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singular physique. One day he would stroll by his old tennis club, where Nazi party members now played; another day he would get a haircut at a barber shop that was known to be a favorite hunting ground for S.S. patrols looking for “illegal” Jews. His worst transgression occurred when, sauntering into the Heidelberger Platz, he chanced upon an old family friend, Hannes Kupper, a stage manager in civilian life who was now in the army and had come to Berlin to arrange for shows for the troops. Kupper gasped when he saw him. “My God,” he whispered, “what are you doing in Berlin? I figured you’d either been killed or made it to England.”
    â€œOh, no. I’m quite okay,” Hans replied. “I’m living with Marushka.”
    Kupper cut him off. “For God’s sake, man, don’t tell me where you live.” The point did not need elaboration; as long as Kupper didn’t have the information, no one could force it from him.
    It had been a stupid indiscretion that not only compromised Kupper but jeopardized Hans and the woman who was hiding him. For a while he was too ashamed to tell her what had happened, but when his conscience forced it from him, she became enraged and demanded that he never again go out without her.
    Given his dependent circumstances, it was fortunate for Hirschel that he was accustomed to strong women. He had been raised by a dominating mother; his benefactress, the Countess Maria von Maltzan, was even more overpowering. The descendant of an old, noble Swedish family that had migrated to north Germany centuries before, Maria von Maltzan—Marushka to Hans—was a striking woman whom men found irresistible. “Emancipation” was not a word that would have occurred to her; she had never recognized the supposed inferiority of women, and she was as strong as many men her size and a good deal more active. She was trained in judo, rode horses like a jockey and could swim for miles. She had slim hips and walked with a man’s gait, but she was also feminine enough to enjoy wearing dresses that showed off her well shaped legs.
    She had met Hirschel in 1939 at a soirée given by the proprietress of a boarding school that she had once attended, and from whom Hans had once taken English lessons. She was thirty, Hans was thirty-nine. She was more quick-witted, but he had greater experience and knowledge, and the fact that he was Jewish appealed to her immensely. The wide streak of daring in her complemented her loathing of the Nazis, so that in associating with a Jew in direct violation of the Nazis’ racial laws she was demonstrating her defiance.
    Whatever symbolic value the relationship had for them soon became unimportant; they fell quickly and genuinely in love. But although they were lovers, they didn’t live together—partly out of prudence, partly out of deference to Hans’s mother who was terrified at the prospect of her son’s liaison with an “Aryan” woman. If discovered, it would cause his imprisonment.
    By February 1942, however, so many of the Hirschels’ friends had been deported that neither prudence nor deference was appropriate. Hans moved into Marushka’s flat under a subterfuge concocted by Marushka. He gave a “suicide” note to his mother that said he couldn’t stand what was happening, that he could not support himself and was a burden to her. “If you are alone, perhaps it will be easier,” the note concluded.
    A few days after Hans went into hiding Frau Hirschel wrote the police that Hans had been missing for several days, and enclosed his note. She asked them to drag the Wannsee, a lake within the city in which many Jews had drowned themselves. As Marushka had reckoned, the police had no interest in searching for the body of a missing Jew, and from then on he was listed as dead.
    Marushka’s flat, on the Detmolder Strasse in Wilmersdorf, had once been a store.