“She was unharmed when the agents took me away.”
Max’s voice broke when he spoke again. “She didn’t want to leave your family behind.”
“When they release us... I will convince her to go.”
Max eyed the large doorway into the riding school, flanked by four guards. There’d be no running past them, no matter how much he wanted to rescue her.
Dr. Weiss lowered his head, leaning over as if he were going totie his shoe. He spoke quietly instead. “They are asking about my patients’ things.”
Max glanced up at the guards again, rifles molded from wood and metal in their hands. “How do they know?”
“I pray none of my patients...” Dr. Weiss rubbed his hands over the clay. “I told the agents that I didn’t take anything.”
Max prayed the items would be safe at Schloss Schwansee, in Annika’s care. That she would keep this secret from her father. If the Gestapo found out the truth about Max and Dr. Weiss, they would surely kill both of them and, heaven forbid, the Weiss family and even Annika.
If he’d thought the Nazis would suspect his hiding place, he never would have asked Annika to help him.
“Have you heard from your mother?” Dr. Weiss asked.
“Not yet.”
“I think about Marta, every hour of the day.”
“My mother will care well for her.”
“And will you care for Luzi and Frau Weiss as well, if they don’t release me?”
“They will release you.”
“Please—”
“Aufstehen,”one of the guards shouted into a megaphone. All the men stood.
“I’ll take care of them,” Max promised.
The men stood for hours, all day and most of the night, their legs throbbing. Those who fell asleep were awakened by the butt of a gun. Others, like the rabbi, never awoke.
They’d grown into a crowd of hundreds now, standing in awkward lines under the chandelier light. Some of them were dressed in the nightclothes they’d been wearing when the Nazis arrestedthem. Others were dressed in suits or long cloaks or the black caftans of rabbis.
Guards stood between the white columns that encircled the arena and on top of the balcony as if they were spectators of a sport, as if their captives were the school’s white Lipizzaner stallions on display. Except Austrians treated their horses with much more dignity than they afforded their Jewish compatriots.
The cruelty that Max saw in those hours would haunt him the rest of his life, but he never put into words what he saw there, never spoke of it to his wife or children. To put words to it would give respect to the men inflicting cruelty on all of them. And pour shame deep into his wounds.
When they finally rested, he sat beside Dr. Weiss, drinking cloudy water from a bucket passed around for the men to share. The doctor had tried to care for the men around them who’d collapsed from exhaustion or illness, but he had no medicine, no supplies of any kind. This inability to act was taking a deep toll on him.
On his fourth day in the arena, one of the guards called Max’s name through a megaphone.
Max stood tentatively.
“Come with me.” The guard yanked him away from the others.
He glanced back at Dr. Weiss, who nodded his way.
“Geh mit Gott,”he mouthed.
And so Max went with the blessing, relieved in one sense to flee from this horrific place even as he feared leaving Dr. Weiss behind.
Later he learned that Dr. Weiss and many of the others were taken away hours later.
