She and Natan debated going underground, but pretending to be Annemarie occasionally was as deep as she dared go. They would starve unless someone sheltered them and brought them food, but anyone caught hiding Jews would pay for their selflessness with their lives. Escape was a better option. Jews were forbidden to emigrate, but Natan was working his contacts in the Communist underground and foreign press and hoped to get them both smuggled out of the country before winter. Sara did not care where they went, as long as it was beyond the borders of the Reich. Eventually, somehow, they would make their way to Geneva and their family would be reunited at last.
“If we can’t be somewhere safe, I’m glad the two of us are together,” Sara told Natan one evening over a meal of cabbage, onion, and apples fried in the last of the olive oil. “I couldn’t survive one day alone in this hell without you.”
For a moment Natan was rendered speechless, but then he grinned. “I love you too, baby sister,” he said, reaching across the table to ruffle her hair.
One important objective of the nighttime pamphleting raids was to foment the people’s disapproval of the unpopular Soviet war, challenging the infallibility of the Reich, shattering the myth of one German Volk unified in support of the Führer. Sara and her comrades realized they were making progress when the Propaganda Ministry launched a campaign to bolster public support. In addition to the usual proclamations and posters, Goebbels arranged a cultural exhibition ironically titled “The Soviet Paradise.” A long, one-story, starkly neoclassical building was constructed on the Lustgarten and filled with dioramas and exhibits meant to educate the German people about the “poverty, misery, depravity, and need” of daily life in the Soviet Union.
On the second day of the exhibition, Sara, as Annamarie Hannemann, attended with Mildred, Greta, and their husbands, joining a vast throng of men and women wandering the aisles, some with children in tow. Each visitor was given a booklet describing the various displays—a full-scale replica of a Russian cobbler’s squalid hovel, or the cramped, filthy flat of a Moscow factory worker. The guidebook began with a lengthy treatise explaining how Marxism and Bolshevism, ideologies devised by Jews, had led to the deaths of millions from political executions and starvation. “Further proof that the Soviet state belongs to the Jews is the fact that the people are ruthlessly sacrificed for the goals of the Jewish world revolution,” the author declared, at which point Sara stopped reading in disgust.
Enormous picture panels lined the walls, depicting life in the Soviet Union as grim, cheerless, and colorless, a miserable existence in muddy, decrepit villages beneath gray, sunless skies. Half-empty bottles of liquor were scattered around images of Stalin and Lenin to emphasize the people’s hopelessness and sloth. In a large, darkened room, a fifteen-minute film played continuously; Libertas, who had seen rough cuts at the Deutsche Kulturfilm-Zentrale, had warned her friends that it was not for the faint of heart, but Sara steeled herself and took a seat in the back between Greta and Mildred. The film claimed to show the gruesome scenes German troops had encountered as they marched into the Soviet Union—filthy, emaciated orphans begging for scraps; desecrated churches; drunkards still clutching their bottles as they sprawled in the dirt beside rusted plows and fallow fields; town squares littered with the bloody corpses of massacred civilians. “Where once stood prosperous villages,” the narrator intoned, “today the gray misery of the collective farm predominates. This is where the Soviet peasant lives as a slave.”
“I’d like hard evidence that those atrocities were committed by the retreating Red Army and not the Germans on their advance,” Greta murmured acidly as they left the room, sickened and angry. “After viewing that, no one will wonder why Germany went to war with the Soviet Union.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Mildred replied in an undertone. “Germany had to betray its erstwhile enemy to save the Soviet people.”
“Yes, to save them so that the Einsatzgruppen could kill them.”
Nervous, Sara glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one had overheard. All around them, curious, interested sightseers looked from guidebooks to displays, wincing sometimes if their gaze fell upon an especially grisly image, but revealing little of the shock and revulsion and skepticism Sara felt. A cold prickle ran down the back of her neck, and she was suddenly aware that she was surrounded by enemies. An impulse