Secrets She Kept (36 page)

HANNAH STERLING

MAY 1973

I woke the next morning, relieved beyond words that Dr. Peterson was locked behind bars, that I no longer needed to wonder if he might appear brandishing a pistol over my bed in the night.

But a robbery is a violation, even when the perpetrator’s caught and put away.
I’ve had enough of Berlin. I must talk with Carl about the dispensing of the rest of the cache. I need to get out of this house, to go home . . . but where is home? Not Berlin. And not the mountain
 
—not anymore. Winston-Salem? What will it be like to return to teaching after leading a life out of an Agatha Christie novel?

The telephone rang as I poured coffee in the kitchen. I jumped
 
—something I did too often now
 
—sighed, and headed for the hall phone, balancing my cup and saucer in one hand, sure my coffee would grow cold by the time I took my first sip.

“Hello?”

“Fräulein Sterling? Fräulein Hannah Sterling?” The German accent came thick.

“Yes, this is Hannah Sterling.”

“My name is Frau Goldfarb. I believe you are looking for me.”

“Goldfarb? I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”
Who in the world?

“You may know me better as Marta Kirchmann.”

I nearly dropped the phone. I did drop my coffee
 
—all over my favorite robe. “Marta Kirchmann? Marta Kirchmann?” I couldn’t stop saying her name.

“
Ja
, Hannah. I knew your mother, Lieselotte, and I loved her very much.”

I gasped upon hearing my mother’s name. Tears sprang from somewhere deep inside. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t control the shaking of my hands.

“Are you there?”

“Yes, yes, I’m here. I’m just so
 
—so surprised.”
I’m shocked . . . and I can barely breathe! Thank You, God! Oh, thank You!

“Would you like to meet me? For I would like very much to meet you.”

“Yes, oh, yes, I would like that. I would love that.”

“I’ve spoken with your young man. He knows where I live.”

“My young man?” I repeated, realizing she meant Carl.
Is Carl my “young man”?

“
Ja
, he sounds very nice.” I heard the smile in her voice. “He knows where to come. Tomorrow
 
—shall we say at two?”

“
Ja
 
—yes. Oh, thank you, Frau
 
—Frau
 
—”

“Goldfarb. But you may call me Marta.”

“Thank you . . . Marta. I’m looking forward
 
—very much
 
—to meeting you.”

“We have much to talk about. And I have photographs you may wish to see.”

“Of Mama? Of my mother?”

“
Ja
. . . and more. Come and see.”

“I will. I surely will. Thank you so much!
Danke schön!
”

“
Bitte schön
. I will see you tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes.” I hung the phone in the cradle.
Thank You, Father in heaven. Thank you, Carl.

Carl picked me up at noon and drove me to the café for lunch.

“I’m sorry, I’m just too excited to eat. She sounded so . . . sweet and happy. Do you realize she’s the first happy-sounding person I’ve met in Germany?”

“Well, I don’t like the sound of that,” Carl huffed.

“Oh, I don’t mean you
 
—I mean all the people connected with the Holocaust.”

He shrugged. “You expected something different?”

“No, of course not. But you know how they always say that something good comes out of something bad? Can’t there be in this?”

“A silver lining to the Holocaust? It is a question beyond my comprehension. Over six million Jews died, and many millions more besides
 
—other targets of Hitler and countless civilians, soldiers. The cost in human life . . . staggering, unbelievable. I think it is not a question that any of those we’ve met would appreciate.”

“I know, that’s not the right question. Maybe the question is, what can I do to redeem this? What good can I bring out of the horror?”

“Perhaps it is not our job to bring redemption
 
—not that we shouldn’t do all we can to reduce suffering, but we can’t change what happened; we can’t make it right.”

“I just so want it to be right, to change things,” I pleaded.

Carl lifted my hand and kissed my fingers.

We reached Frau Goldfarb’s just before two. I wanted to run to the door. I wanted to run away from it. Will Lukas be here too? Has he come?
Marta would know, if anyone would, about my father. She’d know what happened to Mama, to Lukas, to them all.
And she wants to meet me.
The wonder of that stole my breath.

“Knock on the door, Hannah.” Carl stepped aside. “Knock, so it will be opened for you.”

The knot in my throat and drums in my stomach snapped to attention. I’d barely raised my fist to knock when the door flung open.

“Hannah! Hannah!” The joyous woman
 
—tall and thin
 
—across the threshold drew me into her arms as if I were her long-lost prodigal child. “Lieselotte’s daughter
 
—let me look at you.”

She pushed me gently away and ran her eyes over me, from head to toe and back again. Tears spilled from her eyes and mine. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t articulate anything.

“Forgive me, you’re both standing here in the cold. Come in, come in!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside, Carl on my heels. “Let me take your coats. Here, now, run ahead into the warm sitting room. I hope you’re famished, because I’ve been cooking and baking
 
—ach, this is like Christmas!”

I walked into a medium-sized room painted a soft yellow. The furniture was covered in a raised rose fabric
 
—welcoming and pretty over heavy dark wood. Globed table lamps glowed pink and yellow, making everything warm and lovely. The mantle over a blazing fire shone, crowded with old black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs. I’d never seen the people pictured there, but somehow they looked familiar.

Marta pulled me to the settee, never taking her eyes from me. “You’re so like her.”

“Like Mama? Like meine Mutter?” I said doubtfully.

“Hmm.” She considered, then smiled. “
Nein
. More like mine.”

“Yours?”

“Wait here.” She squeezed my hands and hopped up, years falling from her stride. She pulled a framed portrait from the mantle. “Do you see the resemblance?” She pointed to a dark-haired woman, slim, tall, younger than I, laughing and happy on her wedding day.

“This could almost be me. This
could
be me!”

“Ja, ja,”
Marta laughed. “This is meine Mutter, and Lukas’s Mutter. This is Hannah Kirchmann.”

“Hannah? Her name is Hannah?”

“
Ja
, my dear, dear girl. It was. And you look like your father. I look into your eyes and I see mein Bruder, Lukas, and meine Mutter.”

Lukas is my father. My father! But where is he? Please, God.
“Carl’s parents said they think Lukas survived the war?” I couldn’t keep the hope from my voice.

“
Ja
, he did, but he was never the same. He had been a strong man. They broke his bones
 
—his fingers and toes. They starved and beat him to tell them names of others who helped smuggle Jews across the borders, but he did not tell
 
—not one name. You come from strong stock.”

“I don’t understand. Why did Mama marry again if Lukas
 
—if my father
 
—was still alive?”

“Ach, but she did not know he was alive.” A veil fell over Marta’s features. “Carl told me that neither of you know what happened after Ravensbruk.” She breathed deeply. “I will tell you all I have learned.

“Near the end, we knew Germany would lose the war. The Allies were all but at the door, and the Nazis began covering their tracks
 
—erasing whatever evidence they could of the horrors they had committed. They knew that the world would hold them accountable. They ‘consolidated prisoners.’ Death marches and gassings and shootings increased.”

“We met a woman
 
—Frau Brunner
 
—who said Mama and . . . and Grandmother . . . left Ravensbruk.”
I have a grandmother
 
—had a grandmother. I bear her name. This is my family.

“
Ja
, this is true. Trainloads of women were sent to Dachau. For days the trains sat on the tracks
 
—locked
 
—while the administration of the camp ran away and new crews replaced them. By the time the Americans came, many
 
—most
 
—in the cars had died. Even in the camp, corpses were stacked high.”

“But what about
 
—”

“A few weeks
 
—not long
 
—after the liberation, an American soldier came to find Lukas.”

“My fa
 
—Sterling. Joe Sterling.”

“Ja.”
Marta nodded and hesitated, looking away. “He told me about Lieselotte, that he had found her in a heap of corpses at Dachau
 
—a heap the Nazis had not had time to bury. He said her fingers were intertwined with those of an older woman
 
—a woman who was dead.” She turned to me once more. “I wanted to believe him, believe that the woman was meine Mutter, that Lieselotte had been with her when she closed her eyes on this world. Lieselotte was a daughter to her, as much as I
 
—more than I, at the end.” Marta picked up her mother’s portrait. “He said Lieselotte was in the hospital and very ill. He did not tell me that she carried a child. But he said that he could get medical help for her to save her life if he could marry her.”

“What?”

“American GI medical benefits, he said. He knew there was not enough medicine
 
—not enough German doctors or hospitals
 
—for all the needs of those suffering after the war, but he said that Americans take care of their own. He said she would die if she didn’t get treatment.”

“But what about Lukas?”

Marta shrugged, as if helpless. “Neither he nor Father had returned from the camp, though others had. I feared he was dead. I believed all my family dead.” Marta’s eyes pleaded with me to understand. “Lieselotte was my only family member left alive
 
—so I thought. She had taken my place in the camp. Because she was arrested, because she gave my name as her own, they never came looking for me. She saved my life.” She hesitated. “I believed Joe Sterling. I believed him when he said that Lieselotte was dying and that marrying her was the only way she could receive the treatment that might save her life.”

“But she was already married!” I wanted to turn back time. I wanted them all
 
—Marta, Mama, Joe
 
—to make different choices. “You had no verification that Lukas was dead.”

Tears fell from Marta’s eyes. “No, I did not. Records were destroyed
in the bombing. I told Joe they could pretend that she’d never married. He said that the marriage need only be for a little while
 
—long enough for her to get the treatment she needed
 
—and he would return her to me before he was sent Stateside. He promised. He seemed so kind . . . sincere.”

“I don’t understand. Joe Sterling raised me as his own child. He never brought Mama or me to Germany.”

“No.”

“And Lukas came back.”

“Two months later
 
—a wreck of a man, very weak and broken. He weighed less than a ten-year-old child. Nothing like the man the Gestapo arrested. Nothing like the man Lieselotte married.” Marta stood and walked to the mantel, retrieving another photograph, and handed it to me. My heart nearly stopped.
Mama
 
—and Lukas, my father.
“Their wedding day
 
—evening. It was a simple affair
 
—a secret affair to keep it from Lieselotte’s father. This picture I snapped is the only evidence that remains.

“I thought Lieselotte would come back the moment she recovered. I explained to Lukas what happened. And though it broke his heart that she might marry another
 
—even if it was only on paper
 
—he got a little better with the hope of seeing her. But another month passed and she did not come. Eventually I went to the American base and asked for Joe Sterling, but was told that he and his wife had gone to America. My heart was sick. How could I tell Lukas?”

“Did you tell him?”

“I waited the year, hoping he would recover more, and if he recovered
 
—when he recovered
 
—we could find her, go to her.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Perhaps, if Lieselotte had been here . . . I wrote to the American base in Oklahoma where Lieutenant Sterling was stationed, but the letters were returned, with scribbles across them:
Moved
 
—Left No Forwarding Address.
”

“You must have found her
 
—sometime.”

“
Ja
. Three, maybe four years later I spoke to an American soldier stationed in Berlin. I told him I was trying to reach an old friend
 
—Lieutenant Sterling and his wife, Lieselotte. He pitied me. He said it was hard for German brides in America and knew she’d be comforted to have a friend write from home.”

“By then Mama and Daddy’d moved to the mountains of North Carolina.”
Joe wasn’t my father. Why didn’t he return Mama to Lukas and Marta, like he promised?

“
Ja
, I do not think Joe wanted me to find her. I know he did not.”

I pulled the banded group of envelopes from my purse
 
—the envelopes I’d carried with me ever since Ward Beecham had given me the key to Mama’s safe deposit box. “These came from you?”

Marta turned the envelopes around, adjusted her glasses, and read the return address. “Where did you find these? Lieselotte kept my letters?”