Between Christmas and New Year’s, after enervating weeks of waiting, the US visas finally came through. There followed on January 10 the “safe conduct” passes to get them to the Spanish border, and finally, most critically, on February 6, the French exit visas. Shortly after Christian’s birth in Nice in 1934, Kurt and Helen had had the good sense to appear with their son at the hôtel de ville to have him registered as a French citizen. Their son’s status had likely helped them secure French identity documents in 1938; years later his mother theorized that only a seven-year-old French-born boy could induce the Vichy bureaucracy to take mercy on all three of them. “The idea was that a French child needs his parents, and we declared our loyalty to France through him,” Helen said. “So, in a sense, our son may have saved our lives.”

  Several times over these weeks the word nervös appears in Kurt’s diary. Shortly before their departure, he wired Fry what was left in his French bank account—50,000 francs, a little more than $1,000. The ERC wasn’t accustomed to its desperate clients fronting the cost of their passage. Fry responded with thanks, “particularly at a time when we must dedicate our support to so many others in need.”

  The Wolffs left Nice early on February 9 to allow for a layover in Marseille, where Fry saw them off at the station for their onward trip to Toulouse. The next day they reached the border at Confranc. As soon as the train crossed into Spain, they began to see roofless buildings and charred fields, the aftermath of the civil war. First a late-winter storm, then several days’ delay before they could find seats between Madrid and Lisbon, turned their railroad journey into a weeklong ordeal.

  From Madrid, Helen sent a postcard, depicting a Diego Velázquez painting in the Prado, to “Señorita Maria Wolff” back in Munich. The card turned up bearing the censor’s stamps of two fascist regimes, with the mark of the Spanish authorities defacing Velázquez’s rendering of the body of the crucified Christ. Vague though the text on the back was, the card and postmark made clear to Maria that her father and stepmother had reached neutral Spain. Next stop Lisbon.

  Of all the advantages to cascade my way—white, male, goy, firstborn, only son, birthright American, upper-middle-class upbringing, Ivy League legatee—few served me better than the grace from which so many good things followed: that, seventeen years before my birth, my grandfather found a place on Varian Fry’s list.

  Every ship leaving Europe then was an ark, Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his novel The Night in Lisbon, with the Americas a remote, beckoning Ararat.

  The flood waters were rising higher by the day. . . . The coast of Portugal had become the last hope of the fugitives to whom justice, freedom, and tolerance meant more than home and livelihood. This was the gate to America. If you couldn’t reach it, you were lost, condemned to bleed away in a jungle of consulates, police stations, and government offices, where visas were refused and work and residence permits unattainable, a jungle of internment camps, bureaucratic red tape, loneliness, homesickness, and withering, universal indifference.

  Sometimes that jungle concealed a snare. It might take the form of fedora-wearing agents of the Gestapo, known to kidnap their marks off the streets of the Portuguese capital. Or it might be a more prosaic glitch: Kurt and Helen discovered that their ship’s cabin—the one for which Kurt had wired those 50,000 francs—hadn’t been booked. Further, the immigrant aid group working with the ERC counted only $625 in Kurt’s name on account, far less than the cost of passage for three. A contracted ship wasn’t due to sail for several months, and by then their visas would be invalid. Only with a flurry of cables to friends was Kurt able to borrow the necessary $1,000 more. He somehow found berths on a Portuguese ship called the Serpa Pinto. Tickets geholt bei Carlos, reads his diary for March 13—“fetched tickets from Carlos.” For a cabin he had coughed up an extortionate $1,594, or more than $28,000 in latter-day dollars.

  The Serpa Pinto left Lisbon on March 15, 1941, with 637 other passengers, well over capacity. Christian suffered from whooping cough, so his parents ordered him to keep his mouth shut, hurried him up the gangplank, and kept him in their cabin until the ship was well out to sea. For the duration of the trip the crew lit up the funnel and masts to signal neutrality and warn off U-boats menacing the North Atlantic.

  Allowing for a three-day stopover in Bermuda, the crossing took two weeks. The Serpa Pinto docked at Stapleton, Staten Island, on March 31. Disembarked 10 o’clock, Kurt noted in his diary. Glorious weather.

  Decades later one of Helen’s authors, Umberto Eco, would liken the Wolffs’ flight to “a novel, with a Casablanca-like ending.” But a screenwriter simply writes things and so they will be. Here their fates had hung on the interventions of a host of earthly angels: Wladimir d’Ormesson, the French diplomat. The Parisian neighbor and child escort No. 1, Madame Bouty. Jean Giraudoux, playwright and government minister. Helen’s fellow internee at Gurs, Anne-Marie Uhde. Countess Colloredo-Mansfeld. Baron Kurd von Hardt. The Louvre employee and child escort No. 2, Tina Vinès. Professor Albert Fuchs. Varian Fry. Thea Dispeker—a woman who would eventually play an existential role in my own life—as well as her friend Robert Weinberg, who didn’t know Kurt and Helen from Adam or Eve. “Carlos.”

  Some of these people already counted the Wolffs as friends. Most did not. It took a daisy chain of kindnesses and gallantries, some performed in blind faith and many at great risk, to land them in New York.

  Among the figures Varian Fry saved was the German writer Anna Seghers, who in 1941 fled through Lisbon with her husband and their two children. Soon after arriving in Mexico, Seghers wrote Transit, a novel inspired by her weeks in Marseille as an émigré-­in-waiting. Her story, spun around a love triangle and a case of mistaken identity, is a tragic portrait of the apatrides and the French port into which they have been herded. When not condemned to the waiting rooms of the city’s consulates, refugees pass time in its cafés and pizzerias, watching “people being disgorged by the revolving door,” Seghers writes, “as if it were a mill that was grinding them, body and soul, dozens of times daily.”

  The Berlin International Film Festival is premiering German director Christian Petzold’s adaptation of Transit, which turns out to be faithful to the novel’s fleeting alliances and easy betrayals. The movie holds in almost perfect balance boredom and fear, emotions rarely treated in tandem. But Petzold retrofits the story for today’s moment, overlaying Seghers’s wartime characters and plot on a latter-day Marseille. There’s not a smartphone or computer terminal to be seen, and passports and visas come thoroughly analog—but to learn when a consular official will finally see them, refugees wasting away in the lobby, wearing forties-style seersucker suits and big hats and clutching period valises, keep an eye on one of those take-a-number LED displays you’d find hung on the wall of a modern bank or travel bureau. People seize up at the sound of twenty-first-century sirens or the sight of police in modern riot gear, knowing that the improperly papered will be dragged away or, to maintain some control over their fate, take their own lives.

  In Transit, the ostensible space to be transited is the linear gap between besieged France and the Americas to which everyone is desperate to flee. But it’s the diminished y-axis transit space, between past and present, that the director highlights with his adaptation. Petzold has telescoped the Marseille of then and now into a single look, buffeting it with a mistral of timelessness, to insist on comparisons across the years. For every frustrated visa applicant in wartime Marseille we’re forced to consider an asylum seeker turned away today. Petzold doesn’t toggle between time periods. He considers the moment too urgent for that. Instead, he collapses them.

  An S-Bahn and a bus take me to the villa where, one morning in January 1941, fifteen officials of the Third Reich decided how to carry out the Final Solution. In a first-floor room overlooking the Wannsee, on the spot where those Nazis enjoyed coffee and rolls, curators have laid out in a glass case the cold-blooded minutes of that meeting.

  Here the Nazis discussed the “problem” of “the Mischlinge.” By leaving intact the Nuremberg Law that exempted Germans with one grandparent of Jewish descent from the worst consequences, they confirmed at least for the moment that my father’s life would be spared. Here too they listened as the SS-­Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich spoke of “our new prospects in the east,” a nod to the barren landscapes my father would capture in sepia photographs he sent home from the steppe. Poland, Ukraine, and the western reaches of the Soviet Union featured that “menacing monotony” of Sebastian Haffner’s description, a vastness that now seemed to promise impunity.

  By the end of the following year, many Germans would have at least a sense of what had been decided at the Wannsee Conference. Home on leave, soldiers talked. “Event reports” (Ereignismeldungen) sent back to Berlin by Waffen-SS “task forces” (Einsatzgruppen) filtered down to mid-level bureaucrats. It’s impossible to seize, transfer, and exterminate millions of people, and expropriate and dispose of their homes and belongings, without engaging substantial numbers of civilians—railway clerks, real-estate agents, middlemen.

  When Goebbels spoke of the Jews during a February 1943 speech in which he called on Germans to commit to “total war,” the propaganda minister went a couple of syllables into the word “extermination” (Ausrottung) before catching himself and pledging simply their “exclusion” (Ausschaltung). But rather than misleading his audience, Goebbels was calculatedly implicating everyone who heard him that day. Of all the regime’s means of social control, this may have been the most insidious: by the middle of the war the Nazi leadership had let the German people in on just enough to make sure they knew that to lose—to submit to victor’s justice—would lead to a fate so grave that under no circumstances would they be able to surrender. Civilians shared the open secret that they knew enough, in the words of historian David Bankier, “to know that it was better not to know more.” The reluctance of so many of today’s Germans to court pity for their ancestors’ suffering, to invoke the Allied bombings and postwar expulsions, is a kind of tacit acknowledgment of how many knew of the Nazi atrocities at the time. To forgo sympathy was a consequence of Germany’s shame.

  I had come out to the Wannsee believing that only members of Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) units and the Waffen-SS carried out the Final Solution where my father served. And then a panel in one of the villa’s downstairs exhibition rooms stopped me cold.

  The Wehrmacht also participated directly in the persecution and murder of Soviet Jews. The military administration was behind the listing and compulsory identification of Jews and the establishment of ghettos. In addition, it decided on the fate of prisoners of war and was frequently responsible for assigning Jews as forced laborers. Wehrmacht units frequently provided logistical and administrative support for the mass murder and also carried out their own shootings, albeit not on the same scale as the murder squads of the SS and police.

  It turns out that in 1995—unbeknownst to me, and likely also to my by-then thoroughly Americanized father­—­Germans had finally been forced to confront a long-standing myth: that only units of the SS and the Order Police committed Nazi atrocities. This reckoning came with the Wehrmachtsausstellung (Wehrmacht exhibition), an installation staged by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which featured photographs and letters sent home from the front that implicated ordinary soldiers in abuses much graver and more extensive than popular memory let on. The exhibit and its message did not go down well. In Munich, five thousand Germans marched with signs like DEUTSCHE SOLDATEN, HELDEN TATEN (GERMAN SOLDIERS, HEROIC DEEDS). But twice as many counterdemonstrators turned out, and the Wehr­macht exhibition marked the beginning of the slow but steady process of modern Germany fusing its conception of World War II with its conception of the Holocaust.

  At the time of the Germans’ invasion of the Soviet Union, my father was a grunt, barely twenty-one. He drove a truck, delivering maps and photographs, as he told me and his letters home attest. He was in some oblivious limbo, I’d long wanted to reassure myself, neither directly involved in atrocities in the east nor party to the dawning awareness of them back home. But he had been in Ukraine, an occupying soldier taking and following orders. What those orders might have included, I now knew.

  There’s a German word, Lebenslüge, that means “life-giving lie.” It refers to the self-deception that permits one to carry on under the shroud of some grave implication. I will never be able to inventory all that my father knew or when he knew it or to measure the full weight of the war on his conscience. He told me only up to a point, at least the point to which I asked. But Günter Grass addressed this subject in his 2006 memoir, and I wonder whether Grass’s words capture how my father felt. “The ignorance I claim could not blind me to the fact that I had been conscripted into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people,” Grass wrote. “Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

  As a family we go to the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s old theater along the Spree, for a stage adaptation of The Tin Drum, the Grass novel that Kurt and Helen acquired in translation for Pantheon Books in 1959. For nearly two hours a single actor will stand before us as Oskar Matzerath, the enfant terrible of German literature­—­a boy born in 1924 who vows on his third birthday to stop growing, and instead shrieks and drums when his elders prefer silence.

  The twenty-seven-euro ticket would have been worth it if we had seen no more than the production’s first thirty seconds. No curtain went up. For the moment, no house lights went down either. The actor playing Oskar simply took several steps out from the wings. Then, lit by a gradually intensifying spotlight, he glared at us. The audience continued to babble. Oskar continued to glare. Only slowly did we begin to quiet ourselves and, finally, fall silent.

  In the space of those moments, subjected to that look of indictment, I could feel the full force of an inquisition, as if we had been transported back to the sixties and everyone in that theater now had a younger generation to answer to.

  In a few hours I would walk out on the riverside promenade and resume my role as a son posing questions. But for now a perpetual three-year-old had turned the tables, making elders of us all, as if to ask, What had we known? When had we known it?

  Six

  Into a Dark Room

  Niko, 1939 to 1941

  World War II broke out—Hitler Angriff gegen Polen, in the words of Kurt’s diary—just as my father began his final year of boarding school. After graduation in August 1940, Niko was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Reich Labor Service, which groomed young men for the military. He reported to Tannheim in Austria’s Tyrol, where he’s pictured here, left, at work on a sports complex.

  Conscripts were issued a visored felt cap with a crease down the middle—what they called “an ass with a handle.” They alternated chores like painting and roadwork with duty at the rifle range. They sang the Labor Service anthem (“Brown like the earth, our uniform”) and sat through lectures on the glory of the Reich. They learned to handle a spade as if it were a weapon, polishing it and shouldering it in turn.

  In October 1940, having been formally drafted, my father reported to an induction center in Bavaria, then returned to Austria for basic training—three months of infantry, another three of driving instruction. When his mother insisted he take along a suitcase, Niko tried to explain to her, as he once told me, “the quality of linen there isn’t what you’re accustomed to.” Poor vision in his left eye spared him flight duty and landed him instead in the motor pool. As a driver and mechanic in the Luftwaffe, he wore a blue uniform graced with an embroidered sleeve patch—two wings sprouting from an automobile radiator.

  Every week or two Niko wrote his mother back in Munich. His letters are marbled with small-bore longings and requests—for chocolate, cigarettes, cash, boot insoles, a raincoat, his beloved Leica, and the donuts of Kuni, the family cook, as well as his violin and (for he loved jazz too) an alto sax on loan from his uncle Hanne. The war is well underway, but like the German people at large he seems oblivious that it might come home. Just turned nineteen, he sounds like a kid sent off to summer camp, regretting what he forgot to pack.

  November 10, 1940: “I’m made to feel as if I’ve never driven before. We have at our disposal a Mercedes passenger car and an extraordinary truck. It has seven gears, three driven axles, and goes almost anywhere off-road. That would be something for Auntie Joe [his sister], who’s too lazy to shift three gears.”

  January 26, 1941: “I’ve finished my driving tests. I’m now in possession of licenses one, two, and three. Once it gets a bit warmer we’ll go on a rally, i.e., we leave base in a car with instructions to hit certain checkpoints. . . . At each checkpoint they’ll monkey with our car, introducing some mechanical flaw. It’s our job to troubleshoot quickly and continue on. Best time over the course is the winner.”

  February 2: “Consider the disaster I’ve been spared: The other day it was announced that privates such-and-so, four men all told, are being transferred tomorrow. Sent off to become parachutists. Those poor souls . . .”

  February 16: “Mid-March we finish our training. On the fifth and sixth we go as a convoy to Graz. Over the Packsattel and Bruck an der Mur. That should be fun. Everybody gets a turn driving a passenger car, a truck, and a motorcycle. Each about fifty or sixty kilometers.”

  That trip was cut short when a soldier died of head injuries after being thrown from his motorcycle while negotiating a curve. The entire unit traveled to his Tyrolean hometown for the funeral. The young man, twenty-one, had been expected to take over the family flour mill.