Anton joined the Franciscan Order as a very young man, and was happy in his work for many years, until Germany began to alter itself subtly—and then, in 1933, not so subtly. A lifelong and self-taught musician, he developed and implemented musical programs at St. Josefsheim, a residential, Franciscan-run school for developmentally delayed and disabled children.
Anton—who, in his Franciscan years, was known as Bruder Nazarius—took great joy in his work. The order was his whole identity. I have a striking photo of him, taken when he was twenty or so, dressed in his Franciscan garb, with his little round spectacles balanced on his long, thin nose. The photo is dear to me, for my husband, Paul, looks almost exactly like his Opa, a resemblance that’s almost eerie in its perfection. Take a photo of Paul in 1940s clothing, pass it through a black-and-white filter, and even Rita would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between her son and her father.
In 1939, Hitler initiated the T4 Program, his campaign to rid the Fatherland of all people physically and intellectually disabled or delayed. The measure began with forced sterilization of adults, but soon progressed to “euthanasia,” carried out in Germany’s many death camps or in hospitals where Josef Mengele and his ilk performed their experiments. As the tide of war slowly began to turn against Hitler, he ramped up his extermination of the disabled and developmentally delayed. Sometime in 1940 or 1941, the children of St. Josefsheim were taken and “redistributed to other homes.” Anton, of course, knew what that meant. I’ve been unable to learn whether his particular order was disbanded at that moment or whether he left of his own accord after the children were seized. Rita and her sister Angela, the only remaining members of Anton’s family—and the only two biological children Anton and Elisabeth shared—don’t know whether their father left on his own or was forced out of the friar’s life by decree of the Nazis, as so many other friars, monks, and nuns were.
When his happy days as a friar ended, Anton found himself conscripted into military service, forced to fight for the government he hated, the people who had taken and destroyed everything he had loved. He did complete one paratrooper’s jump and the march to Riga but left the Wehrmacht immediately after, with an injured back for an excuse. Both Rita and Angie maintain to this day that his back was fine; the lie was his first overt resistance against the Nazi Party (known in this book mostly as the NSDAP, short for the German name: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.)
No one is entirely sure why he did it, but at some point after leaving the Franciscan Order, Anton answered a personal ad in one of the few remaining Catholic newspapers, exchanging letters with Elisabeth Hansjosten Herter, a widow struggling to care for her three children in the tiny village of Unterboihingen. Elisabeth’s past—and the story of her first marriage—were exactly as I portrayed them in this novel. My only alteration to Elisabeth’s past was to change the date of her marriage to Anton. They married in April instead of October, and in 1941. As far as I know, Anton never proposed a companionate marriage, nor faked any incapacity—that was a device I added at the recommendation of my editor, who felt truth was stranger than fiction, and their first meeting needed a little more tension.
That was all I knew of Anton’s life for many years, and goodness knows, it’s interesting enough on its own to carry a novel—the story of a slowly blossoming wartime romance between two unlikely partners, the widow and the ex-friar. But despite my publisher prodding me to dip my toe into World War II, I didn’t feel the time was right to develop my notes about Anton and Elisabeth into a book. Most of my historical fiction has focused on figures whom history remembers as larger than life—powerful, important, far from ordinary. I didn’t yet feel enough drive to tell Opa’s story—the story of an ordinary person who fought back against some of the worst impulses of the human heart.
It wasn’t until the 2016 election that I knew the time had come.
As I watched the US I thought I knew devolve, seemingly overnight, into an unrecognizable landscape—a place where political pundits threw up Nazi salutes in front of news cameras, unafraid—a place where swastikas bloomed like fetid flowers on the walls of synagogues and mosques—I knew the time had come. I called Jodi Warshaw, my first editor at Lake Union Publishing, and told her I’d finally found a World War II subject I wanted to write . . . and I wanted to write it now. Jodi agreed that the time was right for a story of resistance—of an ordinary person taking a stand against hate. Within weeks, my proposal for The Ragged Edge of Night was approved, and I began to research and develop the book in earnest.
I have written many historical novels over the years, and have enjoyed researching them all, but never has the research process touched me so deeply. Rita and Angie were both excited that their family history would soon be a novel, and I was humbled that they trusted me to tell the story well. My mother-in-law and aunt were overwhelmingly generous with their knowledge, time, and irreplaceable family artifacts. Rita gave me a whole bag of Anton’s personal items, and while I worked on Ragged Edge, I kept them spread out across the bed in my guest room, which doubles as my office. Whenever I felt stuck or disheartened, I would look through these artifacts of Anton’s life. I could all but sense his presence, then—a feeling no doubt helped by Paul and the striking resemblance he bears to his astonishingly brave grandfather.
I was moved—so moved, I can’t find the words to describe it—by Rita’s gift of Anton’s Wehrmacht workbook. I can’t read the notes he wrote inside, but the blank spot on the cover, where he scratched away Hitler’s swastika, speaks plainly across our language barrier. Just as touching are Anton’s photos—the story they tell, if you look closely enough. There is an image of a church spire in Riga, wreathed in flames—and a picture of his classroom at St. Josefsheim, empty of children. Anton kept a few photos of his life as a friar, but there are no pictures of any of the children he cared for while he was with the order. Clearly, their loss was a pain so great he couldn’t bear to relive it in later years.
In the spring of 2017, when I was deep in the development phase of this book, Paul and I welcomed Rita and Angie to our home on San Juan Island. They had come to tell me more stories about Opa and the bells—and I was delighted by what they told me.
“You know,” I said as they settled in, “this book I’m writing—it’s fiction, not a biography. So I’m going to take some artistic license. I’ll need to make a lot of things up, for the sake of telling an exciting story.”
“Like what?” Rita asked.
“Well . . .” I paused, worried about how they would react. “I thought I might add some drama by involving your dad in a plot to assassinate Hitler.”
Angie shrugged. “You don’t have to make that up. He was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.”
My eyes must have nearly popped out of my head. “What? Are you kidding me?”
“No,” Rita said, “it’s true. He told us a few times that he was wrapped up in something like that during the war.”
“But he never went into much detail,” Angie added. “He didn’t like to talk about it.”
I couldn’t believe my good luck.
“He must have told you,” Rita said, laughing. “Now do you believe?”
This is a perpetual joke my mother-in-law and I share: her ribbing me for being an atheist, promising me in ominous tones that I’ll believe in God . . . someday. Meanwhile, I play along by pretending to hiss and cringe whenever she shows me a crucifix or a rosary.
That visit from Rita and Angie yielded more material for the novel. Angie, the first child of Anton and Elisabeth’s marriage, was actually born near the end of the war. Some of her earliest memories are of wartime life, and it’s from her that I learned of Unterboihingen’s heavy curtains, its penchant for trading, and—I will be honest—a few colorful German curses. Though she was very young at the time, she had vivid recollections of British and American bombing runs. It was she, not her older half sister, Maria, who hid beneath
the altar in a pitch-black St. Kolumban during a bombing raid on Stuttgart, near Christmas Eve.
In fact, Angie had so many memorable childhood adventures that I included the best of them in this novel, attributed to Maria instead. (Angie, of course, doesn’t make her appearance until the final lines of the book.) The incident of the First Communion dress and the Misthaufen really happened to Angie—though it occurred at a neighbor’s house, not the family’s residence, as Anton and Elisabeth actually lived in a second-story apartment above a shop in town—and by the time Angie had her First Communion, the war was over. Angie was also the one who maintained a rivalry with her teacher—she is still bitter about it to this day—and would sneak away from school on a regular basis to make paper dolls in empty vacation cottages. It should be noted here, just in case my in-laws do watch me from some mysterious Beyond, that the real Maria Herter was an exceptionally well-behaved child. Angie was the naughty one of the family, and prone to amusing mishaps, besides, which has led Paul to dub his aunt the Anne of Green Gables of Germany.
It was Angie, too, who had a special bond with St. Kolumban’s priest—whose name was not Father Emil. The priest’s adoration of mischievous little Angie might have been what drew him to the Starzmann family in the first place, but it was surely Anton’s and Elisabeth’s essential goodness that kept him a firm friend of the Starzmanns. When Unterboihingen took in the refugees from Egerland, the Starzmanns took the priest into their home along with the family they hosted—and the father slept on the floor near Anton and Elisabeth, having given up his bed to those less fortunate. St. Kolumban’s father was also complicit with Anton’s resistance against the Nazis, though I have no way of knowing whether it was he who brought Anton into the work. It may have been Unterboihingen’s mayor—a man who did not appear in this novel, for simplicity’s sake, but who was nonetheless heavily involved in both of Anton’s dangerous schemes—the Hitler Youth–thwarting marching band and the removal and burial of St. Kolumban’s bells.
It may also have been the mayor who sealed the door in the ancient wall—or perhaps that was done well before the war. But the door is real, and you can see it if you travel to Wendlingen, the Württemberg town that has absorbed old Unterboihingen. Paul’s family traveled to Rita’s hometown several times throughout his childhood, and the cemented door remains as one of his most vivid memories of Germany. When, as a boy, he asked someone in the town what was behind the door, the only answer he got was “Nazi ghosts.” Neither Paul nor I have been able to verify the claim that Nazi soldiers were sealed up in that terrible passage, but it’s such a chilling image, I couldn’t resist using it in this novel.
Whether anyone else in the town joined Anton in his quiet acts of rebellion, we will probably never know. But we do know that the mayor and the priest were involved. Their names were listed alongside Anton’s in a certain letter, found on the abandoned desk of Unterboihingen’s gauleiter the day after Hitler’s death was announced. The letter read—as Rita paraphrased for me: “This town’s mayor, priest, and music teacher, Anton Starzmann, are traitors who have betrayed the Party. Come and arrest them.”
Yes, tiny, insignificant Unterboihingen had a gauleiter—unusual, for such a small town—and although his name was not Bruno Franke, the children did call him Möbelbauer. Rita and Angie also swear that he had a habit of propositioning the town’s women, many of whom reluctantly gave in, fearful of what he might do to their families if they resisted. Like most other gauleiters, Möbelbauer fled when the Nazi Party fell, certain of a trial at the hands of the Allies.
If Möbelbauer had remained in Unterboihingen only a day or two longer—if he had sent that letter—the SS almost certainly would have taken Anton and his friends, for the SS still operated for some time after Hitler’s death. Anton would undoubtedly have died at the hands of the defeated Nazis, and my husband—and his wonderful family—wouldn’t exist today. It’s frightening—and somehow, strangely beautiful—to think how the best and most important parts of our lives can depend on a quirk of history, a sudden bend in the road. How different my life would be but for the passage of a few days, a few moments, in a tiny German town thirty-five years before my birth.
But history is never very far behind us. It’s the familiar ghost we trail in our wake.
On the night I finished writing this book, there was a march at the University of Virginia, a show of power by a faction of white supremacists, newly emboldened by the sudden bend in America’s road. The people carried torches, a snake of fire through a black summer night. They chanted “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us.” They chanted “Blood and soil,” the same words Nazis spoke in Anton Starzmann’s time. A cowardly man, threatened by the strength of those who stood in protest against evil, drove his car into the crowd, killing one woman and injuring nearly twenty other people.
The same evil Opa fought—he and countless others—still lives. It thrives now on American soil.
We are fools to think the past remains in the past. History is our guilty conscience; it will not let us rest. Perhaps we will never learn the origin of this sickness, but we understand its cure. We are the White Rose, and the Edelweiss Pirates. We are Widerstand—resistance—you and I. No force can silence us, unless we permit silence. I prefer to roar.
I have seen the power of human goodness; I know how courageous the most ordinary person can be. The history of my own family bears testament to the power of resistance. Because I have seen, I believe—I know—that darkness cannot last forever. And beyond night’s edge, there is light.
Olivia Hawker
August 2017
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people who deserve my thanks—and have my deepest gratitude—for their assistance and support as I worked on this book.
Jodi Warshaw, my first editor at Lake Union, was instrumental in bringing this book forward. Partway through the writing of The Ragged Edge of Night, a twist of corporate fate landed me on the list of Chris Werner, a new editor to Lake Union, who took on this project with enthusiasm and helped create a smooth transition for me. I feel extremely fortunate to have worked with two exceptional editors, and I also must thank Danielle Marshall, editorial director at the press, who continues to believe in me. Her support is both humbling and energizing.
I have worked with developmental editor Dorothy Zemach before, but her attention, thoroughness, and expertise (not to mention her sense of humor) were especially welcome with this book. I look forward to working with her again in the future; I think we make a great team.
Michelle Hope provided an excellent, thorough copy edit; I am grateful for her sharp eye and thoughtful suggestions.
My warmest gratitude to my family, especially Rita Starzmann and Angela Cullers, who have so generously shared their time, memories, and priceless family heirlooms. I hope I’ve done justice to our family’s history. Danke und ich liebe dich.
Thank you to my readers for their support and enthusiasm. As I write, I am always conscious that someone will be at the other end of my stories, reading and absorbing—and, I hope, enjoying what I create. It’s my sincere wish that you find comfort and strength in Anton’s story. I know he would feel honored if his actions inspired another person to shine their light against whatever shadows threaten them.
And, as always, thanks to my husband, Paul Harnden, who is everything to me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Paul Harnden
Through unexpected characters and vivid prose, Olivia Hawker explores the varied landscape of the human spirit. Olivia’s interest in genealogy often informs her writing. Her first two novels from Lake Union Publishing, The Ragged Edge of Night and One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow (2019), are based on true stories found within the author’s family tree. She lives in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, where she homesteads at Longlight, a one-acre microfarm dedicated to sustainable permaculture practices.
Olivia Hawker, The Ragged Edge of Night
The Ragged Edge of Night Page 32
