The Curator's Daughter

by Melanie Dobson

  “We need to go to the labyrinth,” Hanna said, waking Lilly from her sleep.

  Lilly rolled over. “It’s too late.”

  “It’s never too late to pray.”

  They bundled into their coats and boots before removing the mountain of sandbags by the front door. Then they stepped outside, the flashlight and coffee tin stored in her bag.

  The mountain was dusted with snow, their feet crunching over the autumn leaves underneath. Thankfully the stars were bright enough to guide their steps. Hanna could lead them away from the cliffs, the opening to the mine, but she couldn’t predict who might be in the trees.

  “Stay close,” she said.

  “Frau Cohn says there are ghost rabbits in the forest.”

  “Grete likes to scare children with her stories, but it’s only folklore.”

  “I’m more worried about the wolves,” Lilly said. The same fear that had plagued her since she’d arrived at the lodge.

  “The wolves are all in Poland,” Hanna assured her, the branches around them shivering in the breeze. “And Poland is five hundred kilometers away.”

  No matter what happened, Hanna would never send her back to the wolves.

  Lilly was old enough now to hear more of the labyrinth’s story. Perhaps she, like Hanna, would find hope in the sadness. It was much better than the stories about frightening creatures in these woods.

  “Have I told you the story about Emrich and Cristyne?” Hanna asked.

  “No.”

  And so Hanna began to tell her about the young woman who’d wanted to become a nun, about the wealthy man who’d loved her. About how they’d labored together to rescue those who had been infected by the plague.

  “The sisters rescued hundreds of people, but those they lost were never forgotten. They carved an initial on stones to remember their names.”

  Lilly moved closer to her. “What happened to Cristyne?”

  “Sadly she died from the plague, but Emrich lived for many more years. He never forgot her.”

  “It’s good that he remembered.”

  “It is good. According to the legend, he left something in the labyrinth to remember her always, like they’d remembered all who had died,” Hanna said. “A pocket watch was a very rare thing back then, and they say Emrich buried his somewhere in the labyrinth. Because of it, time has stood still on this mountain for five hundred years.”

  “Has anyone found the watch?” Lilly asked.

  “I don’t believe so. According to the legend, the heart of whoever finds it will know love for a lifetime.”

  “I’m going to find it,” Lilly said solemnly.

  “I hope you do.” Hanna lifted a branch, and they ducked under it. “The legend also says that whoever finds it must leave it in the ground. For timeless love to work, it must be shared with others.”

  Usually Lilly played at the abbey while Hanna buried her papers, but tonight she guided her daughter to the center of the labyrinth stones. “People have prayed here for centuries.”

  Lilly brushed her hands over the soil. “I’m going to look for the watch.”

  The girl wouldn’t understand the significance of centuries, but one day the weight of the years would press on her, and she’d understand why Hanna couldn’t tell her where she’d been born. The burial of these papers would save her life.

  Hanna didn’t have time to count stones, but she knew exactly where to hide the adoption papers. Under the initial L—Lael, they had named this one, from the book of Numbers. Belonging to God.

  After moving the stone aside, taking care not to peel back any of the moss for others to suspect, she began to dig far into the ground so no one else would find these papers. Nor would anyone in the Nazi Party question Lilly’s measurements.

  She pounded the dirt firmly with her trowel and replaced the stone. “Let’s go home.”

  Lilly stayed on her knees. “I haven’t found the watch.”

  “Another day,” Hanna replied. “You can search for it in the light.”

  The girl eyed Hanna’s hands. “Where is your coffee tin?”

  “I had to leave it behind.”

  “Like Emrich?” Lilly asked.

  “Very much like him.” She guided Lilly carefully through the trees with her gloved hands, but as they neared the tree line, Lilly stopped walking.

  “What is it?” Hanna whispered.

  Lilly didn’t speak, only shaking her head as if she’d heard one of those wolves that she feared.

  Then Hanna heard something too, the crunch of leaves. A deer, she thought at first, for the mythical creatures of Bavaria didn’t make a sound.

  Someone moved in the trees below them, and she saw a splash of light probing the ground. Who else was coming up the hill?

  She pulled Lilly into a cleft of the sandstone, and they waited quietly together. Both of them in the shadows now.

  36

  EMBER

  Dr. Franz Graf had a stack of papers waiting for Ember in his office and a trove of stories about their collection of artifacts from the years when the German Renaissance was centered in Nuremberg.

  The first terrestrial globe, he explained, was wrought here in 1492, the globe that inspired Christopher Columbus to sail westward from Spain in search of a route to the Orient, stumbling on the Americas instead. In 1510 Peter Henlein invented the first portable watch in Nuremberg, made of copper and iron.

  Ember had already told him via email about her dissertation and search for a hero during the Holocaust. They talked about the centuries of persecution and then that fateful day when a quarter of the Jewish population was massacred, the rest expelled from this town. Intellectual progress, ingenuity of their culture, contrasting with the fall of mankind.

  “Do you have anything in your collection from Saint Katharine’s abbey?” she asked.

  The assistant director eyed her curiously. “We have the tower bell in storage.”

  Yesterday morning, she’d seen the intricately designed Memorbücher at the Jewish Museum, and she wished that she could see every piece in these museums, traveling back in time through their stories.

  “I’m actually looking for information about a woman who used to live near the abbey church.” She showed Dr. Graf the picture. “Her name was Hanna Strauss, and she worked as a curator in this museum during World War II.”

  He glanced at the photo, then typed something on his computer keyboard. “Unfortunately most of our records from the war were destroyed,”

  “Anything you have would be most helpful,” she said. “Her daughter wants to know where she went.” And so did Ember, desperately.

  The printer beside Dr. Graf began to hum, paper stacking up on top, but he didn’t give any indication of what he’d found. When it finished, he swiped up the pile and waved his silver-studded fingers, a diamond on one hand catching a glint of light and casting it across the wall. “Walk with me please,” he said, though it sounded like valk vith me.

  Ember followed him under the lobby’s bridge, into the cloister of a former monastery, Hebrew-inscribed gravestones from centuries past lined up against the plaster walls.

  May her soul be bound in the Garden of Eden.

  Ember scanned the translation from one of the stones as they moved through the tunnel.

  Bound in the perfect Garden of beauty and peace and life.

  Ember would bundle those words up in her heart as well, whenever she remembered her daughter.

  They passed under the arches of a medieval church and a bronze sculpture of the archangel Michael, his wings spanning its stone wall. She wanted to explore every inch of this place. Perhaps when Dakota arrived, they could return.

  Dr. Graf stopped near a collection of wooden sculptures, several created by a local Renaissance artist named Veit Stoss. He pointed out one sculpture of a woman sitting on the ground, the wrinkles in her dress crisp, her eyes lifelike as she gazed beyond Ember, seeming to see something in the future.

  “Gerhard Marcks sculpted this
one,” he said. “Do you know his work?”

  “I don’t.”

  “The Nazi Party said Marcks’s art was unsuitable, so they confiscated all his sculptures and banned him from creating any additional material.”

  Ember studied the longing in the woman’s face and wondered about the artist. Was he trying to demonstrate how he and others felt trapped under the regime?

  “Hitler knew the power of art and entertainment. In 1937, the Nazis held their Great German Art Exhibition in Munich to display its value. Nearby, they also held an exhibition titled Degenerate Art to publicly shame Marcks and others for creating artwork that Hitler perceived to be about Jewish culture or something else contrary to his Reich. He redefined much for the German people, regulating what they could create and even the use of certain words.”

  Whoever owned the definitions, tweaking familiar words for their own use, could influence the morality of a people. The Nazis, she’d read, had tried to redefine the entire German society. Twisting their language. Writing fiction instead of fact. Re-creating their past and eliminating the hard truths for their future.

  Purity meant prejudice. Evacuation meant murder. Living space meant stealing another’s land.

  And Hitler was supposed to be their savior.

  What sounded good and right and true was really evil. Even the hooked cross, the swastika, was an ancient symbol of peace. The Boy Scouts once used it as a badge of kindness before the Nazis stole it for their propaganda.

  Curious, Ember turned back to the assistant director. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “National Socialists did terrible things in our country, but as you finish your dissertation, you must know that not all Germans were Nazis.”

  “I know,” Ember assured him. “I’ve read many accounts of the German people who secretly conspired against Hitler or were part of a network to help the Jewish people.” More than six hundred Germans had been honored for rescuing their Jewish countrymen during the Holocaust. “Just not in Nuremberg.”

  “The Nazis persecuted people in many different ways,” Dr. Graf said. “Some they tortured terribly in the camps and I would never discount the horror those victims experienced, but they also stole away the livelihood from others who dissented. Their craft. Their families. They broke them down first and then they often took their lives.”

  She eyed the papers still clutched in his hand. “Did the Nazis kill Hanna Strauss?”

  “I don’t know what happened to her. The Americans wanted to try her husband here in Nuremberg, but he disappeared like his wife.”

  Ember wished she could read those papers. “What did her husband do during the war?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have that specific information,” he said. “Did you know Frau Strauss worked for the Ahnenerbe?”

  “Yes, she was an archaeologist.”

  “Sadly the Ahnenerbe was doing much more than archaeology. You’ll find it all in here.” He lifted the papers but didn’t hand them over yet. “Have you heard the German word Vergangenheitsbewältigung?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s what we call the process of overcoming the past. Our government doesn’t tolerate fascism now, but there is a whole generation still trying to overcome our collective history. Hitler portrayed himself as a father for the youth in the 1930s and an advocate for the workingman. By the end of the war, there were more than eight million members of the Nazi Party.

  “Many of our parents and grandparents supported Hitler’s regime, but most Germans didn’t know the extent of what was happening in the concentration camps. Everyone knew that the Jews were being persecuted, but few people spoke out. We bear the weight of this guilt as a society, Ms. Ellis, even as we try to understand what went wrong.”

  He was testing her, the papers a carrot in his hand.

  “We each make our own choice to bring good or evil into this world,” she said carefully. “I don’t blame anyone in Germany for what their parents did. Just as I pray my daughter won’t blame me for what I did when she was a baby . . .”

  A sharp nod, then Dr. Graf directed her to a back door. “Frau Strauss packed artifacts for the museum so they wouldn’t be destroyed in the war. Would you like to see where they were stored?”

  Ember’s heart raced. “Very much.”

  They walked out into the pleasant June morning, winding through the cobbled streets of a city completely rebuilt from the rubble, the medieval charm fully intact as they neared an open-air market.

  A golden spike anchored one side of the plaza. The Beautiful Fountain, it was called. She’d read about the dozens of historical figures displayed on this waterless sculpture, the brass rings along the ornate fencing for good luck. Food and flower stalls were sandwiched in the wide courtyard between the fountain and a Gothic church.

  “Is this the Hauptmarkt?” she asked.

  He nodded as they moved through the crowds with their shopping bags and cell phone cameras. Bells chimed in the church tower and below the clock two trumpeters lifted their instruments to entertain a sculpted Holy Roman Emperor figure, his electors, and all of Nuremberg with their music like they’d done for centuries. In that moment, Ember realized that she was watching what Hanna and even Lilly would have watched. What those who visited Nuremberg five hundred years ago would have seen.

  All of her reading, everything she’d learned about this town, centered right here in this marketplace where the Jewish community had gathered in centuries past.

  The former Jewish synagogue was destroyed in 1349, and 150 years later—in 1498—the Jewish people living around the Hauptmarkt were expelled. Many of them returned to their homeland in Poland, but some went west to Fürth. Near the courthouse where the nations tried Nazi officials for their crimes against humanity.

  The synagogue along the Hauptmarkt was destroyed again on the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, burned to the ground when the persecution against the Jewish people resurfaced.

  The Nazi Party as a whole, not just Hitler, hated the Jews. The soldiers in their heavy jackboots had marched right through this square, probably rocking the ancient cobblestones. The rhythm of their power, shaking the buildings, would have beat deeply into the hearts of those who lived here.

  Ember followed Dr. Graf across the Pegnitz and up a hill with Bavarian shops, museums, and restaurants on each side. At the top was the formidable Kaiserburg Castle, the crown of this imperial city in the Holy Roman Empire. Dr. Graf stopped in front of an unmarked door between shops and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket.

  “We call this the art bunker.” When he pushed open the door, a rush of cold air flooded into the street. He reached for a flashlight hanging on the rock wall and guided her down into a tunnel.

  Inside the bunker were more doors, heavy ones that Dr. Graf unlocked along the way, the walls on both sides reinforced by wood.

  “Frau Strauss and Director Kohlhaussen took great care in protecting the Holy Roman and German relics and items from the Jewish culture.” He flipped a switch and an overhead light illuminated a stack of crates. “Ninety percent of the old city was destroyed in the bombing, but the museum staff was able to save most of our relics. Unfortunately the local government didn’t prepare a bunker to save residents. Thousands of our citizens died.”

  Sadness washed over her. If only the Nazis had treasured their people as much as their artwork.

  “I will tell Mrs. Kiehl what her mother did during the war.”

  He lifted the papers and handed them over. “She did something else, it seemed.”

  Ember glanced down at the typed papers, each of them with a name at the top. They appeared to be short biographies.

  “Frau Strauss had been concealing these in crates with other artifacts before sending them off to this bunker. One of the museum secretaries found them after the war.”

  “She was keeping the stories . . .”

  “It seems so. Collecting them would have been even more dangerous than those men and women who crea
ted the degenerate art.”

  Ember looked back at the man. “Is this secretary still alive?”

  “She is.”

  “Do you think she would talk to me?” Ember asked, her heart racing at the thought of meeting someone who remembered Hanna.

  Dr. Graf smiled for the first time since she’d entered his office. Then he handed her the last sheet of paper. “Frau Cohn is her name. You’ll find her number here.”

  “Does she speak English?”

  “A little,” he said. “I took the liberty of calling ahead. She is expecting you tomorrow morning at eleven.”

  Ember glanced down at her watch. “I will be there.”

  And Dakota, she hoped, would arrive in time to join her.

  37

  HANNA

  Knocking—that was the first sound Hanna heard when she woke. Like a woodpecker drumming against a tree. Then in the distance was an explosion, and she jumped to her feet, waking Lilly beside her.

  Wings dipped in the moonlight outside her window, and Lilly screamed.

  Airplanes, Hanna slowly realized. An angry swarm overhead. Neither sandbags nor gas masks would save them if a bomb dropped on the lodge.

  “We have to run,” she told Lilly, glad they were already dressed for the cold.

  A screaming sound replaced the knocking, a boom and whistle like fireworks. They tied their boots quickly, and Hanna reached for the rucksack filled with supplies by her bed. The war, it seemed, had finally come to Nuremberg.

  The museum’s artifacts and artwork were supposedly safe, buried wherever the director had taken them. Now she and Lilly needed to find a place to hide.

  “Schatzi?” Lilly called, her elephant safe under her arm.

  “She’s already hidden,” Hanna said as she threw aside the sandbags blocking the front door. With this noise, the trembling of walls, they might not find the cat for days.

  When no break came in the swarm, she tugged on Lilly’s hand, ducking as they ran toward the meadow, trying to blend in with the tall grass. When they neared the forest, she pulled Lilly back into the cover of trees. Then she held her close to her chest, the two of them curled up at the base of the trees as if she could shield her daughter from the storm.