“Someone will think he escaped from the salt mine.”
He hoped anyone curiouswouldthink this canary escaped from Salzwelten, the mine above Hallstatt. One of the many canaries singing for the miners in the darkness. If their song ever stopped, the miners fled, the lives of those birds sacrificed to protect their caregivers.
Annika looped a rogue curl back over her ear. “I didn’t think you were coming home this summer.”
“We were detained.”
“I’ve been reading the papers,” she said. “Hitler seems to be changing everything. Even Sarah is gone....”
He nodded slowly. “The Jewish people who haven’t been able to leave are afraid.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“I—” He paused to consider his words. “I fear for the people I love.”
She nodded solemnly.
“I need to tell you a secret, Annika. A secret you must swear never to tell anyone. Not even your father.”
Especially not her father.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“Come with me.” He took her hand and led her back into the forest, to the place in the woods where he’d found sanctuary for himself. And where he found it still, in the mountain shadow of Sarstein.
Decades ago, when the cool of autumn began to settle over these mountains, his father had hunted chamois, red stag, and black grouse with Max’s grandfather, Herr Bettauer. After his father-in-law died, Wilhelm Dornbach expected that he and his son would hunt each autumn as well, but their first hunting expedition ended in a flood of tears. Max would rather shoot himself than kill an animal.
Dogs were an entirely different matter to his father. Wilhelm treated his prized hounds as if they were children, pampering theminside the house during their lives and then burying them on the plot of land where Herr Bettauer and perhaps generations before him had buried their dogs. Max had never known his father to be sentimental about anything except those dogs.
Annika eyed the shovel in his hand as they walked through the trees in the faint moonlight, onto the patch of land hemmed in by scrub brush and a sentry of pine trees, the grass and weeds kept short by the Knopfs’ wandering goats. “Have you lost another animal?”
He shook his head. “This place—it’s a burial ground for something else now.”
“I don’t understand, Max.”
“The Nazis keep threatening...,” Max started. “Many Jewish people fear that the Nazis will take or damage their valuable things.”
“My father thinks the Nazis are heroes.”
He cringed. “Your father is wrong.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
He held up a moss-draped pine branch, and Annika ducked under it. Then he leaned his shovel against the wide girth of a tree. Hidden inside his jacket pocket was a small burlap bag, insignificant in appearance but the perfect cloak to camouflage its contents, worth thousands of the new Reichsmarks if the guard had found it.
He had to do more than tell Annika what he did with these jewels and other valuables he collected. He needed to show her.
“You and I can’t fight the Nazis on our own,Kätzchen, but there’s something we can do together to help Sarah’s family and the other Jewish people in these lakes.” Annika’s eyes widened as he took out the bag. “We can keep their family things safe until they return.”
“But they can’t return until the Nazis leave,” she said.
“One day they’ll be gone.” Hitler and his party thought they were here to stay—a Thousand-Year Reich—but Max couldn’t bear to think about evil settling into their country for another year. A thousand years was unfathomable.
Annika glanced into the bag and gasped when she saw the jewels inside. Then Max placed the onionskin list in her hand, folded into a square. Her fingers curled over it.
