“I can meet Ella and your father at the airport.”
“You’ll need a passport,” he says suddenly, as if he’s just thought of this glitch.
“I already have one.”
Brie peeks her head into the office. “The pool closes in two hours.”
“I have to go,” I tell Josh.
“Thank you, Callie.”
After I disconnect the call, Brie asks, “Why are you smiling?”
“Do I have to use my birthday money for Hawaii or France?”
She eyes me curiously. “No.”
“Because I’d like to go to Austria.”
Her scream rocks the books on our walls. And probably scares away any customers left in the store.
CHAPTER 23
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
OCTOBER 1938
Divorce.
That’s how his honorable father chose to deal with his wife’s Jewish problem: by ending a marriage that had lasted more than twenty years.
Neither Max nor his mother told him about the necklace or that Herr Knopf knew her secret. The Gestapo were quite adept at uncovering information about the Jewish people on their own. Weeks after they returned to Vienna, the Gestapo discovered what his mother had paid Herr Knopf handsomely to ignore. The records of Klara Bettauer Dornbach’s heritage were buried, but like the jewelry at his family’s estate, they weren’t buried very deep.
The relentless Gestapo exhumed her family’s records with the precision of trained grave robbers and then issued her husband an ultimatum: either divorce his half-Jewish wife, or Wilhelm Dornbach would be considered a Jew as well. And eventually, they explained, he would lose everything, including his position at thebank.
But with a divorce, Wilhelm could keep his job, their home, and the many assets—including the Schloss—that his wife had brought into their marriage. All Jewish property, they explained, was being redistributed to Aryan owners, and his Aryan pedigree had been documented and certified.
Max wanted to think that his father proceeded with the divorce to protect his wife, but if he considered leaving Austria for her sake, Max never heard of it. Instead his father visited the French consulate, a loyal customer of his bank, and was able to expedite the process for his wife to visit her sister in Paris. She would leave tomorrow, using the baptismal certificate that the Gestapo hadn’t confiscated to travel through Switzerland and then up through France. If she stayed any longer in Vienna, Max suspected the vision in the Gestapo’s blind eye would clear.
His father had promised to cooperate in full with the new government. And someone at the headquarters said Max would be protected as the son of an Aryan.
Ever since they’d returned from the lake, his mother had refused to talk about anything of significance at home. The walls had grown ears, she said, and silence was all the Gestapo deserved.
So they slipped away this evening, she and Max eating Emmental cheese sandwiches and sipping ersatz coffee at a dingy café in the Judenstrasse, the only restaurant they could find that didn’t have some sort of sign out front stating that Jews were nolonger welcome in their establishment. Yet the rest of Austria seemed to be moving along as if nothing had happened, eating and shopping where they pleased as long as the restaurants and shops weren’t owned by Jews. Several of those elite Vienna establishments had closed until further notice.
Max’s own ancestors, he now knew, were Jewish, but it changed nothing about him. He believed that Jesus Christ was God’s Son, attended Mass faithfully every Sunday, though he wondered why his bishop wasn’t decrying the whole state of affairs. The church leaders, he prayed, wouldn’t begin bowing to a new god.
His father had said the discrimination against Jews would only get worse; that was why his mother must leave. In Germany, they were shipping Jewish people off to internment camps.
Soon, Max feared, they would begin sending Austrian Jews away as well.
His mother’s fingers pressed into the silver rim around her plate instead of her sandwich. “I wish you could come with me.”
“They would never let me leave the country now.” In December, he would be required to join the Wehrmacht.
They wouldn’t let him go, but perhaps the guards would allow Luzi to leave with the certificates he’d finally obtained. She could go to France via train with his mother, and he could join them soon, traveling by foot over the mountains if he must. Both Luzi and his mother would be safe from whatever was to come.
She spooned sugar into her coffee and stirred. “I don’t want to leave.”
