be made known, her family would realize their mistake. Perhaps as soon as their next visit, she and Arvid would both be welcomed back with warm embraces.
In mid-August, they departed on a ship bound for Hamburg, dispirited and doubtful that Arvid’s warnings would be heeded by the United States, apprehensive about what awaited them back in Germany. They were together, Mildred reminded herself, and that would be enough to get her through whatever might come next.
Chapter Forty-five
August–September 1939
Greta
Late one August night while Adam worked on a screenplay in the living room, Greta put Ule to bed, tidied the kitchen, folded the laundry, answered her son’s plea for a drink of water, soothed him back to sleep again, and then—only then, exhausted and tempted to give up and go to bed—settled down at the kitchen table to the work she had set out hours before.
It was not recent, the speech she intended to translate for a flyer to distribute around Neukölln, the universities, and perhaps the ghetto too, if she could scrounge up enough paper. President Roosevelt had delivered the speech the previous October, but she had received the transcript only recently from a friend in the foreign press corps. And yet, with the Gestapo squeezing Berlin’s Jews into a few overcrowded, dilapidated blocks and the Wehrmacht going through maneuvers along the border with Poland, Mr. Roosevelt’s words remained sharply relevant. The Ministry of Propaganda controlled the flow of information within the Reich so absolutely that most Germans had no idea what the leaders of other nations said about their country. Most Germans probably did not care, content to believe whatever Goebbels told them to think. But for those people like herself who hated fascism, loved democracy, and longed for reassurance that the free world had not forgotten them, an inspiring speech from a leader like President Roosevelt could make the difference between sustaining hope and succumbing to despair.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that peace by fear has no higher or more enduring quality than peace by the sword,” she murmured aloud, tapping her knee with her pencil, searching for the perfect German phrases to capture Mr. Roosevelt’s eloquent balance of authority and compassion. “There can be no peace if the reign of law is to be replaced by a recurrent sanctification of sheer force.”
The American president did not need to mention Hitler by name for the subject of his speech to be perfectly clear. Greta firmly believed that the German people needed to know that not every Western leader had been duped by Hitler’s hollow claims that he wanted peace. Some Germans would find that a heartening revelation, others an existential threat.
Greta wrote steadily, translating the phrases, referring to her well-worn German-English dictionary, circling a word she knew was not quite right to remind herself to choose a better synonym later. Mildred would know, but the Harnacks had no telephone, and at that hour she was probably asleep anyway.
“‘There can be no peace if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the threat of war,’” Greta read aloud, carrying the transcript in one hand as she went to put the kettle on, yawning until her eyes watered. She ought to go to bed, but Ule was so busy and bright and curious all day long that late nights and early mornings were the only times she could get any work done. “‘There can be no peace if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the dispersion all over the world of millions of helpless and persecuted wanderers with no place to lay their heads.’”
“Greta?” Adam called from the living room.
Sighing, she set the kettle on the burner, tossed the transcript on the table next to her notes, and went to the living room, where she found Adam turning up the volume on the radio.
“Are you deliberately trying to wake up Ule?” she asked wearily, wiping perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. Despite the late hour, the heat of the day had barely diminished with the sunset.
“Come listen,” he urged, without turning away from the radio.
An announcer had interrupted the scheduled classical music program with a news bulletin, but since Greta had missed the beginning, at first she did not understand what he was saying. Sickening dread filled her when she realized that the German minister for foreign affairs was en route to Moscow to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.
“How can this be?” asked Greta. “Fascists and Communists, allies? They’re on opposite sides of