Chapter 16
After Leonore had been accepted onto Operation Seven, she’d received papers from the Abwehr stating she wasn’t to be deported.
In case of an emergency, she could produce the document.
She had also memorized the telephone number of the Foreign Office, where she could ask for urgent help if the Gestapo or SS were suspicious of her papers.
She had then returned to her rented room.
After the few months of living in Herr Balsen’s office, the room seemed smaller, dirtier and more oppressive than before.
At least spring had arrived and the broken coal stove was no longer a hardship.
With a light heart, she packed a suitcase for the upcoming trip to Brandenburg.
She didn’t care that they hadn’t told her the exact location, as long as she was getting out of Berlin.
She was looking forward to agent training, even imagining herself as the main character in a spy thriller in which she single-handedly murdered Hitler, ended the war and saved the world.
Her friends would turn green with envy. It was a shame she mustn’t tell them anything about her adventure.
Herr Lange had impressed upon her the importance of not telling a soul, not even her best friend Birgit, of her imminent escape from Germany, disguised as an Abwehr agent.
They couldn’t afford to endanger the operation or its organizers.
Leonore was acutely aware that a wrong word at the wrong time to the wrong person might put everyone at risk.
Regardless, she still found herself telling Birgit in great detail – at least, in her mind’s eye – of the adventure that lay ahead of her.
Unfortunately, the tale would have to wait until after the war.
Even once she arrived safely in Switzerland or, even more exciting, in South America, she would have to maintain absolute silence.
In preparation for her new life, she had used a pretext to borrow an ancient, tattered Spanish textbook from a friend’s mother and was practicing diligently every day. She had already mastered basic greetings.
Buenos días, mi nombre es Leonore Vogel. Soy una periodista. ?Cómo estás? Muy bien.
She could hardly wait for the operation to finally be set in motion, and to meet her fellow travelers.
Her training as an agent was only the first step toward a glorious future.
Soon she would be standing on the deck of a huge ocean liner heading for South America.
She didn’t intend to waste her time on the ship – on the contrary, it would be her opportunity to lay the foundation for her later journalistic work by interviewing her fellow passengers.
Certainly many of them would have an exciting tale to tell, which she could turn into a column for an emigrants’ magazine.
All she needed was a meaningful, concise and memorable title.
Leonore wrinkled her nose in thought, when there was a knock at the door of her room.
As she opened, a woman in her early forties was standing there.
Her dark hair was pinned up in a bun, and she wore a simple black dress.
The combination would have made her look stern, if it hadn’t been for her kind blue eyes.
She introduced herself in a soft voice, “I’m Michaela Kronberg.”
“Leonore Vogel. You can’t imagine how excited I am.” Leonore shook the woman’s hand. “Would you like to come in? I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“Thank you.” Frau Kronberg stepped into the shabby room and looked around.
“Sorry, it’s not exactly comfortable here,” Leonore apologized, suddenly ashamed of her miserable lodgings.
“I’ve seen worse.” She tilted her head. “It’s not like we get to choose where we live.”
“That’s very true.” Leonore liked the woman already. Looking at the oversized medical bag in Frau Kronberg’s hand, she asked, “Is that your suitcase?”
“Yes. I take my medical bag everywhere with me, and with the best will in the world, I can’t carry two items of luggage.”
“You’re a doctor?” No sooner had she asked the question, than she scolded herself for it, since the answer was obvious.
“I was. Until recently, I was at least allowed to work as a medical carer.” Frau Kronberg’s eyes filled with sadness. Leonore opened her mouth to probe further, but the other woman continued, “Could we call one another by first names? We’ll be spending a lot of time together in the coming week.”
“Of course. I’m Leonore, but my friends call me Leo.”
“A lioness. It suits you.” Michaela held out her hand. “You can call me Michi.”
“Is that thing heavy?” Leonore stared suspiciously at the dark brown leather bag, which undoubtedly had seen decades of use.
“Here, try it.”
Leonore took hold of the bag and almost dropped it in astonishment. “Amazing! What have you got in there? Bricks?”
“That’s my secret,” Michaela grinned. “So, where do you work?”
“For the past few weeks, I’ve been a forced laborer in the munitions industry. Before that I worked as a secretary to a book publisher, but I always wanted to be a journalist.”
Michaela grimaced. “And the Nazis won’t allow that. My husband’s body had barely cooled before they tried to ban me from treating my Jewish patients. It’s only thanks to Lieutenant Ruben’s intervention I wasn’t pressed into forced labor.”
“I hate the Nazis.” Leonore had already learned from Eberhard Lange that Michaela’s husband had recently died after a long illness and that the Gestapo had immediately sent her a deportation order.
Thank heavens they’d soon be turning their backs on the harassment by leaving this inhospitable country.
On that thought, she grabbed her suitcase and left her tiny room with Michaela in tow.
Out on the street, she asked, “Are you looking forward to it?”
“To what?”
“To our training, of course. It’s going to be so exciting! We’ll be real agents.”
“You read too many detective novels,” Michaela replied good-naturedly.
“I don’t care. I can hardly wait.”
They took the bus to the agreed meeting point at Westkreuz station. The other ostensible agents were already waiting on the platform: Eberhard Lange, Anton Seifert, along with a man in Wehrmacht officer’s uniform.
Leonore reached instinctively for the star on her coat, before scolding herself as a fool. The officer clearly worked for the Abwehr and had been assigned to accompany the group to the mysterious training site on Lake Quenz.
“Good morning. I am Lieutenant Hesse and I shall take you to your destination today,” he introduced himself.
The train roared into the station, and Lieutenant Hesse escorted them to their reserved compartment.
After the conductor had checked their papers and tickets, Lieutenant Hesse stood by the compartment door and announced, “Once again, I must urge you to maintain absolute silence about everything that happens in the next few days. At the Quenzgut, you must look like genuine prospective agents – nobody must suspect that your employment is a sham.” He cast each of them a piercing look.
As he gazed into Leonore’s eyes, heat rose into her cheeks. Lieutenant Hesse certainly cut a dashing figure.
After a long pause, during which nobody spoke, he continued.
“The success of the mission stands or falls with your credibility. While the training center belongs to the Abwehr, we cannot rule out the Gestapo having its spies there. A single wrong word and our ruse will be exposed. I don’t need to tell you what will happen then. ”
Each of the supposed agents nodded in turn, until Lieutenant Hesse smiled. “Now we have clarified that, I would like each of you, with the exception of Frau Kronberg, to spend the next few minutes choosing a code name, which you will use from now until you return to Berlin.”
Michaela cast him a questioning look.
“We had to assign one to you already. You are Heloise.”
Leonore thought the French name sounded quite distinguished, but Michaela’s eyes widened in horror.
Lieutenant Hesse, however, didn’t seem to notice. “We thought the name suited you, since Heloise was a healer who lived as a nun in the twelfth century.”
“Heloise also had a tragic life. She fell in love with Abelard, a lecturer twenty years her senior, who impregnated her. As a result, she was forced by her uncle to marry Abelard, although she detested the constraints of a conventional marriage.” Michaela made a sour face.
“The uncle continued to seek revenge, arranging for her husband to be attacked and castrated. Abelard retired to a monastery and commanded Heloise to do the same.”
“I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t know.” Lieutenant Hesse had turned quite pale during her description. “Unfortunately, we can’t change your code name.”
“Let’s hope it’s not a bad omen,” Michaela replied.
Leonore stepped in to lighten the mood. “I already know my name. Nellie. Nellie Bly was the pseudonym of a fearless journalist in the last century in America. She did many courageous, exciting things – she wrote articles for a newspaper, smuggled herself into a mental asylum as a patient to write an investigative story, and even circumnavigated the world in seventy-two days.”
“The name suits you,” Michaela said with a grin, while Eberhard Lange shook his head in disapproval. “Fr?ulein Vogel—”
“Nellie,” Leonore corrected him.
“Fr?ulein Nellie, our work as agents is merely a pretense, none of us will actually be working for the Abwehr.”
A warning nudge in the ribs from Michaela prompted her to nod meekly. “I am very well aware of that, Herr Lange.”
Herr Lange and Herr Seifert hummed and hawed for at least ten minutes before finally agreeing on the rather unimaginative aliases of Grau and Mark. As far as Leonore could tell, the names had no meaning whatsoever, they were simply the best the two men had come up with in the short time.
Regrettably she hadn’t been asked for her opinion, or she would have helped out with some suitable ideas.