Saving Amelie (11 page)

Confessing again—reminding him of her sinfulness—might make him reconsider his offer. But it would be better never to meet with the children than to have them ripped away. She knew this. Still, the curate did not despise her. This time, Curate Bauer wept with her and prayed with her. He said something so strange—that he couldn’t pity her for the journey that was her own, for in it was her Father’s good pleasure to give her the Kingdom.

She wasn’t entirely sure what he’d meant. She could hardly believe that God would despise her and then bless her with the care of these precious children. Perhaps He would yet see He’d made a mistake and take them away. But until He did, Lea resolved to be the best choir director Oberammergau’s youngest after-school choir had ever known—not for the sake of the coming Advent celebration, but for the children.

She would pour every ounce of love she had into them.

She’d squander her rations and buy or beg whatever was needed to bake strudel and kuchen and turnovers and bring fresh milk from her cow to each rehearsal, no matter if she had less to sell in the market. No, perhaps not milk before they sang; that tended to muddy the vocal cords. Water—that should do. But she would give them milk after they sang, so they would walk home on full bellies.

She would sew new robes for the celebration—for each child. Friederich would never begrudge her the cost or trade of the fabric, she was certain. And if it was too dear or new could not be had, well, she had old fabric from curtains no longer needed. That might be even better—might fit the tenor of the celebration even better.

Lea laughed—a soft and gentle laugh known only to her and God. She couldn’t wait to write Friederich. He would understand what this meant to her. But she would not tell him what she’d told Curate
Bauer. She’d not told even Friederich so much about the Institute and the doctors’ branding of her. She pushed those memories away—at least for now.

As she walked clear around the village, she began to sing, softly. Night fell. By the time she reached her gate the sky was inky black and the stars stood as white flames against it—burning brighter than they had perhaps ever. Lea felt cleaner, clearer inside, than she could remember. She wondered if this sensation would last or if it was only a momentary lifting of the cloud that was her life. She wouldn’t ask. For this moment, she would sing praise.

She smiled and, laughing, crying, hugged herself. This night, though he’d not returned the baby Jesus and had stubbornly vowed to Curate Bauer that he never would, even Heinrich Helphman wore a halo.

Jason Young yawned and stretched. He’d been on the trail of a story for seventeen hours—the last three of which he’d spent pounding the keyboard. He’d just phoned his story to New York and was about to call it a night—a very long night—when his desk phone rang. He checked his watch. One thirty. He’d be spending the night on a cot in the downstairs newsroom. The phone rang again. He wanted to ignore it, but that went against his newsman’s grain.

“Can you talk?” The breathless female American voice at the other end of the line bore the trademark tensions of nearly every one of his sources in Germany.

“To my femme fatale? Sure!” Jason smirked, suddenly wide awake.

“You’re very funny, aren’t you?”

“A regular riot—that’s me. What can I do you for?” He was careful not to use her name, certain as he was that every phone in the newsroom was tapped.

“Coffee. Do you like coffee?”

“Real coffee—by the boatload.”

“So do I. Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning? Our corner?”

“See you then.” Jason thumped the phone to its cradle.
She’s scared. Something’s happened.

He rolled down his sleeves, swung his jacket over his shoulder, and headed for the door, wondering what was up, more than glad she’d called, and dubious he’d get a wink of sleep.

10

J
ASON
WAITED
at the corner where he’d found Rachel after the murder of the innocents. He tipped his hat as she approached and fell into step beside him. The Tiergarten café wasn’t far, and it felt good to walk in her company.

Half an hour later the waiter delivered their order and she’d finished her story.

“Let me get this straight.” Jason leaned across the café table toward Rachel, distracted as much by the scent of her perfume as he was by the silver flecks in her blue eyes. “You want me to hide a deaf kid who can’t understand anything I say until Hitler and his cronies go belly-up and disappear, then restore her, unscathed and smiling, to her doting mother, the wife of an SS officer—which officer, by the way, wants to slit both their throats?”

Rachel sat back, blinking in the morning sun as it streamed through the linden trees. She sipped her coffee slowly, then set it down. “I realize it sounds difficult—”

“Difficult? It sounds impossible, dangerous . . . a suicide mission.”

“I didn’t know where else to turn, whom to trust.” She looked desperate.

“I’ll do it.”

“If we don’t do something, her father will take her to the center at the end of this week—” Rachel stopped short. “You’ll do it?”

“I’ll do it.” He sat back, concentrating. “I don’t know how—exactly. But I know some people who might have connections to
others who will. I’ll need a little time. The first thing is to find someplace to hide her—somebody who’ll take her in. And then some way to make it seem like she’s gone for good.”

“I want to take her to America with me, without Gerhardt knowing.”

“You’ll never get a deaf kid out of Germany. In case you hadn’t noticed, you didn’t come in with one. They’re sure not gonna let you leave with a German kid on the lam, Miss Kramer.”

“I wish you’d stop talking like a Chicago gangster, Mr. Young.” Rachel frowned.

“You heard that the US declared neutrality today? I’m not sure we can count on them to help—not now, maybe not ever.”

“Then what do you propose?”

“Give me forty-eight hours. Let me see who can help, what I can arrange.”

“You know people that influential?”

He shrugged and looked away. He couldn’t share the little he knew. “We’ll see.”

“Why? Why are you willing to help me?”

Jason didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure he knew the answer. He only knew he couldn’t stop Hitler or the eugenicists or the crazy things he’d seen perpetrated in the name of building a strong Germany. He was sick of seeing the world go askew and doing nothing. Maybe if he saved this life . . . maybe that meant something.

He looked at Rachel—beautiful and bewildered and vulnerable and proud at once. Her helplessness reminded him of the impotence he’d felt in Germany for months, and of a recent conversation.

“I interviewed a Jewish professor last week—a guy who’d been at the top of his game at the University of Berlin for years. Over the last three years he’s been ousted from the faculty and stripped of his citizenship, his property has been confiscated—Aryanized—and he’s been reduced to half rations. He’s cleaning streets now—on good
days. Those are the days he eats a little, as opposed to nothing. Even that he shares with his wife and their Jewish neighbor. After the interview, I gave him my lunch. You’d have thought I’d given him the world on a platter. He gave me a saying, a proverb, in return: ‘He who saves one life saves the world.’”

Rachel blinked. He recognized the ungainly wheels spinning in her brain, the wrestling and slow dawning of an idea.

“I don’t know how that rates with thousands of people being cut out of society, so many being imprisoned and some even worked to death. But I want to find out, and this is as good a time as any. Besides, maybe we can save more than one.”

Jason stood, pocketing the address of the medical center. “Lunch at the Ummerplatz on Thursday—noon. No more telephone calls. The newsroom is tapped. Goebbels keeps an eye and ear on everything that comes in and goes out with the press. He doesn’t want Germany’s reputation ‘tarnished’ before his world audience, and killing kids might have a way of doing that, no matter the propaganda.”

Rachel nodded, her eyes wide.

Jason knew this was a new world to her. He was glad she was seeing it as it was. Somebody needed to. He wasn’t making much headway through the press.

“You can’t print this in the newspaper,” she whispered. “Not here and not in America. It would be too dangerous for Amelie, for Kristine.”

“Not to mention you.” Jason tossed coins to the table. “I won’t print it now, and not with those names. But there’ll be a story in it sometime, somehow—and it’s my scoop. Don’t forget that.”

Two days later, Rachel received general instructions from Jason and passed them to Kristine, whom Jason promised to contact directly with details. The day after that—the day before Gerhardt and her
father were to return from Frankfurt—the rescue would be carried out. Rachel didn’t know what that meant, only that Jason’s broad plan sounded just wild enough to work—as long as none of them got caught or killed in the process.

Rachel had come to understand through Jason that getting caught could mean arrest and a prison camp—what he called a “concentration camp”—for Kristine, grilling and certain deportation for Jason, and possibly one or the other—thanks to her dual citizenship—for Rachel herself. She couldn’t think of the consequences for Amelie.

She was to stay at the hotel—to be visible to the hotel staff, creating her own alibi. But that meant she would know nothing of the outcome until word came from Jason, verifying Amelie’s safety. Rachel would pass that word to Kristine. Jason believed knowing little beforehand would enable the women to act naturally in response to whatever he had planned. But Rachel knew that merely waiting patiently was outside her capability. Acting innocent and alarmed was something she’d learned to do in theatre class.

Kristine’s last days with her affectionate Amelie were too precious to share. She memorized every smile, every sleeping moment, every blink of her daughter’s eyes and blush of her cheek. She signed constantly, reminding her daughter that she loved her, telling her she was the joy and light of her life. Telling her, as best she could, all the things she would never be able to tell her again.

Kristine rose early Friday morning and took great care in bathing and dressing her little girl and curling her hair. She pinned a pink satin bow to Amelie’s golden ringlets, one that perfectly matched her smocked cream-and-pink frock—Kristine’s favorite, one she’d stitched by hand.

She packed her daughter’s case with only her best summer clothing, a few dresses, and a bright-red jacket for fall—as though she
believed her daughter would need it. She signed that Amelie, now a big girl, was going on a journey without her mother. And then Kristine held her close, before Amelie could sign her lack of understanding.

Several times Amelie reached up to trace her mother’s silent tears and taste the salt, then creased her small brow in worry lines. She poked her tiny finger between Kristine’s lips until she saw her mother smile. Then Amelie would smile as if all were right with the world and sign, “I love you, Mutti.” It broke Kristine’s heart.

Twice Kristine sat down in defeat, knowing she couldn’t go through with it, knowing she must. There was no other way, no better plan. But it was so dangerous—dangerous for Amelie. If Jason Young and those he trusted made one mistake, if they were even a moment too late . . . But she couldn’t think of that. She must trust that they would do only and all that was necessary—that God would fight with them and allow the ruse to be accomplished.