I lower my wineglass to the table. “Sometimes I wonder where God is in the midst of such heartache.”
”I think God’s in the center of it all.”
My eyes grow wide. “That sounds so cruel.”
“I don’t mean it to be cruel. It’s just . . . I spent years wrestling through the question of why God would allow harm to come to His children, like Jacob in the Bible wrestled with God, I suppose.”
The weight of his memories seems to bear down on him, his gaze refocusing on the lake. “In the midst of Grace’s suffering, I saw glimpses of hope. She believed that a renewed and restored body awaited her on the other side of death’s veil. Sickness might have taken her from this earth, but I believe her soul is resting now, hidden away with a compassionate God. He doesn’t run from pain like humans often do. He’s not afraid of it because He knows what’s beyond the grave. No more suffering for those who cling to Him.”
My eyes focus on the lights below us. “But so much suffering right now.”
“I believe God refines us over the fire at times, purifying us like gold, but if the account of Creation is true, then God’s original plan for all His children was beauty and peace and daily walks with Him—not cancer or gas chambers or kids being shot when they attend school. This purity, I think, often stings deep inside, but what freedom to know that God never forces anyone to love or serve Him. Even if it breaks His heart, He allows people to walk away.”
Josh takes a sip of wine. That book by L. M. Montgomery changed my perspective on God and His love for me, but it’s one thing to refine someone and another to . . .
I mold my thoughts into words. “I don’t know if I’ll ever understand how God can allow so much devastation in this world.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand the complexities of the spiritual realm either, at least in this life, but I think the Bible gives us plenty of clues about the freedom that humans have to choose good or evil. Many choose darkness over the light, though I can’t imagine how anyone who holds a baby or watches a sunrise or sips something as simple as this Austrian wine can deny the Creator of all things good.”
I shift in the hard seat. “Some people think that God caused the Holocaust—”
“Hitler and a whole host of men caused the Holocaust. I don’t believe that was ever God’s will.” He taps on the edge of his wineglass. “So often God is blamed when things go wrong, but people don’t usually give Him credit when things go right. Jesus said that a time is coming when the prince of this world will be driven out.
“Life is hard, but He promises victory in the end. And if we believe what the Bible says, we have to focus on what we know to be true—that God loved this world and that His son was moved with compassion by the suffering here.”
My heart seems to somersault. “Like with Grace . . .”
He nods slowly, studying me. “I don’t believe it was God’s will for her to die, but I do think He used her life and, I pray, her death for good.”
“Because He is good.”
“To the core.”
I glance over at the shadowed mountains to the west. “Liberty’s mother said that Max spent a year roaming these Alps, fighting against the evil here. When the war started, he was able to make it over the border to Switzerland. Eventually he joined up with the Allied forces and fought alongside them.”
“Everyone has a choice,” Josh says. “Be strong enough to do what is right or be consumed by evil.”
And I wonder what I would do if given the choice. I pray that I would choose what is good.
When Josh lifts his wineglass, I reach for mine. He toasts to the hope of tomorrow. A place where possibilities abound. A place where one day evil will be destroyed for good.
The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
PSALM 27:1 (OLD TESTAMENT)
CHAPTER 29
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
NOVEMBER 1938
Ernst entered Luzi’s apartment more than a week after they’d taken her father away, kicking down the broken front door, cornering her in the parlor.
The Nazis had stolen anything she could use to defend herself, and her Aryan friends had grown deaf to her pleas. The Jewish neighbors who remained were hidden in the fragile threads of their walls, powerless to help.
She wished for a cocoon to protect her tonight. Wished she could sprout wings and fly.
When Ernst forced himself on her, the world blackened, sending her to a place far from the shattered pieces of her home.
Color emerged again in her mind, bright and steady. She and Marta were together, playing in Max’s swan lake, laughing as they rolled in the meadows of wildflowers. The songbirds sang a beautiful melody, calling her and her sister far away from the lowlands of Austria, to a place high in the Alps where no man ever went.
They flew with the birds, Marta’s hand secured in hers. Instead of cigarette smoke, she could smell the blossoming jasmine in the breeze.
A sound ripped through the mountains, seared through her mind as the birds fluttered away. It was Ernst, zipping up his breeches. And her body felt as shattered as the glass around her feet.
“Max can have you now,” Ernst said. He towered over her with his knife, disgusted. As if she had driven him to do this.
Oh, Max. He could never find out what happened.
“Luzi?” Ernst sneered.
When she didn’t respond, he threw his dagger onto the couch and grabbed her by the throat, his fingers strangling her. She opened her mouth, trying to speak, but nothing came out.
Pain raked through her body again, everything within her collapsing.
And the music, even in her head, was gone.
Max rushed through the apartment’s open door, but the moment he saw Ernst clutching Luzi’s neck, he feared it was too late.
The sitting room was a wreck—legs of her family’s chairs hacked off, the sofa’s upholstery sliced, elegant drapes torn down. And Luzi’s face was the color of the cement floor in the basement of the Hotel Metropole, his residence for the past week.
“Let her go,” Max shouted.
Ernst released Luzi, and relief flooded through Max when she gasped for air. Thank God, Ernst hadn’t killed her . . . but what had he done to Luzi while Max was gone?
His mind reeled with possibilities, blurring his vision, and he struggled to regain focus. For almost two weeks he’d been imprisoned—first at the arena and then at the hotel. The lack of food and sleep had depleted every ounce of strength, but right now he had to concentrate the little energy the Gestapo had left him on freeing Luzi.
On the sofa was a dagger, and Ernst reached for it, his face flushed red. “Go home, Max.”
“I won’t leave,” he said, though without a weapon, he couldn’t fight this man.
Ernst held the knife in front of him, steady. “I told you that you’d have to choose.”
Max could see the etching on the silver blade. Alles für Deutschland.
Everything for Germany. Everything for might.
“I choose what is right,” Max said.
“Right or wrong, it’s irrelevant.”
“Not in my eyes.”
Luzi didn’t speak, as if Ernst had siphoned out the spirit, the music, that once breathed life inside her.
“Come with me now, Max, and I’ll leave her alone.” The words slid off the man’s tongue, like the serpent in the garden.
Max eyed Ernst’s holster on the sofa, next to where his dagger once sat, but it would be impossible to wrestle Ernst for it in his weakened state. Broken.
There must be another option.
The agent at the Hotel Metropole made him swear never to tell anyone what happened during his time in the Nazis’ care or they would arrest the people he loved. Starting, Max feared, with Luzi.
He’d have to leave with Ernst, to protect Luzi’s life, but Ernst would have to take him to Dachau. No matter w
hat they did to him, Max could never join the Wehrmacht.
He prayed that while they were gone, Luzi and her mother would run away.
Ernst waved his knife toward the front door, motioning Max to the stairs outside.
Max took a step back, but his eyes were still on Luzi. And he watched as she reached for Ernst’s holster, slipped out the gun. Ernst never saw her pull the trigger. When the gun blasted, his knife clattered to the floor, and Ernst collapsed beside it, hitting his head on an end table as he fell.
Stunned, Max stared at the man for a moment, at the blood that puddled around his arm.
Luzi lowered the gun, but clutched it in both of her hands. “They killed my father.”
“I saw him just a week ago. . . .”
“There was an accident, the postcard said. Regrettably. They arrested him and then said they regretted his heart failing.” She turned to Max, her eyes cold. “He’s never had trouble with his heart.”
“I know.”
“They killed an innocent man. A doctor who lived to help others.”
His skin seared hot, boiling blood beneath the surface. “They hate anyone who dares to help a fellow Jew.”
He stepped over Ernst and took the gun from her hands, sliding it back into the holster.
“Where did you see him last?” she begged.
But he couldn’t bear to tell her what the Gestapo had done to her father and the other men in the arena, stealing their dignity before they took their lives. Sometimes, he supposed, the best way to protect someone you loved was to protect her from the truth.
“He was helping others when I saw him, and he—he wanted me to tell you that you must be strong as well, for Marta’s and your mother’s sake.” Max glanced down the hallway. “Where is your mother?”
“Resting.” Luzi didn’t move toward the hall, her gaze on the blackened fireplace before her now, a shell of the woman who’d once loved nothing more than to bring life to an instrument, grace the world with its beauty. Tonight Ernst had harmed her, and she needed her mother’s help to heal.
After she heard the gun blast . . . Frau Weiss must have been mad with worry. “Shall I see to her?”
Luzi shook her head. “There’s nothing left to see.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My mother is no longer with us.”
A sword seemed to pierce Max again, stabbing his heart and soul. “They killed her as well.”
“I suppose they did.”
“I don’t understand, Luzi.”
“Vati’s tablets were supposed to help her. . . .” She looked at him, and he saw the glint in her eyes. “But it wasn’t the medicine, not really. The Nazis stole away her hope, and without hope, how can one really live?”
“Luzi, I’m—” He stopped. What was he? Sorry seemed much too tidy, much too shallow a sentiment to communicate the sorrow that burrowed into his soul.
“I tried to revive her, but her grief . . . I think it was too much.”
So much loss, and for what gain? “I’ll call for an undertaker.”
“The superintendent already hired someone to take her away.”
Max stepped toward the broken window, cold air pouring in from the autumn winds.
“Ernst came with a warning,” she said. “If I don’t leave the apartment tonight, the SS will escort me out. Someone else is supposed to occupy these rooms in the morning.”
He swore.
“They can have the apartment, but I—” Her voice faltered as she fell into the chair. “I don’t know where I’ll go.”
“You’ll come with me,” he said. “Right now.”
When she didn’t say anything, he lowered himself beside her, his knees centimeters above the glass. “Please, Luzi.”
“I don’t think I can walk.” Her eyes fell to her light-brown skirt, and that’s when he saw the blood, soaking through her clothes. She flinched when he lifted the hem but didn’t stop him. A gash cut from her ankle up to her knee. She needed stitches, but no hospital in Austria would take her now.
Ernst was unconscious beside them, but Max still heard his breath.
He should take the knife, the gun. Finish what Luzi started.
But no matter how much he hated the man, he couldn’t kill another human being. Instead he tied Ernst’s hands behind him with a cord from the drapes lest he wake and try to hurt Luzi again.
“I’ll return,” he told her.
He hurried down the back steps, into the private entrance of her father’s office. The storm troopers had thrown dozens of the medicine bottles on the floor, a sea of glass, but they hadn’t destroyed everything. He packed one of Dr. Weiss’s bags with a needle and suture thread, antibacterial medication and painkillers.
If only he’d come straight here after they’d released him from the hotel instead of going home. But his skin and clothing had smelled like the stench in the riding school and basement, and he was hungry, cold. What he’d longed for most beyond a bed and food these past two weeks was a hot shower and clean clothes.
He had stood in the shower until the water ran cold, trying to soothe muscles that ached, wash the memories down the drain. He’d intended to go to Luzi’s immediately, but the weakness of his body overpowered the call of his heart, and he had lain down on the sofa, not waking again for another day.
And now he hated himself for it.
He had no animals to carry with him tonight, but he’d taken the cage from his house and hidden hundreds of Reichsmarks in the compartment underneath and then stuffed his papers and some warm clothing into a rucksack. His father wasn’t at the house—if he had petitioned for Max’s release, no one told Max. He’d put another hundred in his wallet before he took the Mercedes, hoping the money and car would suffice as a ticket out of this town.
Headlights gleamed through the window, and Max ducked back toward the stairwell. The SS were here, but neither he nor Luzi would be going with them tonight.
He ran back up the stairs. “We have to leave,” he told her.
Car doors slammed outside, and seconds later, he heard the stomping of boots on the main staircase, below the smashed front door.
How many men had they sent to arrest one broken woman?
Luzi tried to stand but wobbled on her feet, not able to put any weight on her right leg. “You must go without me,” she insisted.
He’d lost weight in the past two weeks, his strength waning, but adrenaline pumped through his veins like water in a hose, a surge to stop the fire. He scooped Luzi off the chair, carrying her down to her father’s office. She trembled in his arms, and he was thankful for her fear in one sense. It meant that she still had life in her. That she could fight.
A man shouted for him to halt as they ran out into the small park, toward his mother’s prized Mercedes on the other side of the trees. But he wouldn’t halt for anyone.
After lowering Luzi into the passenger’s seat, he drove away, praying no one would stop him until they reached the edge of town. And that Luzi would be safe at the estate until they could find a way out of Austria.
Herr Knopf’s face flitted into his mind, and he pushed it right back out. The man knew about his family’s heritage, but he couldn’t think about that now. Annika, he prayed, would help.
Several cars lined up on Hauptstrasse, guards checking vehicles and papers before the drivers and their passengers left Vienna. Luzi had hesitated when he gave her the pain medicine, but he promised her that the powder would help, not harm her as it had done with her mother. He wanted to relieve some of her pain, but even more, he feared it would make her grimace at the guards when they both needed to smile.
The pain went much deeper than her skin—no medicine could relieve the sorrow underneath—but right now, to save her life, they both needed to pretend.
As they crept forward, Max reached over and took her hand. The last time he’d held it was the night of their dance.
Oh, to be able to go back and watch her play her violin and waltz with her acr
oss the floor, inspired by the hope of the future, not the fear.
“Please smile, Luzi,” he begged as a young border guard stepped toward his window, and she forced her mouth to move, though it wasn’t exactly a smile.
“I remember you,” the man said. “You’re the fellow with the canary.”
Max smiled in return. “No animals with me tonight, but I’d like to introduce you to my lovely wife.”
Luzi lifted her hand, waving.
“It’s a late hour for you to be driving.”
“We’re only able to get away for a few days before I join the Wehrmacht. We’re honeymooning at my family’s estate—”
“You have all your papers in order?”
“I believe so.”
He dug into his rucksack and handed the man his baptismal certificate and the forged paper saying that he and Luzi were husband and wife. As the man studied them, Max glanced in his rearview mirror. No sign yet of anyone following them.
“This says you married in August.”
Max nodded. “And we are quite anxious now to depart.”
“Where is your wife’s baptismal certificate?”
Max opened his rucksack again. “Surely I packed it. . . .”
When he looked back up, the guard’s eyes had narrowed.
Instead of showing him the certificate, Max slipped the marks out of his wallet and slid them across the door. “I only want to honeymoon with my wife before I leave. . . .”
The guard eyed the money for a moment before taking it. Then he returned the papers. “Enjoy the estate.”
Luzi leaned back against the seat as they drove out of Vienna, cruising through mountains and valleys. And anger raged inside Max.
He’d been faithfully hiding things for his Jewish friends, thinking they would recover them later, but what value did these items have when lives were being stolen? Luzi had lost both her parents this week, and he feared she was fading away as well.
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