Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  For the first time, it occurred to her that Hans was probably responsible for obtaining permission for her parents and Ule to visit her in prison.

  “I have a good friend in Nikolassee,” Greta said, studying the guard skeptically. “I’d like to tell him first. He can spread the word.”

  “Ah, Nikolassee.” The guard grimaced. “That’s too far. I have so little time, no more than three hours.”

  “Of course,” she said, stung, a bit breathless from trying to match his strides. Another taunt, another cruel joke. She should have known.

  “Listen,” he said. “I had to take your husband and some of your friends to Plötzensee, and it was very difficult for me.”

  Not half as difficult as it was for them, she thought bitterly, but she said nothing.

  “I don’t understand how Germany has come to this.” He shook his head. “I’ll never understand people. I’ll escort you somewhere, yes, but not to Plötzensee.” Suddenly he halted and faced her. “Come with me to a pub. I know one nearby. It’s quiet, and you can talk on the phone.”

  Again he gestured for her to follow him, and, compelled by curiosity and a lack of options, she did. To her astonishment, he led her to a quiet pub with a public phone in the back, gave her his wallet, and told her to order some food and call whomever she wanted. She hesitated only a moment before snatching his wallet from his hand and going to the bar to order a plate of Knackwurst and Spätzle and a beer. After she had eaten, she eyed the guard warily as he sat eating a few breakfast steaks and an apple, apparently unconcerned about what punishment he might face if they were caught.

  Slipping into the phone booth, she called Hans. “Are you free?” he asked, incredulous. He listened solemnly as she told him of her sudden change of fortune. “Oh, Greta. Your life has been spared, but the years ahead will be hard.”

  “I know,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “If only Adam’s execution had been delayed another month, he could be with me right now.”

  “I’ll do everything I can for you, you know that.”

  “All I ask is that you watch over Ule. Help my parents however you can.”

  “On my life, I swear I will,” he said, impassioned. “Greta, my friend, your grief will be easier to bear once the war is over. Do everything you can to keep yourself healthy until then.”

  Voice breaking, she promised to try. She asked him to speak with her parents, and then, reluctantly, she hung up, wiped her eyes, and returned to the guard. He escorted her around the bombed-out neighborhoods to Charlottenburg, and as she passed through the prison gates, she considered the length of her new sentence and realized that Oberin Weider would have to find someone else to be her librarian or medical assistant.

  Two days later, she was loaded into a police van and transferred to the Royal Central Prison in Cottbus, about 130 kilometers southeast of Berlin, 25 kilometers west of the Polish border. On the morning after her arrival, she was put to work with the other inmates on the prison assembly line making gas masks for German troops.

  There were no more visits from her family, no packages, few letters. The days were long and difficult, wretched and tedious. Every morning she woke, remembered where she was, and thought: Ten years. Ten years, but she would live, if she refused to let this bleak existence kill her.

  She fiercely believed the Allies would prevail. She only had to outlast the war.

  As the long months passed, Greta sustained herself with memories of Adam, thoughts of Ule, and vivid, vengeful daydreams of how she would relentlessly pursue Manfred Roeder until he was brought to justice. She had been at Cottbus for more than a year when she and several dozen other political prisoners were transferred to Schloss Waldheim in Saxony. Within the castle’s ancient and cold stone walls, they were crammed into cells until there was scarcely room to breathe, several prisoners to a bunk, arms and legs and elbows in one another’s way. They were skin-and-bone wraiths of their former selves, heads shaved, clad in rags, tormented by hunger, illness, vermin. Their futures had been whittled down to two possibilities—liberation or death. The question haunting each of them was which would come for them first.

  They received almost no news of the world beyond the cellblock and the factory assembly line where they toiled from dawn until dusk. Greta listened carefully for details the prison staff accidentally let fall, and it was in this way she learned that the Allies had landed at Normandy, that Allied troops assisted by the French Resistance had liberated Paris, that the Wehrmacht had launched Operation Watch on the Rhine, a massive campaign on the western front. As 1945 commenced with heavy snows and punishing cold, Greta and a few daring companions tried to gauge the progress of the war by taking turns stealing glimpses through the windows while others stood watch, or by listening intently to the roar of aircraft overhead. As spring came to Schloss Waldheim, the rumble of artillery more frequently penetrated the thick stone walls of the prison, first distant, but every day coming inexorably nearer.

  One morning in early May, Greta woke to the sound of a strange, mechanical cacophony somewhere outside, followed soon thereafter by a commotion somewhere in the building. Heart pounding, she joined two other women at the cell door, straining and stretching in an attempt to peer down the corridor, but the angle made it impossible. They heard the banging of metal and men’s voices raised in shouts and rough laughter steadily approaching.

  “They’re speaking Russian,” Greta exclaimed, just as the heavy door at the end of the corridor opened with a crash. Then, suddenly, a trio of Russian soldiers appeared, the one in the lead with the guard’s heavy key ring in hand. The young men spoke to them cheerfully in Russian as they unlocked the door.

  The door swung open and the prisoners spilled out, merging into a flow of other ragged, filthy, emaciated women. The Russian soldiers were going from floor to floor, cell to cell, unlocking doors, freeing everyone. Running, staggering, shuffling from the cellblock, by some wild instinct the women found the prison commissary and began devouring the bread and jam and milk the guards had left behind. Greta spared a fleeting thought for them—had they fled ahead of the Russian tanks or had they been taken captive?—as she ate her fill, almost weeping from relief and euphoria. She was free. Liberation had come before death after all.

  She was free.

  In the days that followed, Soviet officers interviewed the former prisoners, made sure they were fed, had the ill and injured attended to by their medics. Some of the women were terrified of them; after Operation Barbarossa began, the Nazi propaganda machine had filled their heads with harrowing stories of women and girls viciously raped by invading Russian soldiers. But the troops who liberated Schloss Waldheim harmed none of the inmates. Whether this was because these particular soldiers were exceptionally well disciplined, or because they considered political prisoners their comrades, or because nothing about the frail, wretched figures they beheld inspired either violence or lust, Greta could only wonder.

  When the commanding officers discovered who Greta was, they accorded her great respect and admiration, and offered their deepest sympathies for the loss of her husband and friends. They asked her to help them manage the prisoners, many of whom wanted nothing more than to return home to their families, many of whom had no homes to return to. Greta agreed, but as the days passed and she steadily recovered her strength, she was overcome by an urgency to reunite with Ule and her parents. The Soviet troops could not linger; their orders were to push on deeper into Germany toward the capital. They asked Greta to stay, to remain in charge until another division arrived from the rear to take over, but she respectfully declined. “I have been separated from my son too long already,” she said. “I will not delay any longer than absolutely necessary.”

  “Where has your son been all this time?” the officer asked.

  “Living with my parents in Frankfurt an der Oder. That’s where I intend to go, as soon as I can.”

  He shook his head, his expression grim. “Comrade Kuckhoff, you won’t find your
family there. The citizens fled before the advancing Red Army, and the empty town was burned to the ground.”

  For a moment Greta could not breathe. “Then I’ll go to Nikolassee,” she said, voice trembling. “My son’s legal guardian lives there. My parents and Ule probably sought refuge with him, but if not, he will know where they are.”

  She found some forgotten uniforms in a storeroom and swiftly pieced together a dress, cutting it narrow, for she had lost more than twenty pounds since her arrest. When it was complete, she made her farewells to the commanding officer, thanking him profusely for her freedom. Before she departed, he gave her a special pass verifying her identity and authorizing any Soviet soldier to help her however she required. Even then, he warned, she should try not to be caught out alone if she could help it.

  She packed a bundle of food and set off on foot for Nikolassee. Sometimes she fell in step with other refugees, women, children, the elderly, all walking away from horror or toward a distant loved one or some imagined place of safety. Greta scarcely recognized the war-ravaged landscape. Roads were pockmarked by bomb craters. Railroad lines had been reduced to scorched, twisted heaps of metal. Bridges were gone, with only traces of stone rubble left behind, forcing her to alter her route again and again.

  She walked for days, finding shelter for the night in abandoned cottages or dilapidated barns. Once she hitched a ride with an old farmer, his wrinkled, age-spotted hand gripping the halter of an old nag hauling a load of firewood or straw. Sometimes she passed farms that had miraculously escaped destruction, and the aromas of ersatz coffee or baking bread or frying potatoes would drift to her through the open windows, making her stomach rumble. She did not stop and beg for their hospitality. She was just as likely to be shot as to be offered kindness.

  Hungry, exhausted, aching from exertion after so many years of confinement, she persisted, one foot after another, driven by one thought—to find her son.

  At long last she came to Nikolassee, and with her waning strength she knocked on Hans Hartenstein’s front door. His wife, wan and timorous, answered, but at first she did not recognize her visitor. Then, with a cry of wonder, she brought Greta inside, sat her down, brought her food and drink, but even as Greta gratefully accepted all of it, she repeatedly asked for Ule.

  It was then that she learned that only a month after their last phone call, Hans had died on an operating table after his bunker had received a direct hit during an air raid. The Reich had taken custody of Ule and had placed him with a German family living in occupied Poland.

  After all she had gone through to get to him—

  Greta’s vision went gray and she fainted.

  Hans’s wife looked after her until she felt strong enough to continue on to Berlin. The city was a devastated ruin, a field of rubble where a few surviving structures stood like mute, hollow-eyed witnesses to immeasurable violence and death and misery. Miraculously, her old apartment building was scarcely touched. When she knocked on her landlord’s office door, he gaped at her as if she were a ghost.

  “I no longer have a key,” she told him. “Do you have a spare?”

  Still wide-eyed, he nodded and scurried to his desk to search for it. To her surprise, he returned with not only a key, but also a bundle of mail. “I saved these for you,” he said gruffly. “Sorry about your husband. I always liked him.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on the stack of letters, neatly tied with twine. “I can’t believe you kept these. We’ve been gone years.”

  He shrugged and scratched at the white fringe of hair on the back of his head. “I didn’t know where to forward them, and it didn’t seem right to throw them away, seeing as some of them came so far.”

  Puzzled, Greta leafed through the envelopes, glancing at the postmarks. Dispersed among the letters from German acquaintances were two from her friend Anna Klug in London, several from Wilhelm von Riechmann in Geneva, and many from Sara Weitz from all over the world—Geneva, Edinburgh, Stockholm, New York. Her hands trembled as she studied a postcard, a watercolor portrait of Bascom Hall with a white banner printed in red with the slogan “University of Wisconsin—Madison, Wis.” On the back Sara had written, “Wish you were here!”

  Greta choked out a laugh, or a sob, as she traced the words with a fingertip. Sara had sent the postcard in October 1944, when she could not have known whether Greta was even still alive to read it. Such astonishing optimism. Greta wished she could take hold of some of it for herself. She would need it.

  Haunted by memories, she climbed the stairs to the apartment she had once shared with Adam and Ule and countless secrets. In parting, the landlord had told her that the Gestapo family who had occupied their apartment after their arrest had fled months before, and he personally had rid the place of any sign of them.

  It was surreal, walking through her own front door again after so much time away.

  There was new wallpaper in the kitchen, the bookshelves had been drastically depleted, but most of her and Adam’s furniture and some of their belongings remained. She drifted slowly from room to room, touching a bureau here, straightening a picture frame there. Adam’s map of the Soviet Union was gone, as was the curtain he had used to conceal it.

  Adam was gone, but she remained, and Ule was out there somewhere.

  She would bring him home.

  The Soviet administrators she met with were considerate and helpful once she showed them her pass and they realized who she was. Soon after their first meeting, they informed her that they knew the names of Ule’s foster family and that they had been evacuated from Poland to Germany.

  For the first time since the Russian troops had liberated Schloss Waldheim, Greta felt a stirring of hope. “Then my son is alive?”

  As far as they knew, yes, he was, alive and somewhere in Germany. They would continue to search.

  In the meantime, Greta resolved to find the orphaned children of the other resistance women, to see for herself that they were alive and well, to do for them whatever she could.

  She was too late to help Liane Berkowitz’s daughter, Irena. At first the baby girl had lived with Liane’s grandmother, but at some point—the sources were unclear—Reich authorities had taken Irena away. Two months after her mother was executed, she died under unexplained circumstances in a hospital that already had become infamous for Nazi euthanasia operations.

  Shortly before Christmas 1945, Greta located young Hans Coppi, born at the women’s prison in Charlottenburg ten months before his mother was executed at Plötzensee. At three years old, the little boy already had his father’s inquisitive gaze and his mother’s lovely features. He was living with his grandmother, and had no memory of his brave parents or, mercifully, of his own brief time behind prison walls.

  A week later, Greta reunited with eight-year-old Saskia von Brockdorff, her former neighbor. The little girl had a sweet face and long blond braids, but her father would not allow anyone in the family to talk about the resistance, and Saskia did not understand what had happened and was angry at her mother for abandoning her.

  That will be remedied, Greta silently vowed. If she accomplished nothing else in life, she would make sure that when her friends’ children were old enough, they would understand what their parents had done, and why they had done it. They would understand that their courageous mothers and fathers had sacrificed their lives for a noble cause—for freedom, for an end to oppression, to fight for those who could not fight for themselves.

  She would watch over all of them for the rest of her life, for their sake and that of the lost resistance women who could no longer embrace their beloved children.

  For too long Greta’s own arms were empty. She persisted in her search for her son, meeting with Soviet authorities, American authorities, imprisoned Nazi bureaucrats who sullenly gave information in exchange for small rewards. She befriended American soldiers, feeling a special affinity for the Jews among them, who had confronted unimaginable horrors as they had liberated the Nazi deat
h camps on the march across Germany. They were friendly and generous and brave, and they cheerfully took her and her friends’ children on jeep rides, and gave them chocolate, and promised they would pester Army intelligence to track down Ule’s foster family.

  And then, early in the New Year of 1946, Greta received a telegram from an American army nurse. Ule had been found. They were bringing him home.

  All that day she watched from her window, and when the American officers’ staff car halted in front of her building, she flew downstairs, heart racing, breathless, and outside to the pavement, where she found her son standing between two officers, gazing up at their apartment building with a curious frown, as if he almost remembered it but not quite.

  “Ule,” Greta cried, kneeling, holding out her arms to him.

  He turned at the sound of his name. Their eyes met, and a slow smile spread over his face. Then he was running toward her, and then he was in her arms, and then she swept him up and held him close as if she would never let him go.

  Author’s Note

  True to her word, Greta Kuckhoff became a watchful, supportive guardian to the children of the Rote Kapelle, encouraging them in their educations and careers for the rest of her life. The orphans described her as a woman of compassion, dignity, and integrity who provided them with encouragement and support, but sternly disapproved of any wrongdoing. Their parents had sacrificed too much for them not to live exemplary lives.

  In 1946, Greta, Günther Weisenborn, Adolf Grimme, and Falk Harnack submitted a brief to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg accusing Manfred Roeder of crimes against humanity based upon his use of torture in interrogations and relentlessly cruel methods in prosecutions. However, although Nuremberg prosecutors concluded that Roeder should be tried for war crimes, he convinced U.S. Army intelligence that he was uniquely qualified to help them track down Soviet spies. They took custody of him, moving him beyond the court’s reach while he spun tales of his own innocence and former resistance fighters’ ongoing ties to the Soviet Union. By the time the Nuremberg officials turned Roeder’s case over to the German courts in October 1948, the Americans had already released him and he had settled comfortably in northern Germany. Despite pressure from Greta and other survivors, the lackluster investigation into Roeder’s war crimes was suspended entirely in 1951. He became involved in radical right politics and continued to accuse the Rote Kapelle of wartime treason until his death in 1971.