Her Darkest Hour: Beautiful and heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction

by Sharon Maas

  She placed an arm around Marie-Claire, who was could hardly stand for the sobs that shook her body, and led her out of the room. She shut the bedroom door behind them, turned to Marie-Claire, white as a ghost, her face a grim mask, eyes wide open with the horror of the night.

  ‘Because in the end we won. Just as we will win the war. See, Marie-Claire. We both paid the price. Your nightmare is over. Tomorrow, you will ring Maman, and then you will come home. The Nazis might have torn this family apart, and now it’s time to mend the wounds. Stop the bleeding. As a family, Marie-Claire, we have won.’

  Their eyes met. At last, Marie-Claire’s face relaxed, and she smiled as she spoke. ‘What about a glass of champagne, petite soeur?’

  Epilogue

  1945

  It all came out in the end. Kurtz’s last plan, to empty the Natzweiler-Struthof camp before the Allies came, succeeded. Even without him, all the prisoners were evacuated by 1 September of that year: sent to camps in the East, in Germany or Poland. Some were sent on a death march. By the time the Allies arrived it was a ghost settlement.

  Kurtz’s ‘suicide’ was accepted without question by the police; he was one of many who, knowing the game was up, chose this final solution for themselves. Marie-Claire, the grieving widow, verified that yes, he had seemed very depressed and frantic towards the end – and of course she knew nothing of his evil deeds, and only wanted to return to her family home to mourn. Which she did, leaving the death rituals to the remains of the German administration. She told her story, truthfully except for the final chapter, and it was believed by those who mattered.

  Victoire destroyed the passport and letters pertaining to Kurtz’s escape plans; it was better that no suspicion of a murder plot should ever fall on Marie-Claire. Why would Kurtz have committed suicide if he had been planning to escape? But the list of Catholic priests willing to harbour escaping Nazi criminals – that, she passed on to Jacques, who passed it on to Allied Intelligence, not naming his source. Those priests, too, should find justice…

  Margaux, on hearing of the dastardly plan, and of the Church’s collaboration with the Nazis, immediately did as her husband had begged her for years: filed for divorce. She could no longer respect the rules of a Church that could so readily break the very first tenet of Christ’s message: love one another, and your neighbour as yourself. Yes, she was ready to divorce, and to remarry, with or without the Church’s blessing. Preferably without; but with Christ’s. A different matter altogether, she said.

  Strasbourg fell to the Allies in November 1944. Hitler, determined to hold Alsace, launched a final defence on 1 January 1945. Operation Nordwind, as it was called, was the final, furious flailing of a dying beast. The Colmar Pocket became a vicious, bloody battle that turned the snow-covered rolling hills of the countryside from pristine white to red – red with the blood of Allied and German soldiers equally. Civilians took shelter in their cellars as their villages became battlegrounds, some reduced to piles of rubble, homes left behind as hollow ruins.

  Eric, Victoire’s Eric, bled to death in a mound of red snow outside the decimated village of Jebstown. Jacques brought the news to Victoire, who now worked as a nursing aide in a school taken over by the International Red Cross to do what little they could for those injured and dying who could be brought back to Colmar.

  Victoire, by now no stranger to grief, had not the time or space to mourn Eric, busy as she was day and night with her patients, who lay side by side on the frozen ground as there were no beds, no cots.

  ‘This is what Eric signed up for, Victoire,’ said Jacques. ‘All of us knew we could be the next to go, that every day could be our last. He died a hero. Be proud of him; proud that such a man loved you.’

  ‘I am,’ said Victoire. She turned away. She had wounds to dress. Her own wounds must wait their turn. After Marcel’s death, after Leon’s and, most of all, Juliette’s, grief had become her permanent state of being, a substratum of herself that could not be added to.

  But then it was over. Colmar, France, finally free. Church bells rang out, citizens came out of hiding. ‘La Marseillaise’, their anthem of triumph, rang out from jubilant throats. Hitler commited suicide. The war in Europe was finally over after almost six long weary years. The Allies crossed the Rhine and advanced into Germany, to find not only a nation ravaged, its defeated citizens dazed and unbelieving – for this was never meant to happen! – but new horrors, untold horrors, of which Natzweiler-Struthof was only the beginning.

  Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz. Synonyms for a horror whose like the world had never before seen. One by one, the death camps were discovered, their emaciated survivors freed. The International Red Cross was once again to hand.

  On 29 April 1945 the 42nd U.S. Infantry Division liberated Dachau. They found 67,665 registered prisoners in Dachau and its sub camps, around 32,000 prisoners in the Dachau camp itself, crammed into 20 barracks designed to house only 250 people. Most of them were dying; Dachau’s prisoners had been used as subjects of medical experiments. Thousands had been deliberately infected with typhoid. Thousands had already died, and been cremated.

  Victoire was sent by the Red Cross to help with the evacuees of Dachau.

  In yet another makeshift ward she stepped between bodies that were little more than skeletons covered in skin, kneeling down to offer a bottle of water, leaning over to offer a useless word of comfort, to hold up the head of a half-starved stranger.

  And then, this. A twinge of recognition. A second look, a step nearer. She knelt down beside the still-living, half-dead (it was impossible to tell from appearances) woman; her head was little more than a skull covered in skin, the eyes buried in sunken hollows, the cheeks caverns clinging to bones. A few grey strands of hair still clung to the bald bony scalp.

  Hair that had once been black. Eyes buried in hollowed-out canyons; eyes that once shone with life and love and the promise of a future, now closed. Kneeling beside the woman, she cupped a hand beneath the head, raising it slightly, gently. With the other hand, she turned the head to face her. Had there been hair, thick, luxuriant, shiny black hair, she would have brushed it aside in a so-familiar gesture, but there was none. Not a single black strand, just a few grey wisps on a bald head. She leaned nearer, placed her face before those eyes’ seemingly empty depths.

  ‘Juliette?’ she whispered. ‘Juliette, it is you? It’s me, Victoire.’

  She reached for one of the woman’s hands, felt for a pulse. The hand was as thin and fragile as a bird, but the tiny flutter it gave could not be mistaken, the flutter of a butterfly’s wing. The woman was alive, and had heard.

  ‘Juliette!’ she whispered again. And again: ‘Juliette! It’s me! I’m here!’

  And somewhere, deep within those dark sockets, eyelids twitched and then flickered open. ‘Juliette! It’s me, Victoire!’ Victoire whispered again. She cupped the head in her hands, stroked the almost transparent skin with her thumbs and came closer, repeating the name, calling to life. No response. She kept calling, calling into the emptiness within those sockets. A blink, another blink. And then from deep within, two tiny lights of recognition flickered. Fireflies in the darkest night.

  ‘Juliette!’ whispered Victoire again, slightly louder this time. ‘Wake up, Juliette! Wake up! I’ve come to take you home.’

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  Books by Sharon Maas

  Her Darkest Hour

  The Violin Maker’s Daught
er

  The Soldier’s Girl

  The Orphan of India

  The Lost Daughter of India

  Of Marriageable Age

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  THE QUINT CHRONICLES

  The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q

  The Secret Life of Winnie Cox

  The Sugar Planter’s Daughter

  The Girl from the Sugar Plantation

  Available in Audio

  The Violin Maker's Daughter (Available in the UK and in the US)

  The Lost Daughter of India (Available in the UK and in the US)

  A Letter from Sharon

  Dear Readers,

  Thank you so much for reading Her Darkest Hour. I do hope you enjoyed it; that would be my greatest reward! Should you care to tell others of your enjoyment by word of mouth, or on social media, or in a review, that would be even better! You might also enjoy my previous books, The Soldier’s Girl and The Violin Maker’s Daughter, which are also set in Alsace and feature a few of the same characters. If you would like to keep up to date with my latest releases, please do sign up at the following link. Your email address will always be confidential and you can unsubscribe at any time.

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  Writing a novel is a solitary occupation. I lived with the characters and the story for many months, but once that work was done, many others gave their wisdom and their expertise to helping this work make its entry into the big wide world, and into your hands. I would like to thank, first of all, my wonderful editor, Lydia Vassar-Smith, who with her sensitive and skilled touch helped to create the very best version of the story. Many other members of the Bookouture family played their part in the book’s release: Jacqui Lewis, Jane Donovan, Ami Smithson, Alexandra Holmes and Radhika Sonagra; thank you to them, and to Kim Nash, Noelle Holten and Sarah Hardy for their dedicated work in promoting it; and not forgetting a big thank-you to all the bloggers and social media readers who’ve taken the time to review and write about it; word of mouth is a silent but powerful helper!

  I’d also like to thank my fellow authors for their unwavering support, advice and encouragement, in particular Debbie Rix, Renita D’Silva and Laura Elliot, as well as the wonderful authors in the Facebook groups Second World War Authors and the Savvy Writers Snug, and also members of the AbsoluteWrite Water Cooler.

  Last, but not least, I’d like to thank Oliver Rhodes, who, by creating the publishing phenomenon that is Bookouture gave my faltering writing career a new lease of life back in 2014. Her Darkest Hour is my tenth Bookouture novel! I couldn’t be more delighted to have reached this milestone, but I couldn’t have done it without you, my readers. Just knowing you are out there, reading words I’ve written, entering worlds I’ve created, is the best encouragement ever, and hopefully there’ll be many more books to come. So once again – thank you!

  To my children, Saskia and Miro, the biggest thank-you of all, for standing by your mother through all the years and your good humour at her sometimes scatty and absent-minded behaviour. I really do, sometimes, live in another world, but all for a good cause!

  Historial Notes

  Of course, if you are writing a historical novel, it is not about dumping all that knowledge and research into the text. That’s the last thing you want to do. Your aim is to entertain readers with a riveting story, not bore their socks off. Elizabeth Chadwick

  Her Darkest Hour is a work of fiction; its main aim was to tell the story of a fictional family living through World War Two and torn apart by certain events of that war. It was never intended to be an account of the war itself, but only of how it affected that family. But it is my duty, as a historical novelist, to get that war background as accurate as possible, and weave fact and fiction neatly together so as to retain the historical details without jeopardising the story, and vice versa.

  My task while writing it was, I felt, to do my research as thoroughly as possible, and then use my imagination to fill in the details; and now I owe it to you, my readers, to pull apart the woven tapestry of fact and fiction and let you know which is which.

  The facts are: the Nazis did march into Colmar in early November 1940. They did claim the annexation of the French province of Alsace, which was separated from Germany by the River Rhine. They did initiate a thorough Germanisation of Alsace, which meant that the spoken and written language had to change, almost overnight, from French to German, French names had to be changed to German, schools had to adopt a German curriculum and so on. They did take over the Colmar Mairie. The misguided attempt to woo newly-wed couples by distributing copies of Mein Kampf to them: that indeed happened. Later on, Alsatian young men were indeed conscripted into the Wehrmacht, and if they refused or absconded, their families were targeted for reprisals.

  However, how this all took place is in its entirety a figment of my imagination. The figures of Otto Grötzinger and Dietrich Kurtz and all the Mairie staff members – the giggling secretaries, the guards, the keeper of the storeroom – are all invented. I’ve used creative licence to describe the internal workings of the Mairie during this time, and the pressure Marie-Claire felt as she continued to work there, and her eventual rape, is all a part of that.

  Finally, though, this novel was inspired by two little-known (in the English-speaking world) historical realities. One was the heroism of Marcel Weinum. The very thought of this brave young man, a teenager, moves me to tears, and it’s a crying shame that, in doing my research, I found nothing at all in English about him. Yet just as Sophie Scholl was guillotined for her role in resisting the Nazis, so too was Weinum. He is only a minor character in Her Darkest Hour, and obviously his cameo appearance in the novel is fiction, but he was a real person, a genuine hero, and should not be forgotten but rather be remembered and honoured as one of the outstanding unsung heroes of the Resistance. His letter to his parents, written the day before he was beheaded, is a tragic and very moving testament to his faith, courage and compassion, and can be found on the many French-language sites recounting his life and untimely death.

  The second little-known historical fact that inspired this book was the horrific existence of one of the worst Nazi concentration camps, high up in the spectacular Vosges mountains: Natzweiler-Struthof. Situated in Alsace, where my story unfolds, it was the only such camp on French territory. Until fairly recently, I myself knew nothing of its existence, in spite of my long connection with Alsace.

  As a student in Freiburg, Germany, and over the following years, I often crossed the border into Alsace to visit my much-older friend, Trudel Elsässer. Trudel had been born in the village of Ribeauvillé, not far from the town of Colmar, which features in a few of my novels. She spent the war years in Berlin, and she is in fact the only person I know who lived through the war who actually spoke of her experiences. As her mother had been Jewish, her stories were both riveting and heartbreaking. The man she married had the surname Elsässer, which means ‘Alsatian’ in German, and when he retired, they both moved back to her beloved Alsace, to their beautiful house in the hills beyond Colmar.

  That’s where I listened to her anecdotes, and in fact it is she who first alerted me to the myriad of untold personal stories that would inevitably die out with her generation. To this day, I feel sadness that I never questioned my father and his brothers about their own war experiences: they had volunteered from British Guiana, a colony in South America, and crossed an ocean to fulfil their duty. My father had been in the RAF, but I know not a thing about what he did and what he went through. Why didn’t I question him more? Listen to his stories? I’m pretty sure he would have talked, but as a young woman I just wasn’t interested in what went before.

  That’s a crying shame, because whereas the history books can reveal the recorded facts of what happened during the war, it is the personal stories that can really grab us, awaken us, move us, change us. So it was with me, listening to Trudel’s stories. Trudel died, mentally still sharp as a pin, aged 102, just when I started t
o write historical fiction and to research Alsace in particular. And so, belatedly, I learned of the existence of Natzweiler-Struthof.

  Very little is written in English about this camp, but then I was graciously allowed access to a translation by Diana Henry of testimony for the camp (see below). This testimony, coupled with a personal visit to the camp in October 2019, revealed all I needed to know. It was a visit so disturbing that I changed my initial plan to set some of the scenes of my novel there. To do so felt somehow disrespectful to those who had been its victims – how could I ever fictionalise their agony? How could I ever come close to reproducing what they went through? At best, I could just hint at it. And so the novel’s action remains outside the camp walls, and the horror is revealed only as reported by others.

  Here, now, are some of the facts:

  Natzweiler-Struthof was planned as a very small camp for about 2,000 inmates. Yet it contained at least 7,000 during the summer of its evacuation in 1944, with 450,000 prisoners registered in total. From the start it was classified as a Category III concentration camp, the toughest camps for the ‘incorrigible political enemies’ of the Third Reich. As such, its prisoners were mostly dissidents and Resistance fighters, anyone the Nazis considered an enemy of the state, and they came from all over Europe. It was also a labour camp and a transit camp. There were no female prisoners.