The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  “When did you have this conversation?” Danforth asked.

  “It was in the summer of 1943,” Teitler answered. “I was only in Berlin for a few days. There was no work in the courts for me, so I went back to Nuremberg.”

  Danforth’s pen remained still. “Did he mention the woman’s name?”

  Teitler shook his head.

  “Did he describe her?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything else at all about her?”

  This time Teitler shrugged. “Only that before they chopped off her head, they should shave off her hair.”

  Danforth was careful not to allow himself to consider the possibility that this woman might have been Anna. And yet, over the following days, he could not stop thinking about what Teitler had told him. It was like the Spanish idiom for relentless worrying over a single thought: dar vueltas,“ incessant circling.” The prospect had led Danforth to an incessant circling of particular scenes: Anna at their first meeting; Anna strolling among the tombs of Père-Lachaise. She might have survived until the summer of 1943: this was the thought that awakened him each morning after he returned to Nuremberg following his interview with Teitler, and it was the thought that faded at last with sleep, though only after it had kept him up until nearly dawn.

  For the next few days, Danforth went about his work, interviewing others distantly involved in the Katzenberger case, mostly judges who claimed to have had nothing but contempt for Rothaug, whom they described as a clown, a buffoon, a climber, and a toady. Teitler’s tiny clue continued to work like a needle in Danforth’s mind, consuming his every free moment, keeping him in his office until the early hours of the morning going through files, ledgers, accounting books, old newspapers, anything he could find that might hold, however distantly, a clue to the identity of the woman Rothaug had mentioned.

  It was three o’clock in the morning, but the man Danforth saw when he glanced up from his desk looked freshly shaved and ready for the new day with none of Danforth’s hollow exhaustion in his eyes.

  The man sat down in the chair across from Danforth’s desk. “My name is Edward Brock. I understand you’ve been looking for an American woman who you think was executed by the Germans.”

  Danforth nodded.

  “I can save you some work,” Brock said. “Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American who lived in Germany and spoke and wrote fluent German. She was a Communist, but — get this — she was also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” He drew a paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Danforth. “The State Department kept an eye on her.” He nodded toward the paper. “Here in a nutshell is what we know.”

  Harnack had moved to Germany with her husband in 1929, Danforth read. She’d gotten interested in Communism and later toured the Soviet Union. By 1933 she’d begun teaching English literature at night-school classes in Berlin. Still later she’d published articles in the Berliner Tageblatt and Die Literatur, but the work had dried up once the Nazis came to power. It was then she’d stepped over the line and become what amounted to a Soviet agent, a fact the Gestapo had discovered and for which both she and her husband had been arrested in the fall of 1943. Her husband had been sentenced to death, but for some reason Mildred had received a mere six-year imprisonment, a sentence that was not to Hitler’s liking and which he’d ordered to be reviewed. The review had ended with a predicable result, and Mildred Harnack had been executed at Plötzensee on February 16, 1943-

  Most decidedly, Mildred Harnack had not been Anna Klein.

  Danforth gave the paper back to Brock. “Thank you,” he said wearily. “You’re right, that will save me a lot of time.”

  Brock folded the paper and returned it to his jacket pocket. “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “Because I might be able to help you there too. We have quite a few documents from German intelligence, you know.” He lit a cigarette. “So, who was this woman?”

  “Her name was Anna Klein,” Danforth said. “She worked for me before the war. We were in Berlin in August of 1939. She was arrested by the Gestapo. I never saw her again.”

  “What can you tell me about her?” Brock asked.

  Danforth told him that she was Jewish, that she was in her twenties, small, dark, with curly hair.

  “That’s not a lot to go on,” Brock said.

  “She was brilliant with languages,” Danforth added. It was little more than a futile aside, and he was surprised to see that this suddenly spurred Brock’s interest.

  “How many did she speak?” he asked.

  “Nine that I know of.”

  “Was Ukrainian one of them?” Brock asked significantly.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have an intelligence report on a Ukrainian named Rudy Romanchuk. He was a forger who specialized in fake documents for people who were trying to get out of Germany He was working for the Russians too. A low-level informant. But they began to suspect that he was working for the Germans. So they picked Rudy up and took him to Warsaw for interrogation. Rudy’s Russian wasn’t so great, so they brought in an interpreter. An American. In her twenties. Quite pretty, according to Rudy.”

  “When was this interrogation?” Danforth asked.

  “A week or two before the Germans attacked Russia,” Brock answered. “Which means she could be anywhere now.” He let this sink in, then added, “As you know, we’re not that chummy with the Russians anymore, so we’d be interested in tracking down any American citizen who might be in their hands.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into the ashtray on Danforth’s desk. “So, this woman. The one who was in Warsaw. Could she have been Anna Klein?”

  ~ * ~

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “I had no idea, of course,” Danforth said, “and I told Brock that. I had too little to go on, and I didn’t want to tell him anything about Anna he didn’t already know. Which was nothing.”

  “So, you don’t think Brock knew anything about the Project?” I asked. “Anything about Anna being in France, anything at all about her?”

  “I couldn’t tell what he knew,” Danforth said, “other than that an American woman had been translating for the Soviets in Warsaw just before the Germans invaded Russia, which was in June of 1941.” He leaned back slightly. “But if this woman was Anna, then she was still alive in June of 1941, alive and in Warsaw, which meant that she’d been turned over to the Soviets.” He paused, then added, “But why would the Germans have turned a woman who’d plotted to kill Adolf Hitler over to the Russians?”

  I had no answer for this, and so I simply shrugged.

  “Don’t feel inadequate, Paul,” Danforth said. “No one knew the answer to that question. Which is why I was ordered to find it.”

  “Ordered? You?”

  “I was still in the army, so who would have been a better choice?” Danforth asked. “By that time, I spoke passable Polish and a little Russian. Brock had a few leads. He knew that Romanchuk had later been arrested and sent to Auschwitz, which he’d survived. It was only after the war that he’d vanished. But then so had this woman, which left me no option but to assume that she was still alive.”

  I thought over all Danforth had just told me, then said, “But realistically, could a woman who’d tried to kill Hitler have survived the war?”

  “I had the same question, Paul,” Danforth answered. “And although the supposition seemed far-fetched, I looked into whether it might be possible. That’s how I came across the file on Olga Chekhova.”

  Then he told me who she was.

  She’d been born in Armenia in 1897, a niece by marriage to the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov. She’d gotten married quite young to a Jewish man, and she’d borne him a daughter. She later divorced him but she never lost interest in the welfare of her daughter. The Russian Revolution drove her to Germany She went by train to Vienna in the company of a Soviet agent, then on to Berlin, where she managed to get work a
s an actress. By 1930, she’d become one of the brightest stars in German cinema. She’d also attracted the notice of Adolf Hitler, in whose company she’d been photographed. Olga looked quite lovely as she sat next to the man himself, and the picture’s significance had not been lost on Soviet intelligence.

  “From that picture, the Communists knew that Olga was a member of the true in crowd, familiar with all the Nazi bigwigs,” Danforth said, “and since she had family still in Russia, they decided she could be pressured into the spy game.”

  They were right, and Olga Chekhova became a sleeper agent, Danforth told me. At one point she’d even been discussed as a critical figure in a Russian secret police plot to assassinate Hitler.

  “Rather like Anna, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said at the conclusion of this narrative.

  “A little too much like Anna,” I agreed. “What happened to Olga?”

  “She was never discovered by the Germans,” Danforth answered. “Once Berlin fell, she was flown to Moscow, where she was debriefed. Then she went back to Germany, where she lived quite well under Soviet protection.” He smiled. “Her last words were ‘Life is beautiful.”‘

  “When did she die?”

  “In 1980,” Danforth answered. He saw my astonishment and added, “So you see, Paul, it was quite possible for a young woman who was gifted at languages and something of an actress to survive the war. Even one with deep Jewish connections whose name was later connected to a plot to kill Hitler.”

  I nodded. “Well, Anna was a good actress. That can’t be denied.”

  “No, it can’t,” Danforth agreed. “She acted a New York nut case and she acted the perfect assistant to an importer. She acted the art critic when the target was standing right in front of her. She acted the dedicated assassin up to the moment she was arrested.” All of this appeared to build darkly in Danforth’s mind, but he continued anyway. “She acted like she could kill a man,” he said, and then, after a grim pause that seemed to renew every ancient ache within him, he added, “and perhaps she also acted like she could love one.”

  “But Olga Chekhova survived only because she’d been a Soviet agent all along,” I said.

  Danforth now seemed a creature formed of shadows. “True enough, Paul,” he said quietly. “A Soviet agent all along. As Rache was too. Which meant that only Bannion had been what he seemed.”

  “Only Bannion,” I said softly. “And so he was completely expendable.”

  “As the innocent always are,” Danforth said. “Because they are of no importance to either side. And so we can kill them without losing anything save the value we once gave to innocence.”

  “But you couldn’t know that any of this was true,” I said.

  “No, I couldn’t,” Danforth admitted. “Because the best conspiracies work like nesting dolls, Paul. They hide inside each other.” He smiled, but it was a dark, painful smile that gave him a rather wizened look. “It took me years and a great deal of moving around, mostly in those rattling trains that wound through Eastern Europe, but I finally found Rudy Romanchuk,” he said, by way of returning to his tale. “He’d gone back to the Ukraine, just as Brock had thought, a town the Germans called Lemberg.”

  ~ * ~

  Lemberg, Ukraine, 1951

  Danforth had started in Warsaw, which still lay in ruins, went on to Radom, and then continued farther eastward in long torturous rides on belching, coal-fired trains and groaning buses, all of them crowded with peasants who ate bread and cheese and washed it down with bottles of miód pitny, which they passed from one to another as if it were a favored grandchild.

  “You speak not bad Polish,” an old man said to him on the road out of Zamość, Danforth on this occasion riding in a horse-drawn lorry with a group of former Polish prisoners, all of them huddled together on a layer of wet hay. The old man held up the bottle the others had been passing around. “Vodka come from old word,” he said, “gorzalka. You know what means gorzalka?”

  Danforth shook his head.

  The old man placed his gnarled hands on either side of his face, rocked his head left and right, smiled widely, and fluttered his eyes almost girlishly. “It mean,” he said, “‘to glow.’”

  This had been the brightest moment of Danforth’s eastward journey. The rest had been a long ordeal of bone-battering travel through a landscape he’d last visited many years before the war, and the vast sweep of its destruction amazed him, even though he’d followed the Third Army through France and walked the charred remains of Dresden and the rubble of Berlin. War is one thing, as he would later realize, but massacre is another, and in town after wasted town he’d seen the cruel arrogance of the German invasion and the cruel vengeance of the Soviet reoccupation. He’d walked the pit of death in Dubno and valley of death in Bydgoszcz, and once he’d reached Lemberg it was beneath the bridge of death he’d walked to find Romanchuk’s freezing hovel on Peltewna Street.

  As he traveled along that winding way, Soviet soldiers had been anything but welcoming, and he was stopped repeatedly and interrogated in small concrete rooms pocked with bullet holes and ripped by shrapnel. But the old art of bribery still possessed its ancient power, and he’d been free in the dispensing of it, softening these war-weary men with meals and liquor and speaking his precarious Russian in ways that made them laugh and drink more and in their sad stupor remove whatever was barring his movement east.

  They’d been boys, for the most part, the soldiers and border guards who’d detained him, and in their faces Danforth had seen the youth that war had taken from them. They were cynical and cunning and something in them had been deflowered so that on a whim and in an instant they could become unimaginably brutal. In every town, he’d heard stories of men slit open at the abdomen and then made to dance until their bowels unraveled, of herds of women driven down roads and across fields and over bridges as human mine detectors, of villagers arranged in towering pyramids until those who formed its base were crushed to death. But it was an old woman’s tale of a teenage girl taken from her father’s house near the camp at Lambinowice that he’d never forgotten. She’d been an ethnic German, the old woman said, her parents killed in the anti-German reprisals that had been unleashed by the conquering Russians and thereafter swept the eastern territories. The girl had been entirely naked and radiantly blond, the perfect Aryan victim. A rope had been tied around her neck and she’d been tugged forward like an animal on a leash and loaded into the back of a truck filled with Polish partisans, all of them, as Danforth imagined it, “glowing.” She’d never been seen again.

  There was nothing particularly horrendous in this tale compared to other stories of anti-German reprisals Danforth had heard by then, and yet this scene had haunted him for the rest of his journey. He’d come to realize by the time he reached Lemberg that, as with Anna, it was the unknown fate that moved him. What tormented him was not what had definitely been destroyed but what had mysteriously vanished into time and space; not someone who without doubt had been shot in a prison courtyard but that other one — lost in night and fog — who’d last been seen strolling in a park or buying apples from a stand.

  Night had fallen by the time he reached what appeared to be a shoemaker’s shop. A yellow glow came from the front window, a color Danforth recognized as candlelight because he’d seen so much of it radiating softly from the otherwise pitch-dark streets of the shattered cities through which he’d passed.

  He knocked at the door and waited. It opened slightly and a thin shaft of light crossed the threshold. A small eye floated like a rheumy brown bubble in that same narrow slit, and to this eye Danforth presented his now-defunct military credentials.

  In the German he hoped the man understood, he said, “I’m Captain Thomas Danforth. United States Army. I’m looking for Rudy Romanchuk on a matter of great urgency.”

  The eye blinked once, slowly and wearily and even a bit resignedly, and Danforth saw the many crimes for which Romanchuk now thought he was at last to pay the price.

/>   With no word, the door opened and Danforth stepped inside a badly damaged room, precariously supported by cracked walls and splintered wood, and with a disturbing droop in the ceiling. Water marks spread across that ceiling and then down the peeling walls to a bare concrete floor, broken and stained, on which stood old furniture and a few crippled machines. The room’s shattered appearance echoed the mood of Central Europe, Danforth thought as he glanced about: crumbling, torn, a thing of jagged borders, more or less idle.

  “American? So far?” Romanchuk asked in very broken German, making it clear that the man had probably spent very little time in that country. Romanchuk’s grin flashed like pieces of silver. “You have plenty money.”

  When Danforth didn’t answer, Romanchuk grabbed a spindly wooden chair and drew it over to the coal stove that rested in the center of the room. Beside it an old crate contained the few chunks of coal he’d managed to procure by God only knew what illicit means.