The last time they’d climbed this hill, someone else had been in the woods. Not a mythical creature. A man. He hadn’t seen her and Lilly, but the encounter scared her enough that she hadn’t returned to the labyrinth during the day or night. If Kolman was back in Nuremberg, if an agent was continuing to watch her, she didn’t want to lead either man to her hiding place.
A racket of bombs released in the distance, and moments later, smoke began creeping up the mountain. Nuremberg blazed orange like a bed of coals in the blackened frame of night.
“The sky war,” Lilly said in awe.
A bloodred glow. Black creatures that shifted in the moonlight. Perhaps this was exactly what the celestial war looked like in 1561.
Perhaps God had had enough.
Lilly waved her arms in front of her as if she could clear the smoke.
“Breathe,” Hanna said, speaking to both of them.
The girl took another breath, poisoned by smoke, and coughed violently. Hanna dug a scarf out of her pack and masked Lilly’s mouth, but she continued to cough.
A nearby crash shook the hill, flames breaking through the smoke.
Lilly pounded Hanna’s arm. “The elephants!” she shouted over the roar.
Were the airplanes bombing the zoo? The animals must be going mad with the smoke and noise and the rattling of their cages.
If she were alone, she would try to help, but not with Lilly. Her priority was to protect this girl.
“The director’s taking care of the animals,” she said, praying it was true. “We have to go to the mine.”
She guided Lilly up the hill, branches shaking as the planes dove over them. Perhaps it was finally the end of this war. The end of Hitler and Himmler and the lies from their regime.
But who would take their place? The land she loved, the strength of the German people, would they all be swallowed up by Communism now?
Another explosion and she heard the rattle of rocks on the cliffs. The Allied powers wouldn’t care about one woman and a child. All Germans, they would assume, were the enemy.
Lilly tripped, and Hanna caught her before she fell into the quarry.
Ahead was the entrance to the old mine, and they stepped carefully over the iron grate. Inside, she pulled the flashlight out of her bag, flipping it on.
As a girl, she used to hide back in this tunnel when Luisa and Vater were distracted, playing among the rusted buckets and picks. She’d wanted to explore the different channels off the main path, but Vater’s warning about the cave-ins and drop-offs and all who’d lost their lives had stopped her.
What if a bomb hit the hillside now? The ground would collapse, she feared, and then they would be trapped. But the outside seemed to be even more dangerous than in here.
A curtain of smoke hung low at the entrance, so she pulled Lilly around a corner, taking care not to trip over an old track embedded in the rock. When smoke began to creep around the corner, they followed the path down the corridor in search of clear air, the sandstone a vibrant red in her light. In France she had been searching for buried treasure, but here she was trying to hide the treasure in her care.
They walked until they could go no farther. Someone had installed another gate inside the mine, and this one they’d locked, just like the attic door.
Hanna fiddled with the latch, but it wouldn’t open. Had her father built this before he passed away? If so, what was he trying to hide back here?
They fell to the ground, their backs to the door.
“I love you with all of my heart,” she told Lilly.
The girl snuggled into her side. “Are we going to die?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Where’s your elephant?”
Lilly reached inside her coat, removing the stuffed animal that had been more faithful than any friend, wrapping her arms around it.
How long they sat, she didn’t know, but as the hours passed, they finished the water in the canteen. The box of crackers and dried pieces of fruit.
She’d lived at the apex of the unknown for almost five years now, at the tip of Hitler’s sword, clenched in the talons of his regime. And once again there was nothing she could do except wait, hoping for a cushion near the bottom when they fell.
Help, she prayed, would come.
And she prayed that it would be the Allied soldiers, not the Russians, who marched into their town.
38
EMBER
Stormwater spilled over Fleisch Bridge, the river rumbling underneath. Ember rushed across it, window light carving a path for her in the rain. The stones were slippery beneath her feet, the castle above veiled in fog.
She seemed to be the only person outside in this deluge, as if locals were afraid of the storm. She’d blame it on the jet lag, but storms seemed to accost her without notice. Or perhaps she brought the storms with her.
At least this time, she didn’t have far to run.
An old-world palace was her home for tonight, built for a bourgeois family at the base of the castle. In her attic room, she removed the papers that Dr. Graf had given her. Then she dried her backpack with a towel and hung it from the knob of a dormer window.
After settling on her bed, she began reading one of the biographies the museum had found hidden in the crates, a story about a wealthy Jewish family who’d tried to leave Germany, but by the time they completed their paperwork, the borders had closed. They asked a neighbor to watch over their home when it was time for them to go east, but in days the government had requisitioned everything they owned. Their story didn’t have an ending, but Ember suspected that none of these accounts ended well.
The second biography had been handwritten instead of typed, the story of a family with two sons, one of them handicapped. The parents sent the older son to Argentina, to prepare their new home, but then their youngest became ill and couldn’t travel. At the time the parents thought it best to keep the rest of their family together in Germany. Even in the hardships, they thought they would have each other. When the paper began to describe what happened to the handicapped boy, Ember put it aside. Not because she didn’t care. Because she cared deeply and nothing she could do now would stop their pain.
The third was about a woman named Marianne Weber, who had helped collect the stories with Hanna. A seamstress who hid some of her former Jewish customers in her apartment until the Gestapo found out and sent her away.
Ember read those lines again, her heart racing.
This was what she wanted to find for her dissertation. A woman like Frau Weber who had sacrificed everything to take a stand.
Her biography didn’t have an ending either, so Ember logged into the Arolsen Archives—Germany’s service that traced victims of Nazi persecution—and found a brief record of the woman’s life and then death in Ravensbrück. A tragic hero.
Ember quietly grieved the loss.
Most everyone who stood up against the Nazis, it seemed, had been exterminated.
Five more biographies followed, and then the next set of papers was about the Ahnenerbe where Hanna had worked, the information based on transcripts during the Nuremberg military trials. The Nazis believed that as the most advanced people group in the world, it was their duty to expand into new lands and raise the next generation of an Aryan race. By removing those they believed to be racially inferior from their land—squatters—they were doing all of humanity a service.
Heinrich Himmler, a rumored member of the Thule Society, helped found this academic ancestral heritage organization to prove the Aryan heritage through archaeology and to build a master race. With fifty different research branches called institutes, his organization studied music, water, linguistics, and ancient Nordic runes. Like Indiana Jones, the Ahnenerbe archaeologists traveled the world, trying to find artifacts such as the Holy Grail, legends like Atlantis, the truth about the yeti. Secrets to unlock their ancestral heritage. They studied animals and used calipers to measure facial dimensions of people around the world, recording their findings for w
hat they deemed science.
According to Dr. Graf’s research, this pseudoscience organization became part of the feared SS in 1940, its work headquartered at a castle named Wewelsburg. Himmler and Hitler both used people who called themselves Christian to further their work, but the intention of the Nazi Party was to create their own Germanic religion, a new world order stocked by strong, pure Aryans, and in order to do this, their SS officers needed to populate the earth.
Monogamy, Himmler believed, was a diabolical invention of the Catholic church, holding his SS men back from their purpose. He wanted his men to marry, to uphold society’s norms, but faithfulness to one’s wife was not a value. In fact, the Nazis passed a law that allowed a man to divorce his wife if she already had four children so he could begin a new family with another woman.
Himmler didn’t value the commitment of marriage nor did he value the lives of his test subjects. During World War II, the Ahnenerbe expanded their research duties by conducting medical experiments on prisoners, studying what they called a subhuman prototype. And the Nazi doctors justified it all by saying the experiments helped advance the superiority of their Nordic race.
Ember’s stomach rolled at the thought of it. How could those doctors, the scientists, truly validate such horror? And how could Hanna Strauss have been a member of this organization?
Like Mrs. Kiehl, Ember wanted to find the good in Hanna’s life. She desperately wanted her to stand up against the Nazis. Say what they were doing was horrific. Wrong. She wanted Mrs. Kiehl’s mother to save someone’s life, like Frau Weber had done, not just their stories.
But then again, she couldn’t dare judge Hanna, judge anyone, when she hadn’t even been able to save the life of the one who needed her most.
A friend to the Jewish people, that’s what Mrs. Kiehl had said about her mother. And there was no greater honor in the Hebrew culture than to remember one’s story.
She shoved the papers into a drawer and checked her phone.
I’m headed your way, Dakota had written.
This time she wanted to see him. Welcome him to this town like he’d welcomed her back to the island.
I’m glad, she typed and then erased her words. She was glad, but how she needed to guard this heart of hers that was spinning back out of control. A friend of Hanna’s has invited us over tomorrow at 11.
You want to do breakfast before?
She thought for a moment and then agreed to meet up with him in the hotel lobby.
One more text, this one to Noah, and then her eyes began to close, the jet lag catching up with her pace.
Some of the Ahnenerbe members had probably chosen this course for their life, but others might have been forced to comply with the Reich.
If she’d lived in Germany during the Holocaust, would she have doubled back under the tide like those who’d resisted the enemy? Thrown one of her stones at Goliath?
Neither her parents nor Lukas had been forced into following the neo-Nazi code like the people of Germany. They chose to impound this hatred in their hearts. If it hadn’t been for the fire, the raid, it was entirely possibly that she would have succumbed to the madness around her instead of resisted. That she would have chosen to hate as well.
She began tapping her legs as she lay down on the narrow bed.
She was tired of trying to forget the first fifteen years of her life, stuffing it away in a shoebox at the back of her mental closet. She couldn’t just forget it. She needed to pray that in some way, God would heal it instead. Redeem what happened even as she moved forward.
When Dakota arrived, she would tell him exactly what happened in Idaho. Perhaps she would even tell him about Elsie.
If, by a miracle, Elsie was still alive, she prayed that her daughter had chosen to love instead of hate. That she had stood up against evil.
And Ember prayed that she could find out what happened to her daughter and that somehow she was still alive.
Her heart stirred at the thought, her hands resting at her sides.
Just once, she wished, Elsie would call her Mom.
39
HANNA
SPRING 1945
The medieval city of Nuremberg, a millennium of history, had been crushed in hours by the Allied bombs. Even though she’d tried to forget, that night kept replaying in Hanna’s head, the terror as she and Lilly had huddled together in the mine, the smoke coiling around them. She’d spent those hours making peace with her Maker, thinking they would never survive, but God didn’t take them home.
After the sky finally quieted, the air clear enough to breathe, she and Lilly had crept back down the hill, the thunderclouds raining ashes. They’d coaxed Schatzi out from under a sofa in the great hall, and Lilly had fallen asleep with the cat in her arms.
The Communists never arrived, thank God, and Kolman didn’t return home. But the Nazi agents and soldiers were replaced by a swarm of American soldiers—Amis—who arrived via truck. They’d picked through mountains of rubble, searching for members of the Nazi Party. Enemy combatants. SS officers. Werewolves, as the remaining fighters called themselves. Men who were preparing to fight for the Fourth Reich.
The Americans fought among the smolder until they’d taken over the enemy’s hive. Then some of the soldiers stayed behind in German homes to restore order to the chaos.
Stunde Null. That’s what Germans called it. Their zero hour. They wanted to forget the past decade, begin rebuilding, but Hanna suspected that the world would remember.
Most of the museum had been destroyed in the bombing, and she didn’t know where Director Kohlhaussen had gone . . . or if he was still alive. But those crates of artifacts that he’d carried out at night, she wondered if they were hidden in the abandoned mine. Perhaps that was why Himmler had sent her home to work at the museum. He wanted to use her and her property to protect all they’d plundered.
If the mine was being used for storage, it would explain why she’d seen someone walking in the forest at night. Why she’d been assigned a chauffeur to escort her into town and make sure that she stayed at the museum, why the driver and later the Gestapo agents often waited in the car while she was at home. They were guarding this land.
Both the fighting in Nuremberg and the fear of roaming lions kept her and Lilly close to the lodge. They’d seen smaller animals from the windows, freed from their cages, and exotic birds in the trees. She still didn’t know what happened to the zoo’s predators, but if they’d escaped, she hoped they’d wandered far into the wilderness where no one would ever find them.
Finally today, while Lilly was consoled by her make-believe world in the attic, Hanna felt safe in returning to the mine. She rattled the locked grate again, her flashlight beam breaking through the iron barrier. The light exposed another curve in the tunnel ahead, but she couldn’t see any crates.
If only she could get past the gate. See what was inside. But she’d wait to tell the Americans what she suspected so these artifacts wouldn’t be plundered again.
As she walked out of the tunnel, down to the meadow, she thought back to the Holy Grail she’d tried to uncover in France. To the artifacts they’d brought home from places like Sweden, Iceland, and Nepal. She’d been part of the plundering, from the stolen altarpieces to children from the east.
It was zero hour for her too.
Did Lilly have a mother waiting for her? If so, how would they find her in all of this mess?
The stolen artifacts, she thought, should be returned to their homes right away, but Lilly needed to stay in Germany where she was safe. Later, they would search for any survivors of her family. When order was restored.
And when the time was right, Hanna would honor those who’d been transported east by sharing their biographies and educate the world in hopes that the Nazis would never be able to persecute the Jewish people again.
A giraffe wandered out of the trees in front of her, stopping to eat the grass in her meadow. She waited by the edge, mesmerized by the animal who didn’t seem to
notice her, the breeze strumming the spring flowers. Then she heard a rumble in the distance, the crunch of gravel making her jump before a dusty Jeep circled her drive.
Hanna rushed out toward the vehicle, wanting to deter whoever had arrived before they tried to enter her house.
A man in a tailored blue suit and skewed tie stepped out, an American with hair shaved close to his head. “I’ve never seen a giraffe in the wild,” he said, quite friendly, but she didn’t trust him any more than she’d trusted the Gestapo agent who searched her house five years ago.
“A number of animals escaped from the zoo,” she replied in English, thanks to the university and all the American and British friends she’d made in Berlin.
The giraffe turned its back to eat another clump of grass, and she wished that she could do the same with this agent.
The man flashed his identification card, but she didn’t bother to look at it. “Surely you didn’t come here to visit the giraffes.”
He glanced at the flashlight in her hand, the mud on the hem of her trousers. “I’ve come to inquire about your husband.”
She cringed. “I haven’t seen my husband in two years.”
He pulled a pocket-size memo pad from his coat and scribbled something on it. “Any children?”
“One daughter.”
He scanned the forest behind her as if Lilly were among the trees.
“Visitors scare her,” she said. Especially all the soldiers who’d congregated recently in Nuremberg, celebrating their victory over the Nazi empire.
She didn’t tell this agent that she was celebrating as well.
He eyed the large house. “It’s just you and your daughter living here?”
Her groan folded into the wind, remembering well the Gestapo agent who’d followed her to her bedroom. The knife was back in its proper place in the kitchen, but perhaps it was even more important for her to carry it now. “I don’t have to answer that question.”
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