Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  A flicker of anger surged. She was not willing to accept that she was done for, not yet, not until the sentence was pronounced. “Very well,” she managed to say. “Grimme knew nothing. He did nothing. We hid our work from him because we knew he would not approve.”

  He smiled, relieved. “That’s my good girl.” He drew her close again and kissed her cheek. “Thank you, darling.”

  She stiffened in his embrace, but knowing that she might never again feel his arms around her, she forced herself to relax, to relent, to forgive. And yet in the back of her mind a plaintive voice lamented that Adam and Grimme could have worked out a story to exonerate her instead. She was Adam’s wife, the mother of his youngest son, and yet when he decided to try to save one person, he had chosen someone else.

  The guard unlocked the door and barked a command, ending their brief interlude. The eight defendants were escorted into the courtroom and ordered to take their places. The court was called into session, Roeder began the proceedings, and then, so swiftly that Greta would have become outraged if she were not so afraid and overwhelmed, Hitler’s Bloodhound flew through all eight prosecutions in a single day.

  After the judges retired to their chambers, the eight defendants were escorted back to the waiting room and again permitted to speak freely. Shaken from the courtroom ordeal, Greta seized Adam’s hand and tried to draw strength from his firm, familiar grasp. She expected the men to discuss the trial and its possible outcomes, but instead they shared rumors of a staggering German defeat at Stalingrad that had apparently occurred only a few days before. Greta looked from one eager, careworn face to another, marveling at their enthusiasm. Could it be that none of them had reached the same conclusion she had—that Hitler, who always found a scapegoat to blame for every failure, could very well hold the Rote Kapelle responsible for this disastrous loss? They had provided volumes of military and economic intelligence to the Soviets. Hitler would not care if a direct link could not be established. He would not care if the correct people were punished, as long as someone was.

  As the men’s discussion became increasingly animated, Greta worried that they had abandoned caution, at the Reichskriegsgericht of all places. She glanced surreptitiously toward the guards and was surprised to find them conversing nonchalantly, utterly indifferent to their prisoners’ seditious talk. Indeed, why should they care? Greta thought bitterly. To the guards, the defendants were as good as dead. Nothing they said mattered anymore.

  All too soon, the defendants were loaded into the police van and taken back to prison. Greta slept poorly that night, and was awakened before dawn by a guard rattling her cell door. Groggily, she rose, dressed, and attended to her face and hair as best she could, determined to appear dignified and respectable before the court, not that it would sway their decision.

  Again they were brought before the judges, but this time, they were asked if they wished to make any final statements on their own behalf. Greta’s blood roiled with shock and anger as Adolf Grimme reminded the court that he was a man of prominence and renown, that he had served as the Reich minister of culture, that he had received the Goethe Prize from Field Marshal Hindenburg’s own hands. He swore that he was no Communist, but a socialist and a man of faith who had succumbed to Adam Kuckhoff’s influence.

  As he returned to his place, Greta could not bear to look at him, but she was startled to find Adam apparently unsurprised by his friend’s denunciation. Perhaps they had worked out Grimme’s statement between themselves ahead of time, but Greta still seethed with suppressed fury. How dare Grimme vainly attempt to save his own life by shoving Adam toward the gallows?

  The verdicts were read: Greta, Adam, and five others received the death sentence. Grimme was condemned for failing to report an attempt at high treason and was sentenced to three years hard labor.

  Afterward, they gathered one last time in the waiting room as the police van was made ready. Greta was too furious to speak to Grimme, who stood abashedly cleaning his glasses so he would not have to look Adam in the eye. Once Adam released her hand so that he could shake Grimme’s, and she burned with resentment that he had squandered even those few of their last precious moments together. She wanted to shake him, to scream at him that Grimme would live but she would die, and she, his loyal and loving wife, deserved every second of his time.

  But she did not want to part from Adam with anger or resentment lingering between them. With an apologetic frown for Grimme, she pulled Adam aside, knowing she would probably never see him again. They embraced, they kissed, they spoke words of love and encouragement. They talked about Ule, their hearts aching even as they reassured each other that he would be brought up well by Greta’s parents. One day he would know that his mother and father had given their lives to a righteous cause.

  Then they were separated. Greta returned to Alexanderplatz and prepared to die. She wrote letters to her parents, to Ule, to Adam’s mother, letters full of fond reminiscences of their lives together and of her love and her hopes for their futures. She filed an appeal for clemency, as her friends and comrades had done before her, knowing that it was almost certainly futile but refusing to give up without at least making the attempt.

  She had always been that way, from her impoverished childhood through her student days and into her ill-fated years as a woman of the resistance, stubbornly persisting long after wiser people acquiesced. That quirk of her nature that endeared her to some and made rivals of others had served her well for forty years, and she would not forsake it now.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  February 15–16, 1943

  Mildred

  On the evening of February 15, a guard unlocked the door to Mildred’s cell and ordered her to gather her belongings.

  Mildred’s heart plummeted. “May I ask why?” It was after nine o’clock, almost time for lights-out, too late for an interrogation or a meeting with the matron.

  “You’re being transferred to Plötzensee,” the guard replied. “You have five minutes.”

  “No!” her cellmate cried out. “Not so soon!”

  Every prisoner knew that Plötzensee was where the condemned went to die.

  Lightheaded with fear, Mildred rose and mechanically collected her few books, her sweater, the letters from Arvid’s family, her precious stub of a pencil. She had already entrusted Arvid’s last letter to Gertrud, believing that it would be safer with her in Ravensbrück. She already knew every word by heart, and she knew that Mutti Clara would cherish it. Gertrud had promised to get it to her somehow, even if it took years.

  As Mildred’s cellmate began to sob, Mildred wrapped her belongings in the soft flannel blanket Inge had sent.

  “One minute,” said the guard.

  Mildred and her cellmate embraced, and for a moment, as her friend’s tears fell upon her shoulder, Mildred’s legs gave out and she would have collapsed if her cellmate had not held her upright.

  The guard pulled them apart, cuffed Mildred’s hands behind her back, tucked her bundle under one arm, and led her down corridors and outside. An icy, driving rain soaked her hair and dress as she boarded a green police van parked in the courtyard. The doors closed and the van pulled away from the Charlottenburg prison, rumbling over cobblestones and around bomb craters, jolting her roughly as it sped through the blackout.

  When the van halted at Plötzensee, she descended with some difficulty and was taken inside to a small office, where another guard removed her handcuffs, gestured to a chair pulled up to a narrow desk, and ordered her to sit. As soon as she was seated, he placed a questionnaire on the desk, set a sharpened pencil above it, and told her to fill it out, honestly and completely.

  She obeyed, but as she finished the simple biographical questions and moved on to others asking about her financial assets, career, health, criminal history, and relationships, she began to wonder if it was all a cruel joke. To the query “Are you single? Married? With whom?” she took a deep breath and responded, It can be assumed that I am widowed. I haven’t
however received an official letter informing me of the death of my husband, who was supposed to be executed.

  On the next page: “Why are you punished now? Do you admit committing the deed you are charged with? In which circumstances and for what reason did you commit the deed?” Mildred reflected carefully upon Dr. Schwarz’s argument at her trial before writing, Accomplice in treason. I admit being an accomplice in treason because I had to be obedient to my husband. She disliked maligning Arvid, but it would do none of them any good if she bungled their story now.

  The last question was so absurd that she might have laughed if she had not felt so wretched: “What do you plan to do after your release? Do you want to go back to your previous work or devote yourself to another, and which?”

  She had been sentenced to die by the Führer himself. Did anyone really believe she thought she might one day be released? She could not put that down, so instead she wrote, To continue translating the best German poems such as Goethe’s for the Anglo-Saxon world.

  When she finished the questionnaire, a guard led her to a small cell on the first floor, cold and windowless, illuminated by a single bulb suspended from the ceiling out of reach. He tossed her bundle onto the bed and departed without a word, but no sooner had he left than an SS officer appeared in the doorway. “Your request for an appeal has been denied,” he told her curtly. “You will be executed by guillotine tomorrow evening.”

  Her chest constricting, she sank onto the bed, blood rushing in her ears. She lay down and curled up on her side, staring straight ahead, too shocked for tears.

  She expected the dim lightbulb to be turned off eventually, but when it stayed illuminated, she inhaled deeply, sat up, and untied her bundle. She removed her books, gifts from Mutti Clara, turning each one over in her hands and studying them as if they were precious artifacts from another life. Somehow she was not tired; she supposed she would never sleep again.

  She opened her Goethe, turned to “Vermächtnis,” and read it once quietly aloud before taking up her pencil and writing an English translation in the margin.

  No being can to nothing fall;

  The everlasting lives in all.

  Sustain yourself in joy with life.

  Life is eternal; there are laws

  To keep the living treasure’s cause

  With which the worlds are rife.

  She was engrossed in translating Goethe when the prison chaplain came to her cell at daybreak. As Reverend Poelchau entered, she saw herself reflected in his shocked expression and realized how completely imprisonment had transformed her. She had withered, aged beyond her forty years. Illness and hunger had chiseled her thin, and her once thick blond hair had gone brittle and white. Her shoulders were bent, her breathing labored.

  She invited him to sit. He offered her a Bible in English, which she accepted. She expected him to urge her to pray or to confess her sins so she could face her Creator with an unblemished conscience, but instead he began to converse with her, easily and kindly. They discussed the Bible, Goethe, and her literary work, almost as if they were two acquaintances passing time at a bus stop rather than a woman who was about to die and her spiritual counsel.

  Then his expression turned sorrowful. “Frau Harnack,” he said gently, “I regret to inform you, since I believe you have not yet been told, that your husband has preceded you in death.”

  She felt a stabbing pain in her chest. For a moment her vision blurred with tears, and then they spilled over, trickling down her cheeks. She had long feared he was dead, but now all hope that he lived was truly lost. “How?” she said hoarsely. “When?”

  “He was hanged here at Plötzensee on the evening of December twenty-second.”

  Mildred’s head spun. Her beloved husband had been gone for almost two months. Even as she had been pleading to be allowed to see him for Christmas, it had already been too late, and no one had told her. “Was he alone?” she asked, because she could not bear to ask if he had suffered.

  “Harro Schulze-Boysen, Kurt Schumacher, and John Graudenz were hanged within minutes of your husband. About an hour later, Horst Heilmann, Hans Coppi, Kurt Schulze, Libertas Schulze-Boysen, and Elizabeth Schumacher were executed by guillotine.”

  Unbidden, Mildred’s hand went to her throat. She knew decapitation was considered more humane because death came swiftly, a suitable method for women and youths. Military men were usually accorded an honorable death by firing squad, but apparently that had been denied Harro. Hanging was regarded as the most degrading form of execution, one last cruel, malicious gesture from their Nazi tormentors.

  She would face the guillotine. It was only a matter of hours now.

  “Your husband was not alone in the hours leading up to his death, either,” Reverend Poelchau continued. “I was with him.”

  Arvid had spent his last day writing letters to his family and reading Plato’s Defense of Socrates, the minister told her. He had asked Reverend Poelchau to read the story of the birth of Jesus from the Book of Luke, which his father had recited to the family every Christmas. Then he requested to hear the “Prologue in Heaven” from Goethe’s Faust, which the minister spoke from memory. In his final moments, he asked the chaplain to join him in singing Bortniansky’s hymn “Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe.”

  “I pray to the power of love,” Mildred murmured.

  “Dr. Harnack did believe in the power of love,” the minister said. “He went to his death bravely and heartened by his belief that your life would be spared.”

  She was grateful he had had that last comfort, false though it had proven to be.

  Reverend Poelchau glanced over his shoulder to confirm they were not being observed through the cell door, then reached into the breast pocket of his coat and took out a small packet and an orange, so colorful and bright in the dim light of the drab cell that she blinked. “From Inge,” he said, placing the packet on the table before her and handing her the orange. She took it, marveling at its brilliant hue, its full, round perfection. She lifted it to her face, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, then set it on the table so that she could open the packet, uttering a small cry of joy when she beheld several family photographs. She studied each one lovingly, but when she came to one of her mother, her eyes filled with tears and she kissed the photo over and over. Then she set it facedown on the table, picked up her pencil, and wrote carefully on the back, “The face of my mother expresses everything that I want to say at this moment. This face was with me all through these last months. 16.II.43.”

  She peeled the orange slowly, reluctant to spoil its beauty, and ate it, savoring its sweetness.

  Reverend Poelchau left soon thereafter, but he promised to return at the appointed hour. Alone once more, grieving for her lost love, for her own too swiftly passing life, she opened the Bible the minister had given her and turned to 1 Corinthians 13. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal,” she softly read aloud the familiar verses. “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

  She closed the Bible and held it for a moment, contemplating the scripture. Then she set the Bible aside and resumed her translation of Goethe. She would leave a note for the minister with her books, ask him to send them to Mutti Clara.

  The day passed, and night descended.

  At twilight, a silver-haired man the guards called the shoemaker was let into Mildred’s cell. His expression impassive, he searched her mouth for
gold fillings, found none, and cut her hair short to bare her neck for the blade. She shivered, unused to the cold air on her scalp and neck. The shoemaker departed and a guard brought her a pair of wooden clogs and a coarse, sleeveless, open-necked smock. He ordered her to put them on; she obeyed, though her hands shook so badly she struggled to pull the smock over her head.

  Another guard arrived, handcuffed her wrists behind her back, and grasped her bony elbow to steer her from her cell. Flanking her, the two guards led her down the corridor to the exit, then outside and across the courtyard to the execution shed.

  Her throat constricted; her mouth went dry. She stumbled on a cobblestone but a guard seized her by the upper arm and kept her on her feet. This was where Arvid died, she realized as they ushered her into the execution chamber. Reverend Poelchau stood just inside the doorway; he held her gaze and nodded to remind her that he was there for her, not for the Reich. She swallowed hard and nodded back, hardly able to bear so much compassion and pity after months of cold indifference.

  Her gaze darted around the room, heart thudding in her chest. Half of the chamber was concealed by a black curtain. Several officials sat at a table to her right. One stood and read aloud from a paper, but her ears rang and she could not quite make out his words. She grasped that the men at the table were confirming her identity and acting as witnesses as her death sentence was read aloud.

  Somehow even then she could not quite believe that this was how her life would end.

  The official set down his paper and turned to a man clad in a long black coat, white gloves, and tall black hat. “Executioner,” he intoned, “do your duty.”

  The black curtain was pulled aside to reveal a stark white chamber. There were two arched windows on the far wall covered with blackout curtains. In front of them, an iron beam with eight sharp meat hooks was fixed into the ceiling; a wave of grief washed over her, for she knew Arvid had been hanged from one of them.