German people to wonder what other lies their government has told them,” Arvid said as he and Mildred packed their suitcases before setting out to spend the holidays with family in Jena. Mildred hoped so, but with suspicious neighbors denouncing one another to the Gestapo for the smallest offenses, sometimes only out of anger, or revenge, or to settle petty scores, a widespread protest against the war seemed beyond imagination.
The New Year began with little hope that 1942 would bring peace, prosperity, or anything else one usually wished for on the holiday. For all the hardships the German people endured, the Jews suffered far worse as the fate of their departed friends remained uncertain and still more constraints upon their lives were imposed. Jews were forbidden to sell their personal property without official permission from the Reich. They were banned from all public baths and forbidden to buy firewood, newspapers, and periodicals. The pace of deportations increased, but the Jews were now marched to the Grunewald station at night, presumably to reduce the number of witnesses. Instead of passenger carriages, the deportees were now crowded into cars used to transport goods or cattle. Sara and Natan had observed a pattern in the most recent transport lists, which seemed overwhelmingly comprised of the elderly and the bedridden. As the Gestapo cleared out hospitals and sanatoriums for the aged, Arvid and Natan surmised that the Nazis wanted to keep healthy young Jews in Berlin so they would be available for conscripted labor, but Mildred and Sara worried that the Nazis were targeting the old and the sick because they were helpless and weak, less likely to fight back and reduce the efficiency of the deportation process. Perhaps both possibilities were true.
What had become of the deported Jews after they left Berlin remained an ominous question. At first, some Jews had sent letters to friends in the capital from ghettos in Litzmannstadt, Minsk, Kaunas, and Riga to say that they had arrived safely but desperately needed food and warm clothes, but before long the flow of letters slowed to a trickle and then ceased. Why would the deportees be forbidden to write home? Complaints and strategic information could be censored. Why cut off communications entirely?
By the middle of February, Mildred knew of no one who had heard from a departed Jewish friend in weeks, and letters sent to the resettlement sites were often returned stamped “Addressee Deceased” or “Address Unknown.” Rumors swept through Berlin like snow crystals carried aloft in the cold February winds, whispering that the Jews had died in typhus epidemics or had been murdered outright. The rumors were as ephemeral as snow crystals too, for few Berliners remarked upon their absent neighbors at all. Many people were no doubt afraid to say anything rather than risk appearing disloyal to the Reich. Others were glad to be rid of the Jews and to benefit from the redistribution of the property they had left behind—vacated homes given as rewards to party members, furs and jewels sold in special shops at a fraction of their value. It seemed to Mildred, however, that the vast majority of Germans responded to the plight of the Jews as they had for more than a decade, with profound indifference. As long as they and theirs were exempt from persecution, why should they care what happened to strangers?
Their unfathomable lack of empathy and compassion rendered Mildred heartsick, bewildered, and afraid.
In mid-February, Harro came across documents at Luftwaffe headquarters that chillingly, meticulously revealed a sudden and drastic worsening of Reich policy toward the Jews. According to a conference transcript Harro glimpsed on a superior officer’s desk, on January 20, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and thirteen other high-ranking officials had met at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Harro could not have stolen a copy of the transcript without raising the alarm, but he studied it swiftly, intently, when it was left briefly unattended on his superior officer’s desk. What he saw was enough to convince him that within the past year, Adolf Hitler had authorized a plan to deliberately and methodically annihilate eleven million European Jews. The purpose of the Wannsee Conference had not been to debate whether such a heinous program of mass murder should be undertaken, for that had already been decided, but how to implement it.
As horrifying as Harro’s conclusions were, nothing he described contradicted what the Nazis had done elsewhere to Communists, to labor