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“Very good,” the commander said through his microphone, his voice echoing. “We are looking for individuals with particular skills. If you have experience in woodsmithing, tailoring, or goldsmithing, raise your hand.”

A smattering of hands went up. SS guards walked down each column, questioning those who raised their hands. Most of those people were then told to step out of their lines, placing them in the middle of the two columns.

As the SS guards worked their way down the line, Lars debated whether he should raise his hand. He did, in fact, have considerable experience in woodwork. After being forced to resign his position as a physics professor at the University of Amsterdam in 1941, he’d worked as a carpenter, principally building furniture. Yet he was reluctant to set himself apart from the rest of his family. Would he be sent to a different labor camp? Nothing was more important than staying together as a family.

He looked across at Annika. Her brow furrowed as she nodded at him. Why did she think he should raise his hand? Perhaps, Lars reasoned, having a unique skill would grant him an elevated status with the Nazis. And perhaps that heightened status would allow him more leverage in keeping his family together.

“Raise your hand, boy,” his father whispered to him.

Lars raised his hand.

An SS guard soon reached him. “What is your trade?” the guard asked in Dutch.

“Woodsmithing,” Lars answered in German. “I build furniture.”

“You speak German.”

“I grew up in Munich. I moved to Amsterdam for university and stayed there.”

The guard, far younger than Lars, probably no more than twenty, nodded. “Step out of the line,” he said before moving on.

Lars complied. He stood perfectly still between the two columns, but his eyes moved to his wife’s. Annika gave him a tight smile. Had he made the right decision?

Across from Lars, an SS guard approached a small woman with dark hair. “I am a seamstress, sir,” she said in Dutch. “I can tailor clothes.”

“All right, step out of line.”

The woman gestured to her right, to her son, whose hand she was holding. “And my son, too,” she said. “We must stay together.”

“You have a son?” The guard shook his head. “Never mind. Get back in the line.” The woman didn’t understand, pausing, before the guard barked at her. “Back in line!”

“Very good,” said the commander when the questioning of all prisoners was completed, by which time over a dozen Jewish detainees had been separated out. “As I said, you will be put to work. Some of you may remain in this camp. Some of you may be transferred to other camps temporarily. But be assured, we will not separate mothers from children. And we will do our best to keep entire families together.

“First, we must address hygiene,” the commander continued. “Some of the labor camps have been infiltrated with lice and typhus. So each of you will now be provided a hot shower. And your hair will be cut short. While you are showering, we will disinfect your clothes. You may leave your baggage here. It will be returned to you after your baths.” The commander turned to one of the guards. “Oberscharführer Michel?”

The Oberscharführer waved the column of men forward. “Follow me!”

Lars reached out his hand. His father took it. “I will see you soon, Papa,” he managed to say, his voice breaking. He watched his father march with over a thousand men through an arched gate bearing the sign SONDERKOMMANDO.

Then it was time for the column of women and children, ranging in age from their eighties to merely newborn. Elderly women hobbled forward. Mothers held the hands of their children or carried their newborns or infants in their arms. The children looked about with wonder.

With tears in his eyes and a dull ache in his stomach, Lars von der Haas blew kisses to his wife, to his daughter, to his mother, as they looked back at him before disappearing beyond the arched gate.

107

Fall 1943

Berchtesgaden, the Berghof

Bavarian Alps

AT HIS MOUNTAINSIDE COMPOUND in Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler leaned over a table full of battle maps, surrounded by his generals and field marshals in their gray uniforms. He stared at the maps, with their different colors and symbols to signify the advance and retreat of various columns of troops, with disbelief. The tide had turned against the Nazis.

It had been a tactical mistake to commit three million soldiers to the Russian front. Nazi forces had bogged down and stagnated during the brutal Russian winter.

In Italy, Axis ally Mussolini, whom Hitler had revered as an inspirational leader, was deposed and arrested.

They’d lost the Battle of Britain. And the Allies had initiated a counteroffensive, American and British forces intensifying bombing raids that pummeled German cities. Half the factories in Hamburg had been destroyed, and forty thousand people died.