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

by Kate Hewitt

  “I fear I must be duller.”

  “No.” He’d nudged her even closer, so their bodies were a breath apart. “You are not at all dull to me.”

  “Only because my provincial ways are a novelty to you, then,” Johanna said, her voice rising as if she wanted to prove something to him, or perhaps just to herself. “Admit it. You must.”

  “I must?” Franz’s eyes glinted. “I think you are fishing for compliments.”

  “Compliments!”

  “Do you want me to tell you how lovely you are, with your golden braids and your flashing eyes?” He touched each of the braids looped over her ears with one finger. “Or perhaps you want me to say how exciting I find you, how when you set a plate before me at supper time I feel as if you are giving me a dare?”

  “A dare?” Johanna scoffed, but her voice was breathless.

  “Everything you do is so purposeful, Johanna. You make the most mundane action alive and exciting. Your life might be in the kitchen but your mind is not. You are not at all provincial to me, and I think you must know it.”

  It was true, Johanna realized with a thrill, she did know it. Although her pride advised caution, her body flared with feminine knowledge and power. A smile as old as time curved her mouth and Franz laughed softly.

  “Yes, you do,” he murmured, and he tugged her even closer. He dipped his head, his dark gaze intent on hers.

  He’s going to kiss me, Johanna realized. It seemed unimaginable, that this handsome, intelligent, interesting man wanted to kiss her—her, Johanna Eder, who had spent all her life in the convent and kitchen, whose future had seemed to stretch out unimpeded and uninteresting, for decades. It would be her first kiss, and the prospect filled her with equal measures of terror and wonder.

  “Hey, you two,” Birgit called, and Johanna sprang away from Franz. “We’ve found a place to eat. Franz, you have the picnic basket!”

  “Coming,” Franz called, holding the basket high like a trophy.

  Johanna kept her head lowered as she followed him up the slope, her whole body tingling, and he hadn’t even touched her, not really. Does he really find me exciting? She longed to believe it, and yet pride—and a fear of being humiliated—made her wary. Incredulous, and yet hopeful.

  If he was just amusing himself, she would be furious, but far worse, she knew, she’d be heartbroken, even after just a few weeks. She could not bear to be either, ever, yet she feared she would not be able to keep herself from it.

  As Johanna crested the hill she saw that everyone had assembled in one of the simple mountain huts that could be found throughout the countryside; her mother was massaging her already swollen ankles and Manfred smiled at them both genially while Birgit merely looked cross. Lotte was standing a few meters away on the brow of the hill, her arms outstretched and her head tilted to the sky. With her blond hair gilded by sunlight, she looked like an angel. An angel in hobnailed boots.

  “Lotte, what are you doing?” Johanna called in a mix of exasperation and affection. She sometimes thought her sister was a bit touched, the way she carried on.

  “I am praying,” Lotte declared, her face still lifted, her eyes closed. “Don’t you feel closer to God here? I feel as if I can almost touch heaven.”

  “Well, we’re nearly a thousand meters closer to it,” Johanna replied dryly. “But the only way you’ll be touching it is you take a tumble!”

  Laughing, Lotte lowered her arms and turned to face them all, a look of such joyful serenity on her face that for a disconcerting moment Johanna felt as if her sister was right, and she had, albeit briefly, touched something otherworldly and eternal.

  “I’m not going to tumble,” she said, her gaze moving beyond Johanna to Franz. “Don’t you feel it, Franz? Closer to heaven?”

  Franz dug his hands into the pockets of his coat as he rocked back on his heels. “I can’t say I do,” he told her with a smile, “since I don’t believe in heaven.”

  “What!” Lotte stared at him in surprise.

  “What do you mean?” Johanna asked him, a note of uncertainty entering her voice. “Of course you believe in heaven.”

  Franz shook his head, still smiling. “I’m afraid I don’t. Or God, for that matter. At least the verdict is still out on that one. I’m not completely convinced any deity exists, and nothing I’ve experienced so far has given me cause to think it does.”

  Vaguely Johanna recalled the heated but good-spirited debates in the evenings between Franz and her father; she didn’t feel she possessed the intellect or even the interest to follow the argument, but she recalled Franz talking about all knowledge being based in logic and needing evidence for everything. But surely God was the most logical thing of all?

  “How can you not believe in God?” Lotte exclaimed, throwing her arms wide again. “Just look all around you!”

  Slowly Franz gazed around at the beauty of the mountains, the snow-capped peaks in the distance, the rolling fields still green in autumn, thanks to the Schnürlregen. “I admit,” he said, “it is easier to believe in God here than in some other places.”

  Lotte dropped her arms and shook her head. “You miss so much,” she said sadly as she walked into the hut.

  Franz turned to Johanna. “Are you disappointed?” he asked quietly, and she stared at him, unsure how to answer.

  She was more surprised than anything else. She had never met anyone who did not believe in God, who did not attend mass, who didn’t mark the year in saints’ days and festivals, or spend hours in prayer. It made her realize how different he was. It was as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice and had only just looked down to realize how precarious her position was, and how small.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Perhaps if you had seen some of the things I’ve seen you wouldn’t believe in God, either,” he remarked quietly.

  “Johanna, Franz, come eat,” Hedwig called, a gruff command, and unable to reply, Johanna turned away from Franz before hurrying into the hut.

  Chapter Six

  Birgit

  December 1936

  Birgit stood in the doorway of the shabby café, the warm fug of cigarette smoke and coffee enveloping her in a steamy cloud. Outside it was sleeting icy rain and the walk from Getreidegasse to this coffeehouse in the less salubrious district of Elisabeth-Vorstadt, by the train station, had soaked her coat right through.

  A waiter by the bar caught her eye and gave a small nod. Birgit nodded back before looking away, a feeling like pride buoying up inside her. This was the third time she’d come to the coffeehouse, and the second that she had been given the knowing nod. She closed the door behind her and wound her way through the tables, her head held high, before she slipped into a small room at the back, its door inlaid with a mirror so it was barely visible.

  The room at the back was even stuffier than the main coffeehouse, cluttered with rickety tables and chairs and thick with the smell of sweat, smoke, and schnapps. A few people glanced her way as she came into the room—men in the stained overalls and jackets of railway workers, and a few shop girls and jaded-looking women, some who worked the streets, others who earned a few groschen sewing or cleaning or taking in washing. Since coming to these meetings, Birgit had been exposed to a whole new world, an entirely different universe from the comfortable little shop on Getreidegasse, and she was glad.

  Birgit had been terrified the first time she’d ventured across the city to attend the meeting the woman had told her about on the rainy night Janos Panov had been attacked. She’d never even been in this part of Salzburg before, with its shabby tenements and warehouses, except to take the train from the main station, on rare occasions. She’d crept along the sidewalk, afraid of being accosted by one of the many rough-looking people jostling all around her, tempted at every turn to hare back to the old-world comfort of Getreidegasse.

  But some stubborn spark inside her that she had not realized she’d possessed had forced her on; at supper that evening, with great
ceremony, her father had presented Franz with a set of his own tools, in a leather case just as Birgit’s were. He’d been an apprentice then for just over a month. Birgit had not received her own set of tools until she’d been working by her father’s side for two years.

  The knowledge had burned, just as so much had burned—her father’s obvious delight in his pupil, the way Franz engaged him in the evenings with complicated talk of philosophy and logic, in a manner Birgit knew she never could. He was the son her father had never had, the partner he’d clearly wanted. And Manfred was not the only member of the Eder family who had fallen for Franz’s charms—it was all too apparent that Johanna was besotted with him.

  She’d denied it of course, when Birgit had challenged her, but she knew all the same. Franz had wormed his way into everyone’s hearts, and if she did not feel so resentful, she probably would have liked him, as well. All this knowledge had forced her on, until she had entered the coffee house whose address had been on the paper, and, having no idea what to do, she’d gone up to a waiter and asked haltingly,

  “Please… is there a meeting here tonight, for those who wish to resist fascism?”

  The man had looked at her incredulously and before Birgit even knew what was happening, she was being hustled into little more than a cupboard, her heart beating with hard painful thuds as two rough-looking men demanded to know who she was and how she’d heard about the meeting.

  Birgit had barely been able to stammer something about Janos, the fountain, and a woman, before a clear, husky voice she remembered had declared, “Stop pestering her! She’s Eder’s daughter, and she’s with me.”

  Birgit, brought nearly to tears, had blinked gratefully up at the woman she’d encountered that rainy night in the street. In the light of the café she could see how striking she was, with her dark hair and red lips. She wore a button-down shirt, like a man’s, belted into a pair of wide-legged trousers and a kerchief around her throat. Birgit thought she looked like something out of a fairy tale, a female Puss in Boots, perhaps, her stance wide, her hands planted on her hips as she gave Birgit a frank stare.

  “I’m sorry they scared you,” the woman said, “but we have to be careful. My name is Ingrid.” She’d stuck out a hand for Birgit to shake the way a man would and then ushered her into the back room. Over the next hour Birgit had listened, both rapt and uneasy, as a man had pontificated about the evils of fascism, the Nazi threat and the need for socialists, communists, trade unionists and Catholics all to unite to fight the menace not just of Hitler, but of Austria’s Ständestaat.

  “We must unite to stand strong against evil. We must put Hitler and his fascist cronies in Austria and abroad in the dustbin of history! As Marx himself said, let the ruling classes tremble! The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, and those chains will be heavy indeed, my comrades and friends, when they are laid upon us by Hitler himself. We must shake them off now, before it is too late. Workers of the world, unite!”

  Birgit had been a bit taken aback by the furious rhetoric, the man’s red face, the claps and shouts and whistles and stomping of feet in response. Ingrid, blowing out a stream of smoke from her cigarette, had given her a knowing and sympathetic smile.

  “August can be a bit much to take, but he means well, and more importantly, he is willing to die for the cause.”

  “The cause against Hitler?” Birgit had asked uncertainly. “He spoke against Schuschnigg, as well.”

  “Schuschnigg is better than Hitler, it is true, but the Fatherland Front is still fascist and must be fought. Why should our meetings here be illegal? Why should we not all be free to meet and believe as we like?”

  Birgit had known the meeting was illegal, of course, yet having Ingrid state it so simply made her insides lurch with alarm. She’d never done anything illegal before. “My father says the Ständestaat must endure so we can be strong enough to resist Hitler.”

  “Your father is a good man,” Ingrid had replied, “but he is naïve.” She gave Birgit the same sort of direct look she remembered from the night they helped Janos. “Why did you come?”

  “Wh—why?” Birgit had stammered. “I was… curious, I suppose.” And she’d liked the fact that she’d been invited, wanted. She knew some part of her had longed to do something rebellious, if not actually illegal. Something brave.

  “And so? Your curiosity is satisfied now?” A hard note had entered Ingrid’s voice. “You go home and that is all?”

  “I…” Birgit had trailed off, unsure. She hadn’t known what she’d thought about it all, or what she would do. There had been an energy and purpose in the room that she’d found nowhere else, and it had both attracted and alarmed her with its magnetic force. “What can I do?” she’d asked, meaning it, she’d realized afterward, as something of a rhetorical question, but Ingrid had leaned forward, thrusting her face close to hers.

  “Plenty,” she’d said.

  That night, after the meeting had finished, Ingrid gave her a bundle of communist pamphlets and had told her to leave them in public places all over the city. Birgit had stared at her in dismayed shock. If she were to be caught with just one of the pamphlets, never mind five hundred, she would almost certainly be arrested.

  Although Birgit had never had much interest in politics, she’d known enough even before coming to Elisabeth-Vorstadt to realize that the Federal State of Austria did not tolerate any political action by other parties, and certainly not by communists or socialists. The pamphlets, with their enraged denunciation of all forms of fascism, its bold call to arms, were dangerous indeed.

  And yet, compelled by Ingrid’s challenging stare, Birgit had taken them, and hidden them under her bed, wrapped in an old apron. She could have left them there, and indeed she had been tempted to, but that surprising spark of courage and honor had fanned into a flame strong enough to take a few out at a time, and secretly leave them about the city—pinned to a door or on the steps of a fountain, left in the library or in SL Schwarz, the department store on Alter Markt that was run by Jews.

  Every time she took out one of the pamphlets, her insides had trembled, and yet the more she had done it, the more she had been emboldened to continue. This is who I am, she’d thought in wonder. This is who I can be. Someone bold and strong and purposeful, like Ingrid. Someone who believes and acts. And perhaps, after all, it helped to be invisible. No one noticed the potato-faced girl lingering by a doorway or market stall. No one cared, and for once that was a good thing.

  Now, two months on from that first meeting, as she settled herself at one of the tables in the back, Birgit felt, if not exactly confident in these surroundings, then at least more comfortable.

  She met people’s eyes and smiled and nodded, although she did not know their names, she felt known herself. She liked feeling not important, no, not that, but useful. Purposeful. A part of things.

  “Our little Catholic has come,” Ingrid said in a voice of gentle mockery as she joined Birgit at her table. “Did you distribute all the pamphlets I gave you?”

  Birgit nodded, unable to keep a note of pride from her voice as she answered, “Yes. All of them.”

  “Good girl.” Although Ingrid was only thirty or so, she seemed far more worldly and experienced, so Birgit couldn’t help but preen a little under the praise like a pupil with her teacher.

  “I have never asked how you knew of my father,” she remarked as Ingrid lit a cigarette. She could not imagine her father knowing any of the people at a meeting such as this; he despised communism and its anti-Catholic rhetoric.

  Ingrid gave her a rather amused look as she flicked out the match and tossed it on the floor. “We assisted each other with a small matter, a few months ago.”

  “Assisted?” Birgit could not keep from sounding incredulous. “How?”

  “Perhaps that is for you to ask him.” She cocked her head. “He doesn’t know you come to these meetings, I suppose?”

  Birgit shook her head. “No, of course not.”
/>   “You think he would disapprove?”

  “He disagrees with the aims of communism, certainly.”

  “But perhaps he, like so many others, sees the need for us to unite. Catholics and communists together, working against fascism before it takes over the world like the pestilence it truly is. It could happen, you know.” Ingrid leaned forward, an urgency in her eyes. “We must unite.”

  The fierce light in Ingrid’s eyes made Birgit experience an unsettling mix of courage and fear. She wanted to share the older woman’s sense of purpose, but she didn’t know if she did. If she was strong enough. She didn’t think she was, like August Gruber had stated so confidently, willing to die for the cause.

  “You speak as if the Nazis coming into Austria is a certainty,” she remarked finally.

  “I believe it is a certainty,” Ingrid replied, her voice cool. “They have already taken the Rhineland and made a pact with Italy. Already they are looking to the Sudetenland, and to us. And to their eternal shame, many Austrians long for it. They think their lot will be better under Hitler’s iron fist. Of course, it is not all that good under Schuschnigg,” she admitted with a grimace, “but Hitler would be far worse. And as if getting rid of all the Jews will somehow help them.” She snorted in derision. “How can you think it will not happen?”

  Birgit shrugged, feeling both chastised and stupid. She wanted to be brave, but she did not fully understand politics. She could not talk as Ingrid did, with worldly knowledge and confidence.

  Ingrid must have sensed something of how she felt, for she lowered her voice, covering her hand with her own. “I forget how young you are,” she said. “How innocent. You do not realize how bad things have become, or how bad they will be.”

  “I distributed those pamphlets,” Birgit protested, as if that made that much of a difference.