The Edelweiss Sisters: An epic, heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel

by Kate Hewitt

  Janos smiled sickly and wiped the blood from his chin. He did not seem very surprised by the treatment he’d received, and somehow that made it seem worse.

  “How could they do this!” Birgit exclaimed.

  The woman gave her a quick, burning look. “You object?”

  “Of course I object. Janos is innocent! It’s wrong to hurt someone simply for who they are. It’s evil.” She was saying no more than what her father said, and yet she realized how much she meant it. The passion in her voice was both surprising to her and real; it fired through her, woke her up from a sleep she hadn’t realized she’d been drifting into, consumed by her own problems and little else.

  “You are kind, Fräulein Eder,” Janos said in a half-mumble. “Just as your father is kind.”

  “Your father is Herr Eder?” the woman said sharply. “The clockmaker?”

  Birgit stared at her in surprise. “Yes… Do you know him?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” She nodded to Janos. “We must get him home. They’ll come back, don’t doubt it.”

  With his arms draped around their shoulders, Janos managed to walk to the rented room in Judengasse where he lived, as sorry and squalid a place as Birgit had ever seen.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said after they’d left Janos on his bed; she had wiped his face as tenderly as a mother and left a jug of water and a glass on the table nearby. “I believe you’ve ruined your skirt.”

  Birgit glanced down at her plain skirt of brown tweed. It was soaking wet and stained with blood. How on earth would she explain it to Mother? “It doesn’t matter.”

  The woman gave her a frank look. She had full lips and a strong nose, and her hazel eyes were bright, her gaze direct. Birgit thought she must be about thirty, perhaps a little older. “You were brave.”

  Birgit shook her head. “No, I wasn’t. If I had been, I would have done something before they’d left him in the fountain to drown.”

  “That would have been stupid, rather than brave,” she replied. “There is a difference.” She gave Birgit an appraising look that made her want to fidget; no one ever looked so boldly at her, as if taking her measure. Usually their glances skimmed over her, moved on to something more interesting. This woman’s did not. “Perhaps you would wish to help again,” she said, her tone both challenging and yet also cautious.

  “Again? How?” Birgit looked at her in confusion. “Janos is safe now.”

  “He is but one. There are many more. And many other evils as well that need… resisting.” She spoke the word with careful emphasis. “Do you think you would you be interested? Or was this just a one-off to salve your conscience?”

  Birgit didn’t miss the slightly sneering tone of the woman’s voice and something in her burned. Of course, it would be far more prudent to refuse the woman’s nameless challenge; she was someone who crackled with energy, radiated danger. Her eyes were bright, her expression fierce, and in response a new reckless courage bloomed in Birgit. She was surely being replaced at her father’s shop, by her father’s side; here, perhaps, she could still be useful. Important, even.

  “Perhaps I would be,” she declared, meeting the woman’s direct stare with her chin lifted. “What are you proposing?”

  A smile flickered across her face. “Here,” she said, and from her pocket she withdrew a single sheet of paper with a few printed lines, badly typeset, and handed it to her. “Take this. Show it to no one. And if you are interested, come to Oskar’s Coffeehouse in Elisabeth-Vorstadt next Wednesday evening, at seven o’clock. Tell no one else.” The woman’s eyes flashed. “Or you’ll regret it.”

  A tremor went through Birgit at the implied threat. She had an urge to thrust the sheet back at the woman, no matter what it said, and yet she didn’t. “Wednesday,” she repeated, and the woman nodded before turning away, her heels clicking on the cobbles as she hurried down the street. Birgit looked down at the typewritten sheet.

  Imagining A Greater Germany, she read out loud. Do Not Let Hitler Lie to You, Comrades! Down with Fascism! She drew her breath in sharply and glanced up, but the woman was gone, swallowed up by the shadows.

  Chapter Four

  Lotte

  October 1936

  Lotte sat on a bench in Residenzplatz and watched as a flock of starlings rose in a dark cloud and hovered over the magnificent Residence Fountain with its Triton gazing upward—water jetting out from his conch-shell trumpet—before taking wing to the slate-colored sky. It was the time of year when the Salzburger Schnürlregen, or string rain, misted the city in a constant drizzle and turned the whole world to gray, shrouding the mountains behind a thick fog.

  Huddling deeper in her coat, Lotte gave a heavy sigh as her cheeks dampened with mist-like tears. She was due at the Mozarteum for her class on composition in just fifteen minutes, and she most certainly should hurry from this bench so she could attend it in a timely fashion.

  The trouble was, she did not want to go. At all.

  She had been taking classes at the esteemed music academy for over a month, and with each passing day she feared her parents’ hard-earned schillings, and worse, their unspoken hope, were both being wasted.

  She might have once sung in that silly competition with the von Trapps, who were now musical stars in the making and had already toured Europe, but she had, she realized, a rather ordinary voice. According to the cultured professors as well as the other pupils of the Mozarteum, she was quite an ordinary pupil.

  Not that Lotte minded. She didn’t particularly want to be anything other than ordinary. She had no delusions of grandeur or illusions of fame, just a hope of happiness, of finding a kind of peace and contentment.

  Sometimes she glimpsed it, felt it almost at the tips of her fingers—when she saw the mist rising from the mountains in the morning, or in the hushed breath before the mass was sung, and her whole being rose in delighted sympathy—but then it slipped away again, as she returned with a crash to the weary world with all of its disappointments and dangers, a world that held so much joy, and yet also so much pain.

  She did not think she would find the elusive happiness and peace she craved at the Mozarteum.

  Attending the prestigious music academy had been her father’s idea, after a colleague who had seen Lotte sing in the competition with her sisters suggested she was talented enough to take lessons once she’d finished at school.

  Her father had put the idea to her with such a hopeful twinkle in his eye that Lotte had felt she’d had to agree. She couldn’t bear to disappoint anyone, especially not her father, and in any case there was nothing else she wanted to do—unlike Birgit she had no affinity for clockmaking, and the kitchen was clearly only her mother and Johanna’s domain. Work outside of the home was never spoken about and not to be thought of. Why not study at the Mozarteum if she was accepted into their program? Why not study and learn? Why not please her father if she did not know how to please herself?

  And yet she had discovered almost immediately that she loathed the atmosphere of ambition and striving at the academy, the petty gossip and backbiting between its competitive pupils; just as quickly she’d realized she wasn’t talented enough to be taken seriously by anyone, teacher or student.

  It was a waste of money as well as effort, and she struggled not to feel uncharacteristically despondent as she tried to ignore the sideways sneers of the other pupils, the artistic exasperation of her professors. So here she sat, in the middle of Residenzplatz, dreading to return to her lessons, yet having nowhere else to go.

  With a sigh she rose from the bench and started across the wide square towards the footbridge over the Salzach that led to the university’s premises on Schwarzstrasse. As she crossed the square Lotte noticed a crowd of people listening to a man standing on the steps of the fountain; he was shouting about something with a look of exultant fury on his face as spittle flew out of his mouth along with angry words.

  “Who is responsible for the failure of the banks? The Jews!
Who keeps your money and eats your bread? The Jews! Who controls the stocks, the banks, even where you buy your clothes?” He waited, a faint expectant smile curving his mouth.

  The crowd, buoyed by his frenzied delivery, chanted, “The Jews!”

  “You are right, good people of Salzburg! The Jews are destroying our way of life. They are polluting our pure Germanic blood! We are children and heirs of Deutschland, with a long and noble history going back to Charlemagne himself, and we are now reduced to scrounging for scraps that the Jews deign to give us. This must stop! And it will stop, when Hitler unites us with Germany!”

  The cheers that went up from the crowd chilled Lotte right through. More and more often she had seen such demonstrations in the city, or read ugly rhetoric in the newspapers—hatred against the Jews as well as the increasing signs of Austrians’ affinity with Germany, despite the government’s determination to remain independent and outlaw membership in the National Socialist Party.

  Last week Lotte had seen Janos, the knife grinder, with his eye blackened and his face bruised. When her mother had demanded to know what had happened to him, he’d shrugged and smiled, revealing several missing teeth. “Some boys decided to teach me a lesson. What can I say, Frau Eder? The world is an unhappy place.”

  Her mother’s mouth had thinned but she had said nothing more. Her father, however, had been greatly distressed by the sight of Janos’s poor face, and had insisted on paying him double for the knives he’d sharpened.

  “Double!” Hedwig had exclaimed after the knife grinder had gone away with his cart. “There is charity and then there is foolishness.”

  “Then let me be foolish,” Manfred had replied with a sad smile, and Hedwig had harrumphed upstairs.

  Lotte knew her father hated the Nazis and all they stood for; she heard enough lambasting of their policies during his monthly salons. She did not, however, know what her mother thought; if Hedwig had any political opinions, she kept them to herself, although Lotte suspected she would agree with her husband, simply out of solidarity.

  And what did she herself think of these matters? Lotte had not given them much thought, beyond disliking the shouting and the fury. She preferred life to be peaceful, a gentle stream rather than a rushing river, and everything she did—from listening to the old men during her father’s gatherings, or eating her mother’s heavy Gröstl even though she could barely choke down the pork-fried potatoes, to attending the music classes she didn’t even want—was to make people happy.

  For Lotte herself, fleeting happiness always seemed to be just out of reach, a shimmer on the horizon that too often disappeared from view, no matter how she tried to discover it, in music or silence, in pleasing others or pleasing herself. She was always, Lotte reflected, left feeling a bit discontented and restless, chasing after that elusive emotion, that distant glinting.

  The man had jumped down from the steps and the crowd began to disperse, Lotte kept well out of the way of them all, doing her best not to meet anyone’s gaze. For someone who had commanded such an audience, he seemed a rough-necked sort of person, with a ruddy face and a stained cravat tied loosely around his stubbly throat. He caught her eye and grinned in a way that made Lotte look away quickly.

  More and more she had noticed men staring at her like that—with a knowing glint in their eye, a leer to their lips as their eyes wandered up and down her body in a way that felt far too familiar, even crude.

  “It’s because you’re beautiful,” Johanna had told her. “Surely you know how lovely you are, Lotte? And men know it as well. They can’t help themselves, unfortunately, although they should.”

  How was she to answer that? Yes, she’d been told often enough that her abundant blond hair, wide blue eyes and rosebud mouth were the ideal of beauty, yet what good did it do her, besides attracting unwanted attention? She would rather be plain, although she never said so, because beauty was a gift, just like a lovely voice or a quick mind. She did not want to be ungrateful, and yet she hated the stares.

  Lotte reached the other side of the square and headed across the Mozartsteg, the wrought-iron footbridge that crossed the Salzach, when she realized the man from the fountain had caught up with her and was deliberately dogging her steps on the narrow bridge.

  “Well, Fraülein, what did you think about what I said?” he asked in a strong Bavarian accent, his voice filled with what seemed like lewd insinuation.

  Lotte ignored him and kept walking, quickening her steps. The man quickened his as well, and then he grabbed her arm, startling her so much that it felt as if her heart was leaping into her throat.

  He forced her to turn around as he kept hold of her arm, drawing her body closer to his as his gaze wandered up and down, just as Lotte had dreaded it would. “I saw you watching,” he said in a tone that was caught between a growl and a murmur.

  “Only because you were so loud,” Lotte replied as she tried to shake him off, but he kept hold of her, pushing his face close to hers.

  “You think you’re too good for me, eh?” he demanded as he shook her arm. “Eh?”

  Lotte’s voice bottled in her throat as she stared at him with both fear and loathing; this close to him she could smell the stench of sweat and beer on his body and breath, and it made her stomach churn.

  “Let me go,” she demanded, but her voice sounded faint and her head was swimming.

  “Too good for the likes of me, eh,” the man stated, giving her arm another shake. “You should be a good daughter of the Führer. You know what he says about women? Your only use is your womb.” He laughed, his spittle flying in her face, and once again Lotte tried to jerk her arm away.

  “Please…” She hated to beg, but she was too frightened to fight any longer. The man gave her a considering look, and distantly Lotte wondered what on earth he intended to do right here on the bridge, but then, as he caught sight of someone coming across from the other side, he finally, thankfully, let go of her.

  “Fraülein, is this man bothering you?” An officious-looking older man in a homburg and heavy overcoat came frowning towards them as Lotte cradled her arm to her chest as if it had been broken. She could still feel where the man’s fingers had dug in.

  “He—he was,” she stammered, but the rough man was already loping away from her towards the other side of the river.

  “Are you all right?” the gentleman asked, but Lotte could barely see him through the haze of her tears.

  “Yes—yes, thank you.” She hurried from the bridge, away from the stranger, and away from the Mozarteum as well. She could not bear to follow the odious man, afraid he might leap out at her again. She kept her hurried, frightened pace until she’d reached the far side of Residenzplatz, and was sure she wasn’t being followed.

  For a few seconds Lotte simply stood there, her heart thudding, her head still spinning. Even now she could picture the man’s leering face, the lewd look in his eyes, and she shuddered. She could not go to her class in such a state. Yet if she went home she’d have to explain, and she did not wish to do that either.

  Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she glanced up and saw the familiar red dome of Nonnberg Abbey, the oldest nunnery in Austria as well as in Germany, a beacon of faith and hope high above the city.

  Slowly, without knowing exactly what she intended, she began to walk up Kaigasse, and then turned onto Nonnbergstiege, the steep set of stairs built between two tall buildings that led to the abbey itself. She was breathing hard by the time she climbed the one hundred and fifty steps and came to the abbey’s visitors’ entrance, an old wrought-iron gate that led to the courtyard and chapel, the only parts of the abbey open to the public.

  Lotte slipped through the gate and into the courtyard, the ancient cloisters leading off it in several directions, the cold, damp air turning hushed, as if she’d come into another world. Indeed, she felt as if she had.

  She was utterly alone, and for a few seconds she simply reveled in the quiet she found there, the way the noise and bustle
of the city simply fell away, replaced by a perfect stillness that echoed through her like a memory, or maybe a dream.

  Here there would never be rough-looking men shouting on steps or grabbing her arm; there would be no supercilious professors or snobbish students. No man would look at her with a leer as he wet his lips. There would be no anger or aggression, no fury or fear. Just this stillness, like the settling of twilight or the rising of dawn.

  Lotte released the breath she’d instinctively held in a long, low sigh of contentment as the blessed silence soaked into her bones.

  The door to the chapel was open, and she went through it, breathing in the familiar smells of candle wax and incense, letting them comfort her, before she realized with a jolt that the nuns were standing in their stalls, saying their prayers, their voices rising and falling in mellifluous waves, a sound of peace that, for a moment, brought tears to Lotte’s eyes. This was even better than the beauty of silence. She stood in the doorway for a few minutes, listening to the ancient prayers, letting them soothe her troubled soul.

  She had always liked going to mass at St. Blasius, the simple church carved into the rock of the Monschberg that her family had been attending since before she was born, but this felt like something far more elevated, a devotion given solely and entirely to God.

  It caused her a flicker of indefinable yearning, and the opening lines of Rilke’s poem from The Book of Hours went through her in a shudder:

  I am too alone in this world, yet I am not alone enough

  to make each moment holy.

  This moment felt holy.

  The sudden sound of speaking voices from the courtyard startled her, and quickly Lotte left the church, longing to stay, yet feeling vaguely guilty for coming at all, as if she were an interloper into a world that was both sacred and somehow forbidden.

  As she came back into the courtyard, she saw a woman and a child standing there—and she realized, with a jolt of shock, that the woman was Maria von Trapp.