She’d do anything to protect this girl who’d become her daughter, taking care of her until the end of this war. After the fighting, she didn’t know what would happen—no one did—but Lilly was her daughter for life.
Would Kolman—would Germany—expect the three of them to fold back into a family after the war? She’d thought Kolman might bring her additional children to adopt, but he’d brought no other Kinder and he rarely bothered to bring himself home, so she hadn’t any fear of pregnancy.
He’d never sent many letters, but any correspondence stopped months ago. The last she’d known, he was digging in one of their newly occupied territories, but it seemed a strange time for the Nazis to be searching for the roots of their culture in the midst of this war, when those left in Germany were far from victorious Aryans with health and strength flowing through their veins.
They were cold, hungry, many of them sick now. And for what purpose? Hitler didn’t need to take over the world. He needed to take care of their people.
Lilly pressed her nose up against the window. “Do you see a sword?”
Night and day, she watched the sky for a celestial display like the one in the Middle Ages, waiting with the unshakable faith that God would show up again to right all that had gone wrong.
Snowflakes stuck to her window now, piling up in the window box that once held flowers. And Lilly’s breathing stilled.
Hanna laid her on the bed, sitting beside her in case she woke again. She began to nod off until she heard the creak of a door downstairs.
Sometimes a Gestapo agent would circle her driveway in the night, but no one except Luisa had attempted to come into her home and Luisa simply unlocked the front door with her key. The next morning, Hanna would find several biographies in the percolator, waiting to be hidden away. They’d collected about a hundred of them now, most of them buried on the hill.
She’d hoped her cousin was sleeping in the house as well, especially on these cold nights. Perhaps, if Luisa had returned, she could speak with her.
The only other person with a key was Kolman, and he never returned at this hour.
She hurried down the steps with her flashlight, hoping to find Luisa in the kitchen, but she stopped in the great hall. The chair was pushed away from the desk, papers scattered across the top.
Her breath quickened like Lilly’s as she turned off the flashlight and shuffled toward the hall. Had she missed the sound of breaking glass, the Gestapo entering her home?
The front door had been locked, but it wasn’t fully closed. Hanging on a peg beside it was an olive-colored scarf.
Her stomach rolled. Had Kolman finally come home? If so, why had he arrived during the night?
She opened the door and in the faint light, the canopy of snow, she could see a man’s footprints leading around the side of the house but saw no tracks for a car. Closing the door, she relocked it, then dragged sandbags from the pantry to block the entrance.
All these months she thought Kolman was overseeing a dig in the expanded territory. Was it possible that he hadn’t gone far at all? If so, did he often come to their lodge at night? Or, perhaps, while she was working in town?
Back at the desk, she flicked on the light and sat down. Utility bills had been dumped across the surface. Her father’s records from the factory. Medical records that dated back to her mother’s hospital stay.
She opened the top cabinet drawer and thumbed through the manila folders. More household records and inventories from the factory.
What was Kolman searching for during the night?
Not the stories, she prayed.
Near the back of the cabinet was an unlabeled folder and she pulled it out. Inside were the adoption papers for Lilly, a small stack of them stapled together.
The first was an adoption certificate with Hanna’s forged signature and Kolman’s name. Then a third signature, a woman named Inge Viermetz, who verified it. On a separate page was a state medical certificate issued from Berlin with the name of Lilly Strauss. The one she’d shown to the doctor a few weeks after Lilly arrived.
The last page was one she hadn’t seen, an official form with a name she didn’t recognize. Roza Nowak. Born March 7, 1936. Adopted from Sonnenwiese in October 1940.
Hanna looked up at Hitler’s portrait, the face of all the mysteries that shrouded this Reich.
Was Lilly’s name actually Roza? And this Sonnenwiese—was it the home near Berlin?
Outside, she heard a rumble of a motor and cringed. Either Kolman was leaving or he had returned to search for something among these papers.
She turned off the lamp and slipped back the curtain. No one was in her drive but in the sky—
A glint of silver in the moonlight. The wing of an enemy plane.
Was it too late to save Frau Weber and Paul Gruenewald and the other Jewish people that Himmler had sent away? To calm the fears of a girl being haunted by the past?
To stop the madness?
Perhaps it wasn’t the enemy who flew over her home tonight.
Perhaps it might be a friend.
34
EMBER
On the two-hour train ride between Frankfurt and Nuremberg, Ember immersed herself in this country that had wrestled for centuries with the balance of protecting and caring for its people. A castle tower pierced through the treetops outside her window, a terra-cotta village tumbling around it like blocks, and she wondered who had built this fortress above town. Was it meant for a duke to defend his duchy or to detain prisoners in the old German Kingdom?
This history resonated deeply with her, the time capsule buildings that held secrets from entire centuries past. Much of it unchanged since the Middle Ages.
A cappuccino helped fight off her jet lag, her tablet propped up next to the broad window in the dining car. Patchwork, that’s what she would be doing in Nuremberg. Collecting all the remaining pieces for her dissertation, stitching them together so she could put it on paper to defend. She would ask everyone she met about a man or woman who’d stood up against the Nazis, but sometimes, she knew, a hero was impossible to find. Sometimes they didn’t even share their own story.
But adults didn’t just disappear. Someone had to know where Hanna went after the war.
Tomorrow morning she was meeting with the director at the Jewish Museum of Franconia, near the courtroom where the world convened in 1945 to bring some sort of justice after the Holocaust. Dr. Graf, the assistant director of the Germanic National Museum, had also been able to reschedule their meeting. He would answer her questions on Thursday.
All her head knowledge about Nuremberg was about to merge with the realities of this place.
As the train sped east, she searched online for Mrs. Kiehl’s labyrinth above the zoo. According to the map, there were miles upon miles of forest and cliffs layering these hills, extending east toward Czechia, and it felt a bit like Horton the elephant searching for his speck in a field of clover.
An abandoned church. Mrs. Kiehl had mentioned that as well. Germany was speckled with old monasteries and convents, but Ember found the ruins of an abbey within a mile of the Nuremberg Zoo, near where Mrs. Kiehl said she used to play. A fellow traveler had stumbled on the place, taking photographs of its ivy-clad walls when he was hiking.
Fascinated, Ember began reading about the convent named after Katharine of Alexandria, a princess in the third century who’d been well-schooled like her male counterparts. A woman who was grounded firmly in her faith, embracing who she was beyond her noble family, education, and potential marriage.
After receiving a vision, Katharine dedicated herself to becoming the bride of Christ, giving herself completely to Him. Unfortunately her beauty and intelligence captured the attention of Roman emperor Maxentius, and that was the beginning of her earthly demise. The emperor appealed to her intellect first—employing fifty philosophers to dissuade her from her beliefs. Then he proposed marriage.
But this young woman refused to renounce her faith or marry the empe
ror. Angels cared for her in prison, and when Maxentius finally beheaded her, the angels escorted her home.
Katharine’s story trickled down through centuries, Ember read, reminding sisters around the world that if they were faithful to Him, God would minister to them always, even in their pain.
Were the ruins of the abbey and its labyrinth on public property? She couldn’t tell on Google, but when Dakota arrived, perhaps they could find it together.
Ember looked away from the screen as the train cruised past another red-roofed town. This country had mesmerized her for the past twenty years, but perhaps her interest was rooted in something deeper. Perhaps something inside her was trying to right the wrongs of what her family had done.
She wanted to return home with answers for Mrs. Kiehl and she wanted answers for herself.
Her phone chimed, and she saw a return text from Dakota.
Kayla and Gram found this in a shoebox.
It was a grainy photograph of a woman and a girl with braids, one of the child’s arms wrapped around a stuffed animal, the other hand clinging to her mother. Or, perhaps, the older woman was clinging to her.
Charlie took this picture of Hanna and Lilly when they were in Germany.
She stared at the picture until the train pulled into Nuremberg’s Central Station.
“What happened to you?” she whispered, tracing her finger around the woman’s thin face, wondering why she looked so sad.
35
HANNA
“She refuses to let the other children measure her,” the principal said to Hanna, as if this infringement were worthy of the corporal punishment already inflicted on his second-grade pupil.
He’d phoned last night, asking for this morning meeting, and Lilly had gone to bed in tears, though she refused to tell Hanna what she’d done to warrant a spanking.
Insubordination, the principal reported. The worst possible quality in a Nazi maiden.
Lilly could quote from Mein Kampf, sing songs about their almighty Führer, but she wasn’t allowed to return to school until her classmates could wrap their measuring tape around her head. Important training, the principal explained, to recognize racial impurities in their neighbors.
Perhaps it would be good for Lilly to spend a few days at home.
“Why won’t you let your classmates measure you?” Hanna asked after they stepped out of the sedan.
“I don’t want them to touch me.”
“But you didn’t mind the spanking?”
Lilly’s lower lip trembled, and Hanna took the girl’s hand as they walked toward the museum. She and the other children didn’t know that most of the world didn’t measure each other’s heads. “Did one of the students hurt you?”
“No,” Lilly said. “I was afraid.”
It must have been a terrible fear if it was worth the strap. “Afraid of what?”
Lilly shook off her hand, wrapping her arms around her chest. Several people passed them on the slushy sidewalk, looking down at the girl who should be in school, but no one in Nuremberg greeted each other any longer on the streets, not even with a simple Guten Morgen.
It wasn’t just the children who were afraid.
“You don’t have to be scared of me, Lilly.”
Her daughter released the tangle of arms, her hands back at her sides. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t measure right.”
Hanna slipped onto a bench outside the museum and held the girl tightly, knowing that something significant had shifted between them. If Lilly could trust her, they had hope for their future, no matter how they measured.
“What do you remember, Lilly? From before you came to the lodge.”
Lilly shook her head. “I don’t remember anything.”
“You used to ask about your brothers.” And she still asked about them when the night terrors struck.
“I don’t have any brothers.”
Hanna studied her face, and she didn’t seem to be lying. Had she forgotten her years before Kolman brought her to Nuremberg?
The toy elephant was packed in Lilly’s tote bag, the companion that always rode down with them to town. Hanna retrieved it, and Lilly folded the animal into her arms. “You’ll have to play quietly while I work.”
The museum had been closed to the public for the past year, most of the exhibits stored away now. While Völkischer Beobachter continued to tout victory in its headlines, the few staff members left here were preparing for the worst.
She rang the bell by the entrance, and Grete answered.
“We’ve requisitioned another shipment,” Grete said as she glanced down at Lilly. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“She needs to stay with me today,” Hanna said.
“The director won’t care, as long as she’s out of the way.”
Her daughter knew well how to slip into the shadows.
Grete continued, “You’ll probably need to work late tonight anyway. I will make sure you have something to eat.”
Lilly tipped her head up. “Frau Cohn?”
“Yes.”
“May I have something to eat too?”
Grete smiled, patting Lilly on her shoulder. “Of course.”
Hanna moved toward the basement steps. “We’ll get started right away.”
“You’ll need to work in the cloister,” Grete said. “The boxes are too big to carry downstairs.”
They followed Grete back through the empty museum to the renovated cloister that once held displays. Lined up along the walls were large crates, waiting for her to open and archive.
Lilly leaned toward one of the crates, trying to peek through a small hole. They’d catalog whatever was inside and then pack the crates back up again to ship off to Director Kohlhaussen’s hiding place.
Hanna unscrewed the front, and Lilly helped her lower it. Masked in canvas wrappings was an elaborately sculpted panel of three wise men clothed in gold, one of them kneeling before the Savior and His saintly mother. Lilly reached forward and petted the white horse that accompanied the men, its shiny red saddle crafted for royalty.
It was from an altarpiece, Hanna thought, carved during the Renaissance. She removed a second panel, this one a vivid portrayal of Christ dancing on His grave, a host of soldiers seemingly blinded from the shafts of light cast from His head.
“Jesus,” Lilly whispered.
She turned back and saw the mixture of awe and terror in Lilly’s eyes, as if something haunted her. “Have you seen this before?”
“At the church.” Lilly’s fingers smoothed over a beam of light. “You took me when I was little.”
“I didn’t—” She stopped. For a moment, she thought Lilly’s mother had taken her to a church in Berlin before she’d died, but Hanna had spent four years at the university, visiting churches across that city. She wouldn’t have forgotten this piece.
“Do you remember anything else about the church?”
But Lilly wasn’t listening. She was introducing her elephant to the Christ child.
When Grete brought them steaming cups of chicory, Hanna pointed at the collection of panels now lined up against the cloister wall. “Were these taken from a German church?”
The secretary pressed her fingers together. “They were taken from a church.”
“Please, Grete—”
She glanced back at the entrance, at Lilly rocking her elephant in front of the manger. “They’re from Poland,” she whispered.
The words sank into Hanna’s gut.
She’d wanted Lilly to be from Berlin, wanted her to be German, but often the words that came out of her mouth, especially in her dreams, were a different language. And Kolman’s stories about Berlin never rang true.
Was it possible that Lilly had been born across the border? That she wasn’t even Aryan?
“But the pieces were carved by Veit Stoss,” Grete said. A renowned sculptor from Nuremberg. “No one else except the director knows where they came from.”
“What are we going to do with all these t
hings after the war?” Hanna asked.
“We’re only protecting them,” she said. “But until it’s time to return them, we can’t tell anyone.”
“Of course not.” No one else could find out about these panels or the fact that Lilly recognized them.
That night, after she tucked Lilly under a pile of warm covers, several planes rattled the lodge. She collected supplies—a box of crackers and bag of dried apples, canteen of water, candles and matches, gloves and scarfs—and put them in a rucksack beside her bed, in case they needed to run in the night. Then she replaced the sandbags in front of the doors so Kolman couldn’t steal inside the lodge without knocking.
She retrieved the adoption papers from the cabinet, reading through them one more time. Lilly was Polish; she had no doubt now. But how did she end up at an orphanage in Germany?
Grete said their country would return the altarpieces after this war was over. Would they also return the children?
That’s why Lilly was so worried about her measurements. Someone might send her back.
Burn the papers. That was her first thought. It didn’t matter if her daughter was Roza from Poland or Lilly from Berlin. Her heritage was now entwined with Hanna’s. She was Aryan to the core.
But this was Lilly’s story. What if her daughter needed these papers after the war? Hanna could always burn them later.
The medical card was the only thing that she’d keep, certified with the name Lilly Strauss to prove to any agent that her daughter was German. The rest of the papers she’d bury in the labyrinth, before the Gestapo found them and sent Lilly away to one of their camps. Or the war ended and she had to escort Lilly home.
The folded papers fit easily into a coffee tin. Her driver had stopped coming long ago, but sometimes one of the patrolling Gestapo agents would trail her when she left the house. On those mornings she and Lilly circled the meadow and returned home.
She couldn’t wait until morning to bury this tin. Nor could she leave Lilly alone, in case Kolman returned or she had another night terror. They’d have to go now, in this midnight hour, hoping no one would follow them into the forest. And the airplanes wouldn’t return.
The Curator's Daughter Page 22
