of our eternal love, which, I have to say, was very flattering but impossible, because—Are you sitting down?—I’m going to be married!”
Mildred was so startled she had to start over at the beginning and read the letter again.
She had not misunderstood. Soon after Martha arrived in New York, she had met Alfred Stern—tall, handsome, ten years older than she, and wonderfully wealthy thanks to a generous divorce settlement he had received from his defunct marriage to a Sears Roebuck heiress. After a whirlwind romance, Alfred had proposed and Martha had accepted. They planned a large celebration at the family farm in Round Hill, Virginia, on September 4, and Mildred and Arvid were very welcome to attend if they could possibly make it.
“I suppose I must tell Boris,” Martha wrote, with a trace of chagrin. “What an awful letter that will be to write, nearly as bad as it would be to receive!”
Mildred felt more than a little chagrined herself. Apparently Arvid had been right all along about her friend’s fickle heart. She hoped his judgment was equally sound about Donald Heath, and that the embassy’s new first secretary would prove to be as shrewdly intelligent, cautious, and deserving of their trust as he seemed. Their lives depended on it.
Chapter Forty-one
March–September 1938
Sara
For Austria’s Jews, the Anschluss became a swiftly unfolding nightmare.
In the aftermath of the annexation, the Nazis immediately imposed the same restrictions upon Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables that they had honed to cruel perfection in Germany. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, one hatred. Jewish shops and businesses were looted, the proprietors hauled out to the sidewalks and beaten. Throughout Austria, the front windows of Jewish-owned stores and restaurants were marked in yellow paint, Jude and the Star of David, warning Aryans to avoid them. In Austrian cities, Jews were forced to scrub city streets; laborers, lawyers, and clerks toiled on their hands and knees with coarse brushes and buckets of soapy water under the watchful gaze of armed storm troopers and hundreds of curious onlookers. In Vienna, Jewish actresses were made to scrub public toilets.
Sara and her family followed the news from Austria with a cold, sinking dread that outwardly might have appeared stoic. All of it was horrifying, none of it unexpected. To Sara the rumors spreading through the Jewish community and the reports in the Jewish press bore a grotesque veneer of familiarity. Everything that was happening to the Austrian Jews—the public humiliations, the loss of rights, the chilling certainty that any passing Aryan could inflict whatever violence they wanted upon you and the authorities would do nothing—had been a part of their daily lives for years.
By late spring, the hiding place at Schloss Federle was nearly complete, five rooms in the attic of the west wing accessible only by a narrow staircase leading from a spare room used to store old furniture, some of which was dusted off and hauled upstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky stocked a large closet with canned and dried food and other necessities, purchased in modest amounts over time to avoid drawing attention. Sara’s father and Natan rerouted pipes to provide running water for a sink, shower, and toilet. Though the dormer windows faced the forest, Sara and her mother covered them with heavy blackout curtains, and made up the beds and put down rugs, not only for comfort, but to muffle their footsteps.
They did all of the work themselves. They could not risk entrusting their secret to contractors, strangers who might betray them later out of carelessness or malice. The household staff, whose integrity and loyalty Wilhelm swore was secure, treated their suddenly more frequent visits as perfectly unremarkable and pretended not to notice the sporadic bursts of activity in the castle’s least-used wing.
“We may never need to spend a single night here,” Sara’s father told her mother. “Let us hope our hard work will prove unnecessary.”
Her mother smiled wanly and agreed.
Then, in late June, Mr. and Mrs. Panofsky suddenly changed their plans. Germany had become too dangerous for Hans and Ruth, they told Sara’s parents. Since Mr. Dodd and his family no longer resided at Tiergartenstrasse 27a, the children were not safe even in their own home. Friends in Great Britain had agreed to take them in, and although the thought of splitting up the family was hardly bearable, it would be a relief to have the children out of harm’s way. And perhaps the family would not be separated for long. On March 1, two Aryan partners had