Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

  She did this because Hitler and his men had given her no other choice.

  CHAPTER 24

  Ella clings to my hand as we board the jet. Or perhaps I’m clinging to her, ready to embark on my very first flight, an entire box of Dramamine stored in my carry-on and my cell phone upgraded to an international plan so I can call my sister or Charlotte whenever I’d like.

  Charlotte kissed my cheek an hour ago, after she and Brie escorted me to the security line. “Courage, dear heart,” she said, quoting Aslan, and I saw the pride in her eyes. In two weeks, they both promised to be back at the Columbus airport, waiting for me.

  Ella and I loaded up on extra snacks, just in case, and after we find our seats on the plane, she gazes out the window, waiting for the other passengers to board. “Do you think we’ll be able to see the ocean?”

  “I’m certain of it, and I read something about seeing icebergs near Greenland too.”

  “I’m not going to sleep a wink,” she says with all the confidence of a seven-year-old who knows exactly what she thinks.

  “I hope you’ll sleep some. If not, you’ll be too tired to play with your dad when we land.”

  “I’m never too tired to play with him.”

  “I’m sure he’s never too tired to play with you either.”

  She fidgets in her seat. “How long do we have to sit?”

  “Awhile, but I brought something for us to read.” I reach into my handbag as if it’s a magician’s hat and pull out three books. Ella picks Bloom, a story about an ordinary subject living in a kingdom of glass, a girl named Genevieve who must save everyone in her land.

  As the airplane backs away from the gate, Ella reaches for my hand, and I gladly hold it, checking both of our seat belts before we begin rolling down the runway and then lift off into the air. As we climb higher, the city that confounds me seems so small, minuscule. We have a clear view of the entire place instead of trying to maneuver through all the confusion on the ground.

  Once we’re above the clouds, Ella removes her nose from the window, and I release her hand. Together we begin to read about Genevieve’s quest in this fairy-tale world.

  “They will never believe that an ordinary girl could do such an extraordinary thing,” Genevieve worried. “What would I tell them?”

  “Tell them there is no such thing as an ordinary girl,” said Bloom.

  “See, you can read without your socks,” Ella says when we finish the story, as if I’ve accomplished a feat.

  “I guess I can.”

  She gives a firm nod of affirmation and picks up another book, this one about a treasure hunt.

  “If you could hide a treasure, where would you hide it?” I ask.

  “Someplace no one would ever find it.”

  “A wise choice.”

  “Like in my shoes.”

  I glance down at the sparkly silver and teal shoes on her feet, Velcro strapping them together instead of laces. “Interesting . . .”

  “My mom said that you can tell a lot about a girl by her shoes.”

  “I believe you must have had the smartest mom in the world.”

  “Smart and pretty,” she says before glancing over at me. “Was your mom smart and pretty?”

  “I don’t remember much about her.”

  Ella reaches for my hand, and I hold it, both of us lost for a moment in our own thoughts. My mother seems pretty enough, I think, on Facebook. I decide that she must be smart, too. Extraordinary.

  “None of us are ordinary girls,” I say.

  Ella and I read about the grand treasure hunt, a brain candy kind of book, and as she drifts off to sleep, I realize that I’ve forgotten to take my Dramamine. But after our layover in New York, I fall asleep just fine, waking again on Friday morning when the rays from a Parisian sun flood through the window.

  Uniformed French agents check our bags and passports on the ground before I grab a pastry for Ella and a latte for me. Two hours later, Ella reaches for my hand one more time as our plane descends over Austria, this time landing in Salzburg.

  The fortress of salt.

  Josh beams when he sees his daughter. He swings her in his arms, and then he reaches out toward me.

  My mouth drops open. “You’re not going to try and swing me . . .”

  He laughs. “I can if you’d like.”

  “No, thank you.”

  He takes my carry-on bag instead.

  Ella chatters about our flight and the Sprite that I let her drink and all the books we read. When she races forward to collect her suitcase from the belt, Josh turns to me again, the intensity in his brown eyes tempered into a welcoming gaze.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Callie.”

  “Me too.”

  “Thank you for bringing her.”

  “She’s a joy,” I say, and he grins at my words.

  As a taxi drives us to Salzburg Hauptbahnhof, I feel as if I’ve entered another world with the cathedrals and abbey and the faint strains of music that have lingered here for hundreds of years. My own fairy-tale kingdom.

  While we wait for the next train to Hallstatt, my cell phone rings.

  “It’s an Idaho number,” I tell Josh, taking a sip of my second latte.

  “You’d better take it.”

  I walk toward a quieter space, away from the crowds, before I answer Liberty’s call.

  “I’ve spoken with my brother,” she says. “Neither of us knew about this list.”

  An announcement blasts overhead in German, but Liberty doesn’t acknowledge it.

  “Did your father ever speak to him about Annika Knopf or the Stadlers?” I ask.

  “In the years before my father’s death, he spoke often to both of us about his memories in Austria, but my brother doesn’t remember him mentioning anyone named Annika.”

  “What sort of things did your father tell you?”

  “He liked to talk about the dances in Vienna and the animals he would rescue from the streets. And the castle, of course. He loved that place as a boy. I asked him several times about the conflict in Austria, but he only wanted to talk about his escape over the mountains and his work for the Allies until the end of the war.”

  I glance over at Josh and Ella, and they are huddled together, engaged in conversation. The familiar pang of jealousy rips through my heart. Once again, I’m alone.

  I turn away. “Was your father named Max?”

  She pauses. “How did you find his name?”

  “There was a photograph in the book.”

  “Can you text it to me?” she asks.

  Seconds later, I send it off. Her voice shakes when she speaks again. “He was a handsome young man, wasn’t he?”

  “Very.”

  “Do you know the name of the woman with him?”

  “Luzia,” I say slowly, hoping that she knows this name. “Luzia Weiss.”

  “I wish I knew who she was.”

  And the thought occurs to me—if Charlotte is Max and Luzia’s daughter, Liberty would be her half sister.

  “I’m trying to find out,” I tell her. “Did Max return to Austria after the war?”

  “Once, my mother said, before they married, but he never talked to my brother or me about it. On one hand, I think he was trying to protect his family from the horror, but I also think the memories were incredibly painful. My father wanted to help people and animals alike. What he must have seen during the war—I’m surprised it didn’t kill him.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “After he died, my mother told us a little more of his story. I think she wanted us to understand why he slipped away sometimes in his mind. Fugue is what she called those times, from the Latin word that means ‘flee.’”

  Like Charlotte when she slipped away.

  “Everything changed for my dad when he was arrested.” Liberty’s voice sounds hollow, as if an echo from the depths of a tunnel. “During Kristallnacht.”

  “The night . . . ,” I begin, but the words seem to lodge in
my throat.

  Liberty finishes it for me. “The night of broken glass.”

  CHAPTER 25

  VIENNA, AUSTRIA

  NOVEMBER 1938

  A whole lot more than glass shattered on the ninth of November, during Vienna’s night hours. Men, a horde of them with axes and knives, broke down doors in the darkness. They smashed windows, started fires, arrested thousands of innocent Jewish men. A pogrom, they called it. As if naming the event justified the horrific things they did to the people across Austria.

  When Hitler’s men began pounding on the Weiss family’s locked door, everyone except Dr. Weiss was asleep in their beds. The crack of steel, ripping through wood, woke Luzi from her fitful sleep, and she reached for Marta in the crib that still stood at the base of her bed. But Marta was gone, only a memory dimmed by the violent stomping of feet, the raucous laughter of men who’d reverted to the bullies of youth.

  She lifted a tattered bear from Marta’s crib and reached for a robe to cover her nightgown. Perhaps, if the men weren’t inside the apartment, it wasn’t too late. They could escape downstairs, hide in her father’s office.

  She found her father fully dressed in the music room, an old Austrian novel called The City Without Jews in his lap. As if he were waiting for the Nazis to come.

  The men were in the kitchen now. She could hear them, crashing pots together, shattering her mother’s china.

  Their floors had trembled several days ago when the earth under Vienna quaked, as if nature itself had been warning them to flee, but they could do nothing. They couldn’t leave then, nor could they leave now.

  “Go back to your bedroom,” her father said, his voice strangely calm. “And lock the door.”

  “A locked door won’t stop them!”

  Four men stomped into the music room, their eyes wild as they scanned the books on the shelves, the music on her stand. The teddy bear clutched in her arms, Luzi cowered in the corner as the men pulled out drawers, swiped the shelves clean of their contents. One of them opened her violin case and ripped out the prized instrument that her father had commissioned for her. Then he smashed it over his knee. With the crack of the violin’s neck, her heart seemed to split in two.

  When her father followed them into the hallway, begging them to stop this madness, Luzi reached for the phone, her entire body trembling so hard that it pounded against her ear. She phoned the police station, telling them they had intruders.

  “Are you Aryan?” the dispatcher asked.

  “No, but—” Something else crashed in the hallway, deafening her for a moment, and when she could hear the line again, she realized the dispatcher had hung up.

  Smoke flowed through the window, and she wondered if the Nazis had set the entire city on fire. Screams echoed through the room, intruding from outside. Her family wasn’t alone tonight, but there was no consolation in this brotherhood. No comfort in the communal wounding of bodies and souls.

  The men stuffed their pockets full, stealing what little her family had left, but she didn’t start screaming until they seized her father, tying his hands behind his back.

  “He’s a doctor,” she cried after them. “An honorable man.”

  But these thugs didn’t respect things like honor.

  Luzi followed them downstairs, into the frigid air, pleading as they forced her father into an open-air truck with a host of other respectable men, some of them wearing nightcaps and dressing gowns, others in fancy suits as if they’d been pulled from a performance at the Vienna State Opera.

  Her father glanced at her, his eyes sad. He forced a smile before they drove him away, and the pieces left of her heart splintered like her violin.

  Turning, she raced back up the stairs, into her apartment. “Mother,” she yelled.

  The lock, the entire knob, from her parents’ door was lying on the carpet. She flung back the wood door and switched on the light before scanning the room. The men had forced themselves inside, but they hadn’t harmed her mother. At least, not her body. She was still in her bed, her vacant eyes focused on the dark window.

  “We must do something,” Luzi shouted, trying to rouse her.

  When she finally spoke, Mutti’s voice was as vacant as her eyes. “There is nothing we can do,” she said before she fainted away.

  Luzi collapsed on the mattress beside her mother. She—they—couldn’t give up now.

  Closing her eyes, Luzi forced the music of Strauss, the composition about the village swallows, to flood into the darkness and tears. The music, it was the only salve against the pain. Against the atrocity. Even without her violin, the melody anchored her. Da capo. Playing again and again.

  Where had that truck taken her father?

  More shouting outside now as acrid smoke bled into Mutti’s bedroom, the sulfur burning Luzi’s nose, coating her mouth. She closed the window, but it didn’t block out the screams that shook the glass. Someone else was hurting in the darkness. Probably one of the tens of thousands in this city who dared to be Jews.

  These men were like bloodhounds, never relenting from the hunt.

  Luzi looked back at her mother. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. And she felt torn between the two people she loved.

  Perhaps she and her mother could go together; they could find her father at the police station. The men who’d arrested him, they had made a terrible mistake. Her father, she would make them understand, had done nothing wrong.

  When her mother cried out, Luzi reached for her hand.

  Her mother wouldn’t be able to make it to the police station, and her father would be angry if she left alone. What if the men returned while she was gone?

  She couldn’t leave her mother to fend for herself.

  Someone else cried out from another building. Or perhaps the park below their apartment.

  God help them all.

  Or had God left Vienna?

  If He hadn’t, it seemed as if He’d looked away.

  “Run, Max,” his father commanded, pushing his son toward the hallway when he saw the officers through the spyhole.

  Max ran down the back staircase of their home in his nightclothes, but it was too late. The Gestapo was waiting for him outside.

  His father joined them, swearing at the uniformed men, saying that Max was the son of a party leader, heir to the Dornbach fortune and estate. But the Gestapo had a list of men to arrest in Vienna, and Max was on it. There was no arguing with the list.

  Two men waited as Max dressed and then dragged him to the police station as if he were a criminal. He knew the police captain, a friend of his father’s. And the man apologized profusely as one of his officers searched Max, saying he had to do his job. A miserable job it was, Max replied, arresting innocent citizens in the middle of the night.

  They drove Max away from the station in an army truck with a dozen other men, a guard and his gun watching over them. The streets were pandemonium. Windows broken, walls streaked bloodred with hateful slurs, a mob of pigeons squawking in the chaos. Smoke poured from the synagogue they passed, and two women chased after their truck, calling out names of men who weren’t among them.

  The Nazis took Max and their other prisoners to the elite Spanish Riding School, next to the Hofburg Palace. The men awaiting them inside shoved him into the crowded arena, beating a fellow passenger for inquiring about a Toilette.

  Scanning the room, he found a familiar face. Luzi’s father was kneeling on the clay floor, trying to care for an elderly rabbi who was clutching his chest, his face blackened with bruises. Max knelt beside Dr. Weiss, but they couldn’t save the rabbi’s life.

  When the man slipped away, Dr. Weiss’s head collapsed into his hands. “It’s meaningless, all of this destruction.”

  God created man to care for the earth, Max believed, and care for each other. This evil was the work of the serpent in the garden, the enemy who wanted to kill instead of care. All these guards around them, they’d made a pact with a snake. Revenge was what they sought, but neith
er Max nor Dr. Weiss had tried to harm any of these men.

  The guards lifted the rabbi and hauled him away.

  Dr. Weiss focused on Max. “Why are you here?”

  “The Gestapo discovered that my mother is Jewish.”

  “Does Luzia know?” Dr. Weiss asked.

  He shook his head. Then he dared to ask the question that had haunted him all night. “How is Luzi?”

  “She was unharmed when the agents took me away.”

  Max’s voice broke when he spoke again. “She didn’t want to leave your family behind.”

  “When they release us . . . I will convince her to go.”

  Max eyed the large doorway into the riding school, flanked by four guards. There’d be no running past them, no matter how much he wanted to rescue her.

  Dr. Weiss lowered his head, leaning over as if he were going to tie his shoe. He spoke quietly instead. “They are asking about my patients’ things.”

  Max glanced up at the guards again, rifles molded from wood and metal in their hands. “How do they know?”

  “I pray none of my patients . . .” Dr. Weiss rubbed his hands over the clay. “I told the agents that I didn’t take anything.”

  Max prayed the items would be safe at Schloss Schwansee, in Annika’s care. That she would keep this secret from her father. If the Gestapo found out the truth about Max and Dr. Weiss, they would surely kill both of them and, heaven forbid, the Weiss family and even Annika.

  If he’d thought the Nazis would suspect his hiding place, he never would have asked Annika to help him.

  “Have you heard from your mother?” Dr. Weiss asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “I think about Marta, every hour of the day.”

  “My mother will care well for her.”

  “And will you care for Luzi and Frau Weiss as well, if they don’t release me?”

  “They will release you.”

  “Please—”

  “Aufstehen,” one of the guards shouted into a megaphone. All the men stood.

  “I’ll take care of them,” Max promised.

  The men stood for hours, all day and most of the night, their legs throbbing. Those who fell asleep were awakened by the butt of a gun. Others, like the rabbi, never awoke.