The Curator's Daughter

by Melanie Dobson

  The 4Runner spun instead, the tail end thudding against the tree, halting their slide. Then all was still as if they’d stopped this moment in time.

  Like the gate on a drawbridge, the oak cut off their access to Mrs. Kiehl.

  Dakota didn’t move, his hands clutching the wheel. “I’m afraid it’s going to take a few more minutes to get home.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice small, the image of their truck tumbling downhill on replay in her head. Thank God, they hadn’t flipped over.

  He shifted to park and hopped out, examining the tree before he returned to his seat. “I’ll need to bring back a chain saw to clear the road.”

  She nodded toward the muddy path between the tree and wall. “Can we walk up to the house?”

  A flash of lightning answered her question.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to reschedule until tomorrow,” he said.

  She nodded slowly, trying to let go of her plans like she’d asked Noah to do with his plans today. “Tomorrow would be fine.”

  She could still take the ferry back in the afternoon. Maybe she could even stop in Pennsylvania and spend the night with her brother.

  In the morning, she prayed, the storm would be gone.

  12

  LILLY

  SONNENWIESE CHILDREN’S HOME

  Lightning stabbed the village below, and the little girl, her nose pressed against the glass, waited until the thunder rolled across town and up the hill, shaking this big house.

  They had thunder at her home too, back in the trees. Perhaps Mama had heard it.

  This big house with its endless rooms, all the children crowded inside, was nothing like home. She missed the fields and stream behind her cottage. Missed her brothers and how they’d bring her sweet pączki when they returned from work.

  Most of all, she missed her mother.

  “Lilly?”

  The girl didn’t move, her nose squished against the cold as she waited for another light, a second roll of thunder. Was Mama thinking about her?

  “Lilly,” the woman called again.

  This time the girl turned. Lilly was her name now; she’d forgotten.

  The matron was standing before her, a white apron wrapped tightly around ribbons of flesh, a towel in her thick hands.

  Was it time to be measured again? She hated the doctors with their rulers who made notes about her face, her arms. Picked through her hair. Hated the nurses who smacked her bottom like they were giant bats, she the ball.

  When her brothers played palant, they would drop their bat—after they’d hit the ball—and race between niebo and piekło. Heaven and hell.

  Some days it felt like she was between heaven and hell here, searching for a safe place to hide.

  Sonnenwiese, they called this house. Sun Meadow. A happy name, but still she felt so very sad.

  She followed the matron into the kitchen.

  “Where are we, Lilly?” the woman asked, taking a silver tray off the counter, filling it with peppernut cookies for the children.

  “Kuchnia,” she replied softly, knowing the word wasn’t right, but she couldn’t remember all these new words.

  “Nein. Try again.”

  “Ku—”

  “Küche,” the woman said. “You have to learn these words if you ever want a family.”

  Family.

  That word made her smile, but she didn’t want a new family. She already had one.

  “Come along,” the woman said.

  She followed the matron through the stark hall, into a room unlike any other in this place. The brown walls reminded her of a forest, the seat cushions like autumn leaves. A pretty woman sat on a chair, wearing a bright-green dress as if she were budding on the branches.

  When Lilly walked in, the green lady wrote something on her notepad.

  “She’s about three,” the matron told her. “But she’s not ready yet.”

  “When will she be ready?”

  “In six months, maybe sooner.”

  The green lady’s eyes narrowed. “We have hundreds more children waiting for a decent bed.”

  “She’s a slow learner.”

  “Then you must encourage her to learn faster.”

  The matron nodded briskly before shuffling Lilly into the next room. Instead of forest browns, this room was gray and silver. Like the storm.

  New children were lined up against a wall, waiting for the doctors and nurses. The matron guided her to the opposite end of the room, where they made her climb up on a metal step, lower a bar onto the top of her head. To see if she measured up.

  That’s one word she learned early.

  Messen.

  Everything here was measured.

  Were they measuring Mama in another room? Or another house?

  They couldn’t measure Papa—he’d left home a long time ago—but her brothers would measure up.

  Once she’d asked the matron about her family, and she received a slap in return. She had no family, the matron said. Not yet.

  But she did have a family. And they would be looking for her.

  Questions were not permitted here—she’d learned that quickly—but they bubbled up inside her like apple soda, no place to spill.

  The matron pushed her along and then handed her a dolly. She was supposed to pretend like she was the mama, taking care of this baby, but she couldn’t shake the questions out of her head.

  Why had the soldiers taken her from Mama?

  And if she didn’t measure right, why couldn’t she just go home?

  13

  HANNA

  Hanna jimmied the key in the attic lock. When she was a child, she’d often sneak into Vater’s room, testing this door. Never once had she found it unlatched, but it became a ritual, a crusade of her own to explore the world of dollhouses that her grandfather had created. A world she’d explored with her brother before the war.

  After Jonny’s death, Vater had locked the door for good. She’d desperately wanted to play among the dollhouses again, discover the secrets they must contain, but then she’d grown up and decided to uncover secrets in other places around the world.

  If Luisa had hidden something incriminating here, if the Gestapo agent found it, he’d implicate both women. She had to find this piece—the labyrinth that Frau Weber described—before the agent returned.

  If only her muscles were stronger than her mind. Instead of wriggling this old key in the lock, she’d force the door open with her shoulder, like the men in the movies.

  A click from the lock, and her breath skipped. Tentatively she pressed down on the latch, and the hinges groaned in response.

  The haze of afternoon light pressed through splotches on the weathered windows, pinholes of light illuminating the vast space. Like a cavern, she thought, without a dirt floor for her to dig.

  A flashlight in hand, she trailed the sunlight under low timbers and then the room opened up into a magical space, even grander than her childhood memories.

  Opa’s workshop was a wonderland.

  Dollhouses encircled the room. The kind that wealthy people of old would purchase—not for their children but as a collection to impress their aristocratic neighbors. Oversized Puppenhäuser normally found in museums across Nuremberg, not hidden away.

  Mesmerized, Hanna shone her flashlight on one of the dust-coated houses to study the details. Each room was meticulously designed with colorful chintz drapes and polished tables and tiny pewter candlesticks and tableware. One of the bedrooms had a canopy bed with carved posts and a miniature hobbyhorse for the little girl who was tucked into bed, a pink stocking cap to match her gown and a shelf on her wall filled with books.

  The next house was fashioned after a home from the early 1800s, it seemed, with an attached stable and carriage house. The carriage inside rolled seamlessly when she nudged it forward.

  Her grandfather must have worked up in the attic religiously, creating samples to replicate in the Tillich Toy Factory. Or was he commissioned by local
families to build these? The workmanship seemed too precise to be a sample, unless potential customers came to view these models.

  She would have been about three when she and Jonny had talked Vater into letting them see this place. Perhaps she’d forgotten all these marvelous details, but it seemed they would have been seared into her young mind.

  Had Vater worked up here as well, after Jonny died?

  The third dollhouse stretched almost a meter above her head, the rooms a mirror of the former hunting lodge, the downstairs hall mounted with trophies of faux animal heads. At the base of the house was a wooden stool, and Hanna stepped on it, looking into the miniature attic. Inside were tiny dollhouses and a male doll bent over a workbench, his graying hair a mantle above the tools.

  She moved to the next house, brushing dust off a tea service in the parlor.

  Perhaps her grandfather had simply enjoyed building these as a hobby for himself. Or as a gift for his children. Instead of daughters, Opa had two sons. The oldest died in 1887 from typhoid when it swept through the factory. The younger one, Hanna’s father, inherited a toy factory that he had never wanted to run.

  Why hadn’t her father allowed her to enjoy this legacy of toys instead of hiding them away? She would have loved nothing more as a girl than to slip up here and create stories of her own.

  It was possible that her father, like her, wanted to preserve the past, but it was probably something deeper. Vater had never wanted her to be a child, at least not a girl. He’d loved her in his own way, but he didn’t want her enamored by dolls or the other playthings that parents bought from his factory. He’d wanted her to be well-versed in books so she didn’t have to focus solely on Kinder, Küche, und Kirche.

  She circled the far end with her flashlight, searching for a labyrinth. Tools rested on the former workbench and beside it was a container with an assortment of fabric scraps and threads. Had her grandfather stitched the curtains and clothing himself? Forged the pewter? The factory, perhaps, had fired the porcelain for the dolls, but he might have painted some of the faces here.

  The stories he would have been able to tell about creating these pieces, perhaps he did tell, but Vater never passed them along. Her father didn’t like talking about the past. One of the many reasons why history had intrigued her so.

  She had no plans for children, but if she ever had a daughter, she wouldn’t lock doors to an attic or bury keys or hide the past away. She’d leave her daughter a legacy of stories, like her mother had left for her.

  A picture flashed in her mind, one of her pragmatic father up here as a boy, learning the trade. Was it possible that her father had worked in this attic alongside Opa, stitching or painting or carving as an apprentice? Perhaps, decades ago, he had been happy, before he was sent off to the war. Perhaps, in this place, he had escaped into his own world later in life, adding to Opa’s collection.

  There were an endless number of hiding places here for papers, folded into a neat square—trunks and cabinets and armoires. What had Luisa meant about hiding them under a labyrinth?

  Light was fading outside, and she didn’t want to alert anyone, especially another unwelcome visitor, to her presence with the flashlight. But what if the Gestapo agent returned first thing in the morning? He might find the papers that Frau Weber asked her to burn.

  She stepped back to the dollhouse that resembled the lodge, opening the small cabinets and a miniature steamer trunk, lifting the beds and furniture to look underneath.

  Outside one of the dollhouse windows, paned with glass, was a meadow of sorts, like the one behind her real home. Hanna shuffled behind the play house and shone her light on the ground.

  A block of green fabric stretched across a small square of floor, decorated with ceramic flowers that had been stained blue and yellow. At the far end of the meadow was a cropping of rocks on a gray circle of fabric, markings etched on each one. Like her labyrinth on the hill.

  Hanna lifted up the edge of the fabric and saw two pieces of paper stashed underneath. One was typed, then edited with a blue pen. The second was a sheet covered with names—some of them checked, others crossed off in pen. She didn’t recognize any of the names, but the addresses were all in Nuremberg.

  She locked the door and carried the papers downstairs, placing the key in the back of one of Vater’s desk drawers. If the Gestapo found it, she would claim ignorance. Her father had left it, and she’d yet to go through his things.

  On a pantry stool, hidden away from the windows, Hanna shone her light across the typed sheet. Paul’s name was at the top in bold letters, and the following paragraphs described the man who’d been born in Nuremberg and employed in management at various toy factories until he’d been asked to take over Herr Tillich’s role. No one at the Tillich Toy Factory, according to this report, had known that Paul’s parents were Jewish.

  The biography continued on the back of the sheet. As the new president, Paul had been determined to create toys to calm children’s fears about a possible war. He was successful at his work and the Nazis allowed him to continue running the factory until 1937, three years after Hanna’s father died. Then the Nazis requisitioned Tillich Toy Factory to build compasses for soldiers. Much more important than toys, management was told, their children needed the promise of a safe homeland where they could thrive.

  Numbers stacked themselves up in Hanna’s head: 1937 would have been two years after the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Race Laws to prevent race pollution, prohibiting Germans and Jews to marry. A full year after Hitler hosted the Olympics so the world could see that, in spite of the rumors, all was well in Germany.

  According to this biography, Paul and Luisa annulled their marriage months after the wedding, but they continued to live as husband and wife. When Paul was forced to resign his job, Luisa supported their family by caring for invalids, some of them Jewish, inside the lodge.

  A year ago, the Gestapo showed up at the Gruenewalds’ front door. They beat Paul until he could no longer walk and hauled him and their guests away in a truck. Then they shaved Luisa’s head and marched her through the heart of Old Town, a placard around her neck stating that she’d sullied the honor of German women. For the next three months, they’d imprisoned her for racial defilement, an atrocity among the Nazi leadership.

  Hanna’s stomach turned. Her cousin had gone to prison for loving her husband and helping those who required medical care. Her purported enemies.

  Hanna had spent a lifetime learning about purity, her education steeped in the Aryan traditions. A Germanic race to rule the world. Searching for one’s identity was one thing, but the thought of this, what happened to her cousin, made her nauseous.

  And Paul—how could the Nazis convict this kind man, a good leader, for the blood running through his veins? As if he’d committed a crime. He could change his behavior, but he couldn’t aryanize his blood.

  Now she understood why Frau Weber wanted her to burn Paul and Luisa’s story. The museum could curate Jewish artifacts, but the Gestapo would imprison, kill even, anyone who dared to record the oppression against Jewish people today. If the outside world found out the rumors of persecution were true, they might intervene.

  But Hanna couldn’t burn these papers. She’d dedicated her life to discovering and preserving artifacts, wishing the stories behind those pieces hadn’t been lost to time. What if she could preserve the stories now? Hide this biography away like the Cathars had done with their relics?

  Their society, thank God, had advanced past the massacres of earlier centuries—when they’d tried to exterminate a whole population—but Hitler and the others had made it quite clear that people like Paul were no longer welcome in Germany. They were already being repressed by impossible laws, but if they didn’t leave voluntarily, it seemed they were being forced to move away.

  Someday the world would want to know what happened when the Nazis were in power. If she saved just one story, salvaged this record of two innocent people who’d been criminalized, othe
rs inside and outside Germany might learn the truth.

  She’d carry the story of Paul and Luisa up to the prayer labyrinth tonight, bury it under stone number Vierzig—forty—to commemorate the year.

  The doorbell rang, and her heart skipped. She hadn’t expected the Gestapo to drive up the mountain after dark, but the agent was probably keen to find her home alone, especially if he discovered she’d lied about her engagement to Kolman.

  Folding the papers quickly, she hid them inside a cookie tin, placing it right back up on the pantry shelf with the other food.

  She could pretend she wasn’t home, hide in one of the bedrooms. But if the agent had brought a locksmith, it wouldn’t take them long to enter the lodge. And the repercussions would be swift.

  The bell rang again as she retrieved the knife from the kitchen drawer and wrapped it in a dish towel, holding the towel at her side as if the agent had interrupted her dinner preparations. If he dared to threaten her, she’d threaten back.

  Through the windows, she saw the headlamps of a car and slowly opened the front door, the knife secure in her hand. But instead of the agent, a much younger man stood at her door, his cap tucked under one arm.

  “Telegram delivery for Fräulein Tillich.”

  She thanked him as she took the offered envelope, glancing both directions to see if there was a Gestapo agent nearby.

  He thrust the cap back on his head. “Guten Abend.”

  She wished him a good evening as well; then she relocked the door.

  Had Kolman sent her a note from the field? If she knew where he was located, she would write him tomorrow.

  But the message wasn’t from Kolman. It was an official notice from Himmler, stamped Reich Leader of the SS.

  Your presence is required at Wewelsburg Castle the morning of 10 June for your marriage to Standartenführer Strauss. Arrive in wedding attire. Only invited guests permitted to attend.

  Her marriage? Hanna flipped the envelope, thinking for a moment this telegram must be meant for someone else, but the message was addressed to her.