Again she nodded. “But it’s all very worrying,” she said.
“All the more reason to go home and try not to think about it.” He patted her hand. “Let me do the worrying. I shall take the report from the Jewess and then deal with her. Tomorrow it will be as if she were never here. Ja?”
Katherina smiled at his cajoling tone, and he patted her shoulder, helped her collect her belongings, and showed her to the door. When she had gone he went back to the kitchen and made a plate of sandwiches.
Upstairs he found Elisabeth standing close to the radiator warming her hands. He noticed for the first time how thin she was, how threadbare her coat. She looked at the tray of sandwiches, then at Dietrich, and back to the sandwiches. He set the tray on the desk and pulled out the chair.
“Sit, eat,” he said. “It’s all for you.”
Without a word she did as she was told, gripping a sandwich with both hands and showing her teeth as she tore at the bread’s tough crust. She chewed very fast. Dietrich retreated to the clavier bench and watched her. A lock of hair fell across her forehead, and he longed to push it back but he remained still.
She paused at her eating and looked up. “Sorry,” she said with her mouth full.
“I’m aware that rations for Jews are not what they should be,” he said.
She glanced uneasily at his bedroom door.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re alone in the house and no one seems to be about outside.”
“The maid who answered the door?”
“I made up some story and sent her home. My mother is spending the day with Suse and my father is at the Charité.”
He had made three sandwiches of sliced ham and cheese, and after finishing the first she pushed one toward him. “No, for you,” he said, but she said, “I’m not used to so much at one sitting. You haven’t had your midday meal, have you?”
He admitted he hadn’t, and accepted a sandwich for himself. Elisabeth ate her second sandwich more slowly. She still kept her coat on, though the room was warm, and now and then she shivered, her shoulders hunched tightly together.
“I wish I could offer you some coffee,” Dietrich said, “but we’re out until we receive more rationing coupons. I’ll go down and warm some milk. And there,” he pointed to a door in the corner, “I have my own bathroom. It’s early in the month—you could draw a small tub of hot water.”
She looked down at her half-eaten sandwich. “Baths are restricted,” she mumbled.
“I don’t care. I’ll make do with water heated on the stove.”
“I shall get you in trouble. I must leave soon or your neighbors will think you’re up to something.”
“Perhaps you weren’t seen.”
“Someone will have seen. It’s quiet here. There won’t be many yellow stars about.”
“Elisabeth,” he said firmly, “you must tell me where you have been living, what your circumstances are, and what brought you here this morning. Then together we shall decide what to do.”
He left her to draw a bath and went downstairs to heat the milk, taking his time so she wouldn’t feel rushed. He remembered a bar of chocolate in the pantry he’d been saving for the Dohnanyi children, and went to his mother’s room and slipped a heavy cotton nightgown from the bottom of a drawer. Back in his room he knocked quietly on the bathroom door, then handed in the gown and chocolate and cup of milk without entering.
She emerged a few minutes later wearing the nightgown, hair wet and skin rosy. He gave her a pair of his socks and insisted she bundle herself in a blanket and sit on the bed, propped up on a pile of pillows. She laughed and said, “Dietrich, you are spoiling me.”
“Something you’ve been denied lately,” he said.
She stopped smiling and settled back on the pillows.
He said, “I did look for you. I swear it.”
“I knew you would look,” she said. She sipped the hot milk. “But then I didn’t want to be found. Anyway, I thought you would leave Germany. I assumed you’d got out before the war began. It’s something I’ve held on to, actually, the thought of you living safely abroad.”
“I went to New York, but I didn’t stay. I couldn’t bear to be away at such a time. But if you thought I was gone, why did you come here?”
Elisabeth looked embarrassed. “I suppose it was some sort of desperate gesture. An act of nostalgia. Or perhaps I wanted to reassure myself that you, at least, were safe. If I’d known you were actually here, I probably would have stayed away.”
“Are you still so angry with me?” he asked. “If I could only tell—” But he went no further, could not stand before her and plead—as he had to Reinhold Niebuhr and George Bell and Willem Visser’t Hooft—Trust me, for there is a reason why I am not helping Jews.
But Elisabeth was saying, “We’ve grown apart in so many ways. But I still care for you very much, and there’s something you don’t know.”
He waited.
“Dietrich, I’m married.”
She was no longer Elisabeth Hildebrandt, but Elisabeth Fliess, wife of Dr. Hermann Fliess, a pediatrician. She had married in June of 1940, even as Paris was falling, even as Dietrich was sparring with Falk Harnack by the Baltic in Memel.
“Hermann and I have a lot in common,” she explained. “He interned at the Charité and knew my father. He grew up only two blocks from the Leibholz family in Wilmersdorf and went to school with Gerhard and his cousins. He met Sabine once at a party. So we even had you in common. We worked together in an underground Jewish organization. We’ve had to run our own medical clinics.”
“I see,” he said, only half listening. He felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach, was thinking selfishly of what he’d lost.
“Hermann and I agreed we wouldn’t resist if we were rounded up. If Jews from Pomerania and East Prussia are being resettled in the East to do war work, as we hear, you can be sure there is a need for doctors. And there will be plenty for me to do as well. But Hermann and I always assumed we’d go together when—” Her voice broke and she pressed her hand to her mouth.
While she composed herself, Dietrich went to the window and looked out. Nothing moved in the street.
“They’ve begun the roundup in Berlin,” she said. “This morning.”
Dietrich turned, surprised. “Today? I’ve heard nothing of this.”
“Nothing has been announced publicly. But word was spreading throughout our building before dawn, and Hermann went out to see if it was true. While he was gone the Gestapo came with eviction notices. We must be ready to leave for the East in three days. We’re only allowed to pack what we can carry onto the train. I waited for Hermann to return, but he didn’t come back, so I went downstairs. A neighbor told me he’d been talking to some men on the street corner when a van came up and the SS took them all away at gunpoint. So I didn’t pack. I went out looking for him but I couldn’t find him and I was afraid I’d be picked up so I came here.”
“Do you have any idea where they would have taken him?”
She shook her head. “I tried to ask questions at first, but I was afraid to linger on the street too long, especially once I left the Scheunenviertel. I saw the vans myself, taking people who stopped to talk. It’s as if they want to keep people from gathering in public.”
She fell silent. Dietrich remained standing near the window. He seemed to have gone a long way away. Elisabeth waited a moment, then pushed away the blanket.
“I must go. It was wrong of me to bother you after all these years when it can only cause you trouble.”
She stood and looked around for her coat, but Dietrich was beside her, pulled her to him and rested one large hand on top of her head. “No,” he said. “I’m going out to look for your husband.”
“Dietrich, you mustn’t—”
“Hush, now. You will stay here. Be very quiet, take a nap if you like, or read one of my books. Cook will come in around two, but she’ll stay downstairs. My mother will be gone for hours yet, and s
he never enters my room without knocking first. All I ask is if she comes up here, hide in the bathroom or under the bed. It will be easier for my parents to behave as if nothing has happened if they know nothing to begin with. I’ll be back tonight at the latest, and I’ll bring you something to eat then. Who knows, perhaps I shall bring your Hermann as well. All right?”
She tried to smile and nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “But Dietrich, if they have already sent him East, I want to go there and find him. Only I need to know where he has gone. If you can learn that, I would be so grateful.”
“I’ll try my best,” he said, and left her, closing the door to his room softly behind him.
Downstairs he put on his coat and hat, then hesitated, thinking hard. He left a hastily scribbled note on the hall table explaining he had gone out on “some business for Hans” and might not return until after dark. Then he took a small bottle of cognac from his father’s liquor cabinet, slipped it into his coat pocket, and walked to the Grunewald S-Bahn station. From the platform he could look toward the forest past a row of idle trains that extended out of sight.
In the Oranienburger Straße he felt as if he stood on the bank of a fast-moving river. Thousands of people wearing yellow stars flowed past him—some carrying suitcases and boxes, others wandering confused and empty-handed—beneath the watchful eyes of armed SS guards. Dietrich plunged through the stream, dodging one here, jostling another there, stopping to make way for a woman leading five small children like a gaggle of geese. At the corner of Krausnickstraße he asked a guard, “Where are these people going?”
The SS guard, a corporal, gave him a cold stare and said, “Who wants to know?”
Dietrich held his breath and dug out his identification. The corporal studied it a moment with a bored expression, then said with a sideways nod of his head, “The Jewish Home for the Elderly at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Schönhauser Allee.”
Dietrich clicked his heels and thrust out his arm.
The Jewish Home for the Elderly occupied a pleasant campus on the edge of the cemetery. This proximity to a burial ground had given rise in the past to right-wing jokes about the efficiency of dispatching aged Jews. The grounds of the home as well as the open spaces of the cemetery were now filled with people spreading their belongings on the ground, huddling in forlorn groups, or wandering aimlessly in search of friends or relatives. Impossible, Dietrich realized, to identify a man he’d never set eyes on. Not without help. He patted the bottle of cognac in his pocket and went in search of an officer.
Near the cemetery gates a row of tables had been set up to process the deportees—for that was the fate Dietrich assumed awaited these Jews. Clerks searched through sheaves of paper, checked off typed names, paused now and then to sharpen pencils, shouted their questions above the crying of children and general din of confusion. Dietrich pushed his way through the crowds, despairing of finding anyone in authority who would take the trouble to help him. In the end, he was himself found. He was the only person about in civilian clothes who was not wearing a yellow star. In not a quarter of an hour he had been accosted by a black-uniformed private who demanded to know his business. Once again Dietrich flashed his Abwehr ID and asked, “Who is in charge here? I would like to speak with him.” The private led him toward the home. As they were about to enter, there came a racketing of gunfire from inside the cemetery. Dietrich stopped.
“What was that?” he asked.
The private shrugged and adjusted the strap of his own rifle. “Just some of the troublemakers,” he said. “We try to catch them early.”
As he followed the private along the hall, Dietrich realized there was nothing of what one might expect to see in a home for the elderly: no nurses in white uniforms, no attendants pushing meal wagons or medicine carts. No elderly people. Had the inmates already been evacuated? But for what purpose? What sort of war work could be done by frail octogenarians?
SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Hubertus sat at a cluttered desk in what had once been the supervisor’s office of the elderly home, according to the faded lettering on the glass door. He studied Dietrich’s papers, then looked up. “And how may I help you?” he asked in a not unfriendly tone of voice.
“I am looking for someone,” Dietrich said. “A Jew who has been useful to me in the past.”
Hubertus motioned for him to sit. Dietrich remembered the bottle of cognac and took it from his pocket. “Um, I hope you will not be insulted, but I thought I might offer you a glass while we talk.”
The Hauptsturmführer looked amused. “Really, Admiral Canaris should teach his men to be a bit more subtle.” But he rose readily enough, produced two glasses from a sideboard, and accepted the proffered bottle. When he had filled the glasses and handed one across to Dietrich, he raised the other in a jaunty toast.
“Now,” said Hubertus. “This useful Jew of yours. His name is?”
“Hermann Fliess.”
Hubertus called to an adjutant in the next room. “Alex. Check today’s lists for a Hermann Fliess.”
“It is also possible,” Dietrich said, “that he may not be on your lists. It’s my understanding he was rounded up on the street. A random pickup.”
“Oh, that may very well be,” Hubertus agreed. “It is our policy to discourage the Jews from gathering in crowds during the roundup. Otherwise there might be some ugly confrontations. Best for all concerned to avoid that.”
“Of course,” Dietrich said.
“Which raises an important question. There is only one way to keep a Jew from being caught up in such a sweep. Did yours carry a safe conduct from the Abwehr?”
“No,” Dietrich admitted. He felt his stomach tighten.
Hubertus shook his head and made a tut-tutting sound. “Very sloppy, Herr Bonhoeffer. If he is such an important asset of the Abwehr, you should take better care of him. How exactly has he helped you?”
Dietrich felt a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades. “Dr. Fliess is a well-respected physician in the Jewish community,” he said. “People confide in him, and he has from time to time passed on the names of troublemakers. Especially saboteurs, people working in the factories who might harm the war effort. That is our special concern in the Abwehr. The rest we leave to the Gestapo.”
“Of course,” Hubertus agreed, helping himself to a second glass of cognac. “A doctor, you say? In that case, there is nothing I can do for you, even if we locate him. No physicians will be allowed to stay in Berlin, I can tell you that, Abwehr informers or no.”
“Why not?”
“In future a physician will either be very useful, in certain situations and if he is cooperative, or a great deal of trouble. Once the transports arrive at their destination, all physicians will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. That is all I can tell you. But the only Jews who will remain in Berlin are essential defense workers. A very few, as you will guess.” He shrugged good-naturedly. “Here is what I would do. Forget your doctor and find an informer inside the factories. A Pole, perhaps, or a Russian. And if you want them left alone, issue them a safe conduct. I tell you this because from here on everything is going to be much more tricky.” Hubertus nodded and pursed his lips. “Much more tricky.”
The adjutant returned to report that the name Hermann Fliess did not appear on any of the current lists. Hubertus stood, said, “So,” and shrugged. Dietrich realized he was being dismissed. He stood, his mind racing, but he could think of nothing else. Hubertus picked up the bottle of cognac as though to hand it back, but Dietrich waved him off. “May I ask,” he said, “where you are sending these Jews?”
“This lot is going to the ghetto in Smolensk,” said Hubertus. “After that?” He held out his hands, palm up.
Dietrich thanked him, exchanged a straight-armed salute, and left.
Hubertus patted the bottle of cognac, a very good brand he had noticed at once, and said to the adjutant, “God, the Abwehr! Aristocratic bloody amateurs! Why the Führer doesn’t just turn all the intelligen
ce work over to us, I’ll never know.”
By the time Dietrich reached the Tirpitz-Ufer it was growing dark. In peacetime the streetlamps would be coming up, but now there was a blackout because of the occasional air raids by the British. People were leaving their offices in darkness and heading home, bundled against the cold. But Hans von Dohnanyi would certainly still be in his office, and there Dietrich found him, blackout curtain in place over his window, working in a circle of light at his desk. He looked up questioningly when Dietrich entered.
“We have to talk,” Dietrich said.
Dohnanyi looked at the papers spread before him.
“I know you’re busy,” Dietrich said, “but it can’t wait. And I don’t want to talk about it here. I don’t trust—” He looked around.
“Very well,” Dohnanyi said. “Over a beer?”
“If there is someplace we can speak quietly without attracting attention.”
Hans smiled. “I know just the place.”
Dohnanyi drove with his headlights shrouded because of the blackout, but this was not especially difficult, since vehicles were increasingly rare. As a high-ranking official, Dohnanyi was one of the few people who had access to an adequate supply of petrol. He navigated the Daimler like a bat through the darkened city to a beer cellar off the Alexanderplatz. It was a warm, smoky place, loud, but with high-walled oak booths conducive to private conversations. When they had their steins of dark beer, Dohnanyi said, “See the proprietor over there?” and nodded toward a stout, red-faced man talking with the bartender. “He’s Hitler’s half brother Alois.”
“No!” Dietrich exclaimed, craning his neck to have a look. “And you bring me here to talk confidences?”
“Can you think of a safer place?” Dohnanyi said.
Dietrich laughed then, for the first time in what seemed ages.
“Sometimes,” Dohnanyi said, “we must be defiant. Of everything.”
Saints and Villains Page 38
