Dagmar, daughter of Johann Sterzer, age 20

It was that Tuesday, about two thirty. We’d just gone out into the garden, me and my mother. To tidy up the beds.

As soon as we’re out in the garden, the mechanic from the agricultural machinery firm comes by on his bike. I know him; he came here once to repair one of our machines.

He braked right by our garden fence. Stopped but didn’t get off his bike. He just called to us from the fence, said if we saw Danner to tell him his machine was working fine again. It took him five hours, he said, he’d be sending the invoice in the post.

Then the mechanic got back on his bike and rode away.

My mother and I were surprised to hear there wasn’t anyone at the Danner farm. But it didn’t bother us. A little later I was thinking no more about it. I’d forgotten it entirely.

About an hour after the mechanic came by, young Hansl Hauer showed up. I was still in the garden with my mother. Hansl was waving his arms in the air. Waving them around like crazy. He was all worked up. Long before he got to us he was shouting, asking if Father was at home, saying something had happened at the Danner place.

At that very moment Father came out of the front door. He’d seen Hansl through the window.

Hansl still hadn’t reached us when he started shouting again. His dad had sent him, he said, because there was something wrong up at the Danners’.

“Herr Sterzer, he wants you to go up to Tannöd and the farm too,” he told my father.

At Hauer’s, they didn’t want to go poking around there on their own. None of them had seen the Danners since Saturday, he said. Even on Sunday there wasn’t a single one of the Danner family at church.

Then I remembered what the mechanic said, how he, too, had told us there wasn’t anyone at home at the Danner farm.

Hansl told us his aunt had sent him up to the Danners’ place. To look around, because no one at the Hauer farm had seen any of them for the last few days.

The cattle were mooing in the farmyard, he said, and the dog was whining frantically. Hansl shook the front door of the house, but it was locked. He shook it really hard; he knocked, too, and called to Barbara and Marianne. And when no one answered, and all of a sudden he didn’t like the way it felt up there at the farm, he went back to his dad.

He told him all about it, and his dad sent him over to us, for one of us to go up to the farm with him. So now Hansl was here with Father and Alois; they were to go straight up to Tannöd with him, and Hauer would be waiting for them there.

Father left right away with Lois. Up to the Danner farm. They took Hansl with them.

And that’s where they found them. All of them.