the port of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Creating a vassal state from captured territory would bring most of the Soviet population and economic resources under control of the Reich. As an important preliminary measure, the German military would occupy Romania. The officer had hinted that preparations for the incursion into that country would require a postponement of the invasion of Great Britain.
Sara’s thoughts raced as she slipped the report into a secret pouch in her old student satchel. In late September, Germany, Italy, and Japan had signed a pact agreeing to assist one another if any of the three were attacked by a country not involved in the current conflicts. One article specifically stated that the Tripartite Pact did not affect the political status existing between any of their countries and the Soviet Union, but Hitler’s invasion plans revealed how tenuous relations between Germany and the USSR truly were. If Stalin knew Hitler already intended to betray him, he might abandon the nonaggression pact of 1939, which, unbeknownst to him, Germany had already violated. The Soviets would almost certainly cut off the steady flow of raw materials from the Soviet Union into Germany rather than sustain the production of war materiel that might be turned against them. Perhaps—however improbable it seemed—the Soviets might even form an alliance with Great Britain in order to defeat Germany.
Sara knew the Harnacks had already provided copies of the report to their contacts at the embassies of the Soviet Union and the United States, but she had no idea who would come for the copy she left at the dead drop. Could it be someone she had known from her student days, a former classmate or professor? It seemed so long ago that she had studied there, that she had dreamed of earning her doctorate and winning a fellowship to study in the United States. Her life had turned out nothing like she had imagined it when she passed through the front gates of the university on her first day as a student, so thrilled, so hopeful, so full of anticipation for all that she would learn and do.
By now the students she had studied with had all moved on, graduated or forced out like herself. There were only a handful of people who might recognize her on campus, but she blended in so well that it was unlikely anyone would notice her. And if someone did suspect she was a Jew wandering about where she was forbidden, she would show them the false identity papers the Kuckhoffs had procured for her. They showed that she was Annemarie Hannemann, a student from Frankfurt, with all the rights and privileges accorded to any other Aryan citizen of the Reich.
But no one would catch her. Sara walked with purpose, as if her thoughts were fixed on important matters and she belonged exactly where she was. No one ever questioned her. Sometimes a few young men tried to catch her eye or chat her up, but she offered only polite smiles and quiet demurrals in reply. How lovely it might be to enjoy a brief flirtation with a handsome stranger, like any other young woman could—somewhere else in a time of peace, but not in Berlin in 1940, not when one was a Jew in the resistance, not when it was impossible to tell at a glance who was an inveterate Nazi, who was a friend, and who was a Mitläufer, one of the vast number of Germans who went along with the Reich’s atrocities, not actively persecuting anyone but refusing to intervene on behalf of the oppressed.
Was Dieter still a Mitläufer, Sara wondered, or had he fully assimilated into the Reich for the sake of his precious business? He might be dead for all she knew. Bombs had fallen in the neighborhood where he and his mother had lived, though not on their apartment building. Or he could have been conscripted, and might be encamped somewhere in conquered France or lying in a battlefield grave. Unsettled, she pushed the images aside. She did not want to brood over Dieter’s fate, or to think of him at all. If he ever spared a thought for her, it could only be to pray that no one remembered he had once been engaged to a Jew.
Thus far the British bombers had spared the block where Sara and Natan moved after being evicted from the apartment in Friedenau. The cramped studio they shared was on Grenadierstrasse on the eastern edge