“Once, my mother said, before they married, but he never talked to my brother or me about it. On one hand, I think he was trying to protect his family from the horror, but I also think the memories were incredibly painful. My father wanted to help people and animals alike. What he must have seen during the war—I’m surprised it didn’t kill him.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“After he died, my mother told us a little more of his story. Ithink she wanted us to understand why he slipped away sometimes in his mind.Fugueis what she called those times, from the Latin word that means ‘flee.’”
Like Charlotte when she slipped away.
“Everything changed for my dad when he was arrested.” Liberty’s voice sounds hollow, as if an echo from the depths of a tunnel. “During Kristallnacht.”
“The night...,” I begin, but the words seem to lodge in my throat.
Liberty finishes it for me. “The night of broken glass.”
CHAPTER 25
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
NOVEMBER 1938
A whole lot more than glass shattered on the ninth of November, during Vienna’s night hours. Men, a horde of them with axes and knives, broke down doors in the darkness. They smashed windows, started fires, arrested thousands of innocent Jewish men. Apogrom, they called it. As if naming the event justified the horrific things they did to the people across Austria.
When Hitler’s men began pounding on the Weiss family’s locked door, everyone except Dr. Weiss was asleep in their beds. The crack of steel, ripping through wood, woke Luzi from her fitful sleep, and she reached for Marta in the crib that still stood at the base of her bed. But Marta was gone, only a memory dimmedby the violent stomping of feet, the raucous laughter of men who’d reverted to the bullies of youth.
She lifted a tattered bear from Marta’s crib and reached for a robe to cover her nightgown. Perhaps, if the men weren’t inside the apartment, it wasn’t too late. They could escape downstairs, hide in her father’s office.
She found her father fully dressed in the music room, an old Austrian novel calledThe City Without Jewsin his lap. As if he were waiting for the Nazis to come.
The men were in the kitchen now. She could hear them, crashing pots together, shattering her mother’s china.
Their floors had trembled several days ago when the earth under Vienna quaked, as if nature itself had been warning them to flee, but they could do nothing. They couldn’t leave then, nor could they leave now.
“Go back to your bedroom,” her father said, his voice strangely calm. “And lock the door.”
“A locked door won’t stop them!”
Four men stomped into the music room, their eyes wild as they scanned the books on the shelves, the music on her stand. The teddy bear clutched in her arms, Luzi cowered in the corner as the men pulled out drawers, swiped the shelves clean of their contents. One of them opened her violin case and ripped out the prized instrument that her father had commissioned for her. Then he smashed it over his knee. With the crack of the violin’s neck, her heart seemed to split in two.
When her father followed them into the hallway, begging them to stop this madness, Luzi reached for the phone, her entire body trembling so hard that it pounded against her ear. She phoned the police station, telling them they had intruders.
“Are you Aryan?” the dispatcher asked.
“No, but—” Something else crashed in the hallway, deafening her for a moment, and when she could hear the line again, she realized the dispatcher had hung up.
Smoke flowed through the window, and she wondered if the Nazis had set the entire city on fire. Screams echoed through the room, intruding from outside. Her family wasn’t alone tonight, but there was no consolation in this brotherhood. No comfort in the communal wounding of bodies and souls.
The men stuffed their pockets full, stealing what little her family had left, but she didn’t start screaming until they seized her father, tying his hands behind his back.
“He’s a doctor,” she cried after them. “An honorable man.”
But these thugs didn’t respect things like honor.
Luzi followed them downstairs, into the frigid air, pleading as they forced her father into an open-air truck with a host of other respectable men, some of them wearing nightcaps and dressing gowns, others in fancy suits as if they’d been pulled from a performance at the Vienna State Opera.
Her father glanced at her, his eyes sad. He forced a smile before they drove him away, and the pieces left of her heart splintered like her violin.
Turning, she raced back up the stairs, into her apartment. “Mother,” she yelled.
The lock, the entire knob, from her parents’ door was lying on the carpet. She flung back the wood door and switched on the light before scanning the room. The men had forced themselves inside, but they hadn’t harmed her mother. At least, not her body. She was still in her bed, her vacant eyes focused on the dark window.
