I fear a terrible injustice has occurred to someone I care about.
Again.
If that’s the case, I won’t be able to rest until I can make it right somehow.
And this time, I will succeed.
I must.
23
Before...
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
MAY 1939
In all the years I’d been employed by families with multiple little ones, I’d always had equal affection for all of them. But with seven-year-old Brigitta Maier, it was different.
I wasn’t certain if the other Maier children sensed I had a special affection for their youngest sister. I’d long supposed the children’s parents, Johannes and Martine Maier, could tell. If they knew, no one ever mentioned it, not even Hanna, the second-to-last born and only eighteen months older than Brigitta.
Perhaps the other children didn’t mind because Brigitta had been dealt a heavy blow compared to them, and the extra love I gave Brigitta helped to offset that. Werner and Karl, the two oldest at fourteen and twelve, could run, ski, and shoot a bow and arrow; Brigitta could not. Hanna and the ten-year-old twins, Liliana and Amelia, could play hopscotch and take ballet classes and would one day gain the notice of the boys in the neighborhood; Brigitta could not and likely would not.
She’d been born prematurely and with misshapen limbs,including arms that ended in three fingers on each hand. She’d had problems from the start with breathing on her own and had struggled with almost every developmental step a child takes as she grows. She walked with an unsteady gait, and her other motor skills were likewise unrefined. She struggled at times to find the words she wanted to say. She would likely always remain at home, unsuited to living an independent life.
But Brigitta Maier was never without a smile on her face, and the thought that this sweet child would never outgrow the need for my care, tragic as that was, also filled me with a sense of lasting purpose, an immense comfort since I’d been unlucky in love and had no children of my own. I felt fortunate that in this family I had what my own life hadn’t given me.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d given my heart fully to three different men over the decades. All three had swept me off my feet, courted me with affection, professed love, and then left me.
The first had been when I was twenty-six and still in London. I dated Byron for two years and had been ready to give up a posting and family I loved to be his wife and move with him to Calcutta for his job. But he abruptly ended things just when I thought he would propose, telling me that he had met someone else.
Devastated, I’d waited six years before allowing myself to fall that deeply in love again. This time I was nannying in Paris and the world was at war. I met a Frenchman who wooed and charmed me for a year and a half, and to whom I wrote perfume-scented letters that he read in muddy trenches. It was when I spoke of marriage upon his safe return that he confessed he already had a wife, and that I was actually his mistress, that he had no plans to divorce, and that he liked things just the way they were. This time it was I who ended it, but I was just as broken.
The third time, after having spent a decade casually dating and being supremely cautious, I had fallen for Marcel, a divorced Parisian with two grown children. I had just celebrated myforty-third birthday. Marcel was kind and gentle, and for the four years we dated, he spoiled me with jewelry and weekly bouquets and summer vacations to Provence. I’d just begun to believe Marcel was the one I’d been waiting for all those years when he was killed in a traffic accident involving his motorcycle. It was at his funeral that I learned he and his ex-wife had started seeing each other again.
The blow had been hard and swift, and I’d been ready for a change. A big one. The Parisian family I’d been working for at the time, whose last child was going off to boarding school, had heard through friends that there was a couple in Vienna who were looking for a new nanny. The Maiers had five children already and were expecting their sixth. They’d been greatly interested in me not only because I now had more than twenty years’ experience but I spoke French, knew a lot of German already, and was of course fluent in English.
I had eagerly accepted the position, and I immediately fell in love with Vienna, just as I had with London and Paris.
But the years since I’d first arrived in Europe were filled with political and civil unrest. When Adolf Hitler and his army marched into Austria to annex it, Truman wrote and begged me to come home. He even offered to wire me the money for my passage on the next ship out of Marseilles.
Johannes Maier had also told me if I wanted to return home, he’d understand.
But leaving Brigitta wasn’t something I could consider. Johannes, now an officer in a German panzer division, had been deployed to Berlin for training.
Martine needed me more than ever.
The Austria that I loved was hiding now under the flapping of thousands of red flags bearing the Nazi swastika. With the German troops’ arrival came their anti-Jewish laws and hatred for Jewish people. SS officers routinely forced Jewish men and womento get on their knees and scrub off graffiti critical of the annexation. The Schutzstaffel expected Viennese civilian spectators to witness these humiliations and toss in our own insults.
Most of the synagogues in Vienna lay in ruins. Businesses owned by Jews had been ransacked. Thousands of Jewish people had been arrested and deported to penal camps.
“I don’t understand Herr Hitler’s hatred for Jewish people, Johannes,” Martine had said one evening when he was at the town house and all the children were in bed. It was his first night home in weeks, and we were all sitting in the parlor having a nightcap. “Why does he want them gone?”
“Because he sees what most cannot,” Johannes replied. “He can see a strong Germany where her people can thrive in every way. A strong Germany for Germany’s people, and that includes us. The Jews aren’t German,Liebling. They aren’t even European. They immigrated from elsewhere, you see? Palestine is their ancestral home. That’s where they belong. It is fine to live in a place for a time, like Helen here is living in Vienna with us. But she is American. Her true home will always be America. Am I not right, Helen?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d not heard Johannes talk this way before. It had never been a practice of his to discuss politics at home.
“Well,” I said after a moment’s thought, “what is an American, though, Captain Maier? America is a nation of immigrants.”
