The last letter she’d received from Luisa said all was well, but by the state of the yard, all was not well now.
A bird fluttered into a nearby tree, the branch bowing toward Hanna as if it was the only creature left to welcome her home.
She shuddered, turning away as the sun dipped behind the trees.
Had Luisa and Paul gone into town for the evening? Or had they decided to leave Nuremberg?
She prayed not. Luisa was the only family Hanna had left. She’d never move away without sending a letter. Or leaving a note, at the very least, inside the house.
She checked the back door, but it was locked like the front.
As night swelled between the trees, a coolness latched itself to the breeze. Hanna snagged her cashmere sweater from the suitcase, then secured her suitcase in the shed.
She had hidden a spare key after her father’s death, in a place no intruder would ever look. She had to retrieve the key before it got dark.
Tomorrow she’d find Luisa.
5
EMBER
Ember pressed through a wall of tourists to catch the blue line headed west, her hands trembling as she fell into an open seat. She wouldn’t let that rally ruin her afternoon. The hatred of those people, the animosity of whoever had decided to write another angry letter, drove her to succeed. Before history circled again to lure those in search of finding significance in the worst possible way. Preserving their culture by hurting other people.
She fidgeted with the clasp of her handbag and slipped out her phone. It was already after three.
She’d stood on that sidewalk for too long, her blood boiling at the barrage of words. Usually she walked twenty minutes from the Metro station at Foggy Bottom to her condominium in Georgetown, but if she walked this afternoon, she’d be too late to answer Noah’s knock. When she reached the station, she’d forgo the walk and use one of her rideshare apps. It was the optimist in her, but if the driver hurried, she could still be inside her condo door by 3:40, maybe even a minute or two before Noah knocked.
As the subway rumbled through a tunnel, she checked email and found one from Brooke.
Mom sent me this story from the Vineyard Gazette. Hate me as much as you want for forwarding it but thought it might help with your paper. You’re only allowed to be mad at me for a day!
How could she possibly hate Brooke for forwarding an article? They’d been friends for twenty years now, bonding for life after they’d twinned their junior year in art history with matching pink blouses, their collars popped up to their ears.
Much later they both confessed to despising pink as well as their desire to fit into the well-established pecking order at their high school. Ember had been the new kid without any money and with enough emotional baggage to down a fleet of planes. Brooke’s family didn’t have much money either, but she’d managed to secure a foothold among their fellow students. Not only had she thrown Ember a rope, she’d belayed her to the same platform until Ember fled from the island, seven months before graduation.
Even though they’d gone on to climb different mountains—Brooke working as a nurse at Children’s Minnesota and Ember on a winding trek as an educator and researcher—they still talked at least once a week.
The article was a feature on Mrs. Kiehl, the social studies teacher who’d inspired Ember to dig deeper into the history of Nuremberg. The woman who’d told her that no one else could establish her identity, no matter what they said about her. It was her choice who she was, who she would become. Her choice to let the past define her. Or not.
Ember had loved Mrs. Kiehl, but she’d been head over heels for the woman’s grandson.
That’s why Brooke was nervous. Dakota was the one boundary they’d drawn between them long ago, setting it deeply in cement after Ember left the island. The Dakota Ban, they called it. Any news that Brooke had about him, she was supposed to share with someone else.
Ember shook her head, declining the invitation for Dakota to step back into her mind. There was no space left in her head for that man.
She refocused on the article, and in the photograph, Mrs. Kiehl was sitting on the front porch of her family’s farmhouse, a cat nestled in her lap. This story was published last week, after Mrs. Kiehl finally agreed, at age eighty-five, to retire her part-time position. According to the reporter, three generations of islanders, about ten thousand students, had taken one of her classes.
The class of 2002 had 114 students. Ember had wondered about some of her classmates fondly over the years, checking their profiles on social media. Others, like Dakota, she refused to display on any of her screens, but they still swept into her mind uninvited. An invitation that would never come.
Dakota was the sole reason why she hadn’t contacted Mrs. Kiehl for an interview. The logic was irrational, she’d told herself this repeatedly, but it was her irrationality. No one, she’d decided long ago, needed to pity her.
Mrs. Kiehl had been born in Nuremberg right after the war. When she’d talked about this city during history class, the plight of the Jewish people there for five centuries, Mrs. Kiehl had deposited those stories straight into Ember’s memory bank, inspiring her to learn more.
Over the years, Ember began verifying the woman’s stories and found they were true. Anti-Semitism had new faces in each century, but the hatred remained. During her fellowship, this extension of time and resources to write her dissertation, she was trying to identify the cycle of hate in places where it had not only repeated but had grown into a Nazi stronghold until it capsized in 1945.
How did an entire society fall victim to the deception, the madness, of one man?
It was a question she’d spent a lifetime trying to answer.
The subway stopped and more people crowded around Ember, heavy shoulders and worn heels carrying their own stories.
Much of the information in the article was familiar. Mrs. Kiehl had spoken freely about Germany, proud of her heritage. In hindsight, Mrs. Kiehl hadn’t really talked about her parents, but according to the article, Charlie Ward—Mrs. Kiehl’s father—had been an American investigator for the military tribunals, and her mother—a German woman named Hanna—had been an archaeologist.
Ember read the line again.
A female archaeologist?
If Mrs. Kiehl had mentioned that piece, she would have remembered.
Intrigued, she signed into the museum archives. While she didn’t find information about Hanna Ward, she found a short listing for Hanna Strauss, a former archaeologist with the Nazis’ Ahnenerbe Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft. The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society.
The Ahnenerbe was an umbrella organization for about fifty research branches that Heinrich Himmler termed institutes to study everything from the Nordic symbols called runes to ancient Gregorian chants. With Himmler at the helm, the organization became increasingly focused on proving, under the Institute for Germanic Archaeology, that German people descended from a mysterious group of people called Aryans.
Ember cringed at this word, tapping both legs to clear it out of her head as she refocused on the crowded train, on the diversity that could either strengthen or destroy. Each person in this railcar, the smallest of samples, had chosen to work together on this journey. If only others could choose this kind of peace across their nation. The world. Choose to embrace love instead of hate.
They didn’t have to keep grinding through the cycles from the past.
Her past.
A snake of a memory crept into her mind, tempting her to dwell, but she wouldn’t linger here. Like she’d done with Dakota, she’d banned these memories for life.
In 1940, when the world finally confronted Hitler’s evil force, the Ahnenerbe changed as well. Every member was required to join the notorious Schutzstaffel, an organization only open to men. Nothing she could find online mentioned what happened to its female staff.
No wonder Mrs. Kiehl had talked so much about finding one’s own identity outside the definition of ot
hers, the shadows of a family and past. Whether or not Hanna had supported Hitler’s rule, Mrs. Kiehl had been raised by a woman who’d partnered at one time with the Nazis.
How had Hanna managed to immigrate to the United States? The US government wouldn’t have welcomed a former Nazi employee in the 1940s, even if she was married to an American. Hanna had probably changed her name and the pieces of her story to start a new life with Charlie on the island. Like Ember had done when she moved back to Martha’s Vineyard to live with her brother.
She read Hanna’s short biography one more time, as a crowd under McPherson Square boarded the subway car. Only a few words to describe what must have been a remarkable life. Perhaps not a sympathetic figure, but a fascinating one nonetheless.
She swiped back to the newspaper article.
“Hanna was a friend to the Jewish people,” Mrs. Kiehl said. “And the best of mothers to me.”
That’s what Ember wanted to find. Someone who had taken a stand in Nuremberg after the Nazi Party had brought that city to its knees. A German man or woman who’d tried to stop the cycle.
If only Mrs. Kiehl could tell her how an intelligent, educated German woman decided to partner with a maniac like Hitler. And how her mother had befriended the Jewish people when everything was stacked against her. Ember wanted to understand how the animosity had swept across Germany and how someone who’d lived in the bowels of Nazism helped others in the midst.
As the car neared her station, she slipped her phone back into her handbag. Eighty years had passed since the Holocaust and still, so many stories to be found. To be told.
In spite of her desire to avoid Dakota Kiehl, she had to pursue his grandmother’s story.
Ember raced out of the Foggy Bottom station, summoning a car to rush up the hill to her condo that overlooked the Potomac River. At exactly 3:38, she unlocked the door and hurried into the kitchen, yanking the ice cream that Ben & Jerry had deemed Phish Food out of her freezer and plopping it on the counter.
Just in time for the knock.
“Surprise!” Noah said, a gold-plated soupspoon in his hand when she swung open the door.
“What a pleasant surprise.” Ember smiled, the rhetoric as familiar as the ten-year-old’s ripped jeans and cherry-red Converse that he wore to school every day.
It was their ritual. Their way of reminding each other in a world of bullies and busyness, someone still cared to stop and remember.
“What brings you by today?” Ember asked, the door’s edge balanced against her hip.
Noah tried to glance around her at the kitchen counter, but Ember didn’t budge. The ice cream would have to wait.
“I can’t figure out how to divide,” he said.
The irony, Ember thought. Division came so naturally to much of this district, especially for kids like Noah. “There’s no need to rush division.”
Noah tilted his head, sweat beaded on his brown skin from the run between his bus stop and her front door. “That’s not what Mrs. Worthington says.”
She tapped her fingernails on the doorframe. “I much prefer multiplication and addition.”
The boy shrugged. Math wasn’t usually part of their banter. “I’m hungry.”
“I have plenty to eat,” she said. “Trout. Salmon. Mahi-mahi even.”
He grinned. “I prefer Phish Food.”
She propped open the door, and Noah ducked under her arm, those red high-tops carrying him across the hardwood floor in record time. Within seconds he was digging out a scoop of ice cream that might have been perfectly rounded if it weren’t for the lumps of chocolate fish swimming in caramel pools.
“What did you remember today?” Ember asked, sitting on a stool.
Instead of asking what he’d learned, they always remembered his day together. Some things they remembered quickly and then decided to forget.
He hooked a fish with his teeth and reeled it in. “I remembered that our government is a tree.”
Ember scooped out swirls of chocolate and marshmallow with her matching golden spoon. “A tree?”
“With three branches. Executive. Legislative. And . . .” He tapped the spoon against his forehead, trying to remember.
She made a branch with one of her arms, the spoon dangling off the end. “Judicial?”
“Right.” He clicked their spoons together. “Lots and lots of branches grow from that one.”
She sighed. “Multiplication and division.”
“What did you remember today?” he asked.
She thought for a moment, of the marchers who hated those different from them. Of people around the world who had stood up against the hatred. “I remembered the life of my history teacher from high school. They’re celebrating her eighty-fifth birthday.”
Noah leaned forward. “Too bad she didn’t teach you math.”
It was too bad. Ember might have learned something.
She showed Noah the picture of Mrs. Kiehl when she was much younger, marrying a local man named Albert Kiehl. Underneath was a photo of Mrs. Kiehl with Titus, her only son.
Noah skimmed the first paragraphs before looking back up. “Are you going to call your old teacher?”
“Former teacher,” Ember corrected. “She was born in 1945, but she probably doesn’t want to be called old.”
Noah shrugged before retrieving a notepad and pencil from his backpack. Then he began scribbling on the paper, hiding his work with his hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He turned his paper around. “You said your teacher was born in 1945.”
“She was.”
“Then your story said it wrong.”
“Said what wrong?”
“Her age.”
She stared down at Noah’s numbers, the proof scribbled onto his paper.
She smoothed her fingers over the edge of her iPad as she read the article again. The reporter had said that Mrs. Kiehl was eighty-five. If that were true, according to Noah’s numbers, the woman would have been born around 1936. Nine years before her American father came to Nuremberg.
“My memory must have failed me.”
Noah eyed her curiously. “Your memory never fails.”
“Then the reporter must be wrong.” She turned off the screen.
“Why don’t you text your teacher? She can tell you when she was born.”
She lidded their ice cream. “I don’t have her number.”
“But you can find it.”
“Maybe I will. After you’re done with your homework.” Ember tousled his hair. “There’s nothing wrong with your subtraction skills.”
Noah pulled out the binder with his math sheets, and they worked on dividing the numbers until one very important professor, Jack Matthews, knocked on her door. Noah’s dad taught mathematics at Georgetown, but he rarely bothered with the basics at home.
Not that she minded. Noah’s daily knock was the highlight of her day. That and the Phish Food.
“Thanks for keeping him out of trouble.” Jack lifted the Star Wars backpack off the floor, his light-blue shirt still perfectly pressed after a full day of teaching. The dry cleaner must use an entire can of starch to bar his wrinkles.
“We got into loads of trouble.” She handed Noah his golden spoon. “Almost cleaned out an entire tub of ice cream.”
Jack didn’t reply, but he lingered by the door as if she might ask them to stay for dinner. While she was thrilled to spend an hour with Noah each day, she had no interest in pursuing a relationship with a wrinkle-free man too pompous to help his ten-year-old son with division, even if Noah saw the world a little differently than the man who’d fathered him.
Noah dragged his feet down the hall, waving to her one last time before Jack unlocked the door to their condo.
After another bite—okay, two bites—of the melted Phish Food, she returned the remaining ice cream to its hold in the freezer. Then she logged into her computer and searched across social media for Mrs. Kiehl.
But Ember could
n’t find information about her former teacher online. Instead she found another short biography about an archaeologist named Hanna Strauss who’d worked at the Germanic National Museum during World War II.
A woman who, according to this writer, had disappeared.
6
HANNA
Hanna followed the familiar path up the hill and around the abbey’s sacred ruins to retrieve her house key. The roof of Saint Katharine’s abbey had collapsed centuries ago, the stained glass shattered, but a stone shell and ribbing of columns remained, a rickety bell tower and open door leading out to a labyrinth that curled like a caterpillar through the bramble and grass, each stone clothed in a mossy stole.
This labyrinth was a place to pray. A place to remember.
A place to hide one’s treasure.
Pushing aside a shrub, Hanna could almost see her mother again, smiling and circling this walk as she prayed. Sharing the ancient stories as Hanna trailed behind her.
Hanna’s favorite story had been about an orphaned postulant from the Middle Ages. After an uncle brought her to the convent, Cristyne resigned herself to becoming a nun. Legend claimed that a man named Emrich, son of Nuremberg’s burgrave, dismounted his horse to pray at a wooden cross built here while his party was hunting in the forest. Cristyne was kneeling in prayer that day, at the foot of the cross, and Emrich’s heart was forever changed.
As the months passed, he continued to ride up the mountain to pray, and when he saw Cristyne, he’d beg her to leave the convent. But even with her growing love, she’d devoted herself to the service of the Lord. Nothing he said would persuade her to leave.
Then a terrible plague swept across Nuremberg, along with rumors that local Jews had poisoned their wells. No one in town seemed to care when Jewish men and women also began dying.
The next time Emrich visited, he knocked on the convent door below the abbey, the son of his Jewish teacher in his arms.
God urged Cristyne and the sisters to help, not just this child but others, young and old, whom Emrich began transporting up the hill. And for each person who died, she and Emrich would place a rock at the cross. Namestones, they called them, carving the initials for each person who’d died. To remember.
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