more, but Arvid made a subtle gesture, and he fell silent. As the officers led Mildred and Arvid from the cottage, Egmont took Mildred’s hand and kissed it. He gave Arvid a long, wordless look conveying his intention to do everything in his power to help them despite the officer’s threats.

  “Dear Egmont,” said Arvid quietly. “I thank you for everything, for ten years of friendship, and for today.” He scarcely had the words out before one of the officers shoved him in the back and forced him stumbling through the doorway, his suitcase banging on the frame. Another officer barked a command close to Mildred’s ear, and she hurried after her husband.

  They were closely watched all the way back to Berlin, never given a moment alone together, forbidden to speak or to touch. Heart aching, lightheaded with fear, Mildred tried to convey her love through long, wordless looks. Arvid replied with faint smiles and reassuring nods, as if to tell her that all would be well. She longed to believe him, but with every passing hour, her apprehensions rose.

  They were taken to Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, where they were promptly separated. Mildred followed a guard’s commands to turn over her valuables, her shoelaces, her belt. Her final destination was the Hausgefängnis, one of about three dozen narrow, dank solitary cells in the basement. As the cell door slammed shut with an ominous clang, cutting her off from the world of light and warmth, terror compelled her to disobey orders for silence. “Where is my husband?” she called out, frantic. “Where have you taken him?”

  No one answered.

  Greta walked home from the Romanisches Café, bemused. It was not like Libertas to miss a date, especially one that had been on their calendar for a fortnight. Greta had waited alone at their favorite table for thirty minutes before hunger compelled her to order lunch. When her Schweineschnitzel and Spätzle were served, she ate slowly, glancing often to the door, expecting Libertas to appear at any moment, breathless and full of apologies and a good story about whatever Kulturfilm crisis had delayed her. But Greta finished her meal and lingered over her drink for another hour and still Libertas did not appear. Eventually she gave up, paid the bill, and left.

  Perhaps Libertas had phoned to cancel at the last minute. Greta had left early to drop off Ule at the kindergarten on the first floor of her apartment building; she might have missed her call. And yet—something was not quite right. Surely if Libertas had tried and failed to reach her at home, she would have left a message at the restaurant.

  Uneasy, Greta quickened her pace. As soon as she collected Ule from the kindergarten, she hurried him upstairs, set him down with some toys, and called Libertas’s home and office. Libertas’s housekeeper and the Kulturfilm receptionist both said that Libertas was traveling, but the receptionist did not know where and the housekeeper refused to say. Perplexed, Greta hung up the phone. Some time earlier Libertas had mentioned that she hoped to travel to Stockholm to visit her sister and brother-in-law, Ottora Maria Countess Douglas and Count Carl Ludvig Douglas. Hermann Göring himself had promised to get her permission to travel as a favor to her grandfather, Philipp, Prince von Eulenburg, but the last Greta had heard, the permit had been canceled at the last minute, with no explanation.

  First Harro had disappeared from his office, or had been sent off on some secret mission for the Luftwaffe, and now Libertas had apparently set off on a mysterious trip without clearing her calendar—

  A fist pounded on the door.

  Glancing back to make sure Ule was distracted with his toys, Greta answered the knock. When she found two SS men standing in the hall, for a moment she could not breathe. “Yes?” she said, fighting to keep the tremor from her voice. “May I help you?”

  “Frau Kuckhoff?”

  “Yes?”

  “You are w
anted for questioning. Come quietly and it will go better for you.”

  “But—” Greta stumbled out of the way as one of the SS men pushed past her into the room. Her blood ran cold as his gaze traveled around the room and settled on the bookcases filled with classic novels, old scripts, and the great many verboten books entrusted to them by nervous friends. “I’m sorry but I can’t go with you. I have a child—”

  “You should have thought of that before you decided to commit treason.”

  “What?” she exclaimed. “I’ve done nothing of the sort. If someone has denounced me, let me confront her face-to-face. Liars inform on neighbors every day out of jealousy and spite. You know that.”

  The second officer grunted agreement, his head tilted slightly as he read the spines of the books.

  “You’re coming with us,” the first officer said coldly. “You may bring the boy if you like, but I assure you he would be better off here alone.”

  The second officer lunged and grabbed Greta’s arm from behind. “Time to go, Fraulein.”

  “Wait. Let me call my son’s grandmother. There’s a kindergarten in our building. He could wait there until she can come for him.”

  The first officer gave his consent, and the second followed her to the phone and listened carefully as she called her mother and explained that she was under arrest and needed her to come for her grandson.

  “Will you be all right?” her mother asked, panic in her voice. “Where’s Adam?”

  “I don’t know,” Greta replied, just as the second officer grabbed the phone from her hand and hung up.

  As slowly as she dared, Greta packed Ule’s little knapsack, washed his face and hands, hugged him fiercely, and led him downstairs to the kindergarten. “May Ule wait here until his grandmother arrives?” she asked the teacher. “It may be awhile. She’s coming from Frankfurt an der Oder.”

  “Of course,” the teacher replied, concern evident in her tone, though she smiled as she held out her hand to Ule. “Is something wrong?”

  The officers had lingered in the foyer, but now Greta heard them approaching. “I’m under arrest,” she murmured. “If any of my friends come by asking for me, tell them to run.”

  Just then the second officer seized her tightly by the arm. “Frau Kuckhoff is mentally ill,” he said. “We’re taking her to an institution. This nonsense she’s speaking is a symptom of the disease. Forget you heard it. Forget we were here.”

  The teacher’s expression tensed and she edged backward, pulling Ule behind her. Greta’s last sight of her son was of his sweet face peering up at her from behind his teacher’s skirt, his dark eyes confused and shining with unshed tears. “Ule, darling, I love you,” she cried as the officers hauled her away.

  They put her in the back of a truck, windowless and stifling. Alone, she buried her head in her hands and fought back tears as they jolted along, the frequent stops and starts telling her they had not left the city. All too soon the truck halted and the engine shut down. Two armed guards in brown military uniforms threw open the back and hauled her out, while the first officer ordered them to take her inside. A quick, frantic glance revealed that she was at the police headquarters at Alexanderplatz. Prodded along by the butt of a rifle, she stumbled through the front doors and down a long hallway. She caught fleeting glimpses of people she knew—Elizabeth Schumacher, Erika von Brockdorff—but not Adam or Mildred or Arvid or the Schulze-Boysens or—

  But even without her closest friends, there were too many familiar faces, ashen and tear-streaked or stoic or angry, for it not to be certain that their circle had been compromised.

  And yet Adam was in Prague, far from all of this. Perhaps the Gestapo did not know. Perhaps one of their friends had been able to get a message to him in time, shouting a warning into the phone while storm troopers broke down their door. Or perhaps her mother had called him before she hurried to Berlin for Ule.

  Greta could only hope that word had reached him in time.

  Two weeks after Mildred’s arrest, she was taken to a large, dark room where she was fingerprinted and photographed, her head held rigidly in a neck brace as they took her photo from the front, in profile, and at three-quarters. By then, the long, harrowing days of endless harsh interrogations without food or water and the agonizing nights of cold, loneliness, and fear had already ravaged her. She had lost weight; the brown prison dress she had been issued on her first day hung from her bent shoulders like a loose shroud. She ached all over from lying on the hard bench in her cell beneath the single barred window, and her flesh was sore and bruised from the slaps and beatings she received under questioning. She was constantly exhausted, her sleep repeatedly interrupted by the discomfort of the cold bench, the screams of other prisoners, nightmares. She felt alternately feverish and chilled, and her chest rattled when she coughed. She was denied medicine, books, visits from loved ones. She had no idea if her family knew where she was.

  The only time she saw other prisoners was when she was dragged from her cell to the interrogation room or to the prison yard for her ten minutes of daily exercise. That was how she knew Libertas and Harro were confined to the Hausgefängnis, also Adam Kuckhoff and John Sieg, Hans Coppi and Kurt Schumacher. For a while she saw Hilde Coppi nearly every day in the yard, carefully walking with the others, her hands resting upon her rounded abdomen, but then she disappeared; Mildred fervently hoped that she had been released on account of her pregnancy. She never saw Greta, but she once glimpsed Wolfgang Havemann, Arvid’s stepnephew. She knew Arvid was near, and she often begged the guards to let her see him, if only for a moment, or at least to tell her which cell was his. They ignored her. The SS officers conducting her interrogations offered to give her time alone with Arvid if she would only make a full confession—such a small thing, really, since they already knew she was guilty—and answer their questions, so many questions about Arvid, the Kuckhoffs, the Schulze-Boysens, the Soviet calling himself Kent and the Soviet intelligence outpost in Brussels and on and on. Increasingly despondent, she responded to every query with denials. She knew nothing of any resistance group. She was a wife and a teacher. Yes, she was an American, but she had no connection to the United States government. Yes, she had been friends with Ambassador Dodd’s daughter and other American diplomats and their wives, but those had been innocent friendships, and her American acquaintances had all left Germany long before.

  Once, after a particularly intense interrogation, so violent that she had to be carried from the room on a stretcher, she was left for a few minutes in a hallway, lying in a blur of pain and despair, unable to rise or even open her eyes. Thinking her insensible, the guards and officers conversed in passing, and so she learned that more than one hundred members of their group had been rounded up. Most of the women, including Greta, were being held in the prison at Alexanderplatz, but Libertas remained at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, confined in relative comfort in an open cell because of her aristocratic rank and noble connections.

  Weeks later, the guard who brought Mildred her supper—a cup of coffee, two pieces of bread spread with margarine—informed her that Arvid and Adam had finally broken under torture in the Stalin Room, stretched between four beds, wrenched by calf clamps, tormented by thumbscrews. “Your husband wept like a child,” he gloated, “but it was Kuckhoff who gave up his friends, John Sieg and Adolf Grimme.”

  “Who?” Mildred murmured, feigning puzzlement as she forced herself to finish the stale bread. Muttering curses, the guard snatched the tin plate from her hands and struck her upside the head with it. She crumpled, blinded by pain, and over the ringing in her ears she heard him stride from the cell, slam the door, and turn the key.

  As her body steadily weakened, her ten minutes of daily exercise in the prison yard became both a respite from the grim isolation of her cell and an ordeal. A guard would take her from her cell and lead her from the Hausgefängnis to a pair of heavy iron doors leading to the central courtyard. When the doors opened with a clang of metal, for a momen
t she would be riveted in place, caressed by sunlight and a sudden rush of cool, fresh air. “No talking,” the guard would remind her as he shoved her into the open yard, where other prisoners walked slowly around the perimeter of the gravel courtyard. She was not permitted to fall in step with them, but could only tread a diagonal path between two corners of the high encircling walls, alone. She wondered about the other prisoners. They were not allowed to speak to her, nor she to them. Once, one brave woman dared offer her sympathetic glances, so Mildred took a chance and whispered her name and cell number and begged the woman to remember her.

  Ten minutes each day was all she had to walk and breathe beneath an open sky and to remind herself that she was human. By the time her stiff, aching limbs loosened up and she fell into a comfortable rhythm, she would be ordered back to her cell.

  An interrogator let slip that she and her friends would be tried, but he did not say when, nor did he explain the charges against her, nor was she permitted to meet with an attorney. She could not imagine who would be brave or foolhardy enough to represent them.

  In mid-November, a guard banged on her cell door, startling her out of a wistful reverie—hiking around Lake Mendota in Wisconsin on a late autumn afternoon, her hand in Arvid’s, the brilliantly colored leaves dancing overhead as breezes tossed the boughs.

  “You see how good behavior is rewarded here,” the guard said, entering her cell carrying a small box. “Just think of how much more we could do for you if you would cooperate.”