The Curator's Daughter

by Melanie Dobson

  “I always thought Charlie was the one who kidnapped me, but it was the Germans . . .”

  “Nazis,” Ember corrected her. “Few Germans knew about this program during the war.”

  Mrs. Kiehl looked out at the people streaming across the plaza. “Do you know my birth name?”

  “Roza,” Dakota said. “Roza Nowak.”

  “Roza,” she repeated as if the name was exhuming something inside her. “How can I find the Nowak family?”

  “You’d start with the Arolsen Archives.” Ember pulled out her phone. “They have a tracing service for victims of World War II. I can help if you’d like.”

  “I would like that.” Mrs. Kiehl reached for Dakota’s hand. “Thank you for finding this.”

  “It’s all of our story, Gram.”

  “Where did Hanna go after the war?” she asked, her voice soft like a child’s.

  “We don’t know yet,” he said, but they told her about the dozens of biographies that Luisa and Frau Weber had collected. About Hanna hiding these stories and then recovering them as a gift for families of the victims and evidence used in the Nuremberg trials.

  As Mrs. Kiehl began to remember, a notification blinked on Ember’s screen. She ignored the message, but later, when she finally checked, she almost dropped her phone.

  “My name’s Aimee,” the recording said. “I’m looking for a woman named Sarah.”

  49

  HANNA

  Hanna’s world shattered the day she sat in the upper gallery of Courtroom 600. It was unprecedented, this international trial of a nation and its crimes against humanity. The people who’d crammed into the benches and tables below, the rooms behind filled with members of the press from around the world—they were paying attention now.

  This Palace of Justice was built during the last World War, but the courtroom below had been remodeled to accommodate the attorneys, translators, and select reporters—all of them wearing headphones—along with a row of cameras. At the left of the room were uniformed sentries who stood guard along a paneled wall so the twenty-four men lined up in the defendants’ box wouldn’t flee.

  Charlie sat at the prosecution table alongside six other investigators and attorneys, across from the defendant seats. Four judges presided over the trials from the raised bench to her right, each representing a different country—Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the United States. Forced labor, the prosecutors had talked about this morning. Death camps and extermination.

  At the thought of Frau Weber and Luisa, imprisoned in one of these camps, the bitterness in her stomach raged again. It was one thing to focus on the heritage of the Aryan people. Another to create a master race by killing off an entire people group and those who loved them.

  “I really do have the intention to gather Germanic blood from the whole world, to rob it, to steal it wherever I can.”

  Himmler was dead, but the attorney still read these words of their former Reichsführer. An unsuccessful chicken farmer, he said, who’d decided to apply his breeding practices to the human race, replenishing their society with children like Lilly, stealing her away from her family in what seemed righteous to him.

  The process of examining each defendant was excruciatingly slow. Every question asked by the American attorney would be translated into German, Russian, and French along with every response. One of the judges, she noticed, had begun nodding off in the heat.

  Not only was the room warm, it was almost void of decor. Sage curtains blocked any sunlight from entering the windows, the overhead lights casting a dull glow across the spectators. Marble pillars braided a side door with the bronze sculpture of Eve overhead, handing Adam an apple. The nations hadn’t been able to remove those pieces, but the chandeliers were gone from the ceiling along with the carved paneling. The spartan design, Charlie had told her, was intentional. The prosecution wanted the Nazi officials to be treated like common criminals instead of celebrities.

  As far as she knew, the Americans had yet to locate Kolman, and she wondered again—what was his part in this tragic scenario that Charlie and the other men were unveiling for the press corps and judges alike?

  Commander Donovan, one of the American attorneys, called Wilhelm Frick to the stand—the man who’d enforced the policy against Jewish people. The lights on a row of television cameras blinked red as the commander began to ask him about concentration camps. Herr Frick denied the existence of any such camps.

  Commander Donovan leaned forward on his podium. “You never heard about any prisoner camps in Germany or Poland?”

  The question hung between the men like a barrage balloon, forming a net to snare whichever one crossed the line.

  The translator repeated the question, but Herr Frick refused to be trapped. “I know nothing about these camps,” he said again, his stoic gaze focused on the prosecutor, defiance in his eyes.

  “And you were the—” Commander Donovan referred to a paper—“minister of the interior.”

  Until Himmler replaced him in 1943. Then he served as a Reich protector in their newly acquired Lebensraum.

  “I have already stated my position, Herr Donovan.”

  “Indeed. You have stated several times that you never heard of these camps.”

  Herr Frick glanced at the row of justices, arms folded over his chest. “Why must we waste everyone’s time?”

  Commander Donovan motioned at the table behind him, and Charlie stood, straightening his black tie. With permission from the court, Charlie pulled down a screen beside Herr Frick so both the justices and the media could see his evidence.

  Someone dimmed the lights, and Charlie began to project the film he’d found in the mine. Films that Kolman had taken for Herr Frick and other leaders in the Reich.

  Silence swept across the noisy courtroom as they watched shaky frames of this film together.

  Nothing could shock her anymore, that’s what Hanna had thought, not after what happened to Luisa and the others and the devastation in her town, but these images were horrific.

  Instead of excavating in Poland, Kolman had been working in these death camps, filming the experiments that Himmler had conducted in order to create a genetically pure race. The man she’d once called husband had watched others die under the Ahnenerbe’s purported research, and he’d done nothing to help them.

  A sound began to swell from the courtroom floor, a rustling at first and then whispering among the defendants and the press. None of the justices were nodding off now.

  She clenched the sides of her chair, tried to stop the shaking. She’d done the same thing as Kolman, watched people taken from her town, transported to these camps. And she’d done nothing except keep their stories safe.

  Charlie had read the stories, but he didn’t really need them, not with these films. All the Nazis had been done in secret was being exposed to the world.

  Kolman would kill her if he returned to the lodge now. Not only had these films indicted him, his work indicted every man in the box below. None of them could fly back again to the safety of their eagle’s nest.

  The Nazi officers ultimately hung themselves with their own pride.

  Charlie started another film, from a camp in Poland, one that appeared to have Herr Frick in a frame. The woman beside her began to sob at the desperation, the horror of it all. Hanna closed her eyes, but she’d already seen too much, the images flickering on the screen of her mind. Her stomach would hold no longer.

  She ran out of the gallery, down the steps, throwing up by the front gate.

  How could anyone do these things to another person? Nothing could justify this evil.

  The tram took her back east from this palace, toward the rubble of Old Town. She stepped off near Central Station, looking up at the smokestack where the Tillich Toy Factory once stood, one of a hundred toy factories from decades past that had operated in Nuremburg. When parents across Germany were clamoring to buy steam engines and magic lanterns and dolls for their children.

  Wh
at would her father think of all this?

  She was glad, in a sense, that he was gone so he didn’t have to see his country in ruins. Didn’t have to watch the children who’d once played with his toys turn into adults who experimented on their former classmates and teachers. On their country’s bankers and grocers and seamstresses.

  Had Herr Frick and the other defendants done things to Paul and Luisa, to Frau Weber for helping? To Lilly’s brothers in Poland? She’d hoped Luisa would return home by now, but she hadn’t heard a word from her cousin.

  She rushed toward Lilly’s primary school, straight into her daughter’s class. Once they were outside, she squeezed Lilly tight. “I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?” Lilly asked.

  “For not doing enough.”

  That evening, after Lilly was asleep and the soldiers were playing craps around the dining room table, she climbed up to the labyrinth with her lamp. She didn’t care if Kolman found her. Or the creatures in the night. Charlie would take care of Lilly if something happened to her.

  Kneeling before the stump in the center, where the cross had once stood, she repented for the cowardice in her heart. The crimes of her people. None of them were pure without embracing the love—the blood—of the One who had washed their sin away.

  Would Jesus forgive them? Perhaps because of those who had helped, who had sacrificed their lives, He would share His love with all of them.

  She stayed out among the rocks for hours, tears watering the cold ground. She prayed for Lilly, that she would never know such guilt. For Charlie, that he would bring justice on those who’d orchestrated the killings. For Luisa and Frau Weber and Paul, wherever they were, that they could find their way back home.

  Charlie said he would keep searching for Kolman, but she suspected Kolman Strauss would never be found. And that, when the Americans stopped looking, his Hanover family might disappear with him.

  50

  EMBER

  Hope was her name.

  The oldest of five children. Blue eyes with the prettiest of smiles, long hair more brown than blonde. She was a dancer. Cello player. An accident, she’d been told when she asked about her parents’ wedding date. An accident they adored.

  After all these years, Ember had found Elsie, except she was someone else’s daughter now.

  She looked at the photograph as Aimee, tears streaming down her face, told her about the girl who had grown up as part of the Lane family. A young woman who’d been loved dearly for the past twenty-one years.

  Timothy sat beside his wife, a strong presence next to her tears.

  Hope was traveling with a group from their church for the week, on a mission trip to Puerto Rico, and the four other Lane children were scattered throughout the beautiful home that overlooked a river and the ribboning Glacier National Park in the distance.

  “Hope’s heart is as big as our sky,” Aimee said. “That, she got from you.”

  Ember should have said something, a thank-you even, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the picture.

  Alex shifted in his seat. “What happened that night on Eagle Lake?”

  It was just the two of them who’d come. Dakota had volunteered and so had Tracy, but it had been her and her brother grieving alone in the aftermath. This was something she and Alex needed to do together now.

  “He tried to kill Hope,” Aimee said, her eyes on Ember. “After you got on the boat.”

  “Lukas wouldn’t kill our daughter—” It was the weakest of protests. She knew, like the rest of them, that he was capable of killing anyone, especially if the authorities might take his child away and give her to a non-Aryan family. Better that she was gone, he’d think, than grow up without the council.

  “She started crying,” Aimee continued. “I suspect it scared him.”

  Ember looked back down at a photograph of Hope when she was about five or six. Lukas, who was never scared of anyone, had been frightened by a three-month-old girl.

  “So you grabbed her?” Alex asked.

  “I dove in after her when Lukas threw her into the water. I don’t think he ever intended to follow you and the others. He was headed back up the mountain.”

  Where they’d stored enough food for ten years, a millennial opportunity when others were terrified about Y2K.

  Ember traced her fingers along the edge of the album. “You saved her life . . .”

  “I didn’t even think about it at the time.” Aimee stared down at a picture of her and Hope together, celebrating a birthday with cake and balloons. “After we got out of the lake, I just ran and then crawled through that hole in the fence where I used to sneak out at night.”

  Ember slowly turned the album page, studying each picture. “I was waiting for her and Lukas on the opposite shore that night. The FBI didn’t know where either of them went.”

  “I told the police in town she was my daughter,” Aimee said. “No one questioned me except Timothy, and I told him the truth. The next day, he put a ring on my finger and a week later we were husband and wife.”

  “And parents.”

  Aimee nodded slowly. “I tried to look for you, as Sarah Heywood, but I didn’t look very hard. At first, I worried that Lukas would get custody of her, and then, after he was sent to prison, I thought you might return to the group. I couldn’t bear to have her . . .” Tears fell again, dripping on the album page.

  “You wouldn’t have found me,” Ember said, “even if you’d scoured the entire state.”

  “I’m still sorry—”

  Alex put his arm around her shoulders, and Ember leaned into him. What would have happened if she’d stayed behind, rescued Elsie from the water? If only she’d known . . .

  “I want to meet her,” Ember said.

  Timothy leaned forward. “Can we wait until she returns from Puerto Rico?”

  “Of course.”

  The days would give her time to process what she’d say to this beautiful girl. She hadn’t meant to abandon her, but would Hope be angry that Ember hadn’t searched until she found her?

  When they finished meeting with the Lanes, Ember and Alex drove down to Eagle Lake. As they circled the shore, she cried happy tears followed by sad ones. The cabins in the old camp were long gone, replaced by a grassy park, but the bark on some of the trees was still charred.

  The trees remembered what happened here. They still bore the scars.

  “Lukas intended to kill her,” she whispered as they stood along the bank.

  “He would have killed anyone in his way.”

  “Thank God Aimee jumped into the water.”

  A turtle wriggled up onto a log, catching the sun on its face.

  “Ember . . . ,” Alex started.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s something else I haven’t told you.”

  A chill swept through her skin. She’d told Alex that she wanted to know everything, but she wasn’t certain now.

  “The whole reason for Lukas coming to Martha’s Vineyard was to kill someone.”

  Her hands began shaking. “Did he succeed?”

  “No.” Alex picked a rock off the grass and threw it into the lake. “He wanted to kill the man who tried to prosecute his grandfather after the war. The man who, he thought, tried to ruin his family.”

  “Charlie Ward?”

  Alex nodded, his eyes focused on the mountains where Lukas and the others had planned to hide.

  Jonny Tillich—that was the name of Lukas’s grandfather. The former SS officer who ignited hatred in his heart, then passed along the mandate with his skull ring to revive the Aryan race.

  Ember took a deep breath. “But Charlie was already gone when Lukas arrived—”

  “Exactly.” Alex threw another rock into the water. “So he befriended Charlie’s grandson instead.”

  51

  HANNA

  Hanna and Lilly hadn’t been alone in the lodge for months, but their guests had relocated yesterday to assist with the trials, taking the housekeeper wi
th them.

  Tonight Hanna planned to take a long bath, wash the rubble off her skin. If only she could wash away the film images that had been seared into her mind, the bruised bodies of those killed in the camps. They haunted her wherever she went.

  “Go play in the attic,” she said, kissing Lilly on the forehead. The hobbyhorse had lost its draw once Lilly was tall enough to rock herself in a chair, but she still loved Opa’s dollhouses. Each piece they’d restored over the years came alive in her hands.

  “But the soldiers?”

  “Are away for now, and I have it on good account that those dolls have been missing you.”

  Lilly giggled. “Where are you going?”

  “To forage.” She reached for a basket to collect onion grass and nettles and chickweed—autumn greens for a dinner salad. “I won’t be long.”

  Lilly scrambled toward the steps, and Hanna opened the front door, her basket in hand, Schatzi on her heels.

  A man in worn civilian clothes was outside her door, pacing beside the front window. She should have slammed the door shut that moment, bolted it and every window in her house, but she stood there in shock as if a bomb had been dropped on her doorstep, a crater swallowing her whole.

  Kolman’s trousers were torn in one knee, shirt stained with mud as if he had escaped from one of the camps. Or just returned, like so many of the men, from fighting a war. “I feared you wouldn’t be home,” he said.

  She stepped onto the stoop. “And I feared that you would come back.”

  The lock clicked when she shut the door behind her, the key buried in her pocket. She prayed that Lilly would stay up in the attic. That she would hide, like she used to do, when a man came to the door.

  “My key stopped working,” Kolman said.

  “The Americans changed our locks when they moved in.”

  “They aren’t home now,” he said. “And I need your help to find something.”

  Did he know about the film reels the Americans had already found? If so, he’d kill her for what she’d done.