“We must do something,” Luzi shouted, trying to rouse her.
When she finally spoke, Mutti’s voice was as vacant as her eyes. “There is nothing we can do,” she said before she fainted away.
Luzi collapsed on the mattress beside her mother. She—they—couldn’t give up now.
Closing her eyes, Luzi forced the music of Strauss, the composition about the village swallows, to flood into the darkness and tears. The music, it was the only salve against the pain. Against the atrocity. Even without her violin, the melody anchored her.Da capo.Playing again and again.
Where had that truck taken her father?
More shouting outside now as acrid smoke bled into Mutti’s bedroom, the sulfur burning Luzi’s nose, coating her mouth. She closed the window, but it didn’t block out the screams that shook the glass. Someone else was hurting in the darkness. Probably one of the tens of thousands in this city who dared to be Jews.
These men were like bloodhounds, never relenting from the hunt.
Luzi looked back at her mother. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. And she felt torn between the two people she loved.
Perhaps she and her mother could go together; they could find her father at the police station. The men who’d arrested him, they had made a terrible mistake. Her father, she would make them understand, had done nothing wrong.
When her mother cried out, Luzi reached for her hand.
Her mother wouldn’t be able to make it to the police station, and her father would be angry if she left alone. What if the men returned while she was gone?
She couldn’t leave her mother to fend for herself.
Someone else cried out from another building. Or perhaps the park below their apartment.
God help them all.
Or had God left Vienna?
If He hadn’t, it seemed as if He’d looked away.
“Run, Max,” his father commanded, pushing his son toward the hallway when he saw the officers through the spyhole.
Max ran down the back staircase of their home in his nightclothes, but it was too late. The Gestapo was waiting for him outside.
His father joined them, swearing at the uniformed men, saying that Max was the son of a party leader, heir to the Dornbach fortune and estate. But the Gestapo had a list of men to arrest in Vienna, and Max was on it. There was no arguing with the list.
Two men waited as Max dressed and then dragged him to the police station as if he were a criminal. He knew the police captain, a friend of his father’s. And the man apologized profusely as one of his officers searched Max, saying he had to do his job. A miserable job it was, Max replied, arresting innocent citizens in the middle of the night.
They drove Max away from the station in an army truck with a dozen other men, a guard and his gun watching over them. The streets were pandemonium. Windows broken, walls streaked bloodred with hateful slurs, a mob of pigeons squawking in the chaos. Smoke poured from the synagogue they passed, and two women chased after their truck, calling out names of men who weren’t among them.
The Nazis took Max and their other prisoners to the elite Spanish Riding School, next to the Hofburg Palace. The men awaiting them inside shoved him into the crowded arena, beating a fellow passenger for inquiring about a Toilette.
Scanning the room, he found a familiar face. Luzi’s father was kneeling on the clay floor, trying to care for an elderly rabbi who was clutching his chest, his face blackened with bruises. Max knelt beside Dr. Weiss, but they couldn’t save the rabbi’s life.
When the man slipped away, Dr. Weiss’s head collapsed into his hands. “It’s meaningless, all of this destruction.”
God created man to care for the earth, Max believed, and care for each other. This evil was the work of the serpent in the garden, the enemy who wanted to kill instead of care. All these guards around them, they’d made a pact with a snake. Revenge was what they sought, but neither Max nor Dr. Weiss had tried to harm any of these men.
The guards lifted the rabbi and hauled him away.
Dr. Weiss focused on Max. “Why are you here?”
“The Gestapo discovered that my mother is Jewish.”
“Does Luzia know?” Dr. Weiss asked.
He shook his head. Then he dared to ask the question that had haunted him all night. “How is Luzi?”
