Jews and Communists, exactly as the Nazis suspected,” Natan said. “This feeds perfectly into their propaganda narrative. They’ve snatched triumph out of the ashes of humiliation.”
More arrests followed as the investigation continued, but although Harro seemed untroubled, others in their circle became increasingly apprehensive. Sara was among those who worried that the Baum cell’s bombing and their group’s Zettelklebeaktion could become conflated, even though their resistance circles did not overlap. She had never been particularly close to Harro, but she observed mutual friends distance themselves from him. Sometimes, too, she overheard angry grumbling about his recklessness, his willingness to risk all of their lives for little gain.
Then, on June 4, two weeks before the bombing suspects were scheduled to go on trial, Chief of Reich Security Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich—creator of the Einsatzgruppen and architect of the Final Solution—was assassinated in Prague.
The resistance welcomed the news, but Arvid’s sources warned that although the two events had occurred 350 kilometers apart, many prominent Nazi officials worried that the Lustgarten bombing had exposed a dangerous breakdown in absolute authority, a show of defiance that had emboldened Heydrich’s killers. Every Jew in Berlin was a potential assassin. “I for one do not wish to be shot in the belly by some twenty-two-year-old Ostjude like one of those perpetrators of the attack against the anti-Soviet exhibition,” Goebbels had reportedly grumbled to a colleague at the Propaganda Ministry.
“There will be reprisals,” Arvid cautioned. “Watch your backs.”
Within hours, they learned that the reprisals had already begun. Radio reception from Czechoslovakia was sporadic, but Mildred had been monitoring one faint, distant station operated by a Czech resistance cell. Before it fell silent, a desperate operator had reported that more than thirteen thousand Czechs had been arrested, and the entire population of the village of Lidice had been massacred after Gestapo agents incorrectly concluded that the assassins were hiding there. Sara offered to help Mildred regain the signal, but although they took turns at the shortwave painstakingly scanning the airwaves and listening intently until their ears rang from the static, their attempts were fruitless. They were so intent on their work that they did not realize Sara had broken curfew until Arvid returned home from the ministry.
“I should go,” Sara said, bolting to her feet.
“You can stay,” Mildred offered. “Have supper with us and spend the night.”
“I don’t want my brother to worry, and it’s too dangerous. If anyone finds me here, you’d be in a great deal of trouble.”
“There are other things here that would get us in even more trouble,” said Arvid, gesturing to the radio.
“I’m not wearing the Judenstern and I have my false papers,” said Sara. “If I’m stopped on my way home, no one will know that I’m breaking curfew.”
Mildred smiled. “In that case, no one will know that you’re breaking curfew if you’re found here.”
Sara wavered a moment longer before agreeing to stay. Natan knew she kept erratic hours and would not worry unless she went missing for more than a day. The Harnacks’ quiet, pleasant apartment offered a welcome respite from the noise and the smells and the tangible fear of the ghetto, and she was not quite ready to abandon the search for the Czech radio signal.
She and Mildred tried again after supper, but eventually, too exhausted to continue, they gave up and went to bed. Sara slept well on the sofa in the spare bedroom the Harnacks used as an office, but she rose early and set out for home as soon as she finished helping Mildred wash and dry the breakfast dishes.
It was not yet eight o’clock as she quickly made her way through the city toward the ghetto. The morning air was cool and misty, fragrant with the scents of cut grass and dew and fresh blossoms. Shopkeepers swept the sidewalks in front of their stores, clerks and secretaries hurried past on the way to their offices, and paperboys called out the headlines of the morning editions. There had been no air raids the night before, so the mood on the streets was one of relief and thankfulness beneath the routine of the start of another workday.
The mood shifted the closer Sara came to the ghetto. It always did, as the buildings grew more crowded and decrepit and the Judenstern appeared in greater numbers, but this morning she sensed something else, as if an alarm pealed just beyond the range of her hearing. Quickening her pace, she turned onto her own street and discovered trucks parked to block