The Paznaun Valley, Southwest Austria
October 1, 1938
9:30 p.m.
The rain had eased a little by the time the mountain troopers and the Jews set off up the path that began behind the cowshed. Slippery and narrow, it followed the steep side of the wooded hill with an animal’s natural respect for gradient, taking long, looping switchbacks up through the dripping trees.
Gunter led the way, as always. He put the oldest adults at the front of the line. He always did that too, taking his pace from them, slow but steady. Halfway along the tramping line, Kurt was leading the first mule bearing the older of the two girls. At the rear Josef followed with the second. On the mule’s back sat little Ilsa, her skinny legs jutting out over the animal’s wet flanks, tiny feet encased in bulbous bandages of canvas that bounced upward from the mule’s rib cage whenever it made a sudden movement up one of the many steps in the path.
Every now and again someone slipped or stumbled. It would cause a pause in the line before it restarted, as if by instinct. There were occasional sickly coughs, muffled into sleeves so as not to incur a hissed rebuke from Gunter, who demanded silence at the slightest sound. At one point, Josef thought he could hear Ilsa faintly crying. When he quietly asked her how she was faring, the noise stopped, but he received no reply. Josef felt for her, for them all, in fact. Over the last few trips, their charges had become so hunted and afraid, particularly the children, that it was no longer enough to remind himself that it wasn’t sympathy that spurred the three of them to lead these desperate collections over the hills. It was habit, and money.
Gunter, Kurt, and Josef were all from a little hamlet situated high in the Bavarian Alps where the men took their living from the surrounding hills, not as soldiers, but as shepherds, hunters, guides, and smugglers. Josef had been five, Kurt six, and Gunter eight, the day a pale limestone mountain in the Dolomites was mined during the third year of the Great War. It had taken the Italians three months to bore the intricate blast tunnel beneath the German hilltop position and load the massive charge. The morning the Alpini finally set the fuse to the thirty tons of tightly packed gelignite, they could smell the Kaiserjäger troops above cooking their breakfast, the mouthwatering scent of bacon seeping down through the natural fissures in the chalky, soft rock. It was the last thing that any of the Germans would smell. In the valleys below, they said it was as if the entire mountain rose up and spilled over into the sky like boiling milk.
The boys’ fathers, all infantrymen in the 71st, died without breakfast that day, exchanging hunger for death in an unknowing instant that left their equally unknowing young sons with the obligation to grow up quickly. As soon as they could, the boys went to work in the high hills to support their stoic yet tired mothers and protect their defenseless sisters. Josef had two, Trudl and Ava, eight and two at the time of their father’s death. Everything he did from that day on, he did for them. When, in 1935, the boys, now men, were conscripted into the 99th Gebirgsjäger, one of the reformed German infantry regiments instructed by Adolf Hitler to ready itself for new glories, they went without enthusiasm, mumbling the oath of loyalty to the führer without conviction. Already successful providers from time-honored mountain trades, the unfair exchange of their days and abilities for a poor soldier’s wage offered little appeal. The three of them had no interest in the politics of the city, in the building of empires, or the supposed perfidy of other races. Not one of them had even seen the sea.
At the barracks in Garmisch, the three unhappily settled into a dull military regime of training ever-younger recruits in mountain skills that they had known since childhood. They became somewhat happier, however, when they realized that their uniforms and Wehrmacht passes provided opportunity to continue their other, more lucrative, alpine trades. Whenever they could, they would lead climbs for the growing National Socialist cult of alpinism, they would track for Nazi dignitaries and businessmen in hunts for trophy chamois, boar, even bear, and, most profitable of all, they would secretly cross into Austria to make runs over the high passes into Switzerland, smuggling people out and foreign cigarettes and currency back in. To do so, they used the high, hidden routes known only by their fathers and their fathers before them, lost smugglers’ paths that ignored arbitrary lines and frontiers on maps and showed little respect for the extremes of natural geography. The Treason against the Reich Act might well make being caught with either cargo punishable by death, but then again, falling off a rock face or being gored by a wounded boar had always offered them such possibility.
Of the three, Gunter was the natural leader, Kurt, the taciturn hunter, and Josef, the agile mountain goat that could climb anything. They combined these skills to form a team that prided itself on being able to get anyone or anything over the highest mountain. As the Nazis’ prohibitions increased, so did the demand and price for their services. Their recently issued Heeresbergführer badges, officially classifying them as army mountain guides and instructors, provided yet more license to roam the hills of the newly joined Germany and Austria under the cover of “training.” This run was the eighth of that year, the third using that secret route above the Paznaun. They rotated them to keep the Austrian border police guessing, but sometimes they wondered why they bothered. The police rarely ventured into the highest hills, particularly if it was snowing.
That night was proving no different than usual. They walked. They stopped. They walked again. No words were spoken. The hours passed, each person retiring from the wet, the cold, the constant exertion, into their own individual hopes and fears, memories and dreams. Josef, as always, lost himself in thoughts of mountains he wanted to visit, of climbs he had made, of others still to do. He could daydream about them for hours. It was his way of shutting out the world, of enduring the boredom of the barracks, of diverting his attention from the risks they ran, and, more and more, of ignoring the frightened people, particularly the young girls that reminded him too closely of his own, once helpless sisters.