Sophie meets me in the lobby of the gold-and-white baroque-style building in Minoritenplatz that houses the state archives. She’s a slight wisp of a woman, drowning in her black pants and baggy blouse, but she doesn’t need stature to command respect. She seems to be an institution of her own in this place that records the institutions from Austria’s history.
Light filters around the edges of the heavy drapes in the reading room, across dozens of tables with cylinder lamps and researchers huddled over mounds of boxed materials and stuffed manila folders. Sophie motions to a table with two folders, and we sit across from each other.
“Why do you want to find Luzia Weiss?” she asks, and I hear the concern in her voice, as if she’s not quite certain that she wants to pass along the information in these files.
Her hands link together, a chain of sorts across the top of the folders, and I begin to tell her the tale of two books and their owners, stories that didn’t end between the covers. About Annika and her list of heirlooms, Josh’s uncle Leo and what Annika told him about the treasure. I tell her about Charlotte and the orphanage in France, about the name I suspect to be her mother’s. And I tell her that I want to know the endings, whether happy or sad.
Besides Brie, Sophie is the first person I tell about the possible connection between Charlotte and Luzia. It’s sacred, I think, this story of theirs, but I’ll never know for certain what happened unless someone in Austria helps me.
“This Frau Stadler . . . ,” Sophie says slowly. “Why do you think she found treasure on the estate?”
“What else would she be record—” I stop.
“Perhaps she took things from the homes of Jewish people who’d already been sent away.”
I take off my glasses and set them on the table. Annika, in my mind, is a hero, but what if she was really the perpetrator of a crime? What if she and Hermann stole heirlooms from the Nazis’ collection or even from her Jewish neighbors after they were gone? Frau Stadler could have been trying to steer Josh’s uncle away from some sort of treasure instead of to it.
“People were prosecuted across Austria and Germany after the war for keeping things that had belonged to people killed in the camps.”
“What if, in some way, they were trying to help?”
“After the war, no one in Austria would have believed them,” she says. “Help was a rare commodity back then.”
I glance down at the folders again. “What’s in the files?”
“A memorandum,” she says as she opens the first folder. “It mentions a Luzi Weiss from Vienna.”
I skim the typed document from across the table, but it’s all in German.
“It’s written by a Gestapo agent,” Sophie explains. “A Kriminalassistent by the name of Ernst Schmid. He’s lost track of Luzi, it seems, and he’s inquiring about her whereabouts.”
The warmth in this room doesn’t stop my shiver. “Why was a Gestapo agent searching for her?”
Instead of answering my question, Sophie turns the memo around, and I see Luzi’s name in the midst of the writing.
Is this the same person as Luzia Weiss from the article? And Luzia Weiss from Charlotte’s book? I don’t know that either woman is related to Charlotte, but seeing Luzi’s name in print here, even recorded by the Gestapo agent, gives me hope.
Perhaps Luzia hid with Charlotte in France while Ernst Schmid was looking for her.
The other folder contains a second memo and a newspaper photograph of a young Luzia playing with an ensemble. This caption says Luzi Weiss, but it’s clearly the same woman who danced with Max at the ball.
“The Gestapo reported that they found a Luzi Weiss.” Sophie inches another paper across the table to me.
My glasses are on again, and I’m trying desperately to decipher the words. “Where did they find her?”
“Hiding inside a castle on Hallstättersee.”
I suck in air so loudly that several researchers turn to look at me.
“They arrested her in April of 1939.” She points down at the paper, and I see the name of the lake clearly, no need for translation.
Where was Max Dornbach when they arrested the woman he seemed to love?
“Perhaps Annika decided to turn Luzi in to the Gestapo,” Sophie says, and even though eighty years have passed, I feel the wounds. Betrayal—one of the worst kinds of pain.
“Was Luzia a Jewish woman?” Sophie asks.
“I believe so.” I glance down at my handbag as if the photocopy of Luzia’s name inscribed in the magic balloon story might talk. As if it would lead me to the truth.
But to what end? If Luzia was Jewish, if the Gestapo sent her away, there was no hope for reconciliation. No healing to be had in the truth of what might have happened to her. Reunion would need to happen on the other side of this life.
I take a picture of the memo before Sophie closes the folder. “I’ve searched everything that is public here. You must rely on the private sources now or the records kept by religious communities in Vienna and perhaps in Hallstatt.”
I reach for my handbag. I don’t want to stop until I’m able to at least link Luzia with Charlotte.
“Many died during the war,” Sophie says, trying to comfort me.
“I know. I’m just holding on to the hope . . .”
“There’s nothing wrong with grieving your loss.”
But I’m not ready to grieve yet. “I need to search . . . to see if Luzia died in a camp.”
She nods. “The Holocaust Memorial Museum keeps a record of victims online.”
There’s no WiFi access in the reading room, so I wander back outside and across cobbles of gray stone that wind between buildings and through a park. My thoughts are as flighty as my feet, not certain of exactly which direction to go, but I know, even if I don’t want to check, that I must search the database to see if the Nazis killed Luzi or Luzia Weiss from Vienna.
A sign in the window of a coffeehouse promises WiFi gratis, so I order a cappuccino and find a marble-covered table. Outside the window is a white statue of a horse and packs of students, professionals, and tourists.
Typing Luzia’s name and birthplace into my iPad is tremendously painful, each letter a hammer to my heart. It’s only a screen in front of me, only words, but words that carry significance far beyond this room.
Nothing is recorded in the database for Luzia Weiss, but when I input Luzi, the screen flashes, opens to a new window. And I see the truth of what happened to her.
Ravensbrück.
The word slams against my chest, the pieces of my heart splintering.
A hundred thousand women, I read, were killed in that German camp alone, each with a family and perhaps children as well. I never knew Luzia Weiss, yet for Charlotte’s sake, I feel keenly the pain of losing her. All those years Charlotte searched, Luzia was already gone. Exterminated.
This wasn’t God. Isn’t God. A beautiful young woman dying for who He created her to be. I didn’t know Luzia, but tears, I think, are one of the greatest tributes of all. Perhaps that was why Jesus wept for the loss of his friend in the Bible, before He raised him from the grave. Perhaps, even when we know there is life in the after, we can still grieve for the now.
I may be the only one left to grieve for Luzia. To remember. And so I cry for her tragic death, mourn in that coffeehouse what might have been.
I’d hoped to be able to bring Charlotte information about what happened to her mother, but this news . . .
As I walk back to the train station, along the regal lanes with shops and restaurants and houses built for opera, I wonder how many people in Vienna remember what happened in the war. My world of books confronts the realities of life, but the endings—at least the ones I prefer—clean up the mess at the end. Everything is resolved when I close the cover, but the ugly realities of this world—what man does to man—bleeds right off the page.
Tears flow down my cheeks again, and I decide in that moment that Sophie is right—there’s nothing wrong with the sadness. With remembering a dance of life that ended much too soon. A star captured from the freedom of sky.
Perhaps this woman wasn’t Charlotte’s mother, but even if she was, I don’t have anyplace else to look. The search for Luzia Weiss has ended for me, the final page closing at the gates of Ravensbrück. And I can almost hear the slam of those gates echoing in my head.