Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

  They’d grown into a crowd of hundreds now, standing in awkward lines under the chandelier light. Some of them were dressed in the nightclothes they’d been wearing when the Nazis arrested them. Others were dressed in suits or long cloaks or the black caftans of rabbis.

  Guards stood between the white columns that encircled the arena and on top of the balcony as if they were spectators of a sport, as if their captives were the school’s white Lipizzaner stallions on display. Except Austrians treated their horses with much more dignity than they afforded their Jewish compatriots.

  The cruelty that Max saw in those hours would haunt him the rest of his life, but he never put into words what he saw there, never spoke of it to his wife or children. To put words to it would give respect to the men inflicting cruelty on all of them. And pour shame deep into his wounds.

  When they finally rested, he sat beside Dr. Weiss, drinking cloudy water from a bucket passed around for the men to share. The doctor had tried to care for the men around them who’d collapsed from exhaustion or illness, but he had no medicine, no supplies of any kind. This inability to act was taking a deep toll on him.

  On his fourth day in the arena, one of the guards called Max’s name through a megaphone.

  Max stood tentatively.

  “Come with me.” The guard yanked him away from the others.

  He glanced back at Dr. Weiss, who nodded his way.

  “Geh mit Gott,” he mouthed.

  And so Max went with the blessing, relieved in one sense to flee from this horrific place even as he feared leaving Dr. Weiss behind.

  Later he learned that Dr. Weiss and many of the others were taken away hours later.

  But instead of going home, they were shipped off to a place called Dachau.

  CHAPTER 26

  Glacier water laps against the sides of the ferryboat as Josh, Ella, and I cross between the train station and the glowing lights of Hallstatt village. Ella’s already asleep, resting against her dad’s shoulder, the masked rays of sunlight settling orange and pink over the snow-dusted mountains and clear lake.

  Between the caffeine and mountain air, I’m wide awake, mesmerized by the gold that sparks like fireflies on the lake’s surface. Then I see it, on my left. Schloss Schwansee stands like a worn sentry on the bank, its rear guard a fortified rock wall that sweeps up like a wave about to tumble over the house, into the lake.

  A spruce forest spreads out on both sides of the castle. The train station is on the west, and to the east, hidden behind a jetty of pines, is the town called Obertraun. The lake, Josh said, is five miles in length, plunging down into four hundred feet of hiding spaces—log piles, shifting sands, and a vat of mud.

  He and his team already scanned the water in front of the castle with a remote-operated vehicle before they dove about fifty feet to hunt in the underwater ledges, but they never found any evidence of the rumored treasure.

  His students have scattered now, off to explore Europe on their own. I’ve told him that I’ll be doing some personal research in Vienna while I’m here. Until Jonas Stadler returns his calls, Josh is planning to take Ella to explore the ice caves and snorkel in the water near shore.

  When I glance at Josh again, he’s watching me. I turn back to the castle.

  “It’s been standing there since the 1600s,” he says.

  “Just think of the stories it could tell.” Like the book that once resided there.

  “A salt administrator built the house. An eccentric man by the name of Christoph Eyssl von Eysselsberg.”

  “How do you know this Christoph Eyssl was eccentric?” I ask.

  Ella squirms, and Josh gently rubs her back until she’s resting again. “The man also built a mausoleum for himself in Hallstatt’s Catholic church. Then he mandated that his casket be transported back to the castle every fifty years.”

  “Like he’s returning home?”

  “Exactly.”

  I rub my arms. “That is creepy!”

  “The curator at the local museum said the last time his casket traveled across the lake was before the war. The spring of 1939.”

  “War changes everything, I suppose.”

  The castle seems to fold into the trees as we near the center of the lake. How many Austrian boys were schooled under Hitler’s regime at this place? And had the Nazis stored jewelry and other valuables here before they dumped them into the lake? Even with the help of sonar, the treasure could be lost in these deep waters and silt forever if someone like Annika or her descendants can’t point out where the fleeing Nazis threw it.

  If Annika told Leo about the treasure, surely she would have told her children where the Nazis tried to hide it.

  My mind wanders to Annika and Max. According to his daughter, Max left Austria before the Americans entered the arena of World War II. Did he know about the treasure? Perhaps that’s why he took Annika’s book to Idaho with him.

  But if he knew about the treasure, why didn’t he tell his children?

  “I found the deed of transfer from the Dornbach family to Hermann Stadler in 1955. It was transferred to Sigmund Stadler in 1962 and then to Jonas Stadler in 1992,” Josh says. “I haven’t found anything else about Annika.”

  “Maybe there’s a death certificate for her in Salzburg.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “I found her mother’s grave in the Hallstatt cemetery but not one for any other member of the Knopf family.”

  The ferry nears Hallstatt, and the buildings seem to cling to the mountain behind them. The first road to this village, I read online, wasn’t built until 1890. For centuries, the access between many of the houses was by boat or what locals called the upper path, a small corridor that passed through the attics. Now I understand—the ancient buildings are so close to the water’s edge, they look like they are about to tumble into the lake.

  When the boat docks, Josh reaches for the suitcases, and Ella snuggles close to me as I carry her across the cobblestone plaza to the peach-and-white guesthouse along the waterfront, a three-story inn planted right here for half a millennium.

  The staircase inside winds three times before stopping at the top floor, and Josh opens two doors across the landing from each other, setting my suitcase inside the room on the left.

  I slip into his and Ella’s room, carefully lowering Ella onto one of the twin beds. She wakes with a start, searching until she finds her dad behind me.

  She smiles before closing her eyes again, and he takes her hand, prays a blessing over her, and I’m stunned at the sight of this strong man who would humble himself to pray for his child. When he finishes, he kisses his daughter’s forehead.

  The two of us step out onto the narrow balcony that stretches across to my room on the other side, about twenty feet above the lake.

  “Are you tired?” he asks.

  “More like wired.”

  He points toward a small round table in the center of the balcony, the tabletop a colorful mosaic made from pieces of broken tile. “You want to stay up for a bit?” I hear the trepidation in his voice, as if he’s asking me out on a dinner date.

  I glance toward the dim lightbulb flickering over my sliding-glass door. Part of me longs to nest inside, but a bigger part of me wants to stay right here with him.

  “For a bit,” I say.

  “I’ll be right back,” he says before turning toward his room.

  I lean against the wrought-iron railing and look down at the lights of town reflecting back as if the lake were a mirror. Across the water is Schloss Schwansee, but I can’t see it anymore. Darkness, it seems, has curtained it for the night.

  Four hundred years of stories in that place, many of them lost in the unyielding hourglass of time. But somehow, I think, Josh and I will unearth the story of what happened there during the war.

  CHAPTER 27

  LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA

  NOVEMBER 1938

  A dozen men converged on Schloss Schwansee with blazing torches, like a band of pirates from years past in t
heir boats. Their savage cries ricocheted off the stone crevices in the mountain behind the house and roared across the water.

  Annika hid her shovel behind the cottage and raced into the trees, watching the men in the faint starlight from her fortress of pine needles and bark. They looked like a black cloud of bats, wings pulsing madly, red eyes piercing the night.

  Had they come for the silver and jewelry and candlesticks buried in the land behind her home?

  She shivered in the night air, afraid of what these men would do if they discovered what she’d buried. And she prayed that God would be with her in the darkness, not locked away behind chapel walls.

  Frederica crawled up beside her, and she lifted the cat, clutching her close.

  Were these men drunk or only intoxicated by what they had planned?

  She was glad the Dornbach family was safe in Vienna tonight. From her hiding place, she prayed that the things she’d hidden, dozens of items now, would stay safe in the ground.

  Glass shattered, a window on the stalwart castle victim to a rock or brick.

  Why must they break the glass when they could simply walk through the front door?

  For a moment, she thought about running all the way to Obertraun, finding her father, but then she saw Vati in the crowd, carrying a torch like the rest of the men. And she trembled again.

  More glass breaking—the castle, the barn, her cottage, the sound rippling through the trees, shattering her heart. Then she smelled kerosene, saw the flames. Their little cottage captured by the fire.

  She had to stop these men before the castle was consumed as well.

  Frederica leapt out of her arms when she started to run across the yard.

  “Vati,” she hollered, racing up to him.

  Her father turned to her, a crazed look in his eyes and then hatred. The same look that he’d given her the night her mother died, bitter and cold, as if Annika had taken her life.

  One of the men opened the front door to Schloss Schwansee and rushed inside.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted above the roar.

  “Serving justice.”

  “But what . . .” she started. “What did the Dornbachs do?”

  “Klara Dornbach is a Jew.”

  He said the word as if she were a criminal. As if Frau Dornbach had committed a terrible crime.

  And then Annika understood. The necklace wasn’t a gift for Frau Dornbach or something she’d purchased, like her shoes from Paris. Like Sarah’s, this necklace was a symbol of her heritage. Vati had been forced to work for someone he thought less than him. Someone he believed should be serving him instead.

  Her heart wrenched, the pain of it threading down her limbs. She, in her nosiness, had convicted the entire Dornbach family.

  Through the castle window she saw the flash of flames in the salon, smoke pouring through the portal of broken glass, extinguishing the starlight. If they didn’t douse this now, the fire would devour the castle. Perhaps every building on the estate.

  She yanked on her father’s coat. “We have to stop this!”

  They had a lake full of water behind them and a fire hose. They could pump out every drop of the lake if they must to stop these flames.

  But instead of racing for the hose, her father ran toward the front door.

  An upstairs window shattered, raining down glass from the castle, and the mob of men poured back into the courtyard. One, two, three—she counted only eleven now. Her father wasn’t among them.

  The men rushed back to their boats and disappeared into the darkness, leaving the fire to spread behind them.

  “Vati!” Annika yelled, running toward the castle. She had to get him out before the flaming walls, the roof collapsed on him.

  But the heat—it lashed at her skin when she stepped through the front door. And she couldn’t see through the smoke.

  Surely her father would retreat out one of the back doors. Or she could enter through the chapel.

  Across the courtyard, her cottage buckled under the weight of flames, shuddered to the ground, but the storage shed near it remained intact. The doors behind the castle were locked, so she retrieved the hose in the storage shed and began dragging it toward the main house.

  Through the smoke, she saw someone else rushing up the bank.

  Had more men arrived to finish the destruction?

  But then she heard the man call her name.

  “Hook it up,” Hermann commanded, pointing toward a tap.

  Her hands trembling, Annika screwed in the brass connector, and cold water poured out of the nozzle as they dragged the hose to the front of the house.

  “Vati!” she screamed again as the flames blazed inside the window.

  But he never answered her cries.

  CHAPTER 28

  “I thought it might help you sleep,” Josh says, lifting a bottle of Riesling.

  I step back from the railing and sit on one of the two wrought-iron chairs. “I’d love a glass.”

  He sets a paper bag on the small table between us and fills the two wineglasses that he brought out of his room. “Apparently they grow these grapes at a vineyard nearby.”

  I sip the sweet drink. “Is Ella asleep?”

  “Like someone conked her over the head.”

  “I swear I didn’t do it.”

  He laughs. “I know. She said that you read to her until she fell asleep on the plane.”

  I lift my feet, showing off my black sandals. “She was quite proud of me for being able to read without my Story Girl socks.”

  “You’re a marvel.”

  “Or my cape.”

  “A true achievement,” he quips. “But I’m not joking about your being a marvel. Thank you for bringing Ella and for taking great care of her along the way.”

  “It was a selfish move on my part.” I roll the stem of the glass between my fingers. “I was worried about coming on my own.”

  “I’m glad you came,” he says. “And not just because you brought Ella.”

  Heat flushes up my neck, and I turn back toward the lake, glad for the dim lights. “Thank you.”

  He nods toward the castle across the lake. “We can rent a boat tomorrow so you can see it up close.”

  “I’m going to spend most of the day in Vienna.” I have a list of churches and synagogues on my iPad, and I’ll visit as many as I can to inquire about Luzia’s birth or baptismal certificate.

  “Are you spending the night there?” he asks.

  “No. There’s a train coming back late tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps I can take you to the station in the morning after I show you the castle.”

  “I’d like that.” My face flushes again, and I wish someone would challenge me to dunk my head in a bucket of ice right here. “If only we could go onto the estate . . .”

  “There’s a big sign on the dock threatening prosecution for anyone caught trespassing.”

  “You let a sign stop you?”

  “My team was diving here with special permits from the Austrian government. If I was caught trespassing, it would jeopardize everything we’ve worked for.”

  “And now?” I press.

  “We could knock on the front door together and see if anyone is home.”

  I can’t imagine stepping onto someone’s property without an invitation, but if it brings me closer to Luzia . . . “How long have you been trying to find Annika?”

  “I started more than ten years ago, but then—” he rips open the paper bag and serves soft white cheese and rye crackers on it like it’s a platter—“I had to take a break.”

  Because of his wife, I assume, but it’s not my business to ask. Our friendship is safe as long as we keep it focused on what we’re both searching for, not what’s happened to either of us in the past.

  “When I was in graduate school, I found records confirming what Uncle Leo had said about the Nazis dumping ownerless treasure in these lakes. I also discovered a memo from a Nazi official who had been searching Schloss Sch
wansee for items formerly owned by the Jewish people in this area.

  “If the Nazis ever found these items, no one recorded it—not that they would have. Treasure seemed to stick to Nazi fingers, especially those of officers who were supposed to hand over everything they stole to the Reich. Even American soldiers sent some of the valuable things they found home, calling them the spoils of war.”

  “Were the Nazis searching the estate or the water in front of it?”

  He gives me a curious look. “The memo says the property, but what has been found in this area was located in the caves or lake.”

  “I wish you could search inside Schloss Schwansee.”

  He glances down at his phone. “Herr Stadler still hasn’t responded to any of my inquiries.”

  I take another sip of the wine and wonder about the Stadlers. Did Hermann take over the house from the Dornbachs because he was a Nazi? Or because he married Annika?

  Josh leans back in his chair, dangling his flip-flops over the edge of the railing. “What else did Liberty say?”

  My gaze travels back to a light flickering across the water. A window from the castle or perhaps a boat. “Max Dornbach loved this house and lake when he was a child, but he never told her what happened here during or after the war. Perhaps it was too painful to remember.”

  He slices through the cheese with the edge of his cracker and eats it. “The pain I understand.”

  I decide to step out on a limb, hoping it won’t crack under me. “Lottie told me that you lost your wife,” I say softly. “It must have been devastating.”

  “Four years have passed, and I still miss her.” He leans back against his chair, his gaze forward as if he can see inside the castle walls. “When your heart is yanked out, it’s hard to cram it back into your chest again.”

  I nod slowly. After Scott’s deception, I wasn’t sure if my heart would ever be whole again. “What was Grace like?”

  He thinks for a moment. “Charming and smart and confident in just about everything except when it came to saying good-bye. She was a fighter like Ella, but the cancer, it devoured her from the inside out.” He glances over at me, his eyes sad. “I’ve never told Ella about her mom’s excruciating pain. I want her to remember the laughter and love that Grace poured over her instead of the pain.”