“No,” she insists. “I must find out.”
I lean toward her. “How did you know Charlotte’s mother?”
She reaches across the table and takes my hand. I see more tears building in her eyes before they spill over and flood her cheeks.
“Luzia wasn’t your friend’s mother.” We all wait quietly for her to continue. “I believe Charlotte was Marta—Luzia’s sister. Our mother—she died during the war.”
“Your mother?”
She looks back at the lake as she releases my hand. “I wasn’t born with the name Annika Knopf.”
Sigmund’s face doesn’t change. Whatever she has to say, it seems he already knows.
His mother lowers the paper to her lap. “Once upon a time, many years ago, my name was Luzia Weiss.”
Now Josh reaches for my hand. If she is Luzia, then—
“What happened to Annika?” I ask.
CHAPTER 42
NORTHERN GERMANY
MAY 1939
Her face pressed against a pollen-cloaked window as the milk-run train snaked through farmlands and forest, pressing north and then west toward the setting sun. She’d longed to travel far away by train, but not now—now she just wanted to return home.
The lake, the cold mountain water, it was waiting to wash the dirt and pollen from her sweltering skin. To swim with Sarah and Max and Hermann like they’d done when they were children.
And her mother—oh, how she’d loved singing and laughing with the woman who’d given her birth and then filled her heart with joy, the two of them carefree like the birds in the trees. Like they could fly all the way up to hide among the stars.
This train didn’t stop for milk—it was much too late in the day for that—but it stopped for more women, young and old, packing them into the crowded cars. They clung to each other, these women, holding hands, their tears blending together on shoulders and cheeks. Nameless, each one of them, in the minds of their captors, yet deeply loved by the ladies surrounding them.
The seat beside Annika was still open—the other women chose to huddle on the floor or cram together with their loved ones on plastic seats meant to hold two.
Alone in a crowd—it was a terrible, miserable place to be. She longed for someone to help ease the loneliness in her heart too.
But almost everyone she loved was back in the wilderness of lakes, hidden away so they wouldn’t be pressed into a train, transported into the unknown. And Max—was he searching for the treasure, thinking she had taken it like the necklace?
Hermann, she prayed, would tell him the truth.
“Schweigen!”the guard up front commanded, and the car quieted.
If only he would tell them where this train was going, but he only spoke—barked, really—when the aching sounds of grief overpowered the shuddering noise from this metal box around them.
The car would remain quiet until they stopped at another forlorn station for passengers who didn’t want to board. Then the crying would resume.
Annika had done nothing wrong, and neither had any of these women around her. Their only real crime was the breath that passed in and out of their lungs. This breath, the one thing the Nazis had yet to take from them.
“There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.”
That’s what Bambi had said: that Someone was greater than the Man with the gun who hunted him and his friends. He never said who, but Annika knew.
Jesus—the Son of the God she’d met in her mother’s Bible, the man who conquered death—He was stronger than the guard at the front of this car, than the agents who had interrogated her back in Salzburg, than whatever awaited her when this train stopped for the last time.
He had died for her and the hatred she’d harbored for her father, for her envy of the Dornbach family, for taking the necklace out of Frau Dornbach’s shoe box, for bringing Hitler’s wrath on their beautiful castle.
Darkness fell over the car like a shroud, steel wheels rumbling beneath her feet, and when she closed her eyes, she could almost hear the sound of Max’s shovel pressing into the ground, helping Luzi’s family and others to hide the things they valued, not knowing that their things were worth more now than their lives.
