“I’m afraid that our current projects will be mostly suspended. As for the museum itself, we have already begun rearranging our collections in storage to accommodate the works that will be coming to us, and we’ve secured additional space off-site.”
“Where are we going?” asked the antiquities curator.
“We will be receiving our specific assignments later this week,” the director said. “Fräulein Becker, I suspect that there is a very good chance you will be going to Poland.” He gestured to the binders full of facsimiles that Edith had compiled.
Poland.
Edith felt her stomach seize.
“S-s-surely . . .,” she stammered, “surely we could not be expected to . . .”
“How long?” a curatorial assistant cut Edith’s question short.
Buchner shrugged, and Edith saw the twitch in his neck again. “Until our work is done. As long as it takes. We are at war.”
The director then picked up his stack of folders, nodded, and exited the room. The stream of museum staff followed.
Edith filed out behind the line of men. Reaching the familiar door to the ladies’ washroom, she pressed it open and sealed it behind her. She dropped her box of folios onto the floor, sat on the toilet seat, and pressed her face into her palms. She gasped for air, feeling as if she might faint.
Poland? Indefinitely? How would she manage? Who would care for her father? What about her plans to marry, finally, after so many years of hoping? Was she really being called to the front lines? In danger of losing her life?
After a few long minutes, Edith stood and splashed cool water from the tap onto her face and wrists. When she emerged from the washroom, she found Manfred pacing the hallway.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, taking her arm.
“I . . . I’m not sure, if you want to know the truth. Oh, Manfred . . .” She exhaled, stopping to press her back against the cool tiles along the corridor wall. “What news. I can hardly believe it.” Her hands were still shaking.
“I think we are all in a state of shock,” he said, “even those of us who . . . who have foreseen this outcome.”
Edith squeezed Manfred’s forearm. She had seen little of Manfred’s life outside the museum, but she knew that he had been an organizer in a Munich group that was known for opposing nearly all of the Reich’s policies, their ideas disseminated in weightless leaflets left on park benches and empty tram seats.
“You knew what they were planning?”
Manfred nodded, tight-lipped. “The Generaldirektor has already purchased several truckloads of pictures confiscated from Jewish collectors across Bavaria. If you don’t believe me, come up to the third floor. There are so many pictures in my office that I can barely walk to my desk.”
Edith felt her jaw drop. “I can hardly imagine it. But you . . . Where will you go?”
“I’ll bet they keep me here to catalog whatever comes in. They need me. Plus, I am an old dog.” He shrugged and mustered a smile. “It could be worse. Out of the line of fire. But you, my dear . . . How will you manage? Your father . . .”
Edith pressed her hands to her face again. “I have no idea,” she said. “Heinrich. My fiancé. He is also being shipped out to Poland.”
“Ah!” Manfred said, his eyes growing wide. “Then you are headed to the same place at least.”
“Yes, but . . . Heiliger Strohsack!” she whispered loudly. “This was not what I was expecting.”
“I wish I could say the same, my dear Fräulein Konservator,” Manfred said. “You are too young to remember the beginnings of the last war. And here we are again. All the same, what can we do? When the Führer calls, we hardly have a choice. They will issue us conscription papers. Saying no is not an option unless. . . .”
Manfred gestured toward a window at the end of the hallway, one that overlooked the square where Jewish-owned shops had been forcibly closed or even burned in recent months. At this moment, Edith knew, Jewish families were boarding trams—either by choice or by coercion—that would resettle them in another place, that would consign them to a fate beyond her understanding. The Nusbaums, a couple who lived with their two young children in Edith’s apartment building, had left weeks ago. In the ground-floor corridor, under the sharp eye of their doorman, Edith had watched Frau Nusbaum piling worn leather bags and grain sacks full of their most precious belongings into a rickety barrow.
Edith knew that Manfred was correct in saying that refusing the Führer’s call was not an option, but her mind raced, looking for a way out of the predicament. Was it too much to ask, to return to her conservation studio, to her humble apartment, to her father, to a new life with her husband?
“Well,” said Manfred, mustering a tight grin. “Poland! Perhaps there is a silver lining. You will get to see all those masterpieces you’ve studied all this time.”
3
Edith
Munich, Germany
September 1939
EDITH WAS STRUGGLING WITH THE LOCK ON HER APARTMENT door when she heard her father shriek.
The fine hairs on the back of her neck tingled, and a jolt like a live tram wire ran down her spine. She had never heard that wrenching sound come from his mouth before. She rattled the door with all her force.
“Papa!”
Finally, the key clicked and the door opened. Edith nearly fell into the apartment. She dropped her shoulder bag, spilling the art books and folders she had brought home from work. Bookmarks and handwritten notes fluttered and spun across the worn, wooden floor. Edith rushed down the hallway, toward the loud voice of a radio broadcaster announcing that German troops had crossed the Vistula River in southern Poland. In the front room, she found her father seated in his chair, lashing out with his lanky arms and legs toward the slight woman looming over him.
“Herr Becker!” Elke, the woman who cared for her father while Edith was at work, struggled to grasp the old man’s forearms. Her hair had come loose from its pins at the crown of her head. Her face was a contorted grimace. Edith’s father’s long legs lashed out again, stiff and uncoordinated, toward Elke’s shins.
Then the smell of urine and excrement came over Edith, and she felt her heart sink.
“He refuses to walk to the toilet!” Elke finally let go of Herr Becker’s forearms and turned toward Edith. “I cannot get him to leave that chair!”
“It’s all right,” Edith said, trying to steady her voice. “Let me talk to him.”
Elke threw up her hands in exasperation and retreated to the kitchen. Edith strode across the room and switched off the radio, silencing the ranting announcer.
“Papa.” Edith knelt on the rug before her father’s chair, just as she had when she was a little girl, hungry for another one of her father’s stories about counts and duchesses from long ago. The floral patterns on the arms of the chair had worn pale and threadbare, the cushion sagging and now surely beyond salvage. Edith did her best to ignore the stench.
“That woman . . .” her father said, his eyes wide with uncharacteristic rage, cloudy orbs rimmed in yellow. From the kitchen, Edith heard water running, followed by the loud clang of pots.
Coarse white hairs protruded from his chin. Edith imagined that Elke had been struggling with her father for hours. It was becoming a daily occurrence, Herr Becker’s refusal to partake in the simplest tasks, from putting on a clean shirt to shaving. Getting him in the bath was close to impossible; in recent weeks he had developed an inexplicable fear of water. Edith felt pity for Elke, at the same time that she was frustrated that no one in the ever-changing group of caregivers that Edith had hired understood how to coax her father to cooperate. It required a high level of patience with a dose of trickery, Edith had to admit.