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.

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.