Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

  His father had promised to cooperate in full with the new government. And someone at the headquarters said Max would be protected as the son of an Aryan.

  Ever since they’d returned from the lake, his mother had refused to talk about anything of significance at home. The walls had grown ears, she said, and silence was all the Gestapo deserved.

  So they slipped away this evening, she and Max eating Emmental cheese sandwiches and sipping ersatz coffee at a dingy café in the Judenstrasse, the only restaurant they could find that didn’t have some sort of sign out front stating that Jews were no longer welcome in their establishment. Yet the rest of Austria seemed to be moving along as if nothing had happened, eating and shopping where they pleased as long as the restaurants and shops weren’t owned by Jews. Several of those elite Vienna establishments had closed until further notice.

  Max’s own ancestors, he now knew, were Jewish, but it changed nothing about him. He believed that Jesus Christ was God’s Son, attended Mass faithfully every Sunday, though he wondered why his bishop wasn’t decrying the whole state of affairs. The church leaders, he prayed, wouldn’t begin bowing to a new god.

  His father had said the discrimination against Jews would only get worse; that was why his mother must leave. In Germany, they were shipping Jewish people off to internment camps.

  Soon, Max feared, they would begin sending Austrian Jews away as well.

  His mother’s fingers pressed into the silver rim around her plate instead of her sandwich. “I wish you could come with me.”

  “They would never let me leave the country now.” In December, he would be required to join the Wehrmacht.

  They wouldn’t let him go, but perhaps the guards would allow Luzi to leave with the certificates he’d finally obtained. She could go to France via train with his mother, and he could join them soon, traveling by foot over the mountains if he must. Both Luzi and his mother would be safe from whatever was to come.

  She spooned sugar into her coffee and stirred. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “But you must,” Max said, leaning forward. “And perhaps you could take Luzi Weiss with you. She would be a good companion—”

  “Does she have a visa?”

  “I was able to . . . obtain paperwork for a visa.” He paused. The details of his transaction must remain secret. “I have a marriage certificate for Luzi and me. And a new baptismal certificate for her.”

  “Oh, Max . . .”

  “She doesn’t know, nor has she agreed to marry me, but her father knows. He wants her to leave the country.”

  “She is a lucky girl, Max, for you to love her so much.” Her words seemed to float like the cigarette smoke in this place, a sad reminder that her own husband hadn’t been faithful to his promises.

  “Father only wants you to leave because he loves you as well.”

  “Of course.”

  “When this is over, he will destroy the divorce certificate, and you’ll remarry,” he said, though his words lacked conviction. But hope, no matter how false, was necessary to take the next step. One foot in front of the other until his mother was so far along the path that the motivation to begin her journey was long forgotten.

  “Please take Luzi with you,” he begged.

  “The French consulate only gave me a visa because of your father’s urging. They won’t make an exception for Luzia.”

  “Before you leave tomorrow, you can speak to them about your daughter-in-law.”

  “It’s not that simple, Max.”

  He knew it wasn’t simple. The Nazis, it seemed, thrived on both complication and confusion when it came to ridding their country of the Jewish people. They changed the rules at random, created new processes and then changed them again to confound anyone trying to leave.

  “Have you talked with Luzia?” his mother asked.

  “I’ll speak with her tonight.”

  Max stole over to Luzi’s apartment after darkness fell, dodging the bands of storm troopers that patrolled the streets by ducking behind trash bins and into familiar alleyways.

  In the back of her apartment, the lamp glowed in the library, the window open. He listened for music, but none stole out into the night.

  Cupping his hands around his mouth, his voice hushed, he called her name. If Dr. or Frau Weiss or their neighbor upstairs came to the window, he’d duck back into the shadows, blending again into the night.

  But then he saw Luzi by the curtain, her hair cascading in curls over the shoulders of her white sweater, and his heart quickened.

  “Max?” she whispered through the screen.

  “I need to speak with you.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Please, Luzi.”

  He heard the cry of a baby in the background. “I must bring Marta,” she said. “I fear she has the croup.”

  “The night air will do her good, then.”

  He leaned against a tree, waiting. It had been too long since he’d spoken to Luzi, since the night of their dance, but she lived boldly, beautifully, inside his head, waltzing across the hardwood floor.

  His breath caught when she stepped into the light of a streetlamp. She’d tied her hair back into a ponytail, making her look much younger than her seventeen years. And yet she’d aged in another sense. Perhaps it was her stooped shoulders, an invisible burden weighing her down.

  Marta coughed, and Luzi patted her back, bouncing her gently as Max joined her in the light.

  “Where’s your father?” he asked.

  “Out. I don’t know where he goes.”

  He nodded toward Marta. “Will she let me hold her?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Marta resisted at first, squirming in his arms, but she settled quickly against his chest as her cough subsided. Sometimes the simple things, like the breath of fresh air, were the best cure for an ailment.

  Luzi collapsed onto a bench, her shoulders drooped forward as if the burden was too much to bear.

  Max paced beside her. “You are exhausted.”

  “Marta cries often, and my mother . . .”

  “Is your mother ill?”

  “Ill with worry. She’s taken to her bed.”

  He couldn’t imagine the spirited Frau Weiss confined to her room.

  “I fear she’s lost all hope.”

  “Your father hasn’t been able to get a visa?”

  She shook her head. “Even if we’re able, my mother could never make the journey.”

  Tears filled her eyes, shocking Max. In all the years he’d known Luzi, he realized that he’d never seen her cry.

  “If you went now, your mother could come later.”

  She shook her head. “If we don’t leave as a family, we’re not leaving at all.”

  He glanced around at the trees as if someone might be listening, but he didn’t see anyone. “My mother is traveling to France tomorrow.”

  “Why is she going away?”

  He almost told Luzi the truth about his Jewish ancestry, but he didn’t want to burden her further now. “She’s visiting her sister.”

  “You should go with her, Max.”

  Those were words he didn’t want to hear. Did she want him to leave Vienna without her?

  “If we can obtain a visa, my mother would like you to join her.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Once you’re there, you can send for your entire family. And I will come as soon as I’m able.”

  “The consulate won’t give me a visa.”

  “We have to try.”

  “I can’t leave Mutti or Father in this state. Or Marta.”

  “Your father asked me to get you out, Luzi. If we can’t fight the Nazis, we must flee.”

  “I’m not going,” she insisted.

  “I will speak with him.”

  “Please, Max,” she said. “I don’t want to leave without my family.”

  And with those words, he felt trapped inside a box that kept shrinking. He’d thought Luzi would go if he secured the p
apers.

  “Then we must find a way to get you and your family out together.”

  Marta stirred, reaching her arms out for Luzi. He handed the baby back as she began to cry.

  Luzi nodded toward the upper windows on her building. “I have to feed her before our neighbor complains.”

  When Max leaned forward to kiss Luzi’s cheek, Marta gripped his ear. Her cries stopped for a moment, distracted by her find. Luzi laughed, and Max smiled at the glimpse of joy a child could bring.

  He took the folded paper out of his rucksack and handed it to Luzi. “Take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your baptismal certificate in the Catholic Church.”

  She looked at the paper as if it were powdered with poison. She and her parents may not be practicing Jews, but they were grounded in the heritage of their ancestors’ faith. “I can’t take that.”

  “You might need it, Luzi. And your father wanted you to have it.”

  When Marta began to cry again, Luzi reached for the certificate.

  “Good-bye, Max,” she said before escaping back inside.

  He didn’t like how she’d said her good-bye, so final. As if she thought she might not see him again.

  He stayed in place, underneath the light of the Weiss library. After it turned off, another light flicked on, farther down the apartment. Luzi’s bedroom? She’d yet to draw the curtains, and it took every ounce of strength for him to turn away.

  “I see you’re enjoying the view here as well.”

  Max swiveled at the sound of the voice behind him. It was Ernst Schmid, except the man was wearing a brown shirt and red armband with a black swastika emblazoned on the white circle. He’d gained weight since Max had seen him last, feasting, perhaps, at the table of his commander.

  “What are you doing here?” Max demanded.

  “Same as you,” Ernst said, nodding toward the lit window.

  Max pounded his fist into his hand, wishing that he could knock the smirk off this man’s face. “You’d best keep walking.”

  “And you’d best straighten up your priorities, Max.” Ernst glanced at the window again before looking back at him. “I heard a rumor at headquarters . . . ,” he started. “Something to do with your mother.”

  Max cringed.

  “Heard she was a—” The word he said was so terrible, so vile, that Max didn’t think; he flung out both hands and shoved Ernst back.

  Ernst’s hand dropped to his holster and he pulled out a black pistol, aiming it at Max’s head. “Don’t touch me again.”

  Max backed away, his hands up. If the Gestapo found out one of their cronies shot the son of Herr Dornbach, surely there’d be hell to pay. Then again, if they’d already begun to spread the rumors about his mother, maybe they’d spin his death as the son of a Jewess, another piece of trash the Nazis had heroically cleaned from their city. Or Ernst would say that Max attacked him first.

  He wouldn’t be much help to Luzi dead.

  “Go home,” Ernst said.

  Max stepped into the trees, but he didn’t go far. He waited until the light in the window was extinguished. And Ernst Schmid walked away.

  Tears, they caked Luzi’s cheeks like rosin on the hair of her bow. A violin wouldn’t play without rosin; some people didn’t know that. No music, not a single sound, came from the strings without the rosin to gently coax it out. A violinist, no matter how good, relied on this amber block made from pines.

  She brushed the tears away as she hurried through the mist-laced streets. She couldn’t play her music without rosin, and how—how was she going to live without her sister?

  Marta stirred in her arms and then settled back against her chest. The lingering aroma of sausage and sautéed potatoes, sauerkraut and schnitzel crept out from alleyways between buildings that housed apartments and offices, but besides the smells of Vienna, she and Marta were alone.

  She couldn’t go to France as Max had asked of her, but she must get Marta to a safe place until she and her parents were able to follow.

  A poster was tacked to a newspaper stand—the same poster she’d seen across Vienna in the past weeks. It was the photograph of an adorable baby boy and girl, faces one might see on a box of wheat flakes at the grocer’s, except this piece of Hitler’s propaganda was selling something much different. Underneath the faces of these sweet children were the words Future Criminals.

  As if they’d already indicted Marta and the thousands of other Kinder in their city for the crime of being Jewish.

  An SS officer stopped her near the Schönbrunn Palace, asking why she was out before dawn. She told him her sister was sick. They needed a doctor.

  Marta coughed spectacularly in that moment, as if she were auditioning for a part at the Burgtheater. The officer stepped back, concerned, it seemed, for his own health.

  The truth was, Luzi was the one who was sick. Her own breath had been stolen away.

  The housekeeper at the Dornbach house answered her knock and invited her into the salon. Luzi asked for Frau Dornbach, hoping that both Max and his father were still asleep.

  Marta, with her brown curls and rose-red cheeks and runny nose, fell asleep again in the pleasant warmth. Luzi kissed her forehead and began humming Beethoven’s “7 Ländler,” a song meant to accompany Austrians across the dance floor. The music, she prayed, would carry Marta wherever she went. And she prayed her sister would go far from here.

  Even though it wasn’t yet six, Klara Dornbach was fully dressed in a neat ivory and black traveling suit and matching gloves. When she was a child, Luzi had called her Tante Klara, but she stood beside Klara as an adult this morning. An equal. Klara may be Aryan and an aristocrat in this diverse city, but they had the common bond of music. And of Max.

  Klara glanced back at the hallway before looking at Luzi again. “Why are you here?” she whispered.

  Luzi stood carefully, holding Marta close to her chest so she wouldn’t wake. “I need your help.”

  “I fear that you won’t be able to get a visa to France.”

  “We haven’t been able to get a visa anywhere, Klara.”

  The woman took off her gloves and pulled them through her hands as if she were wringing out excess water. “How is your mother?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid.”

  Klara’s gaze stole to the window, to the first rays that lightened the room. “So many are hurting.”

  “She can no longer care for Marta, and I—I don’t know what is going to happen to our family.”

  “I wish there were something I could do.”

  Luzi hugged her sister closer to her chest, not wanting to let go and yet knowing that she must. “You once had a baby girl, long ago.”

  Surprise blazed through Klara’s eyes, and her lips opened, but no words came out.

  “I was young, but I remember her, Klara. She looked just like Max.”

  Klara reached for an armchair to steady herself. Perhaps Luzi was pressing too hard, but Klara must understand that while her daughter was gone, she could still rescue a child.

  “I cried at her service and for months after,” Luzi said, rubbing her hand softly across Marta’s back. “Whenever I saw a pram on the street, I would mourn your loss.”

  “You should leave—”

  “Please take Marta with you.” Each word shot pain through her chest, but she couldn’t turn back. “You will save her life.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Please, Klara. I fear what will happen to her.”

  “They won’t hurt a baby,” she said, but neither of them believed her words.

  “It will be on our hands—both of our hands—if we do nothing.”

  Klara slid a cigarette out of a carton, her hands trembling as she tried to start the lighter. Finally she gave up and threw both the lighter and cigarette back on the table.

  Luzi stepped toward her. “A long time ago, you said I was like a niece to you.”

  Klara’s eyes filled with tears. “You have alw
ays been like a niece. Your mother like my sister.”

  “Then Marta is like your niece as well, except she can’t fend for herself. We must fight for her.”

  Klara’s gaze dropped to Marta, and Luzi saw the sadness in her eyes. “Your parents want her to leave?”

  “My mother is too sick to care for her.”

  “But your father—”

  “He will be pleased to know she is safe,” Luzi said softly.

  “The agents will never believe me.”

  “I have a baptismal certificate.” Luzi dug into the satchel between diapers and money, a bottle of milk along with an engraved rattle from Luzi’s childhood and a book with her name inside—weak evidence, perhaps, but she hoped they might help Klara in case anyone disputed Marta’s new name.

  She laid the baptismal certificate on the coffee table. The details that Max had forged were impeccable. Luzi only had to alter, very carefully, the date of January 1923 to January 1938. The guards, she prayed, would only scan it, their interest focused on the money in her bag instead of the baby.

  Klara pointed at the top line of the paper. “Your name is on this.”

  “The guards won’t know Luzia is not her birth name. You can tell them that she’s your granddaughter.”

  “But Karl Weiss is not my son,” Klara said, pointing to the father’s name on the certificate.

  “Luzia is the child of your daughter, not your son. Your daughter married a Weiss.”

  “The guards will never believe me—”

  “With enough money, they’ll believe almost anything.”

  Klara knitted her fingers together and rocked up on her toes. “What if they won’t let me through?”

  “Then you bring her back to me tomorrow and board the next train headed to Paris alone.”

  Klara walked to the window and fingered the curtains. “I will consider it.”

  “We don’t have long to consider, Klara.”

  “Wait here,” the older woman said.

  Marta began to stir, and Luzi gently brushed her hand over her curls. “I will come for you,” she whispered. “If only you will wait for me.”

  She did this because Marta needed food and milk and a safe place to rest at night. She did this because she loved her baby sister more than anyone else in the world.