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

by Kate Hewitt

  “Even so…” Lotte trailed off, hating how feeble she sounded.

  “She also said anyone who came to the abbey asking for aid would be answered,” Kunigunde reminded her. “Do you remember that, sister? Or have you conveniently forgotten it, in your desire to keep your own comforts?”

  “I know what she said.” Lotte hesitated, new doubts clouding her mind. “You know that’s not what she meant,” she said at last. It couldn’t have been. “And in any case, did the Jews come to the abbey door?” Kunigunde’s gaze slid away. “I didn’t think so,” Lotte stated, unable to keep an unbecoming note of triumph from her voice. “How did you find out about them? What are you involved in?”

  Kunigunde sighed impatiently. “It’s better if you don’t know. Better for you, and certainly better for me, since I don’t trust you.” Lotte blinked, stung although she realized perhaps she shouldn’t be. “There are people in Salzburg who help the Jews as well as others. I learned of them. That is all you need to know.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “Why? Do you want to join us?” Kunigunde taunted.

  “How did you learn of them?” Lotte demanded. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to know, only that she did.

  “There are ways, if you look for them.” Kunigunde shook her head slowly. “Are you going to tell the Mother Abbess, then?” she asked in a hard voice. “You realize the Jews would be arrested if you did come forward? They’d most likely be killed. Already they’re sending them east to camps. Do you know about those?”

  “It is not my business to know,” Lotte fired back, feeling now as if she were on more sure ground. “And nor is it yours, whatever you may have been able to find out. We are to obey, Sister Kunigunde, without asking questions. That is what we have always been called to do.”

  “I am obeying,” Kunigunde replied. “We answer to God, Sister Maria Josef, first and foremost, and that is whom I am obeying.” And without waiting for her reply, she whirled around and continued down the corridor, leaving Lotte to gape.

  It took Lotte three days before she finally resolved to speak to the Mother Abbess about the matter. She’d spent those days in prayer, wrestling with her conscience, with her vows, with the resentment and anger she felt towards Kunigunde for causing so much difficulty and trouble, and the guilt and doubt she experienced herself, for feeling this way at all.

  Should she care about the Jews? She was meant to care for all people, to love them better than she loved herself. And yet what of her obedience to the Mother Abbess, to the church, to the government? It was all such a hopeless jumble in her mind, and it left her feeling unbearably restless and anxious. She didn’t want to have to wonder. She didn’t even want to have to think. She’d come here to the abbey, she realized, at least in part so she wouldn’t have to.

  Finally, for her own sake, for she needed relief from the misery twisting her insides, she went to see the Mother Abbess in her study.

  “Benedicte,” she greeted her as she fell on her knees and the Mother Abbess extended her hand to be kissed.

  “Dominus.”

  Lotte rose. The Mother Abbess was smiling at her, her careworn face filled with a patient tenderness that gave Lotte a sense of relief. Surely she would have the answers.

  “What is troubling you, my daughter?”

  “It is in regard to Sister Kunigunde, Reverend Mother.”

  “I thought it might be.”

  She should have known her resentment of her fellow novice had not gone unnoticed. “It is not about her shirking her chores,” Lotte said, her head still bowed. “Although I confess that has caused me some resentment. I will do penance for that, of course.”

  The Mother Abbess brushed such concerns aside with a flick of her fingers. “Then what is it that is troubling you, daughter?”

  “Something, I fear, that is far more serious.”

  “Oh?” The Mother Abbess’s voice was as gentle as ever, and yet even so Lotte thought she detected a faint note of reserve.

  “She is sheltering Jews,” Lotte blurted as she looked up. “Hiding them here at the abbey. Involving herself in political matters which is forbidden. If the Jews were discovered, we could all be arrested or even killed—”

  “Do you hold your life in such high regard, daughter?”

  The question, so gently asked, left Lotte speechless for several seconds. “I… no… but…” she finally stammered, before she gathered her wits about her. “But you said yourself things were not to change. We were to act as if nothing had happened. We must obey—”

  “Obey God. What are the first two commandments, Sister Maria Josef, according to our Savior?”

  “To—to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves.” Lotte felt like a child learning her catechism as she recited the commandment.

  The Mother Abbess inclined her head. “Indeed.”

  Lotte stared at her, the silence stretching between them, spooling into realization. “You knew,” she said slowly, still disbelieving. “You knew about the Jews.”

  The Mother Abbess did not reply. Lotte stared at her helplessly. “Why?” she asked. “When the church forbids it? When it is surely an act of disobedience to—”

  “Does God forbid it?” she interjected gently, and after an endless moment, trying not to show her reluctance, Lotte shook her head. No, God would not forbid it. Of course He wouldn’t. To help those in need—the poor, the persecuted, the suffering? Of course it could be nothing but one’s sacred Christian duty, one’s privilege and joy, and yet the realization brought no comfort, for she felt as if all her careful assumptions, all her placid practices, everything on which she’d founded her faith, had been upended and scattered. She had been selfish. All along she had been selfish, not pious or pure—and now she was afraid. She looked away, unable to meet the Mother Abbess’s shrewd gaze.

  “We are now in the unusual position,” she told Lotte after a moment, “of you having a certain amount of power over me.” She smiled faintly while Lotte turned back to her and simply stared.

  “Power—”

  “It is within your power to tell the relevant authorities about what is happening here. If you did so, you would undoubtedly save yourself, and perhaps others, as well. If you did so, I would take full responsibility, of course.” The Mother Abbess gazed at her unflinchingly while Lotte gaped.

  “Reverend Mother, I—I would never. I—I couldn’t—”

  “You could,” she corrected gently. “I fear for many it would be all too easy. The question is, will you?”

  The words seemed to hang in the still air as she continued to hold her gaze and Lotte realized what she was really saying. If she didn’t report her, then she would be complicit. If the Jews were discovered here, she, along with many others, would be arrested or worse. It was her choice.

  “I wish I’d never found out,” she confessed in a choked voice.

  “Curiosity so rarely becomes us,” the Mother Abbess told her with a small smile, before she fixed her with a steely stare. “But you did find out, and so the question now, Sister Maria Josef, is will you help us?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Johanna

  March 1939

  Johanna studied the window display in SL Schwarz, now renamed after the bank that had taken it over after Kristallnacht. Two female mannequins dressed in dirndls and sporting blond braids stood in the window, offering fixed smiles to the passersby who barely gave them a glance.

  They were meant to represent the epitome of Germanic womanhood, the desired model of kinder, küche, kirche—children, kitchen, church—that the Nazis so espoused. Johanna had thought that she already managed two of those quite well; she was two-thirds the way to becoming the ideal National Socialist woman, never mind that she was in love with a Jew.

  With a sigh she turned away from the window and headed back to the house in Getreidegasse. Home felt so dark these days, and yet it was the only beacon of light she knew of in the whole city. Since Kristallnacht, when her father
had become determined to resist the Nazis, they’d been in a state of high tension as well as terror, anticipation, and anxiety twined together, as they waited for the knock on the door, the end to everything, yet so far their acts of resistance had gone undetected.

  No one came to question why the house did not sport a swastika banner; Johanna supposed the Nazis had bigger things to concern themselves with now. Birgit had done as she’d said and left a message for the mysterious Ingrid at a coffeehouse in Elisabeth-Vorstadt, and her father had spoken to Father Josef.

  At first, nothing had happened. Johanna had felt as if their inquiries had been stones skipped across a pond, only to sink without a trace. And then, a month after the inquiries, suddenly, silently, things began to change. A pile of pamphlets—communist propaganda, Johanna had thought, a bit scornfully—had been shoved under their side door. Birgit had taken them without a word.

  “If you are caught with one of those pamphlets,” Johanna had not been able to keep from telling her, “you will most likely be executed.”

  Birgit had looked remarkably unfazed. “I know.”

  “You’re not even a communist, are you?”

  “I am against Hitler, and they are, as well. That is all that matters.”

  Johanna had felt a sudden surge of admiration for her sister’s surprising courage. “What about Werner?” she’d asked, not unkindly. “He doesn’t know, I suppose?”

  “No.”

  “And I suppose it wouldn’t be good for you if he found out?”

  “I…” Birgit had bitten her lip. “Probably not.”

  Johanna had shaken her head. “We’re both playing with fire, then. I’m in love with a Jew, and you with a Nazi. And here we are, flirting with the resistance!” She’d thrown up her hands and Birgit had let out a sudden laugh, and Johanna had joined her, because surely it was better to laugh than to cry. They’d put their arms around each other, laughing until their sides had ached and they’d had to wipe the tears that streamed from their eyes. By the time they’d regained their composure, Johanna could not have said if they’d been truly laughing at all.

  The next week there was another bundle of pamphlets under the door, and a few days later two furtive-looking factory workers had come into the shop, their grimy caps in their hands, and asked if the repair on the Johann Baptist Beha had been finished. Johanna had been bringing a tray of coffees down to the shop, and she’d stared at them in disbelief.

  There was only one Johann Baptist Beha in the shop, the one-hundred-year-old cuckoo clock that had pride of place by the counter. It was not for sale, and it did not need repair.

  Yet as soon as her father had heard the request he’d risen from his bench and replied in a friendly, easy way, “Yes, of course! It has just been finished. Come this way and I will show you.”

  Johanna had watched him lead the two men upstairs, before she’d turned to Birgit and Franz, a question in her eyes.

  “It’s a code, of course,” Birgit had said under her breath, although there was no one about to overhear. “They must have been sent by Father Josef.”

  “Not Ingrid?”

  “She’s said nothing to me.”

  “Who are they?” Johanna had asked, and Birgit had shrugged.

  “Christian socialists perhaps? People who need to hide.”

  When Johanna had gone upstairs, the men had been wolfing down the meal Hedwig had set before them, before Manfred took them upstairs to the attic. Johanna had glanced at her mother, who had looked tight-lipped and troubled, but she’d cut extra thick slices of bread, and she’d given the men two bowls of soup each, even though it meant they’d have less for their own meal that evening.

  Since then there had been more pamphlets for Birgit to distribute, and more people coming into the shop asking if the Johanna Baptist Beha had been repaired. The people Father Josef sent to them only stayed for a night or two before moving on, but even so Johanna knew how dangerous it all was—so many knocks on the door, so many shadows creeping away. Surely their neighbors would notice.

  She’d managed to come to terms with that ever-present danger over the months; she’d learned to live in a state of high tension, just as Franz had to. Since Kristallnacht he’d never left the house, and she knew the enforced seclusion was making him restless. She’d tried to make the best of it, urging him to play the piano again, and singing along with Birgit even though they dearly needed Lotte’s soaring soprano, but it wasn’t the same. Even the snatched moments they took together, lingering in the sitting room by the dying embers of the fire after everyone else had gone to bed, didn’t feel like enough.

  “I want to live with you as my wife in our own house,” Franz would say, and Johanna never had any response, for she wanted that too, more than anything, and yet it felt farther away than ever. She knew she would marry Franz tomorrow, if he would but ask, but he’d already told her he would not tie her to him until he was a free and respected citizen. When that day would be, or if it would ever come, Johanna had no idea.

  Now as she stepped into the house on Getreidegasse, the mood was somber and wary, as it was so often now. Her father looked up from his bench, his expression clearing when he saw her. He looked a decade older than he had just a year ago; he suffered from headaches far more frequently now, although he still managed to keep his good humor as well as his determination to resist.

  “All right, mein schatz?” he called.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  Her gaze moved, as it ever did, to Franz, who was at the bench next to her father as usual, although he would go upstairs if someone came to the shop door. She smiled at him, and he winked back, as determined as her father to keep his good humor, even though every day it felt harder to do so.

  But today, at least, they were safe, and the sun was shining, and spring was a whisper in the air. Eventually the madness that gripped the world would end. She had to believe that.

  Johanna had just put her foot on the first stair to head up to the kitchen when a sudden knock at the door of the shop, a hard rap rap rap, had her stilling, her blood freezing. There was something officious about the sound, something demanding.

  In one fluid movement Franz rose from his bench and hurried past her upstairs, his hand brushing hers, fingers squeezing, before he quickly moved on. Hedwig was already waiting at the top to bolt the attic door after him. Birgit had swept her own tools away and taken Franz’s place as Manfred went to the door, all of them operating in a swift, soundless ballet of subterfuge.

  Two SS officers of the Gestapo stood at the door in their gray uniforms, swastika armbands like splashes of blood on their sleeves.

  “Officers.” Manfred bowed his head respectfully, his voice betraying not a tremor.

  “We have reason to believe there are treasonous activities taking place here,” one of the officers stated coldly, and Manfred looked up at them in surprise.

  “Treasonous? I assure you—”

  “We will search the premises.”

  After a second’s pause, Manfred bowed his head again and stood aside. Johanna watched from the bottom of the stairs as the two men strode into the house, looking, she thought, both elegant and cruel. Their leather boots gleamed and their uniforms were well-pressed and spotless. They exhaled arrogance and evil with every breath.

  “You repair clocks?” one of them asked politely as he glanced down at the Biedermeier her father had been working on.

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “What a beautiful clock,” the man remarked.

  “It is a lovely specimen.” Manfred smiled, and the man smiled back before, with one leather-gloved finger, he nudged the clock so it tipped over the side of the bench and smashed onto the floor.

  Birgit drew her breath in sharply but no one said a word as the broken sound reverberated through the taut stillness. A cog or gear—some mechanism of the clock Johanna didn’t recognize—rolled across the floor and then came to a stop by the other officer’s foot.

  No one moved; time fe
lt suspended, as if they’d all been frozen in their places, transfixed by the sheer horror of the situation. Johanna realized she was biting her knuckles hard enough to draw blood. The officer walked across the shop, the shattered glass crunching beneath his boots, towards her.

  “There have been reports of meetings held at this house,” he announced in a clear voice, his tone jarringly offhand. “Reports of treasonous meetings discussing the possibility of an independent Osterreich, separate from Germany.”

  Osterreich, not Austria, even though the country had had its new name for barely a year. Johanna swallowed and pressed her body against the wall as the man eyed her with cold-eyed interest.

  “You are Fräulein Eder?”

  She nodded. He looked her up and down and then away. Johanna exhaled as quietly as she could.

  “We did once have such meetings,” her father stated calmly from his place by the door, “but they ceased as soon as Austria—Osterreich—was annexed. We have not held any since.”

  The man swiveled to face him. “Even so, your loyalty to the Reich is suspect.”

  Her father did not reply, and Johanna felt as if her heart were leaping into her throat, a silent scream bottling in her chest. If the Gestapo had only heard about those old meetings, and not the other activities, surely they couldn’t be in too much trouble? And yet she knew her father would not lie, even to the SS, even to save his life. If the man asked him if he was loyal to the Reich, Manfred Eder would tell the truth, God help them all.

  The silence stretched on for nearly a minute. Johanna stood completely still, each beat of her heart a slow, painful thud, anchoring her to the floor, rooting her to reality when all she wanted was to escape.

  “We will search the house,” the man announced, and walked past Johanna up the stairs, the other following him. Johanna threw her father and Birgit a quick, panicked look. If they searched the house, they would almost certainly find Franz. He was under the eaves, just behind a door. It wasn’t even hidden, not really. Stupidly, they hadn’t thought it necessary, as long as he wasn’t seen. They hadn’t, Johanna realized, ever actually believed it would come to this, as much as they’d thought they’d been waiting for it.