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

by Kate Hewitt

  After they’d been marched through another line, they were taken into a shower room and forced to undress under the leering eye of another guard, this time a young man with dark hair and heavy eyebrows. Lotte’s fingers trembled as she stripped off her prison garment, appallingly conscious of her nakedness. No man had ever seen her unclothed before.

  As she hurried past the man to the spigot offering no more than a trickle of icy water, he slapped her bottom the way a farmer might slap the flank of a mare. Lotte jumped, and he laughed.

  “You’re a pretty one,” he told her, and Lotte’s stomach roiled. She turned away from him, shielding herself as best as she could, as the cold water dripped over her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Johanna

  Sankt Georgen an der Gusen, Upper Austria, January 1943

  “Papers, please.”

  Without so much as a tremor Johanna handed her papers to the guard standing by the door of the innocuous-looking, red-roofed building that housed the Granitwerke Mauthausen, the company that managed the quarries worked by the Mauthausen concentration camp.

  He flicked through them before handing them back without a word. With her head held high, Johanna proceeded into the building to start her first day as one of the women who worked in the typing pool at the company, a position that Ingrid had arranged for her.

  When Ingrid had asked her, a year ago now, whether she was willing to work with the resistance, Johanna’s answer had been instant and unequivocal. “Yes.” Of course, always, yes. Ingrid had been right; she had nothing left to lose. Her sisters and Franz were all out of reach, perhaps forever; her father was a shell of a man and her mother lived only for her father. There was nothing she wanted to do but fight back; anger and certainty blazed through her like a flame, burning any doubt and fear away.

  “You have learned the hard way,” Ingrid had said simply. “You can do much good for our cause.”

  But the next six months had passed with dreary sameness, and Johanna hadn’t done any good at all. She’d continued her dull work at the accountant’s, coming home every night to eat dinner and listen to the radio with her parents before going to bed. When she’d sought out Ingrid to ask her what could be done, the other woman had pursed her lips and shaken her head.

  “Lie low for now, until the danger passes. Until they forget about your sisters and the Jew.”

  “Franz,” Johanna had said through gritted teeth. “His name is Franz.”

  A look of mingled sympathy and irritation had flickered across Ingrid’s face. “You need to stop caring so much about people,” she’d told her. “There is a greater cause.”

  “A cause that is for the people,” Johanna had flashed back. “There is no cause without individuals, and there is no victory without their effort. I will continue to care because that makes me human. The danger is when I stop caring.”

  To her surprise, Ingrid had laughed. “Yes, yes, as your good father said. Very well. Look, perhaps I can find out what has happened to your Franz.”

  “And my sisters,” Johanna had returned quickly. “I need to know where they are.”

  True to her word, Ingrid had, after a few months, found out where they all were—Birgit and Lotte in Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, while Franz was only a little more than a hundred kilometers away, at Mauthausen, a camp reserved for political prisoners and members of the intelligentsia.

  “It is considered one of the worst camps,” Ingrid had warned her. “The SS have nicknamed it ‘Knochenmühle.’” The Bone-Grinder. “I’m sorry,” she had added, briefly covering Johanna’s hand with her own, “but it is unlikely he will survive. He is probably already dead. They treat the Jews the worst, and the journey down to the quarry is called the Stairway of Death. They work them—”

  “I understand,” Johanna had interjected sharply. “You don’t need to say any more.”

  Yet Ingrid had said enough, for the images she’d brought to mind—bones ground to dust and staircases leading down to hell—tormented Johanna in her weaker moments, when she let herself think about it. What if Ingrid was right and Franz was already dead? She thought she’d know if he’d died, but then she dismissed that as a fanciful, fairy-tale sort of notion. Of course she wouldn’t know.

  Then, after six months, Ingrid had contacted her, at last. “We are arranging for you to have a position in the typing pool at Granitwerke Mauthausen.”

  “Mauthausen.” Johanna had stared at her in surprise and alarm. “But that is where Franz is.”

  “This is the company that is in control of the quarry. It is located in Sankt Georgen an der Gusen, about ten kilometers from the camp.” Ingrid had smoked silently for several moments, her face drawn, the lines from nose to mouth cut deeply into her skin. She was starting to look old, Johanna had thought, her body thin and angular, her suffering written on her face.

  “How did you arrange such a thing?” she’d asked.

  Ingrid had shaken her head. “Better not to know. We have people in place, that is all.”

  “But Mauthausen is over a hundred kilometers from Salzburg,” Johanna had said slowly. “How can I work there?”

  “You will have to board in the village. It’s a very pretty place, with the mountains and the lake. Most of the villagers pretend the camp doesn’t exist.” Her mouth had twisted and she stubbed out her cigarette in one vicious movement.

  “And what will I do? How will this help?” Johanna’s mind had been whirling with all this new information.

  “For now, simply work there and show what a capable, loyal, devoted servant of the Reich you are. Your time will come.”

  Johanna had swallowed and nodded. To be working in the office associated with a concentration camp, under the very men who orchestrated the deaths of so many—and to have it be the camp where Franz was. It seemed both a wonderful and terrible thing.

  “Will I be able to see him?” she’d asked, her voice wobbling with hope and desperation; Ingrid had grimaced.

  “I don’t know. It is doubtful, but perhaps, in time. If he’s still alive. For now, do nothing but your work. Like I said, you have to be devoted.” She’d given Johanna a fierce look, and she’d nodded in understanding.

  And now Johanna was here, standing in respectful silence, her head bowed, as Frau West, the stern-looking woman in charge of the typing pool, indicated her place. Johanna put her coat on her chair as she sat down and began to type the first of a long list of tools that had been ordered. The work was as mind-numbing as that at the accountant’s, yet at the same time every moment in this place frayed her nerves. The men who emerged suddenly from offices, with slicked-back hair and smelling of cigarette smoke, were murderers.

  Granitwerke Mauthausen was a subsidiary of the massive Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke, the building works owned and managed by the SS as part of its vast commercial empire. They controlled quarries, mines, armament and munitions factories, and like Ingrid had said, they worked their laborers to death.

  Despite the fear that kept every sense on high alert, Johanna’s first day of work was uneventful, even dull, and so were the following weeks and months—every day she typed up lists and letters, none of them offering any relevant information that she could pass on, and then went back to the house in the village where she rented a small, shabby room. She ate a stodgy supper of stew filled out with old potatoes, and then usually went to bed right after. She was merely marking the days, waiting for something to happen.

  Then, a year after she’d started, something finally did. A man, blank-faced, not even looking at her, dropped a file on her desk.

  “To be typed immediately,” he said, and then kept walking.

  Johanna looked up in surprise, but the man had already disappeared. She glanced at the file, which looked like any other she might come across, made of yellow card, and yet… strange men did not drop files onto her desk. They all went into the wooden tray and then Frau West divvied out the jobs.

  Cautiously, glancing around to make sure s
he was not being noticed, Johanna opened the file. It held only one page, with a few lines quickly scrawled onto it, clearly in some sort of code. It looked, Johanna realized, like poetry. She stared at it in stupefaction, having no idea what it could mean.

  “Fräulein Eder?” Frau West’s voice cut sharply across the clacking and clatter of the typewriters, and quickly Johanna closed the file and replaced it on her desk. Her heart was thudding as Frau West came toward her.

  “Do you need more work?” she demanded, and Johanna shook her head.

  “No, Frau West. Danke.” She reached for a clean sheet of paper and fed it through the typewriter, the incriminating file lying only inches from her supervisor. She willed herself not to look at it, not to give anything away. Finally, after what felt like an age, Frau West moved on.

  Johanna worked for the rest of the afternoon, doing her best to keep her expression composed as her mind raced. What was the meaning of the lines of poetry? And what was she to do with the information? She supposed the answer to the first question didn’t matter; as for the second, the only thing she could think of was to tell Ingrid. She memorized the lines of poetry and destroyed the file; when she returned home, as she did once a month, she

  went to the café in Elisabeth-Vorstadt and left the strange message of poetry with the man behind the bar, having no idea if what she’d done was useful at all.

  Still, the whole bizarre episode had given her an idea; the man who had left the file most likely had come from the camp, to pass messages from there to the outside world. What if she visited Mauthausen herself and was somehow able to find Franz? Surely it was possible. Dangerous, yes, foolish, certainly, but possible.

  Some of her superiors at Granitwerke moved regularly between the office and the camp: foremen, their clothes covered in a thin, gray film of granite dust, came to give reports, and SS officers went to inspect prisoners to see if they were able to work. Ten kilometers was a fair distance, but if she had to, she could walk it. She just needed a pretext to get into the camp itself.

  She began to fantasize about a reunion with Franz; in her mind she brushed away all the obstacles—the barbed wire, the watchtowers, the guards and the guns—and she pictured only her and Franz running towards each other under a wide blue sky. He’d sweep her up into his arms and kiss her tenderly; the whole world would melt away.

  A few days later, another file landed on her desk. Johanna bolted upright as she saw the man walk quickly away.

  “Fräulein Eder—” Frau West began in remonstration but Johanna gabbled something about needing to use the toilet. She hurried after the man, catching up with him in the corridor.

  “Mein Herr, please,” she whispered breathlessly. “I need to know—” Johanna caught his sleeve, and he jerked his arm away, giving her a quelling look. He was wearing the uniform of a functionary, a civilian who worked under the SS in camp administration.

  “Please,” she whispered. “You come from the camp. I need to go there. I need to find someone.” The man looked at her incredulously; his face was filled with fury rather than fear. Johanna realized how foolhardy she was being, and for what? It wasn’t as if she could rescue Franz, or even help him. And by confronting this man, her fellow worker in the resistance, she could be jeopardizing the whole operation and endangering both their lives. Even so, now that she’d got this far, she felt compelled to persist. “Franz Weber,” she whispered. “A Jew from Vienna, then Salzburg. Can you tell me what block he is in?”

  Tight-lipped, the man simply shook his head and walked away. Johanna watched in despair, and then, a few days later, another file dropped on her desk. This one had another incomprehensible message, but it was followed by two hastily scrawled words: Block 13.

  The next day, after work, Johanna put a typed list of tools in a file folder and then took the bus to Mauthausen, a small town on the Danube, and then walked the rest of the way to the camp. It was easy enough to find, a sprawling scene of barbed wire and barracks, watchtowers pointing to the sky, the stench of suffering and death heavy in the air. She clutched the file to her chest, keeping her head high and her gaze haughtily officious as she approached the camp’s gate.

  “I am here to see Kommandant Stuber,” Johanna announced sharply; she’d looked up the name of one of the commandants of camp administration in the staff book at the office. “I have to deliver classified information from the Granitwerke immediately.” She waved the file with its Granitwerke stamp on the front, but the guard barely glanced at it.

  “Papers,” he said, holding out his hand, and she gave them over. “And the file?”

  “I told you, it is classified. Ask Kommandant Stuber if you wish to know what it contains.” She met his gaze coolly, almost believing her own story, and with a shrug he waved her through.

  Johanna walked into the camp on wobbly legs, doing her best to look as if she knew where she was going. It was already early evening, darkness falling swiftly; she hoped the quarry workers would have returned.

  The guard had already forgotten about her, not even checking to see if she was going to the block of administrative buildings at one end of the vast compound. Quickly she walked the other way, towards the barracks. The sight of a man shuffling toward one of the blocks had her faltering in her step. He looked… he looked… like a skeleton. She gazed in stupefied horror at his arms and legs, skin stretched over bone. She could even see the outlines of his shin bones, like two twigs twined together. He barely looked human, and yet he, like all the others, was surely being sent to work in the quarry for ten hours or more a day.

  A sudden rage, fiercer than ever before, burned in her chest. It was more than monstrous, what they were doing here and everywhere. It was beyond what anyone could even comprehend as evil. To grasp the whole horror of it was impossible; her mind shied away as she clutched the file to her chest and walked blindly on, searching for Block 13, determined now more than ever to find Franz. Would he look like that man? Worse? Dear God, let him still be alive.

  Finally she came to the right block; she stood in front of the wooden hut, like dozens of others, her heart thudding, her hands clammy. She could hardly walk inside, and yet she longed to.

  “Johanna? Johanna Eder?”

  She whirled around, blinking at the sight of a man she only vaguely recognized. He was not quite as emaciated as the other man she’d seen shuffling along, but he looked sinewy and pale, a haunted look in his eyes, his head shaven, as he stared at her in disbelief.

  “I—”

  “Don’t you remember me?” He let out a huff of something almost like laughter. “God knows I look different. I’m Werner Haas. Birgit’s Werner.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “What are you…?” He glanced around and then took her arm, ushering her over to the side of the barracks where they were more hidden from view. “Birgit? Is she all right? I heard she was arrested.”

  Johanna stared at him, still too shocked to formulate a reply. He was wearing, she realized, the striped uniform of a prisoner. “You’re… you’re an inmate here?” she said stupidly, for it was surely obvious.

  Werner’s mouth twisted. “Yes, I’ve been here for two years.”

  “But why? I mean, you’re a—” She stopped abruptly as he gave a bitter laugh.

  “A Nazi? I tried to be one, it’s true, but I found I didn’t have the stomach for it.” He shook his head. “I’m ashamed of myself. Please tell me Birgit is all right. After they arrested me… I had to tell them—”

  “It was you?” Johanna’s mind was spinning so fast she felt dizzy. “You told them about us? About Franz?” His name came out in a cry.

  “About you? No. Your name never crossed my lips. I told them about Sister Kunigunde at the abbey. She was the only name I knew. I never said anything about Birgit. They didn’t get that from me.”

  “Kunigunde was executed,” Johanna told him coldly. “Did you know that?”

  Werner stared down at the
ground. “I thought she must have been,” he said quietly.

  “How could you—”

  Werner nodded, accepting her anger as his due. “I’m not as brave as I thought I was.” He held his hand out to her and Johanna let out a gasp. It was a mangled, useless, dead-looking thing, the fingers twisted beyond recognition. It looked like a waxwork.

  “I’m sorry about Kunigunde,” he said. “Truly. But Birgit—”

  “She and Lotte were taken to Ravensbrück.”

  “Oh, God.” Werner turned away, hunching his shoulders. Johanna glanced around, and saw two SS officers walking near them.

  “Werner, I’m trying to find Franz Weber. My father’s apprentice—do you remember? He’s a Jew, and I believe he’s in this barracks. Have you seen him?”

  “Franz? Yes.” He turned back to her, his forehead furrowed, as the officers walked past.

  “He’s alive?” Relief flooded through her, turning her weak. She reached one hand out to the wall of the barracks to steady herself. “Can you get him for me? Please? I need to talk to him, see him—”

  He frowned, shaking his head. “How did you even get in here, Johanna—”

  “I work in the office nearby. I told them I had a file to deliver.”

  “Johanna, that’s dangerous—”

  “I know it’s dangerous,” she snapped. “I wanted to take the risk. Please, please fetch Franz for me.”

  Werner stared at her for a moment, and then, resigned, he nodded. “I’ll see if I can find him. But Johanna… when you’re back in Salzburg… can you take a message to my father? Georg Haas. He lives in Aigen, on Traunstrasse, number 22. Tell him… tell him perhaps now he can finally be proud of me.”

  Johanna gazed at him silently as he swallowed hard, and then she nodded. “I’ll try.”