Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

  “What if—?” I start, struggling for words so that this man I’ve grown to admire doesn’t think I’m completely crazy. Then again, his willingness to think outside the proverbial box, like Annika once did, has brought us to this place. “What if you can still return the treasure to its owners?”

  “I don’t think this lake is ever going to relent.”

  I take a deep breath, calming the craziness. “What if the treasure isn’t in the lake?”

  He glances behind us at an estate that would have been thoroughly searched by the Gestapo and the teenage boys who resided here under the Nazi regime. “Where else would it be?”

  I tell him my idea, and he pulls out his phone to dial a contact in Vienna.

  And I realize he doesn’t think I’m crazy at all.

  CHAPTER 44

  LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA

  JUNE 1955

  More than a decade after the war, when the Russian soldiers along with the Americans, British, and French finally left Austria, Max returned to Lake Hallstatt.

  The newly reunited government of Austria was trying to return property to any Jewish owners left to claim it, but he had no desire to keep the estate that had been used by the Nazis. The place where the Gestapo had stolen Luzi away.

  And the treasure that he’d taken such great care to hide with Hermann and Annika—it seemed there was no one left to claim that either.

  The front gate into Schloss Schwansee was locked, but he found the collapsed portion of the wall that he’d climbed over often before the war, between the forest and the sheer cliff at the foot of Sarstein.

  He hadn’t thought he would ever come back here, not after that night in 1939 when he’d crept down and found both his home and his heart in ruins. When he discovered the house ransacked, Annika and Luzi gone, he’d snuck over to Hermann’s house in the dark. His friend told him the news that haunted him for the past fifteen years. The Gestapo had found Luzi, hiding in the wall, and they’d taken her away to a place where he could no longer protect her. A place of no return.

  He’d sobbed then, like a wounded animal, and the thought of Luzi, suffering at their hands, still flooded his eyes with tears. For days he hadn’t been able to eat. And he’d wished he were dead, begged God for the ultimate mercy of taking his life.

  God’s mercy proved to be different from his own.

  Over his shoulder this morning was a rucksack, one that he’d purchased in America, and inside was all the paperwork for the estate. He was transferring this place to Annika. Frau Stadler now, he’d learned.

  He hoped Annika was as happy as possible in these tumultuous years after the war, while their entire country tried to right itself after it fell. Hitler had marched into their country without a fight in 1938, but oh, the war that had been waged to get him back out again. The man had stripped this country bare, though Max could still see the beauty as he’d taken the train from Salzburg. The soul of Austria—it was still here.

  His family’s old home rose in the distance, above the pine trees. These past years he’d traveled plenty and seen castles much older—and much larger—than Schloss Schwansee, but if the original owner had wanted to call his home a castle instead of a manor, then who was Max or anyone else to stop him? His family, and those before the Bettauer and Dornbach families, had certainly played along with the game, pretending that this place was meant for royalty.

  If only he could pretend again and bring Luzi back to him. Unlike what Frau Weiss told him, he never should have let her go.

  After multiple inquiries, he’d discovered that Luzi had died at Ravensbrück days after she arrived at that camp. She had suffered—how could she not?—but it comforted him in one sense that she hadn’t suffered for long.

  After years of searching, he found his mother in New York. She had remarried before the Germans occupied France, and she’d been able to hide her secret with her forged paperwork and newly acquired last name. Her husband, a French professor, hadn’t been enamored of the Nazi Party. He led a group of resisters in their village, thwarting the Nazis whenever possible while married to an Austrian woman no one knew was a Jewess.

  Max’s father had died in the weeks when Berlin was gasping for its last breath, when the city was being slowly suffocated by the Russians in the east and the Allies pressing in from the west.

  He’d searched and searched for Marta, after his mother told him that she had taken the child to an orphanage when she’d crossed into France, unable to care for her after the border guards took most of her money. She’d feared for both of their lives.

  He’d traveled to the orphanage, but the place was closed now, any records destroyed. Then he’d learned the sad, awful truth. Most of the children had been sent to Auschwitz in April 1944, near the end of the war. He refused to believe that Marta was among them; he’d spend his life pretending, if he must. Taking solace in the unknown.

  Before he finished his walk to the castle, he stopped at the old pet cemetery. People had relied on him—him and Dr. Weiss—but how naive he had been. Thinking of himself as some sort of hero when the enemy wasn’t really after the heirlooms of their Jewish friends. The enemy was after their lives.

  A white cottage had been built on the land where all the treasure was once stored, a neat-looking place with geraniums trimming each window and a garden plot that stretched across the land where he’d buried the heirlooms.

  What had Annika done with the items hidden there?

  Not that there was anyone left to return them to, but he wanted to ask her that question today, along with many others that had haunted him for the past fifteen years.

  He knocked tentatively at the castle’s front door, hoping Annika would greet him, but a housekeeper opened it instead, directing him back toward a renovated library. As he waited for the Stadlers, he crossed the room to the secret panel and pressed, but the seam had been sealed shut.

  The books were in good order on the shelves; some of them he recognized from his youth. This place had been a refuge for him and Annika in their younger days, and he hoped it would be a refuge for generations to come.

  He and Annika had been the best of friends as children and then awkward acquaintances of youth. But he’d trusted her with his greatest secrets. The treasure and then Luzi. He didn’t know what happened to their treasure, but she hadn’t failed him on Luzi’s account—no one could stop the Gestapo.

  He wandered to the bookshelf and perused the familiar titles, some new ones among the old books that his parents had collected over the years. Among them, he found Bambi, the story he’d loved as a boy.

  He was beginning to open the cover when someone walked into the room.

  “Max?”

  Turning, he saw Hermann, but if he had expected a warm welcome—and if he were truly honest, he’d hoped for one—the doubt in his friend’s eyes was more like a chill.

  Was Hermann afraid that Max would take this old place from him? Hermann could have it. Could have everything inside it as well.

  He glanced down at the book in his hands. Except, perhaps, this.

  “I only have a short time,” Hermann said. “I have business to attend to.”

  “Of course.” Today’s order was all about business.

  “You are well?” Hermann asked.

  “I am settled. On an American lake that reminds me of Hallstatt.”

  “Much has changed here since you’ve been gone.”

  “The entire world has changed in the past fifteen years.”

  Hermann glanced out the window as if he were looking for someone, and Max turned with him.

  “Where is Annika?” he asked.

  “Not far.”

  “May I see her?”

  “I don’t believe it’s a good idea,” Hermann said. “The memories are hard for her.”

  “They are hard for all of us.”

  But Hermann didn’t relent. Max had wanted to ask Annika about the treasure, but he’d also wanted to thank her for caring for Luzi until the end.r />
  Was this why Hermann was acting strange? Was he worried that Max would somehow steal Annika away? He’d loved her, like a sister, but he couldn’t imagine loving anyone else like he’d loved Luzi.

  “Did you ever find your mother?” Hermann asked as he stepped toward the door. Max followed him.

  “I followed her to America, after the war.” He didn’t tell the man how he’d helped the Allies, escorting messages and people alike across borders that were supposed to be secured. Many here in Austria might hate him if they knew what he had done.

  He hadn’t told anyone about the treasure either. People were being indicted today for stealing valuables from Jewish families during the war. He hadn’t wanted to steal anything. He’d wanted to keep their belongings safe. Be a banker, in one sense, like his father, with holdings for the future. But it would be difficult to convince a judge of his innocence when he couldn’t give an account for the things he’d hidden away.

  “What happened to the things I buried?” he asked, his voice low so neither the housekeeper nor anyone else could hear.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But Annika would—”

  “When the Gestapo came to search,” Hermann said slowly, scratching his cheek, “they took all the heirlooms.”

  Max studied the man’s face, the perspiration beading along his hairline. He’d never been any good at lying—one of the reasons Max hadn’t told him where the treasure was hidden. But Annika had known. If Herr and Frau Stadler sold the items that they’d safeguarded, the guilt was on their heads.

  Max held up the Bambi book. “This used to be my favorite.”

  “What the Nazis didn’t destroy, Annika wanted to keep in honor of your family.”

  “May I keep this one now?” He may never read the story again, but the book reminded him of all that was once happy in his home.

  “Of course.”

  He thought Hermann might ask if there was anything else he wanted from his family’s things, but his former friend was silent. Max tucked the book in his satchel, and Hermann watched him from the door until he crossed into the forest.

  He’d already arranged passage to New York Harbor—he should go directly back to the station, take the next train out to the port at Caen, but it wasn’t right for Hermann to keep him from seeing Annika one last time. He wasn’t a threat. Only an old friend.

  He’d learned how to stay hidden during the war, and he hid now in the trees, watching the courtyard and the gardens. As morning turned into afternoon, a BMW drove up the lane. A woman dressed in a yellow blouse and denim capri pants emerged from the vehicle, a wide-brimmed summer hat on her head. Three children tumbled out behind her, a toddler and two girls around eight and ten, he surmised, and then an older youth, a young man about fifteen or sixteen, stepped out of the passenger door.

  Annika was no longer a kitten. She’d grown into an elegant woman who seemed to have aged well in the past fifteen years. The little boy took one of her hands. Then the girls and the young man joined them as they spun in a circle, laughing together until they fell onto the grass. Annika’s hat tumbled off her head, and when she reached for it, Max saw her face. Saw what he never imagined he would see again.

  It was Luzi there before him, her smile the one that had enchanted him the night of their dance, the eyes that stole his heart.

  Luzia Weiss was alive.

  But the Nazis had logged her name meticulously in their extermination records at Ravensbrück.

  Whom had they taken away in 1939?

  A tremor coiled down Max’s spine. In that moment, he knew, or at least he thought he knew, what Annika—and Hermann—had done. He collapsed onto the floor of pine needles and dried leaves, sick as the day when Hermann told him that Luzi had been taken away. And he held the book closer to his chest, trying to connect the scattered pieces in his memory.

  Annika hadn’t stolen the heirlooms. His friend had been taken away that day in April. And Luzi, perhaps she had thought Max ran away.

  It was much too late to change any of it now, but still the questions flooded his mind.

  Hermann had told him Luzi was gone, taken away by the Gestapo, and then he’d married her.

  Did anyone else know their secret?

  Surely some of the people in town must, but perhaps they’d buried it with the destruction from the war.

  He didn’t speak to Luzi, though everything within him wanted to tell her that he was okay. They’d never dance again, but this time he could leave with a final good-bye.

  But the good-bye would only be good for him. Not for Luzi or Hermann or their children. So much of her life already lay in ruins. He wouldn’t shake the foundation of what remained.

  Before he returned to his ship, Max found the finest maker of violins in Salzburg and commissioned him to craft an instrument and hand-deliver it to a certain woman who had once lived for music. And then he went home.

  EPILOGUE

  Snow sticks to the clear fragments of a stained-glass window—the picture inside, a Madonna watching over Christoph Eyssl’s tomb. We’re an odd group gathered in this chapel above Lake Hallstatt, a week before Christmas. Twenty-three people preparing to open the casket of a man who died nearly four hundred years ago.

  It’s taken months to gather all the necessary permits, but Sigmund partnered with Josh, and these two men, along with Luzia, managed to convince people across Austrian ranks about the possibilities. The Austrian chancellor, a friend of the Stadler family, is here today along with some other very important people, most of whom think I’ve spent too much of my life reading fairy tales.

  I’m most interested in the VIPs who surround me: Charlotte and her sister, Brie and Ella, and a certain man on the other side of the church, the newest tenured professor at OSU, talking to the chancellor about other places he’d like to dive one day.

  “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” Charlotte says, and I agree with her. She’s gone from having a family of only Brie and me to a crowd of nieces and nephews who’ve welcomed her into their fold. And a sister who clearly adores her.

  “I’m proud of you,” Brie whispers to me.

  “For what?”

  “Your courage.”

  I smile at her, the person who knows me best of all. Others wouldn’t think of flying to Austria as courageous, but it took everything I had to get on that plane six months ago. And my everything was worth it for Charlotte and Luzia. And for Josh . . .

  “I’m proud of him too.” Brie nods toward the man who became my husband last month. “For luring you out of your cage.”

  I laugh. “You make him sound so conniving.”

  “He’s a smart man for falling in love with you and inviting you into his world.”

  “Brie!”

  She laughs. “Just saying it like I see it.”

  “Thank you for my gift,” I tell her, sweeping my hand across the crowded room, stopping at Josh. “Without you, this never would have happened.”

  “Has it been worth it, Callie?”

  And I know what she means—not the numerical kind of worth, but has it been worth risking my heart, the safe boundaries of my nest, to accept Josh’s invitation to share our lives as a family.

  “Indubitably.”

  Violin music travels in from the narthex as we wait for an archaeologist representing the World Jewish Congress to arrive. Max Dornbach’s great-granddaughter is playing Luzia’s violin.

  Even though Luzia can no longer play herself, she’s caught up in Anna Dornbach’s song. And so is Charlotte. The two sisters are sitting beside each other, arms linked. Pity the person, I think, who would try to tear them apart now. I’ve lost Charlotte in one sense, but my heart doesn’t bleed as I thought it might. Instead, it’s expanded to make room for more.

  Behind Charlotte and Luzia is a row of eight people from Bolivia and Canada, descendants of a family named Leitner who escaped from Obertraun before the Austrian Jewish people were transported to concentration camps. Besides Luzia, they are
the only ones we’ve been able to locate who might have a claim to what, if anything, is hidden in this chapel.

  When the archaeologist and her assistant arrive, Josh slips up beside me and takes my hand. I’d expected the archaeologist to use some sort of fancy tool to open the casket, but the two women cover their faces with respirator masks and begin to pry open the box with a crowbar.

  The lid tilts up, their success overpowered by the stench that permeates the room. The priest opens two doors, allowing the cold air to sweep through the nave, and I cover my face with my sleeve. Ella glances over at me, and I nod, giving her permission to slip outside with Anna.

  The archaeologist reaches inside the casket with gloved hands and lifts out a burlap bag. One extraordinary girl, she confirms, brilliantly recorded the treasure in a place few adults would look and then hid it in the most unexpected of places.

  Inside the bag is a gold necklace, the Star of David, engraved with the initials S. L. on the back. One of the women from the Leitner family gasps. “It’s Aunt Sarah’s star,” she says, and I smile.

  The Bambi book and I—we’ve found our way home. Perhaps more of these items will find their way home as well.

  Ella and Anna return to the sanctuary, and we watch quietly as daylight fades into the lilac hour, the archaeologist and her assistant carefully cataloging burlap bags and brown-paper wrappings and feed sacks—all filled with valuables from before the war. Every piece will be recorded, using Annika’s book as a reference, and the items will be returned to the Leitners and the descendants of any other families who survived the Holocaust.

  If no one remains, the pieces will go to a museum in their memory and to honor all who died under Hitler’s regime.

  The archaeologist pulls an envelope out of the casket, well preserved in the same salt used for Christoph’s remains. Then she reads the handwritten note to her small audience.

  Dear Max,

  To keep our secret safe, I must hide it away again. I’ll guard it even when I’m afraid, even after you are gone. If I’m not able to retrieve it, I hope that you will find this one day and remember what Mama once told me: Our hearts follow wherever our treasure might be. I hope your heart follows this treasure home.