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

by Kate Hewitt

  Franz’s face paled as she spoke but he did as she said, putting on an old workman’s jacket and a flat cap, and hauling a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. Lotte took out her winter cloak and walking boots; she had not left the safety of the abbey in nearly three years.

  They met no one on the Nonnbergstiege, the city cold and quiet all around them. It was only a fifteen-minute walk to Getreidegasse, Lotte reminded herself. Fifteen minutes was no time at all. And, as the Mother Abbess had said, the Gestapo were unlikely to stop and question a nun.

  Except for the fact that they’d just arrested one.

  “Let’s walk a bit faster,” she told Franz, who was walking as quickly as he could with his heavy load, his head lowered.

  “It looks suspicious if we go too quickly,” he muttered as they headed down Kaigasse. “You’re a nun, remember. You’re supposed to glide.”

  Lotte had never felt less like gliding. She struggled not to break into a sprint. All around her the city blurred into a formless haze of color and noise, everything about it accosting her senses and overwhelming her with even more terror. Had Salzburg always been this loud, people this brash? Her heart was thudding and she’d soaked through her habit with icy sweat. She caught the eye of a man in uniform and she looked away quickly.

  Lord of mercy, help us. Save us…

  Down Kaigasse, then across Mozartplatz, to Judengasse, every step painstaking, and then finally, finally, the little shop with its clockmaker’s sign and the sprig of edelweiss was in sight. Home. Even now, after her years at Nonnberg, it was home.

  She entered the shop with her head held high like any other customer even though everything in her was trembling. Birgit came into the front room as the bells jangled, her mouth dropping open at the sight of them both.

  “What on earth—”

  Quickly Lotte explained.

  “A car,” Birgit repeated dazedly. “A driver.”

  “You can drive, can’t you,” Lotte said a bit desperately.

  “A bit,” Birgit said after a moment. “But not much. And in any case, you know women don’t drive very often. It would look strange.”

  “I can drive,” Franz said. They turned to look at him. “I can be your chauffeur. It will look less suspicious that way—two women in the back, a man at the wheel. If you’re visiting your aunt in Ladis, then you hired me to drive you.”

  Birgit and Lotte exchanged glances. “It might work,” Birgit said.

  “But who has a car?” Franz asked. “As well as the petrol to run it?”

  “I know someone who owes me a favor,” Birgit told them. Lotte and Franz both looked at her questioningly. “Ingrid,” she explained, although neither Lotte nor Franz had ever met her, they both knew her name. “I’ve… helped her a bit.”

  “Helped,” Franz repeated, his eyes narrowing. “Johanna has told me something of it. You’ve done more than help, Birgit.”

  “I am only doing my part. But it’s true, after everything, the least she can give me is a car and petrol.” She turned to Franz. “Stay out of sight for now. I’ll have to find her. I might be a while.”

  “There isn’t time,” Lotte warned, thinking of Kunigunde. Already she would be back at Holfgasse, perhaps already being questioned or worse. How long would it be before she told them everything? Lotte’s stomach felt hollow as she realized she would certainly be indicted. Never mind going to Switzerland, coming back to Salzburg would be the danger.

  Her mind remained in a ferment as Birgit left and she and Franz went upstairs. As they came into the kitchen, Hedwig let out a cry and flung her arms around Lotte first, and then Franz. Manfred wandered in from the sitting room, his tired face breaking into a smile at the sight of them both.

  “How lovely to see you again,” he exclaimed, shaking Franz’s hand over and over again. Lotte gazed at him, shocked by his seeming confusion. She knew from Johanna that he had not been his old self, but he was acting as if Franz had returned from a holiday.

  “Your papa is tired,” Hedwig said quietly. “He has been very… tired since his arrest.”

  Lotte swallowed down her distress as her father turned to her. “Lotte,” he said wonderingly. “Lotte. Why are you dressed so?”

  “It’s my habit, Papa,” Lotte replied. “I am a nun now, do you remember?”

  He shook his head, tapping his temple with a smile. “I’m not as clever as I once was,” he told her, before he drifted back into the sitting room. Lotte bit her lip to keep from crying. She hadn’t realized he was quite that bad.

  “He has good days and bad days,” her mother said swiftly, defensively. “Today has not been a good day.” She glanced searchingly between the two of them. “But now you must go upstairs. Quickly, in case they come.” Her face turned grim. “If they do, they’ll find you only over my dead body.”

  In return Franz grinned and kissed her cheek, which made Hedwig blush and Lotte laugh. It amazed her, that in the midst of all this fear, they could find something to smile about.

  The next few hours passed with agonizing slowness as well as a strange, sweet poignancy. Who knew how long either of them had left? This time tomorrow they could both be arrested, imprisoned, or dead. And what of Birgit? She too was in danger. Everyone was.

  Franz paced the attic room while Lotte sat, her hands folded in her lap, trying to summon a prayer, both of them ready to duck deep under the eaves if the knock at the door came.

  “Where will you go once you get to Switzerland?” she wondered aloud, and Franz shrugged.

  “If I get to Switzerland.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I suppose I’ll try to make it to a city. Find a way to live. There are organizations for refugees there. At least I think there are.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t imagine any of it, to tell you the truth.”

  “Nor can I.” Lotte could not even imagine getting into the car that Birgit would, God willing, soon procure. What if she never saw the Mother Abbess again? Or her own parents? She thought she’d made her peace with such things when she’d said her vows, but now she realized she hadn’t. She still longed for so much—the sun on her face, the embrace of her father, the sound of bells calling her to prayer…

  From downstairs they heard a door open and shut, and she and Franz exchanged a silent, wary look. Footsteps hurrying up the stairs, and then Johanna burst into the room and flung herself into Franz’s arms.

  “My mother told me—I’ll go with you,” she sobbed against his neck while he held her and patted her back. “I won’t let you go alone—”

  “Nonsense, you know it’s dangerous. I need to know you’re safe, Johanna, so I have something to live for.” He eased back, smiling down into her tear-stained face. “Besides, if you go missing from your job, they will notice. And what of your parents? They need you more than I do, especially now. You know as well as I do Birgit is better placed to take the risk.”

  “I don’t care,” Johanna insisted, but Lotte could see she agreed with Franz. She wiped her cheeks as she turned away from him.

  “I saw Birgit in the street,” she told them. “She said Ingrid is getting a car.”

  A look of relief passed over Franz’s face, but Lotte could only feel dread. If Birgit hadn’t been able to get a car, they wouldn’t be able to go. What then? There was no way out, she realized. Whether they went or stayed, they were putting their very lives at risk.

  The next few hours passed in a blur. Birgit returned with a beat-up “people’s car” made by Ford nearly ten years earlier, its fenders dented and one of the windows without glass.

  “We’ll freeze,” Lotte exclaimed, but besides covering it with wax paper, there was nothing they could do about it.

  They dressed as warmly as they could and Hedwig packed them baskets of food, nearly a week’s rations and surely more than they could eat, but Lotte knew it was her mother’s way of showing her love. Then they embraced Manfred, Hedwig, and Johanna in turn, staring into each other’s faces as if to memorize their features, before t
hey finally walked out into the night.

  They sat in silence as Franz drove down the narrow, darkened streets towards the main road to Innsbruck, which he would turn off as soon as possible, to make their way through the tiny hamlets and villages between the two cities, while avoiding the higher roads through the mountains because of the snow.

  Within minutes, the temperature in the car was well below freezing. Lotte and Birgit were both bundled right up to their noses and they clung to each other for warmth as they shivered in the icy wind coming from the broken window.

  Their story, should they be stopped, was that they were sisters visiting a poorly aunt in Ladis; Lotte was both a nun and a nurse. They were traveling by night because she was deathly ill and they wanted to get there as soon as possible. In fact, they did have an aunt in Ladis, although they had not seen her since they were children. Hedwig had given them all the details they could remember to make the tale sound more believable. She had also written a letter to her sister, asking her to take them in once Franz had got safely across. They would stay in Ladis for as long as they needed to, a prospect that Lotte couldn’t imagine. She couldn’t even remember her aunt, or the village where she lived.

  The first few hours passed uneventfully enough, and after a while Lotte fell into an uneasy doze, awaking stiff-limbed and groggy to find they were still driving, on and on through the darkness. It felt, she thought, as if the whole world had turned to endless night, as if the sun would never rise again.

  When dawn broke with pale gray light spreading over the horizon, they ate some of the food Hedwig had provided and tried to sleep, despite the cold.

  “Why don’t we also travel by daylight?” Lotte asked as the sun rose higher in the sky and the whole world shimmered, sunlight on snow. “Surely it would look less suspicious, and it will take ages to get there going only by night.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Birgit protested, but then Franz shook his head.

  “Lotte’s right. The longer we take, the more likely it is that word will get out. Sister Kunigunde might have already told them all she knows. They might already be looking for us.” No one said anything to that and he continued more stridently, “The faster we get across, the better.”

  Birgit hesitated, looking between them both, and then she nodded. “All right,” she said. “So be it.”

  Franz started the car and then pulled out onto the road. The hours passed with painstaking slowness. Sometimes Lotte tried to relieve the tedium, as well as the terror, by asking questions, but Birgit was not very forthcoming.

  “Where did Ingrid get the car from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the petrol?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you suppose they found out about Kunigunde?”

  Something flickered across Birgit’s face as she looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you meet Ingrid, anyway?”

  “I met her a long time ago, in a coffeehouse.”

  “She’s a communist?”

  “So she says.”

  “And what have you done? How have you helped her?”

  “It’s better for you not to know,” Birgit said, and turned to look out the window.

  Eventually Lotte lapsed into silence and they continued on, past Lofer, Waidering, St. John in Tyrol. There were only a few cars on the road, but they were never stopped.

  “God is watching over us,” Lotte proclaimed when they were only fifty kilometers from Ladis. They had been traveling for nearly two days, and she was exhausted and clinging to hope.

  “If we get there in one piece,” Franz told her, “I’ll believe in your God.”

  “And if we don’t?” Lotte challenged. “God is God no matter what happens to us.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Franz replied grimly.

  Another twenty kilometers crawled past. Although no one spoke, the tension in the car felt thick, palpable. They were so close. So close…

  Then, finally, Franz was turning off onto a narrow track that led to the tiny village of Ladis, its wooden farmhouses blanketed in snow like drifts of icing, everything seeming impossibly peaceful.

  “My aunt’s house is the second to last on the main street,” Birgit told him in a low voice. They had agreed to visit her first, for they knew they needed help. Although they were very near the Swiss border, they could not go by the main road, and attempting to cross by foot in January alone—without local knowledge—was surely a death sentence.

  “Can we really trust her?” Franz asked, and Birgit shrugged.

  “We have to. My mother said she is a good woman. We must throw ourselves on her mercy.”

  They found the house easily enough, its front window lit as darkness fell. They parked the car in front and then glanced at each other. Everyone around would have noticed the car, the only one in the village; if there were any Nazi sympathizers among them, they would have very little time indeed.

  Silently Franz climbed out of the car, followed by Birgit and Lotte. They walked along the cleared path, the snowbanks nearly reaching their waists, to the front door, and then knocked.

  The woman who answered the door was tall and stout, with graying blond hair scraped back into a knot, just like their mother’s. Her expression was a mixture of fear and suspicion.

  “Tante Elfriede,” Birgit said. “It is your nieces, Birgit and Lotte. Hedwig’s daughters.”

  “What on earth…” Elfriede stared at them in shock before she ushered them in, glancing nervously out at the darkened street before closing the door. “Is Hedwig all right?”

  “Yes, she is well, and our father, too,” Birgit said. “But we need your help, Tante Elfriede.” Her gaze moved to Franz, and her aunt’s gaze widened in alarmed understanding. “Urgently.”

  Less than an hour later they were driving onward, along the road that led to the Swiss border, just a few kilometers away. Elfriede’s husband, a man named Karl whom Lotte didn’t remember at all, had agreed, with deep reluctance, to help them. They were to drive to about a kilometer from the frontier, and from there Franz would hike through the mountains on foot. There was, Karl had told them, a mountain hut about a mile up where he could shelter for the night, but he should be careful because frontier guards were all about, looking for smugglers or refugees, armed with rifles and Alsatian dogs who were trained to kill.

  “We are so close,” Birgit told her, squeezing her hand. “So close. Only a few more minutes.”

  Minutes. That’s all that was left. Lotte nodded and tried to smile, but her lips trembled.

  They drove in silence, and then Karl pulled the car off the road, the hood nosing a snowbank. As Lotte stepped out of the car, she was amazed at how still and silent it was—moonlight glittered on the hardened crust of snow, a sheet of white spreading endlessly upwards into darkness. How on earth could Franz climb all that and survive?

  He must have been thinking the same thing, for he tilted his head to look up the mountain above him with an expression of mingled determination and despair.

  “Godspeed, Franz,” Birgit said in a whisper. “You will write when you can?”

  “Yes, when I can.”

  He embraced them in turn while Karl waited, his hands tucked into his armpits, one foot tapping impatiently. No doubt he wanted to be rid of them all as soon as he could.

  Heaving his rucksack on his shoulder Franz started towards the mountain looming in front of them, his boots crunching through the crust into the deep snow. The knot in Lotte’s stomach began to loosen. They’d done it. They’d actually done it.

  Then they heard the sound of a motor breaking the stillness. Franz threw a startled look behind him and then started running as best as he could through the deep snow while Lotte and Birgit stood as if frozen. Karl shielded his eyes against the sudden glare of headlights that swept across the snow.

  Lotte heard the slam of a car door, the barking of dogs, and then the bright light of a torch caught her in its b
eam, making her blink and cringe. The breath rushed out of her lungs as she heard a voice call out in strident, sure demand, “Halt!”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Johanna

  Salzburg, January 1942

  It had been five days with no word. Johanna told herself not to panic. It would have taken them several days to get to Ladis, and in any case the post was unreliable at the best of times. Franz might be safely settled in Switzerland—she pictured him sipping a coffee at a café in Geneva or Zurich, overlooking a lake or a mountain—and her sisters might be staying with her aunt at the wooden farmhouse high in the mountains. They could all be safe, and she just didn’t know it. The letter would come. It had to.

  Meanwhile she went every day to work, typing letters and taking shorthand and trying to seem calm. She returned home, trudging through the dark evenings, the air bitter with cold, to the house on Getreidegasse that now seemed so empty. She’d closed the shop, for her father certainly couldn’t go back to his repairs, and shuttered the windows. The sight of the shop so empty and dusty made sorrow sweep through her. It felt like a different kind of death, the life they’d all once known and shared gone, perhaps forever.

  The evenings had become terribly quiet as well; she and her mother rarely spoke as they made supper and then sat down to it, working and eating in silent, grim solidarity. At night they listened to the radio, but they turned it off when it came to the news, for the reports had begun to distress her father, and he would flap his hands and make little noises that tore at Johanna’s heart.

  Sometimes he would ask a question that made her despair all the more—“What happened to Franz?” or “I haven’t seen Birgit in a while.” She answered as best as she could, keeping her voice gentle, explaining that Franz and Birgit had both gone away.

  “Gone?” Manfred’s forehead would crinkle as he scanned her face in confusion. “Gone where?”