With a sharp pang of loneliness, Martha continued on to Tiergartenstrasse 27a. She would miss Mildred terribly, but she felt none of the bitter unhappiness of her parting from Boris, whom she suspected she would never see again. Surely she and Mildred would reunite someday back in America, perhaps not soon, but eventually.
Until then, they would share letters and memories.
On December 14, Martha took a train to Hamburg, where she boarded the SS Manhattan bound for New York. As the ship sailed slowly up the Elbe, Martha stood at the railing on an upper deck and took in her last views of Germany, marveling at how beautiful it became at a distance, as the swastika flags diminished and became indistinct, blending into the background of quaint villages and rich farmland and deep forests until she could almost convince herself that they were not there at all.
Chapter Forty
January–June 1938
Mildred
When Greta and Adam welcomed their son into the world in early January, Mildred and Arvid were among the first to meet him. Little Ule Kuckhoff had his father’s broad face and his mother’s dark, wavy hair and dark eyes, solemn and pensive, as if he knew that courage and sacrifice would be required of him soon.
Greta wrapped him in the soft blue-and-white-striped blanket Mildred had knit for him and placed him in Mildred’s arms. “This is your Tante Mildred,” she said softly, “and though you’ve only just met, she already loves you.”
“It’s true, dear one,” said Mildred softly. She eased herself into Greta’s chair and gently rocked the tiny newborn, her joy for her friends tempered by her incessant yearning for a child of her own. She was already an aunt several times over, but although she found much consolation in the role, it could not fulfill her heart’s desire.
Greta’s mother had come to help the new parents through the first few weeks, but Greta had endured a difficult labor and when her recovery came slowly, her mother’s visit stretched into a month and then two. Mildred visited as often as she could to help, and once, when they were alone, Greta confessed her frustration that her resistance work had come to an abrupt halt. “Adam and his comrades toil over their pamphlets and posters, and what do I do?” she fretted. “Nothing. I lie around the flat doing nothing while people suffer.”
“You’re regaining your strength and caring for your baby,” Mildred protested. “What could be more important?”
“Bringing down the Reich,” Greta retorted, but quietly so her mother would not overhear. “Speaking the truth. Refuting their lies. I have to make a better world for Ule.”
Mildred assured her that she would be able to resume her work soon, but Greta’s frustration mirrored her own. Ambassador Dodd, her most important American contact, had been recalled to the United States, and no one else had emerged as someone she could trust with the intelligence Arvid gathered from the Economics Ministry. Worse yet, acquaintances among the embassy staff had told her that Mr. Dodd’s successor, a career diplomat named Hugh Wilson, had resolved to take a more cordial approach to the Nazi regime. Improved relations between their two countries could only benefit American businesses, he had declared in more than one meeting, and after one junior official had presented reports of Gestapo abuses, Wilson rejected his offer to draft a stern condemnation. “We do not love or hate, we do not judge or condemn,” he had admonished the younger man. “We observe, we reflect, and we report.”
Even as Mildred’s contacts at the American embassy were diminishing in number, Arvid was losing his among the Soviet delegation. Stalin, apparently determined to rid the Soviet Union of every conceivable threat, had ordered sweeping, violent purges of his political enemies. Rumors abounded that within the past few years, nearly five million Soviet intellectuals, military officers, Communist party officials, police chiefs, and others had been arrested. Of these, nearly a million had been executed, and one could only assume that countless others had suffered and died in prison camps, with more deaths every day.
The sheer number of estimated dead was almost too vast to comprehend, but Mildred’s amorphous dread came into sharp focus when, without warning, many Soviet diplomats and attachés stationed in Berlin were ordered to return to Moscow. Among those recalled was Sergei Bessonov, a prominent economist assigned to the Russian trade mission who had helped Arvid set up ARPLAN. In the years since, he and Arvid had become close, and Arvid and