Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Mildred nodded soberly, searching the column for more details, finding none. The last time she had seen Boris’s name in the German papers had been shortly before Christmas, when the German press reported on that same ill-fated unauthorized trip. While Boris had been away from his post, the NKVD had raided the Warsaw embassy and had found incriminating documents in his office, or so they claimed. “I wonder why the Soviets waited so long to recall him.”

  “Perhaps all their jail cells were full. Perhaps he was still useful to them for a while. I hope he disobeyed the order and fled. He must know that if he returns to Moscow, he would be signing his own death warrant.”

  From what Mildred knew of Boris, he did not fear his superiors and would have readily obeyed their summons. “Martha always said that he was unshakably loyal to the Soviet Union,” she mused aloud. “I can’t imagine he betrayed their secrets to the Nazis.”

  “If he believes his innocence will protect him, I’m afraid his trust is misplaced.” Arvid’s voice turned bitter. “My friend Bessonov was loyal, for all the good that does him now.”

  “I wonder if Martha knows.” With a sudden pang, Mildred realized that it was her responsibility as Martha’s friend to break the bad news to her before the American press did. “I’ll write and tell her.”

  “There’s no need. Martha has probably forgotten him by now.”

  “Nonsense,” Mildred protested. “I think she truly loves him. She wanted to marry him.”

  “I’m sure she did at the time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already found someone new.”

  “Oh, Arvid, that’s unkind.”

  “I’m sorry, Liebling. I’m not feeling particularly kind today.” He rose from the table and kissed her on the forehead. “Forgive me.”

  “Of course,” she said, watching as he headed down the hallway to their bedroom. She tidied the kitchen as he got ready for work and kissed him tenderly when they parted at the door. She knew he was not as cold or unfeeling as his words suggested. It was his frustration coming out, his anger at his powerlessness to help his doomed friend.

  Alone in the flat, with only the distant sounds of traffic passing outside and other tenants moving about the building to keep her company, Mildred poured herself a second cup of coffee and settled down with a notepad, a pen, and the New York Times. The paper was several days out of date, but it was the most recent edition she had and it was essential for her work. Earlier that year, the Berlin publisher Rütten & Loening had hired her as a reader and consultant, advising them on American novels they might wish to acquire for translation. This often involved scanning American newspapers for book reviews and announcements of newly released works, copies of which publishers eagerly sent her, all for the price of a stamp and an official request on Rütten & Loening stationery. Her astute recommendations must have impressed her employers, for they soon began offering her translation projects as well, with a commensurate increase in pay. She missed teaching, but her new job was intellectually stimulating, it filled her hours, and it supplemented their household income, and for that she was grateful.

  She was at home working on a translation of Walter Edmonds’s Drums Along the Mohawk when a radio announcer interrupted the musical program to announce that German troops were marching into Austria.

  In public speeches, in the press, in radio addresses redolent with the historic significance of the day, every German official who spoke publicly on the annexation of Austria was careful not to call it an invasion. Uniting the two nations into a Greater Germany had been contemplated since the nineteenth century, they pointed out, although they neglected to add that far more recently, the union had been expressly prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain. They referenced polls and referenda to prove that the Anschluss was overwhelmingly popular in Austria, and indeed, newsreels showed thousands of Austrians lining the streets, cheering, waving swastika flags, and offering the Hitler salute as German tanks rolled across the border and into Austrian villages. Girls and young women, their blond hair in pretty braids and ribbons, presented soldiers with bouquets of flowers as they marched past.

  As all the Berlin newspapers reported in the days that followed, on the afternoon of March 12, Hitler and an entourage of bodyguards four thousand strong received a hero’s welcome at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn, just over the border. A triumphant four-day tour of Austria culminated in a rally at the Heldenplatz in Vienna, where two hundred thousand exultant Austrians gathered to celebrate as their Führer declared their once independent country to be “the newest bastion of the German Reich.” Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, the Nazis declared: One People, One Nation, One Leader.

  Arvid had known the Anschluss was coming. He had observed the steady flow of money for months, and then the sudden rush in the days before the troops moved across the border. It had all come about with the collusion of Austrian Nazis, but that did not make it any less a violation of international treaties. In the days that followed, Arvid, Mildred, and their friends tuned their radios to foreign broadcasts and waited, hopeful and expectant, for news of a strong, united response from the free nations of Europe and America. Statements were released. Condemnation was expressed. But in the end, not even the most vehement opponents of the annexation—Britain, France, Italy, and Mexico—did anything but talk. Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler had never been more popular.

  Although Mildred was disappointed with the ongoing reluctance of the United States to take an unambiguously firm stand, the Anschluss and the rising militaristic fervor permeating Germany compelled her to draw closer to the American expatriate community. Although the Dodds were gone and membership in the American Women’s Club had diminished as husbands resigned posts or arranged transfers to safer regions, she found comfort and companionship at embassy events and club meetings. American accents, foods, and stories felt like letters from home, a soft, warm shawl draped over her shoulders on a chilly morning.

  On Sunday, April 17, she attended an Easter tea with the American Women’s Club at its fashionable suite on the Bellevuestrasse. She missed seeing Martha and her mother there, but she enjoyed catching up with other friends, grateful for each who remained. She met a rare newcomer, too, when the chairwoman introduced her to Louise Heath, the vivacious brown-haired wife of the new first secretary and monetary attaché, Donald Heath.

  “Monetary attaché?” Mildred remarked, smiling. “Is he an economist?”

  “Not really,” replied Louise. “He was a newspaper reporter in Kansas before the war, and after serving in the army he became the White House correspondent for the United Press. Before long he joined the State Department, and that led us here. The reason he’s working for the Treasury Department as well as State is because, thanks to budget cuts, the Treasury Department couldn’t afford to hire a second man.”

  “So your husband has to do the work of two?”

  “Yes, for the price of one, unfortunately.” Louise sipped her tea, her blue eyes bright with mirth. “You know what bothers me most? The Treasury Department, of all places, ought to know how to squeeze one more salary out of even the tightest budget.”

  “That might explain something about our country’s financial woes.”

  “My thought exactly.”

  “Economist or not, as the monetary attaché, your husband probably has a lot in common with mine,” said Mildred. “He works in the Ministry of Economics and will happily talk fiscal policy for hours on end.”

  Louise’s eyebrows rose. “The Germans hired an American to work in the Economics Ministry?”

  “Oh, no. Arvid is German. We met as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.”

  “How marvelous,” said Louise, her gaze keen. “We’ll have to introduce them. Donald needs some German friends.” Leaning closer, she murmured, “Just between us, he’s not inclined to make any among the ‘Sieg Heil’ set.”

  “I like him already,” said Mildred, and Louise smiled knowingly.

  As
it turned out, they did not need to introduce their husbands. As Mildred learned afterward, Donald was so delighted to hear that his wife’s new friend’s German husband had studied in the United States that a few days later he called on Arvid at the Economics Ministry and invited him to lunch. Intrigued, Arvid had accepted.

  “I’m glad you’ve become friends,” said Mildred, smiling as she set the table for supper, charmed by his enthusiasm.

  “He’s more than a friend, Liebling. We’re going to be partners.”

  After lunch the men had taken a walk through the Tiergarten, the only place where one could speak without danger of wiretaps or hidden recording devices. There Heath had revealed that his role in Berlin involved far more than his job titles disclosed. He was also an intelligence officer assigned to obtain vital economic information about the Reich, including the state of the German treasury, the Reichsbank, money markets, national debt, gold, foreign exchange—all subjects squarely in Arvid’s purview. Arvid had agreed to provide him with the information the Americans sought.

  Mildred nodded as he spoke, her heart thudding. She knew this was exactly the sort of work they wanted to do, reopening the flow of vital intelligence that had been choked off with Ambassador Dodd’s departure and the loss of their contacts at the Soviet embassy. But the Reich had declared the delivery of economic information to foreigners to be treason, punishable by death. Arvid knew almost nothing of Donald Heath, nothing to ensure them that he would value his informants’ lives as much as his mission.

  “Are you sure Heath can be trusted?” she asked. “Will he protect you?”

  “I have no idea. My instinct is to trust him, but we’ve only just met.” Arvid shrugged. “You liked his wife.”

  In spite of herself, Mildred laughed. “That’s hardly an exhaustive background check.”

  He smiled, but then he grew solemn again. “My instincts tell me to trust him, and everyone else who could get him this information is loyal to the Nazis. It has to be me.”

  She knew he was right. As the chief of trade policy, Arvid was in nearly daily contact with the Foreign Office and the desk chiefs for individual nations. Since it was his responsibility to monitor Germany’s economic capacity, production levels, financial reserves, and foreign trade, he knew more about the state of the German economy than almost anyone. And, as he had recently been promoted to government counselor, he was required to confer with his counterparts from other nations. He could meet publicly with Heath without raising any suspicions.

  He did not need Mildred’s approval, but she knew he wanted her support. And so she suppressed her worries, put her arms around him, and murmured, “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  He held her close, and only then did she realize how hard his heart was pounding.

  As spring bloomed, green and fragrant and warm, Arvid and Heath became trusted partners, and before long the two couples became good friends. Mildred and Louise met often for lunch, teas at the embassy, or events with the American Women’s Club, and they frequently enjoyed dinners out together or evenings at home playing cards and listening to the radio. On sunny weekend afternoons, the Heaths’ ten-year-old son, Donald Jr., would join them for walks through the Tiergarten or on picnics by the lake in Wannsee. Any observer inclined toward suspicion would see only an innocent family friendship between three expatriate Americans and one indulgent German husband. Mildred did not ask what Heath did with the information Arvid risked his life to give him, but she fervently hoped that it would compel the United States to take bold measures to constrain Hitler’s military expansion before catastrophe struck.

  Then, in late June, Mildred received a letter from another American friend.

  It was only her second letter from Martha since the Dodds had returned to the United States, a reply to Mildred’s letting her know that Boris had been recalled to Moscow under suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis. “You’re a dear to be concerned,” Martha had written, “but I’m sure Boris is fine. Last month I received a letter from him, dated April 29 and sent from Moscow. It was very warm and affectionate, and he had lots of nice things to say about our last meeting in Berlin. He spoke of our eternal love, which, I have to say, was very flattering but impossible, because—Are you sitting down?—I’m going to be married!”

  Mildred was so startled she had to start over at the beginning and read the letter again.

  She had not misunderstood. Soon after Martha arrived in New York, she had met Alfred Stern—tall, handsome, ten years older than she, and wonderfully wealthy thanks to a generous divorce settlement he had received from his defunct marriage to a Sears Roebuck heiress. After a whirlwind romance, Alfred had proposed and Martha had accepted. They planned a large celebration at the family farm in Round Hill, Virginia, on September 4, and Mildred and Arvid were very welcome to attend if they could possibly make it.

  “I suppose I must tell Boris,” Martha wrote, with a trace of chagrin. “What an awful letter that will be to write, nearly as bad as it would be to receive!”

  Mildred felt more than a little chagrined herself. Apparently Arvid had been right all along about her friend’s fickle heart. She hoped his judgment was equally sound about Donald Heath, and that the embassy’s new first secretary would prove to be as shrewdly intelligent, cautious, and deserving of their trust as he seemed. Their lives depended on it.

  Chapter Forty-one

  March–September 1938

  Sara

  For Austria’s Jews, the Anschluss became a swiftly unfolding nightmare.

  In the aftermath of the annexation, the Nazis immediately imposed the same restrictions upon Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables that they had honed to cruel perfection in Germany. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, one hatred. Jewish shops and businesses were looted, the proprietors hauled out to the sidewalks and beaten. Throughout Austria, the front windows of Jewish-owned stores and restaurants were marked in yellow paint, Jude and the Star of David, warning Aryans to avoid them. In Austrian cities, Jews were forced to scrub city streets; laborers, lawyers, and clerks toiled on their hands and knees with coarse brushes and buckets of soapy water under the watchful gaze of armed storm troopers and hundreds of curious onlookers. In Vienna, Jewish actresses were made to scrub public toilets.

  Sara and her family followed the news from Austria with a cold, sinking dread that outwardly might have appeared stoic. All of it was horrifying, none of it unexpected. To Sara the rumors spreading through the Jewish community and the reports in the Jewish press bore a grotesque veneer of familiarity. Everything that was happening to the Austrian Jews—the public humiliations, the loss of rights, the chilling certainty that any passing Aryan could inflict whatever violence they wanted upon you and the authorities would do nothing—had been a part of their daily lives for years.

  By late spring, the hiding place at Schloss Federle was nearly complete, five rooms in the attic of the west wing accessible only by a narrow staircase leading from a spare room used to store old furniture, some of which was dusted off and hauled upstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky stocked a large closet with canned and dried food and other necessities, purchased in modest amounts over time to avoid drawing attention. Sara’s father and Natan rerouted pipes to provide running water for a sink, shower, and toilet. Though the dormer windows faced the forest, Sara and her mother covered them with heavy blackout curtains, and made up the beds and put down rugs, not only for comfort, but to muffle their footsteps.

  They did all of the work themselves. They could not risk entrusting their secret to contractors, strangers who might betray them later out of carelessness or malice. The household staff, whose integrity and loyalty Wilhelm swore was secure, treated their suddenly more frequent visits as perfectly unremarkable and pretended not to notice the sporadic bursts of activity in the castle’s least-used wing.

  “We may never need to spend a single night here,” Sara’s father told her mother. “Let us hope our hard work will prove unnecessary.”

  Her
mother smiled wanly and agreed.

  Then, in late June, Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky suddenly changed their plans. Germany had become too dangerous for Hans and Ruth, they told Sara’s parents. Since Mr. Dodd and his family no longer resided at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, the children were not safe even in their own home. Friends in Great Britain had agreed to take them in, and although the thought of splitting up the family was hardly bearable, it would be a relief to have the children out of harm’s way. And perhaps the family would not be separated for long. On March 1, two Aryan partners had officially taken over Jacquier and Securius, releasing Mr. Panofsky from his commitments to the bank. With nothing to hold them in Berlin any longer, they planned to emigrate to Great Britain as soon as it could be arranged. They had reached the top of the waiting list and it was only a matter of time until they were granted visas. The Panofskys reconciled themselves to the hard fact that as a condition of their emigration, they must relinquish nearly everything they possessed to the Reich and start over in a strange country with almost nothing.

  “You’ve made the right decision,” Sara’s mother told Mrs. Panofsky, embracing her as she fought back tears. “One couldn’t take such young children into hiding. They need to run and play and go to school.”

  “You should leave too,” Mr. Panofsky urged Sara’s father. “Nothing here is worth sacrificing your lives. Leave everything behind if you must, but get out before the door closes.”

  To Sara, it seemed the door was already barely ajar, open only wide enough for children like Hans and Ruth to slip through. The Weitzes had completed the emigration forms and filled out more as new regulations required. They were on waiting lists for Switzerland, Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. In the meantime, they had little choice but to keep their heads down in public, plan their escape to Schloss Federle if they were forced to go into hiding, and hope for the best.