Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

  Unfortunately, I haven’t found any records that mention an Annika Knopf. Austria didn’t have a central birth registry before 1938, but if you know where Annika attended church, you can search for her baptismal certificate, and perhaps a wedding and death certificate through them.

  I finally located the photograph that you requested from the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Attached is the scanned picture along with the caption from the society column.

  I click on the first attachment, and the newspaper photograph expands on my screen. Now I know whom this young man is smiling at—a beautiful young lady who’s dressed as if she descended from royalty. The admiration in his face is clear, not a care in the world beyond the woman across from him. I can’t see the front of her face, but her gaze is focused back on him, as if she could spend the rest of the evening dancing in his arms.

  If this is Annika . . . why would she cut herself out of the picture?

  I click on the second document. Sophie has circled a paragraph for me.

  Maximilian Dornbach and . . .

  My iPad screen seems to gray, and I blink hard, trying to focus again on the second name.

  Maximilian Dornbach and Luzia Weiss, Opera Ball.

  Maximilian Dornbach. Max. The king of the wild things.

  And Luzia Weiss . . . the name in Charlotte’s book.

  My heart races again. Charlotte thought her birth name was Luzia, but clearly this woman was born years before 1938.

  Is it possible that Luzia Weiss was her mother?

  Stunned, I read the name again, afraid that I might have mistaken the spelling, but the caption is identical to the name written in the book about Hatschi Bratschi.

  Charlotte was adopted from an orphanage in France, not Austria, and yet . . .

  I surf online for Luzia Weiss and Luzia Dornbach in both Vienna and Idaho, but nothing comes up. Then I search for Maximilian Dornbach in Idaho.

  This time an obituary fills my screen.

  Max Dornbach. Veterinarian. Resident of Sandpoint. Winner of the AVMA Animal Welfare Award. Father of two children. Husband of Renee Dornbach for almost fifty years.

  A hundred questions spring into my mind for Liberty—Liberty Dornbach, I assume. I try to call her back, but she doesn’t answer.

  Why is the picture of Max and Luzia in the back of Annika’s book? Did Max know about her list?

  And most important to me at the moment, what happened to the woman in Max Dornbach’s arms?

  CHAPTER 20

  LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA

  AUGUST 1938

  Max collapsed onto a chair in the ancient entry hall, the faint strains of music sprinkling down from the second floor of the Schloss. Herr Knopf had refused to return the necklace to him even though Annika had found it in Frau Dornbach’s room. He didn’t blame Annika for being curious, but her father . . . It was thievery, taking something from one’s employer.

  Herr Knopf didn’t seem to care when Max called him a thief. Collateral, that’s what the man had said.

  But collateral for what?

  Herr Knopf had shaken his head, refusing to answer the question. Max’s mother could probably answer it, but he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to know why Herr Knopf had been smirking when he delivered that news. Had he discovered that Klara Dornbach was helping the Jewish people as well?

  A door creaked farther down the corridor, and his mother emerged into the foyer, flipping the switch that powered their chandelier light.

  “Why are you still awake?” she asked, a porcelain cup nestled in her palm. The steam from chamomile tea billowed into a cloud around her dark hair, hanging loose over the shoulders of her robe. Her face was scrubbed clean of rouge and the burgundy-colored lipstick she usually wore.

  “Herr Knopf wanted to speak with me,” he said.

  “Whatever could Emil need at this hour?”

  Max closed his eyes, a dull ache creeping up the back of his neck, shooting pain through his head.

  He’d lost track of the hours since they’d arrived from Vienna. Was it three in the morning now? Later even? Neither of them would have much rest tonight.

  “Herr Knopf found a necklace in your room.”

  She slid into a chair beside him, across from the grand stone fireplace that lay dormant in the summer months.

  “With a Star of David.”

  She stared at him, dumbfounded, and then the shock of the find began to slowly register in her eyes. “It was hidden away. . . .”

  “Not anymore.”

  His mother’s gaze trailed up the carpeted steps to the first floor of their home. “He was rummaging through my things.”

  Max didn’t reply, not ready to incriminate Annika, who seemed as stunned as he had been by the discovery.

  “Did you get it from a friend?”

  “It was a gift from my mother.” Her hands trembled as she tried to sip her drink, splashing tea onto the marble tile. “No one else must find out, Max.”

  “Who gave her the star?”

  “Her mother,” she whispered.

  Max leaned his head back against the wood paneling, the ache behind his eyes pounding with her words. “My grandmother was Jewish.”

  “She was baptized in the Catholic Church as an infant, but according to the new laws in Aus—Ostmark, she would still be Jewish.”

  His grandparents had died more than two decades ago, leaving his parents—the newly wed Wilhelm and Klara—the estate of Schloss Schwansee as their inheritance. He’d never met his grandparents, but people in town remembered them. Unlike the Dornbach family, who used the castle as a holiday residence, his grandparents had lived at Schloss Schwansee year-round.

  His grandparents had two daughters—Klara and Annabel. Tante Annabel had married a French artist years ago and relocated with him to Paris.

  “I will give Emil money,” his mother said. “It will keep him quiet.”

  “Not for long.” The man would take the money and keep asking for more.

  He scooted his chair toward her, the legs screeching across tile. “Does Father know?”

  “He never asked.”

  “But he suspects.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My grandparents converted before my mother was born. Your Oma didn’t know about her heritage until long after she’d married.”

  “But you knew before you married.”

  “I loved your father, and he loved me for who I was. An Austrian Catholic girl.”

  “From a prominent family.” He hated the bitterness in his voice, the cruelty in his words, but if his mother had been an Austrian girl without an inheritance, he doubted his father would have married her.

  What would his father have done—what would he do now—if he discovered the truth? Wilhelm Dornbach’s identity was grounded in his work and the purity of his blood.

  “Our marriage was suitable for both of us.”

  “But not if he knew you were Jewish.”

  “Partially Jewish,” she insisted. “My father and his parents were Aryan.”

  “It shouldn’t have mattered either way.”

  “It didn’t matter twenty years ago,” she said, her head bowing again to the cup in her hands. “But now it matters very much.”

  “Is that why Tante Annabel moved to Paris?”

  She nodded. “The changes in Germany worried her.”

  “What about Uncle Félix?”

  His mother shrugged. “We never spoke of such things.”

  Silence. It seemed to be what kept all of them sealed away in their private spaces, afraid of what might happen when the truth came out. Because speaking the truth now could be ugly, labeling people like they were cans of soup at the grocer’s. Selecting who was worthy to be in Hitler’s Third Reich based on their ancestry or faith.

  People—good people—like Luzi, who had to leave school because of a lineage established long before she was born. Her father, a respected doctor just weeks ago, now without a position, the respect for all his work gone.
r />   Max walked toward the front door to lock it. “Father will find out.”

  “Not if you don’t tell him.”

  He’d never betray either of them.

  CHAPTER 21

  LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA

  OCTOBER 1938

  The rumble of a car engine drowned the chorus of birds who’d nestled themselves between green conifer boughs and crisp leaves turned auburn and orange by the autumn winds. Annika hopped off her bicycle and hid behind one of the giant pines, watching between branches as a black sedan moved slowly toward her, bumping over the rocks and tree limbs that littered the dirt.

  A long lane, the width more accommodating to an oxcart than an automobile, stretched from Schloss Schwansee east, to an unlocked gate about half a kilometer away and on into the town of Obertraun. Every few months, lost or curious drivers would venture through the gate and find themselves on the estate with no place to turn around until they reached the courtyard by the castle.

  The estate had been built to be accessed by water, but this path, hidden under the trees, gave the Dornbachs and the occasional visitor opportunity to drive. These days she wished they could lock the gate and block anyone from coming onto the property. Except Max, of course, and Sarah and Hermann. How she missed all of them. Sarah had left for Bolivia months ago, and Annika’s father no longer needed Hermann’s help with the platform. It still needed to be painted, but Vati didn’t seem to care.

  The men in uniforms came to visit her father several evenings a week now and sometimes during the day, often taking him away with them. At first she thought they were friends of his, going to the pub, but he no longer stumbled home in a stupor, smelling like sour beer. In fact, he seemed much more focused, like the sharp prick of a pin, though she didn’t know exactly what held his attention.

  She was furious at him for telling Max that she’d found his mother’s necklace, as if she had been trying to steal from the Dornbach family. It was almost as if he were intent on ruining the Dornbachs out of pure jealousy for their wealth and prestige. And ruining her as well.

  Where would she and her father go when Herr and Frau Dornbach decided they had enough of Vati’s rage?

  The black sedan crawled past her, and she saw two men in the front seat wearing the stormy gray tunics of the SS men she’d seen in the village of Obertraun.

  What did these men want with her father?

  The Dornbachs, she suspected, wouldn’t want Hitler’s men on their estate, but Vati didn’t care what they thought anymore. He’d stopped their work in the chapel, and he didn’t even bother to lock the front door to the castle, coming and going as if he owned the place.

  As if he didn’t expect the Dornbachs to return.

  Max and his mother had left hours after Vati showed him the necklace. The next day Annika had cleaned the castle, but she didn’t linger, afraid of what she might find. Max hadn’t contacted her even though she’d written a letter of apology, saying that she’d never intended to harm him or his family. It had been stupid of her to go through Frau Dornbach’s things.

  When the forest sounds returned, she pushed her bike back on the lane and began pedaling again, careful to maneuver around the rocks. She’d told Vati that she needed to go to the grocer’s, and if these men returned before she was in the village, she didn’t want them to offer her a ride.

  She’d waited weeks for Hermann to bring her valuables to hide, but he hadn’t returned to the estate after Vati stopped building the platform. Hermann needed to know that she wanted to help. That she would do whatever she could to protect what her father and these men were trying to steal.

  She unlatched the iron gate that stretched like a spiderweb between the stone walls and pedaled to the road that followed the train tracks into town. The chalets and barns ahead of her rambled through the threads of valley, hemmed in between the Alps. In addition to its five hundred residents, Obertraun had been filled in summers past with tourists from across Austria and Germany who boated and swam on the lake or hiked through the mountains. Other visitors arrived in the winter for skiing.

  In autumn and spring, this town consisted mainly of residents like her who’d been living here their entire lives. Most people knew one another, Hermann once told her, but since Vati had forbidden her to attend school or church, her world rarely expanded past the iron gates. Now that Max and Sarah were gone, her only connection to life outside was Hermann, along with the grocer and the butcher and the regular visits from Pastor Dietz, asking Vati if she could return to the evangelical church.

  She’d waited long enough to help Max and the others hide their valuables from the Nazis. The papers no longer reported anything negative about Hitler or his party, but she’d heard something on the BBC last night that terrified her. The Jewish people in Germany were disappearing, it seemed. Taken away to work camps. Their things confiscated.

  What would happen if people in Austria started disappearing as well?

  The air on the other side of the village smelled like fallen leaves and the newly chopped wood that had been stacked in bins near the country homes and lined up neatly against barn walls. Cows wandered toward a fence along the bike path to watch her, their bells clanging like chimes in the breeze.

  The Stadler family farmed in a valley east of Obertraun, at the foot of the Dachstein Mountains, and Annika found Hermann in his overalls and work gloves, loading shovelfuls of manure into a cart inside their barn.

  He leaned his shovel against the door. “You’re a long way from home.”

  She felt awkward for a moment, interrupting his work instead of answering his knock at her cottage. “I’ve come for a reason.”

  “Of course. Would you like some coffee?” He nodded toward his family’s house on the other side of the barn door, a chalet backed against the hillside. Autumn leaves dangled low on heavy branches, framing the sloped roof and heavy shutters and empty window boxes.

  “Perhaps in a bit,” she said. The house would be quiet with Hermann’s siblings gone, off starting families of their own, but she still wanted to speak with him outside so his mother wouldn’t hear. “Did you see Max when he visited in August?”

  Hermann shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know he was here.”

  “My father scared him away.”

  “Did he say when he would return?”

  “No, but . . . Max spoke with me.”

  Hermann propped one of his boots on the blade of his shovel, waiting for her to continue.

  “I know where he hides your things, Hermann.”

  Hermann’s eyes flashed. Not an admission of guilt, but enough that she knew he understood. “What things?”

  “The things you’re keeping from the Nazis.”

  He glanced over at the chalet and then reached for the handle of his shovel before turning away from her. “I don’t know what you’re referring to—”

  “He asked me to help you, Hermann.”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I want to help.”

  He ground the metal tip of his shovel into the floor of dirt and hay, looking through the door again. “This isn’t child’s play, Annika.”

  She straightened her back, her head held high. “I’m no longer a child.”

  He studied her for a moment, and she wished that she’d worn a scarf over her hair instead of plaiting it into braids. “I suppose you aren’t.”

  “What happens if the Nazis search your home? They will find these things, and your family—”

  “I’ve already counted the cost,” he said, his voice sober. “There’s always a cost for standing up against evil, Annika. You have to do it for the right reasons.”

  “Max asked me to do this.”

  “You can’t help people because of Max.”

  Annika considered his words. Was she helping hide the valuables because of Max or because she thought it was right?

  The image of Sarah flashed in her mind. Her friend carrying the bag with treasur
es for Hermann. The items were probably somewhere on Hermann’s farm, waiting to be buried in the land behind Annika’s cottage. Max said that not even Hermann knew what he’d done with them.

  She had to do something to help those who were being plundered by the evil in their country. It would be the greatest honor to care for Sarah’s heirlooms and to do the same for others in their community until they returned.

  “Please, Hermann. These things—they will be safe on the estate.”

  “Your father has become quite friendly with Hitler’s friends.”

  “Then they will never suspect that we’re hiding things.”

  He filled his shovel with the manure and piled it into the cart. “I’ll come to the boathouse tonight, while your father is gone.”

  Hermann kept his promise, rowing his boat under the catkins and into the boathouse before her father returned. The sky was ablaze with yellow sparks of sun and red-ember clouds that coiled like flames above the lake before the cold blues of night soaked up the fire.

  He handed Annika a seed bag, and she cradled it in her arms.

  “I’ve listed the items and the initials of each owner inside the bag,” he said. “Burn my list when you’re done.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll bring you more when I get them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Take care, Annika,” he said before rowing away.

  She hurried up the bank, and as she neared the cottage, she heard the rumble of a car engine again. She rushed into her bedroom, sliding the bolt across the door, and minutes later, her father’s boots clapped down the hallway, the slam of his door shaking her room.

  When his snores finally rattled the thin walls, she turned on the lamp and dumped the contents of the bag onto her bed. Some pieces were wrapped in brown paper, rolled in so much masking tape that they looked like one of the boulders along the lake. She brushed her hands across the loose pieces. Gold necklace. Ruby brooch. Six silver teacups with saucers.

  Teacups that she’d seen displayed in Sarah’s dining room hutch.

  If her father found this, she had no doubt he’d sell the items and return to the tavern, drinking away the profits. Or he’d use the items to bribe other people in their community. She couldn’t let either happen, for his sake or the sake of the families who valued these things.