In the Garden of Beasts

jail. The next morning he was permitted to confront his denouncers face-to-face. He accused them ofhaving lied. Now, unprotected by the veil of anonymity, the witnesses wavered. “The witnesses themselves appeared to be confused and not sure of their ground,” Wollstein recalled in his affidavit.
    Meanwhile, the U.S. consul in Breslau reported the arrest to the consulate in Berlin. Vice Consul Raymond Geist in turn complained to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels and requested a full report on Wollstein’s arrest. That evening, Diels telephoned and told Geist that on his orders Wollstein would be released.
    Back in Breslau, the two Gestapo men ordered Wollstein to sign a statement declaring that he would never “be an enemy to the German State.” The document included a magnanimous offer: that if he ever felt his safety endangered, he could report for arrest under protective custody.
    He was released.
    MARTHA ASSIGNED HERSELF the task of trimming the family tree, an enormous fir placed in the ballroom on the second floor of the house. She enlisted the help of Boris, Bill, butler Fritz, the family chauffeur, and various friends who stopped by to help. She resolved to have a tree that was entirely white and silver and so bought silver balls, silver tinsel, a large silver star, and white candles, eschewing electric lights for the more traditional and infinitely more lethal approach. “In those days,” she wrote, “it was heresy to think of electric lights for a tree.” She and her helpers kept pails of water nearby.
    Her father, she wrote, was “bored with all this foolishness” and avoided the project, as did her mother, who was busy with myriad other holiday preparations. Bill was helpful to a point but had a tendency to drift away in search of more engaging pursuits. The project took two days and two evenings.
    Martha found it funny that Boris was willing to help, given that he claimed not to believe in the existence of God. She smiled as she watched him at work atop a stepladder dutifully helping her trim a symbol of the foremost holy day of the Christian faith.
    “My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?”
    He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ,
liebes Kind
,”he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful. What would you like?” He sat at the apex of the ladder. “Do you want me to put my white orchids on top? Or would you prefer a handsome red star?”
    She insisted on white.
    He protested. “But red
is
a more beautiful color than white, darling.”
    Despite the tree and Boris and the overall cheer of the season, Martha felt that a fundamental element was absent from her life in Berlin. She missed her friends—Sandburg and Wilder and her colleagues at the
Tribune
—and her comfortable house in Hyde Park. By now her friends and neighbors would be gathering for cozy parties, caroling sessions, and mulled wine.
    On Thursday, December 14, she wrote a long letter to Wilder. She felt keenly the withering of her connection to him. Just knowing him gave her a sense of credibility, as if by refraction she too possessed literary cachet. But she had sent him a short story of hers, and he had said nothing. “Have you lost even your literary interest in me or shall I say your interest in the literary me (what there is left of it, if there was anything to begin with). And your trip to Germany. Has it been definitely passed up. Gosh, you have certainly given me the slip, to lapse back into Berlin slang for a moment!”
    She had done little other writing, she told him, though she had found a certain satisfaction in talking and writing about books, thanks to her new friendship with Arvid and Mildred Harnack. Together, she told Wilder, “we have concluded we are the only people in Berlin genuinely interested in writers.” Mildred and she had begun their book column. “She is tall and beautiful with a heavy burden of honey colored hair—dark honey in some lights.… Very poor and real and fine and not much in favor though the family is old and respected. An oasis really to me mad with thirst.”
    She alluded to her father’s sense that a conspiracy was mounting against him from within the State Department. “Mazes of hate and intrigue in our Embassy have as yet failed to trap us,” she wrote.
    Hatreds of a more personal kind had touched her as well. In America her secret marriage