CHAPTER 25

VIENNA, AUSTRIA

NOVEMBER 1938

A whole lot more than glass shattered on the ninth of November, during Vienna’s night hours. Men, a horde of them with axes and knives, broke down doors in the darkness. They smashed windows, started fires, arrested thousands of innocent Jewish men. A pogrom, they called it. As if naming the event justified the horrific things they did to the people across Austria.

When Hitler’s men began pounding on the Weiss family’s locked door, everyone except Dr. Weiss was asleep in their beds. The crack of steel, ripping through wood, woke Luzi from her fitful sleep, and she reached for Marta in the crib that still stood at the base of her bed. But Marta was gone, only a memory dimmed by the violent stomping of feet, the raucous laughter of men who’d reverted to the bullies of youth.

She lifted a tattered bear from Marta’s crib and reached for a robe to cover her nightgown. Perhaps, if the men weren’t inside the apartment, it wasn’t too late. They could escape downstairs, hide in her father’s office.

She found her father fully dressed in the music room, an old Austrian novel called The City Without Jews in his lap. As if he were waiting for the Nazis to come.

The men were in the kitchen now. She could hear them, crashing pots together, shattering her mother’s china.

Their floors had trembled several days ago when the earth under Vienna quaked, as if nature itself had been warning them to flee, but they could do nothing. They couldn’t leave then, nor could they leave now.

“Go back to your bedroom,” her father said, his voice strangely calm. “And lock the door.”

“A locked door won’t stop them!”

Four men stomped into the music room, their eyes wild as they scanned the books on the shelves, the music on her stand. The teddy bear clutched in her arms, Luzi cowered in the corner as the men pulled out drawers, swiped the shelves clean of their contents. One of them opened her violin case and ripped out the prized instrument that her father had commissioned for her. Then he smashed it over his knee. With the crack of the violin’s neck, her heart seemed to split in two.

When her father followed them into the hallway, begging them to stop this madness, Luzi reached for the phone, her entire body trembling so hard that it pounded against her ear. She phoned the police station, telling them they had intruders.

“Are you Aryan?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, but—” Something else crashed in the hallway, deafening her for a moment, and when she could hear the line again, she realized the dispatcher had hung up.

Smoke flowed through the window, and she wondered if the Nazis had set the entire city on fire. Screams echoed through the room, intruding from outside. Her family wasn’t alone tonight, but there was no consolation in this brotherhood. No comfort in the communal wounding of bodies and souls.

The men stuffed their pockets full, stealing what little her family had left, but she didn’t start screaming until they seized her father, tying his hands behind his back.

“He’s a doctor,” she cried after them. “An honorable man.”

But these thugs didn’t respect things like honor.

Luzi followed them downstairs, into the frigid air, pleading as they forced her father into an open-air truck with a host of other respectable men, some of them wearing nightcaps and dressing gowns, others in fancy suits as if they’d been pulled from a performance at the Vienna State Opera.

Her father glanced at her, his eyes sad. He forced a smile before they drove him away, and the pieces left of her heart splintered like her violin.

Turning, she raced back up the stairs, into her apartment. “Mother,” she yelled.

The lock, the entire knob, from her parents’ door was lying on the carpet. She flung back the wood door and switched on the light before scanning the room. The men had forced themselves inside, but they hadn’t harmed her mother. At least, not her body. She was still in her bed, her vacant eyes focused on the dark window.

“We must do something,” Luzi shouted, trying to rouse her.

When she finally spoke, Mutti’s voice was as vacant as her eyes. “There is nothing we can do,” she said before she fainted away.

Luzi collapsed on the mattress beside her mother. She—they—couldn’t give up now.

Closing her eyes, Luzi forced the music of Strauss, the composition about the village swallows, to flood into the darkness and tears. The music, it was the only salve against the pain. Against the atrocity. Even without her violin, the melody anchored her. Da capo. Playing again and again.

Where had that truck taken her father?

More shouting outside now as acrid smoke bled into Mutti’s bedroom, the sulfur burning Luzi’s nose, coating her mouth. She closed the window, but it didn’t block out the screams that shook the glass. Someone else was hurting in the darkness. Probably one of the tens of thousands in this city who dared to be Jews.

These men were like bloodhounds, never relenting from the hunt.

Luzi looked back at her mother. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. And she felt torn between the two people she loved.

Perhaps she and her mother could go together; they could find her father at the police station. The men who’d arrested him, they had made a terrible mistake. Her father, she would make them understand, had done nothing wrong.

When her mother cried out, Luzi reached for her hand.

Her mother wouldn’t be able to make it to the police station, and her father would be angry if she left alone. What if the men returned while she was gone?

She couldn’t leave her mother to fend for herself.

Someone else cried out from another building. Or perhaps the park below their apartment.

God help them all.

Or had God left Vienna?

If He hadn’t, it seemed as if He’d looked away.

“Run, Max,” his father commanded, pushing his son toward the hallway when he saw the officers through the spyhole.

Max ran down the back staircase of their home in his nightclothes, but it was too late. The Gestapo was waiting for him outside.

His father joined them, swearing at the uniformed men, saying that Max was the son of a party leader, heir to the Dornbach fortune and estate. But the Gestapo had a list of men to arrest in Vienna, and Max was on it. There was no arguing with the list.

Two men waited as Max dressed and then dragged him to the police station as if he were a criminal. He knew the police captain, a friend of his father’s. And the man apologized profusely as one of his officers searched Max, saying he had to do his job. A miserable job it was, Max replied, arresting innocent citizens in the middle of the night.

They drove Max away from the station in an army truck with a dozen other men, a guard and his gun watching over them. The streets were pandemonium. Windows broken, walls streaked bloodred with hateful slurs, a mob of pigeons squawking in the chaos. Smoke poured from the synagogue they passed, and two women chased after their truck, calling out names of men who weren’t among them.

The Nazis took Max and their other prisoners to the elite Spanish Riding School, next to the Hofburg Palace. The men awaiting them inside shoved him into the crowded arena, beating a fellow passenger for inquiring about a Toilette.

Scanning the room, he found a familiar face. Luzi’s father was kneeling on the clay floor, trying to care for an elderly rabbi who was clutching his chest, his face blackened with bruises. Max knelt beside Dr. Weiss, but they couldn’t save the rabbi’s life.

When the man slipped away, Dr. Weiss’s head collapsed into his hands. “It’s meaningless, all of this destruction.”

God created man to care for the earth, Max believed, and care for each other. This evil was the work of the serpent in the garden, the enemy who wanted to kill instead of care. All these guards around them, they’d made a pact with a snake. Revenge was what they sought, but neither Max nor Dr. Weiss had tried to harm any of these men.

The guards lifted the rabbi and hauled him away.

Dr. Weiss focused on Max. “Why are you here?”

“The Gestapo discovered that my mother is Jewish.”

“Does Luzia know?” Dr. Weiss asked.

He shook his head. Then he dared to ask the question that had haunted him all night. “How is Luzi?”

“She was unharmed when the agents took me away.”

Max’s voice broke when he spoke again. “She didn’t want to leave your family behind.”

“When they release us . . . I will convince her to go.”

Max eyed the large doorway into the riding school, flanked by four guards. There’d be no running past them, no matter how much he wanted to rescue her.

Dr. Weiss lowered his head, leaning over as if he were going to tie his shoe. He spoke quietly instead. “They are asking about my patients’ things.”

Max glanced up at the guards again, rifles molded from wood and metal in their hands. “How do they know?”

“I pray none of my patients . . .” Dr. Weiss rubbed his hands over the clay. “I told the agents that I didn’t take anything.”

Max prayed the items would be safe at Schloss Schwansee, in Annika’s care. That she would keep this secret from her father. If the Gestapo found out the truth about Max and Dr. Weiss, they would surely kill both of them and, heaven forbid, the Weiss family and even Annika.

If he’d thought the Nazis would suspect his hiding place, he never would have asked Annika to help him.

“Have you heard from your mother?” Dr. Weiss asked.

“Not yet.”

“I think about Marta, every hour of the day.”

“My mother will care well for her.”

“And will you care for Luzi and Frau Weiss as well, if they don’t release me?”

“They will release you.”

“Please—”

“Aufstehen,” one of the guards shouted into a megaphone. All the men stood.

“I’ll take care of them,” Max promised.

The men stood for hours, all day and most of the night, their legs throbbing. Those who fell asleep were awakened by the butt of a gun. Others, like the rabbi, never awoke.

They’d grown into a crowd of hundreds now, standing in awkward lines under the chandelier light. Some of them were dressed in the nightclothes they’d been wearing when the Nazis arrested them. Others were dressed in suits or long cloaks or the black caftans of rabbis.

Guards stood between the white columns that encircled the arena and on top of the balcony as if they were spectators of a sport, as if their captives were the school’s white Lipizzaner stallions on display. Except Austrians treated their horses with much more dignity than they afforded their Jewish compatriots.

The cruelty that Max saw in those hours would haunt him the rest of his life, but he never put into words what he saw there, never spoke of it to his wife or children. To put words to it would give respect to the men inflicting cruelty on all of them. And pour shame deep into his wounds.

When they finally rested, he sat beside Dr. Weiss, drinking cloudy water from a bucket passed around for the men to share. The doctor had tried to care for the men around them who’d collapsed from exhaustion or illness, but he had no medicine, no supplies of any kind. This inability to act was taking a deep toll on him.

On his fourth day in the arena, one of the guards called Max’s name through a megaphone.

Max stood tentatively.

“Come with me.” The guard yanked him away from the others.

He glanced back at Dr. Weiss, who nodded his way.

“Geh mit Gott,” he mouthed.

And so Max went with the blessing, relieved in one sense to flee from this horrific place even as he feared leaving Dr. Weiss behind.

Later he learned that Dr. Weiss and many of the others were taken away hours later.

But instead of going home, they were shipped off to a place called Dachau.