Trudel Hergesell

Part III opens with Trudel, now married to Karl Hergesell and five months pregnant, on the train from Erkner into Berlin. Parting from Karl at Alexanderplatz to deliver sewing, she climbs a staircase behind a man she recognises by his bearing alone: Otto Quangel, her dead fiancé Ottochen's father, once told of her banned resistance cell. She watches him leave a postcard on a windowsill and reads its opening line — 'HAVE YOU STILL NOT UNDERSTOOD THAT THE FÜHRER WAS LYING TO YOU' — before catching up outside. Quangel is guarded but warm, unbothered by her marriage, and reminds her Anna still grieves for Ottochen daily. Trudel warns him of the risk he runs; he says only that he acts with Anna's knowledge, tells her to put the card back and never mention it to Karl, then vanishes. Shaken, she replaces the card, nearly faints during her fitting, and later falls asleep at the station waiting for Karl.

Part III begins by rejoining a discarded thread and turning it into a threat: a face from the Quangels' past resurfaces exactly where discovery is likeliest. Trudel's fear for her unborn child makes the postcards' danger newly visceral, after chapters spent inside the professional cruelty of Borkhausen and Escherich.