Every handwritten Letter tells a story. The story isn’t simply what is written, but how it is written, haphazardly or carefully composed, in pencil or in pen. The story of a letter is imbued in the paper it is written on: fine stationary or a scrap of something. The story of a letter is in the crease of the fold, the stamp on the envelope, the postmark on the stamp.

The letters my grandmother pressed into my hands were fragile, the paper gone yellow with age. They were written by my grandmother’s aunt, Mildred Harnack—your great-great-aunt, my grandmother told me. I was sixteen, entranced by my great-great-aunt’s handwriting, as variable as the weather. Languid in one letter, a storm of cursive in another, the loop of the P in Nazi Party cramped, the cross of the t in Hitler emphatic, as if she wished to excise him from her letter and her life in a single, bold stroke. A hasty smear of something—ink? coffee? A Swiss postmark—why?

Some of the letters she signed Mildred. Some she signed M. This much I knew at sixteen: Mildred’s letters held mysteries.

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Mildred Harnack was a young American graduate student studying for a PhD in Berlin. Alarmed, she began recruiting working-class Germans into an Underground Resistance group that would grow in fits and starts over the course of the decade, intersecting with three other Berlin-based underground resistance networks. She helped Jews escape Germany, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler’s regime and called for revolution. During the Second World War she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. In the fall of 1942, the Gestapo pounced, tracking her down in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. At Gestapo headquarters in Berlin she was imprisoned, interrogated, tortured. On February 16, 1943, she was led in shackles to a guillotine at Plötzensee Prison, and on Hitler’s direct order my great-great-aunt was beheaded.

I have devoted years to researching Mildred’s vibrant life and brutal death. Time and again I return to her letters. They are portals into her mind and heart, but they still hold mysteries. I study them for the stories they tell.

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