Secrets of Harmony Grove (41 page)

She said that that was pretty much how things had stayed for the rest of Abe’s life. The two men lived together, Abe kept Emory on a close rein, and no other animal-related problems had ever surfaced.

“As Abe got older of course, he hired that young woman from across the street to work as an aide for both him and Emory.” My grandmother talked about Nina for a while, stressing how very fond Abe had grown of her and how Nina had become the daughter he’d never had.

Changing the subject, I brought up my grandfather’s will, asking if she remembered the part about Emory’s mother’s assets. “At the time you said you thought Grandpa was talking about some diamonds. Were there really diamonds, or could that have been just some figment of his imagination?”

“Oh, at some point there were definitely diamonds,” Grandma Maureen assured me. “Daphne inherited them before she died, but I don’t know what happened to them after that. I always assumed Abe had brought them to the states in secret and kept them hidden away, saving them for Emory. But once Abe died and no diamonds were produced, I wasn’t sure what to think.”

“How do you know that at some point diamonds actually existed? Did Grandpa tell you?”

“No, no. Haven’t you been listening? Abe never told me anything, dear, except maybe ‘pass the ketchup.’”

“Right…”

“I read it.”

“You read it? What do you mean?”

“Oh, Sienna, when my marriage was falling apart, I did something I’m not proud of. Abe had an old journal of Daphne’s, one she had kept when
she was alive. It was written in German, which I don’t speak, so I guess he figured I wouldn’t ever bother trying to read it. He kept it tucked away in his top drawer. Anyway, when I couldn’t take it anymore I stole that journal and had a German-speaking friend translate it into English for me. I just wanted to know more about the “other woman,” as crazy as that sounds, to know what I was up against. The little journal had been given to her as a wedding present, so it only spanned a short time, about a year, from the day she and Abe were married until just before Emory was born. But in its sparse pages I learned a lot, far more than I ever wanted to know.”

Startled, I leaned forward, with one elbow on my knee, listening intently as my grandmother went on with her story.

“The only reason I took Daphne’s journal in the first place was because I hoped that learning more about her might help me save my marriage. In the end I’m afraid it did quite the opposite. After reading her words, I understood the extent of the hold she had on Abe, and I was able to see Daphne as a real person and not just some ghost determined to cling to my husband from the grave.”

I shivered at the very image.

“Sienna, Daphne was such a deep thinker, a poet of sorts, and her sadness and loss after the war were simply palpable. It sounds absurd, I know, but the poor woman had already lost so much that I almost felt guilty about taking Abe from her, even if she was already dead.”

“What happened to the journal?”

“I threw it out, dear,” she said, but when I gasped she quickly added, “No, not the original journal, of course. The translated pages were what I threw out. I didn’t want your grandfather to discover them and figure out what I had done.”

“Do you know what happened to the journal after that?” I asked, wondering if it could have been among the old documents of my grandfather’s that Troy had found.

“I don’t know, dear. I put it back in the drawer where he kept it and never looked at it again.”

“Was it a special drawer, with a secret compartment in it or a false bottom or something?”

“Goodness no, dear. Just a regular drawer. Abe kept the journal under his socks.”

My heart sank, but I was glad at least that Grandma Maureen still had all of her faculties. We may not have had the journal, but at least she had been able to tell me about the parts she remembered.

“Wait a minute, you know what?” said suddenly. “Now that I think about it, there were a couple of poems from the translation that I hung on to, just because they were so lovely and haunting I couldn’t bear to part with them.”

“Where are they now?”

“I’ll have to think about that. I remember hiding them in the bottom of my sewing basket, at least until I left your grandfather. After that, they probably went into a file or a scrapbook or something. I can take a look around for them, if you want.”

Yes, I did want, and we decided that if she was able to find them she would fax them over from the machine down at her community center.

“Text me first,” I urged her, “just to let me know they are on the way.”

Texting was a newly acquired skill for her, one my brother had patiently taught her several months before. We all loved Grandma Maureen, but she was so long winded that the entire family had been grateful for Scott’s idea—though I probably used it far more often with her than I should, just because I was always so busy.

After giving her the fax number here at the B and B, I brought up one last topic, asking if the journal had said anything at all about a Fishing Tree.

“A Fishing Tree? Yes, it did. How did you know that?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll have to share it with you some other time. For now, can you just tell me what that is or what it meant?”

“It was just a tree. I don’t know why it had that particular name, but that’s how Daphne referred to it in the journal, as the Fishing Tree.”

“What was its significance? It was an actual tree? In the grove?”

“Yes. In her family’s grove in Germany.”

According to my grandmother, Daphne Kahn was just a child in the 1930s when the German government began to create restrictions for its Jewish citizens. As their rights were slowly stripped away—the right to own land, serve in the military, belong to certain professions, and more—life for Jews in Germany grew steadily more difficult.

Though some Jews remained optimistic, hoping the anti-Semitic mood of the reigning Nazi party would soon pass, others were afraid they could see the writing on the wall, and it made them very, very nervous. Daphne’s father was one of the nervous ones.

In early 1938 rumors began to circulate that soon Jews would be required to register all of their assets. Mr. Kahn knew if that happened it would only be a matter of time before they would be forced to surrender those assets as well. As a preemptive measure, he and his brother liquidated everything they could and used the money to buy diamonds. Their plan was to hide those jewels where they would be safe through whatever might happen next.

They managed to accomplish this just in the nick of time. On a dark night in early 1938, the two brothers buried their cache of diamonds deep in the ground beside a tree in the grove, the one they called the Fishing Tree. One week later, the Nazis announced that Jews were now required to register all of their wealth and property.

About six months later, Daphne’s father was rounded up by the SS with other Jewish males in his community and taken to a concentration camp. Later, Daphne’s older brother, who was handicapped because of a childhood case of polio, was taken to Bradenburg and gassed as a part of Hitler’s secret T-4 euthanasia program.

“Eventually, of course,” my grandmother continued, “Daphne and her mother and sister were also sent to a concentration camp—several actually, including Auschwitz, if I remember correctly, finally ending up in a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Of the three women, Daphne was the only one who survived.”

“Wow.”

Grandma Maureen went on to say that as Hitler’s regime began to crumble in 1945 and Allied troops were advancing across Europe, the Nazis
forced their prisoners on death marches to other camps, where thousands froze, starved, or were shot along the way. By then Daphne was terribly ill from typhus, so to escape the inevitable death march from her camp, she hid among a pile of corpses, hoping to be taken for dead herself. The next day, the camp was liberated and she was saved.

“According to her journal, when Daphne was carried into one of the treatment areas that had been set up by the Americans, she was triaged by a handsome young medic who didn’t speak much but had ‘said volumes with his eyes,’ or something like that. I knew she was talking about Abe. He always had such beautiful eyes.”

As an army medic, Abe had helped to nurse Daphne back from death’s door, though at first that had required him to feed her with an eyedropper. With his Amish heritage, he was able to speak German, and something about the connection they made in those first few touch-and-go days stayed with them both. Once Daphne was transferred to a nearby hospital, Abe began to visit, ostensibly to monitor her progress.

The two were falling in love. On the day that Daphne was finally released by the doctors, Abe asked her to marry him. She accepted, but because of the U.S. military’s ban on marriages between American servicemen and German women, it had to be done in secret. The journal had been her only wedding present, given to her by the wife of the kind
Stand-esbeamte
who performed the private civil ceremony. Upon receiving the little blank book, Daphne had immediately begun filling it with the history of her family and all that they had been through since the Third Reich had first come into power.

After the ceremony, Abe and Daphne had traveled to her hometown of Erftberg, in the Westphalia region of Germany, to search for any surviving relatives. Daphne had received word on many who were dead, but she had held out hope that at least one or two of those rumors had been false. Sadly, that was not to be.

“That whole section of the journal is so very sad,” Grandma Maureen said now. “It ends with her and Abe going out into the grove in the middle of the night and digging at the base of the Fishing Tree. When they found the diamonds, still there, Daphne knew that was the final proof that she was the only member of her entire family to have survived the Holocaust. She
wrote that she would have traded every single one of those diamonds for just one more day with her parents or siblings. Oh, I tear up just thinking about it. Excuse me a moment.”

As my grandmother fumbled for tissue on her end of the line, I thought about poor Daphne and all she had gone through before, during, and after the war. Suddenly, the diamonds had been given a whole new perspective. No matter how valuable they were, those diamonds would never be worth as much as a single human life.

“The journal didn’t say much about the diamonds after that, beyond mentioning that they put the beautiful stones ‘somewhere safe’ once they wrapped up their trip and Abe reported to his new postwar position in Aachen.”

“How much longer did Daphne live?” I asked.

“Uh, let’s see…She became pregnant soon after they married, much to her dismay, and then, of course, she died when Emory was born. So no more than a year, I would say.”

“And there’s no mention of the diamonds in that time?”

“Not that I recall. She seemed to realize she wasn’t strong enough to be carrying a child, and she felt certain throughout much of her pregnancy that she wasn’t going to survive. She was right. Her last entry was dated just a few weeks before Emory’s birth date. It’s one of the poems I have, a lament about Abe and her fear that she loved him far more than he loved her.”

“Sounds like you weren’t the first wife he emotionally abandoned.”

My grandmother was quiet for a long moment and then spoke.

“You know what, Sienna? I never thought of it that way before. But I think you’re right. Even back then, with her, the man didn’t know how to open himself up to love.”