anyone, not even Bill or her mother, and certainly not Boris. She had no doubt that the letters she sent him at his new post in Poland were opened by Nazi censors before they crossed the border. Even on the few occasions when, to her parents’ consternation, she slipped away to Warsaw to meet him, she limited their conversations to the local nightlife, gossip about mutual acquaintances in Berlin, sex, and—although he had begun to show an infuriating lack of enthusiasm for the subject—marriage. Not that Boris needed her to tell him anything about conflict within the American embassy. Boris still had contacts in Berlin, and he probably knew more about the challenges her father faced than she did.
She would have poured out her heart to Mildred, except they rarely saw each other anymore. Martha and Bill were under almost constant surveillance by the Gestapo and Soviet intelligence. If she and Mildred met other than at official embassy events, they would have been observed, endangering their entire resistance network. Martha wished she dared risk it. Kind, sympathetic Mildred would have found the words to comfort her.
Her father’s circumstances worsened throughout the winter, and spring brought his most difficult ordeal yet. Helmut Hirsch, a twenty-one-year-old German Jew and antifascist, had been sentenced to death for his part in a thwarted plot to bomb sites in Nuremberg, with Nazi Party headquarters and the offices of Der Stürmer among the suspected targets. Although Hirsch had never been to the United States, he held American citizenship through his father, and the State Department instructed Martha’s father to demand a new, fair, and legitimate trial. Outraged that the young man had been condemned to die although no bombing had occurred and no evidence connecting him to any plot had been produced, Martha’s father fought vigorously for clemency.
On April 27, in the midst of intense negotiations about Hirsch’s fate, her parents hosted a luncheon at Tiergartenstrasse 27a for members of the German Foreign Office. In the middle of the soup course, the doughy official seated beside Martha leaned closer to her and, breath thickly scented with alcohol, said, “You should warn your father that he is wasting his time.”
Martha regarded him archly. “What do you mean?”
“Helmut Hirsch, the American Jew who wanted to kill the Führer, cannot be let off with life imprisonment. He must be executed even though he did not actually commit the crime.”
“What sort of justice is that?” Martha asked, taken aback, but the official merely shrugged and took another drink of wine. As soon as their guests departed, Martha passed on the warning to her father, but he could not explain how Hirsch’s charges of a plot to bomb buildings in Nuremberg had been conflated with an attempt to assassinate Hitler.
Undaunted, her father continued to fight for Hirsch’s life. At the end of May, informed that Hirsch could be shown no leniency, he convinced two important Reich ministers, Otto Meissner and Konstantin von Neurath, to appeal personally to Hitler, warning him of the repercussions that would follow if they killed an American citizen under such questionable circumstances.
But her father’s tireless efforts were in vain. At sunrise on the morning of June 4, Helmut Hirsch was executed by guillotine.
Although Martha’s father had exhausted every option, his failure to save the young man struck him a bitter blow. His headaches increased in severity and duration until he suffered continuous pain for days without respite. Once Martha overheard him complain to his physician that intense pain spread over the nerve connections between his stomach, shoulders, and brain until he found it impossible to sleep. By early summer, the problems with his digestive tract had worsened so drastically that eating became torturous, forcing him on one occasion to go without food for thirty hours straight. Through it all, he kept up his rigorous schedule at the embassy, until Martha and her mother worried that he might literally work himself to death.
“Please, please, for our sakes, if not your own, take better care of yourself,” Martha’s mother begged. He promised to try.
Finally, in late July, Martha’s father was granted a three-month leave so he could rest and recover his health. Why their mother had not insisted upon accompanying him home to the United States, Martha and Bill could only wonder. Their parents were usually inseparable, and other embassy officials or their wives could have filled in for their mother at ceremonial occasions. Then, one afternoon, Martha ran into Mrs. Panofsky when she was returning from an outing