109
Safe house
Potsdam, Germany
BAUER AND VON DER Haas loaded the stolen weapons and armaments into their truck, which had been repainted as a vegetable delivery vehicle, and drove through the darkness to a safe house in the city of Potsdam outside Berlin.
The building’s owner, a Dutchman and longtime friend of Erich’s family, had a vacant garden flat that they were allowed to use.
It was also the address that they both used for mail, and Bauer gathered three letters that his wife had written him since he’d last been here. Von der Haas had one.
Bauer sat in the quaint bedroom and eagerly devoured the correspondence, hanging on every word of Amalie’s beautiful penmanship, and staring with love and sheer wonder at the black-and-white photos she’d enclosed.
His beautiful daughter Maxine, the little girl he’d called Mouse, was eighteen—eighteen!
—and in her last year of high school in Downers Grove.
There was one photo of his wife and children together, showing Amalie, Maxine, and Ridley (seventeen, and towering over both of the others!) standing outside a movie theater called the Tivoli. Bauer chose that photo to tuck inside the pocket of his shirt, as near as possible to his heart.
He heard a noise in the kitchen, a violent banging sound. When he walked in, Erich had his head in his hands, leaning against a wall.
“What?” Bauer asked. He looked at the letter on the kitchen counter, which was written in Dutch.
Von der Haas sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “The Nazis emptied out the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam this summer,” he said.
“Have you heard from your brother or your parents?”
Von der Haas shook his head no. Ever since Lars and the rest of the family had been detained in the ghetto, their only means of communication had been via a non-Jewish friend in Amsterdam who passed correspondence back and forth on the rare occasions he was allowed in the Jewish Quarter on business.
It was clunky and unreliable but the best they could do.
“Every Jew was sent to a transit camp in Westerbork,” said von der Haas. “From there, nobody knows. You know what the Nazis told them.”
Bauer nodded. “Right. ‘Resettlement in the east.’ Forced labor. We don’t know for certain that it’s false, Erich. The death-camp chatter might just be rumors.”
The intelligence among the Nazi resistance was spotty.
Attempts to set up reliable communication between countries was difficult, understandably, given the need of most resistance groups to remain underground and often nomadic.
Von der Haas had received intelligence that the “resettlement” of the Jews was a ruse for a systematic program of extermination.
He’d even written a letter to his brother warning him of that possibility.
But who knew if that rumor was true? And who knew if Lars ever received that letter?
“My mother and her asthma?” von der Haas said. “They wouldn’t send her to a labor camp. My father’s not in the greatest shape, either.”
“But your brother is healthy,” said Bauer. “And his wife. And their daughter.”
Von der Haas blew out a sigh. “God, Dahlia is only, what, eleven years old?”
“Hey, listen, partner.” Bauer put his hand on von der Haas’s shoulder. “Let’s hope for the best and focus on what we can control. We just got a nice haul of weapons and explosives. Let’s hit ’em where it hurts. Get some sleep tonight, and tomorrow—”
“Forget sleep,” said von der Haas. “Let’s start right now.”