city almost without respite all day, Greta was startled by a loud pounding on her door. It was a friend of Adam’s, Jon Cutting, a member of the British press corps and an aspiring playwright. Breathless, apologizing profusely for disturbing her, he asked for Adam.
“I’m sorry, but he’s not home.” She held open the door wider. “Would you like to wait? He should be back soon.”
“Sorry, no time. Might I beg a favor?” He held out a set of keys. “Our embassy has ordered all British correspondents to leave for Denmark tonight. Would you ask Adam to take charge of my car while I’m away?”
Startled, Greta took the keys. “Of course.”
“It’s parked out front, with a full tank,” he said, inclining his head toward the window. “I don’t expect to be gone very long—ten days, perhaps, until the embassy gives us the all-clear to return to do our jobs.”
Greta promised they would take good care of his car, the first step being to move it someplace more discreet. He thanked her and dashed off before she had a chance to ask him if anything in particular had prompted the British embassy to urge them to leave the country.
Two days later, when she and Mildred met in the Tiergarten for a walk with Ule, Mildred revealed that earlier that morning, the United States embassy had issued a statement urging all Americans whose presence was not absolutely necessary to leave Germany immediately. “Most businesses and correspondents have already sent their wives and children away,” Mildred said, taking a turn pushing Ule’s stroller. “They’ve chartered two trains to take the rest to Denmark later this week.”
“Will you be on one of them?” Greta asked.
Mildred shook her head. “Arvid wants me to go. When he couldn’t persuade me, he asked Donald Heath to try. But I won’t leave Arvid, and Arvid won’t leave Germany to the Nazis.”
“You should go.”
Mildred gave her a sidelong smile. “You don’t really want me to leave, do you?”
“It’s for your own good,” Greta countered, but of course Mildred was right. She did not want to lose her dearest friend.
Early the next day, the news broke that beginning Monday, August 28, the government would begin rationing essentials including food, soap, shoes, clothing, and coal. The announcement sent a shock rippling through Berlin, dredging up distressing memories of rationing during the Great War, when more than a million German civilians had perished from malnutrition. If she had not been so uneasy, Greta might have laughed at the newspaper articles that accompanied the announcement, column after column describing in excessive detail the abundance of the nation’s food reserves. “Starving is impossible!” one report claimed, which Greta and Adam sardonically agreed was hardly a confirmed scientific fact.
That same morning, before ration cards were issued, before purchases were restricted, Greta left Ule with her neighbor and fellow resistance woman Erika von Brockdorff and hurried out to the shops to stock up on essentials, joining thousands of other Berliners similarly inspired. Quickly, before the shelves were emptied, she snatched up kitchen staples and nonperishable goods, and after dropping the cartloads off at home, she set out again in search of warm winter coats for herself and Adam, winter boots for herself, and entire wardrobes for Ule, enough clothes in increasing sizes to see him through the next two years. She depleted almost all of their household cash and in the end resorted to credit, but instinct told her this was no time to be frugal. She could not take the chance that by the time Ule outgrew his clothes, she would be able to buy him what he needed. She could not say exactly what she thought might prevent Berlin’s shopkeepers from restocking their wares, but there were only a few reasons a nation might impose rationing upon its citizens, and none of them inspired confidence in the future.
At the end of her long day of shopping—waiting in overcrowded queues, noting the swiftly multiplying empty spaces on store shelves, fearing that she might have forgotten something important, avoiding eye contact with other shoppers out of a vague shame for their implied covetousness and pessimism—Greta collected Ule, arranged to watch little Saskia the next day so Erika could shop, and went home, exhausted. When she turned on the radio to listen to the news while she prepared supper, she heard a description of the rationing system, which seemed so convoluted that Greta wondered how it could possibly succeed. All German citizens and permanent residents would be