THE POLISH CAMPAIGN had taken less than five weeks. At the end of combat operations, Waffen-SS and regular SS took over from the military. They began to organize the occupation of Poland and the construction of labour and concentration camps. To make their job easier, they built walls and created the Warsaw ghetto. And the Russians in their part of Poland, as the world would discover years later, murdered twenty thousand Polish officers and academics and scientists and leading politicians in a forest place called Katyn.
But long before then Albert had returned. The curtains at the cottage had been thrown back and the lights turned on again, and on the rare evenings when Albert was home before dark they played with Willa on the swing next to the house. He whittled the first of many willow flutes and worked with spanners and rags on the Norton.
He had made an inner decision, he said to her. In time he would tell her about it. He wanted her to know that.
Then her parents received news that Bernhard was dead. The letter stamped with eagle and swastika said he had died a hero for his country and that the Führer appreciated his sacrifice. No personal effects could be sent.
Albert made inquiries and learned that Bernhard had been assigned to a team of sappers, and while they were disarming a Stuka fragmentation bomb, it detonated. Of the three soldiers just the feet in boots were found. The dog tags were gone, but one of the men, his commanding officer said, would have been Bernhard von Waldstein.
There was a memorial service at the Benedictine chapel in St. Töllden, and because it coincided with Christmas it was doubly sad. She was home for part of the holidays, and Albert came along. He brought the full dress uniform. He stood in it tall and straight, and in the church the few men among the mourners looked at him and they nodded and said Colonel.
Near the end of the service, her mother and father stood before the congregation; he stone-faced, all in black; she all in black from shoes to veil, in her formal coat of black gabardine, heavy and long as had been the fashion in her day, with wide lapels and black velvet cuffs. When the priest spoke the words about the honourable death for cause and country she straightened, and when she reached out and laid a bare hand on the steel helmet they put on the bible stand for these services, everyone in the chapel could see the candlelight reflected on her streaming cheeks behind the veil.
There were twenty-nine people present and every one of them loved her, and they loved her all the more that day because they understood the unspoken and unspeakable lie that underlay all this.
SHE AND ALBERT spent New Year’s Eve and the first day of 1940 at the apartment in Vienna. There was a great deal of snow in the streets and avalanches slid from the roofs of houses. Albert’s young sister, Sissy, was there, and Daniela. Peter was in Norway, or maybe Finland, Daniela said. Sissy had finished boarding school and had received her teacher’s certificate. Clara had hardly seen her since Theo’s funeral.
At midnight they set off firecrackers on the balcony that sailed out and exploded in a shower of blue and orange wheels that sizzled and died on their way to the ground. They danced to the traditional Blue Danube Waltz that played on the radio at midnight, and they worked at being lively at least, if not cheerful. She felt well, and the baby was beginning to show. Cecilia came up once and winked and said, “When?” and she smiled and told her.
On the balcony, looking out over the sea of lights and other people’s firecrackers, Erika told her that more and more reports were coming into the Red Cross office now about people suddenly missing. Abandoned businesses. Empty apartments and houses with everything left behind, but never empty for long before someone else moved in.
In a way Sissy was the one bright note that New Year’s Eve; she who was young and lovely, and she still looked out at the world from trusting eyes. Eyes so black the pupil could not easily be seen within the iris, like in belladonna eyes two generations or more before. At some point Cecilia whispered to Clara and to Mitzi that one reason why Sissy was so happy was that she had recently met someone, a young doctor just finished with his internship, and that she was very much in love.
Cecilia sighed, saying this, and she looked sideways at young Sissy laughing with Erika and sipping champagne, this young woman who was carrying the light and the promise for all of them at the apartment that night.
THREE MONTHS LATER, Sissy’s young doctor, whose name was Oskar Gottschalk, was ordered to report for his military duties. There were hurried preparations for the wedding, not the least of which was the short Ahnenpass certifying three generations of pure Aryan blood on both sides. Only then could they apply for the marriage licence.
The wedding took place at the municipal office in their district, and they signed their names in the large black book that lay on a table there, under the photograph of Hitler staring at them and at everyone in the room.
The new and rosy-faced husband, Dr. Oskar Gottschalk, received cursory basic training, was sent to Norway as a field surgeon, and within two weeks he was dead; machine-gunned through chest and abdomen, the death certificate said. It arrived at the apartment in the same envelope as the official death notice from his company commander. By then Sissy knew already that she was expecting, and so by the end of April 1940 she was a pregnant widow not twenty years old.
There was a modest memorial service in a side chapel at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and as incense swirled and singing voices came from another part of the church, Sissy stood small and lost with her hand on yet another steel helmet. Maximilian and Cecilia and the dead doctor’s parents stood behind her.
“Act as though thou hast faith,” said the priest. “And faith shall be given onto you.”
One month and two more willow flutes later, the last one quite ambitious with three fingerholes that actually worked, Albert received orders to entrain his battalion for the marshalling grounds near Cologne and there to report to the command of General Erwin Rommel.
She saw him off, crouching next to Willa under an umbrella as they stood in the rain among other wives and girlfriends and parents as the brass band played and the tanks rolled out the gates. Armageddon machines they were with heads in leather helmets like soft knobs poking out of hatches, loud and clumsy machines on the wet street; the very notion of them ridiculous, she wrote in notes to herself that night, if you allowed yourself to think about them well and clearly.
Armoured field pieces followed, and then came truck after truck, helmeted soldiers under the tarpaulins with their pale faces and anxious eyes searching for their loved ones while being carted away to a place and fate they could not imagine.
Albert stood in the command car as they headed out, in his field uniform, boots, and gunbelt, and the greatcoat over it, all wet in the rain, rain jumping off the cap visor and off his bare hand there saluting his officers as they went by.
She caught one last glance from him, a smile for her, before he spoke to his major, who in turn spoke to the driver. Albert sat down and the engine started and the car drove off.
In the crowd also stood SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus. From Albert she knew that the man had in fact at the time asked for a transfer. He had been called to Berlin to make a report, and then had been sent straight back to Burgenland with new powers and responsibilities as the political district commander.
She did not notice him until the crowd began to thin, but there he stood in his black raincoat streaming wet, watching her.
THE OBERSTURMFÜHRER came to her house the very next morning. He knocked, and knocked again. When she opened, there he stood in his silver-accented blacks, with his driver waiting by the car. The rain had stopped, and he stood among the rich fragrance of spring and earth, with the garden greening behind him.
“Mrs. Leonhardt,” he said. “This house has a full basement with an exterior entrance, does it not? Most houses in the area do.”
“Yes. Why?”
“May I see it?”
She walked around the house with him, to the other side where the basement door lay hinged on two stone sills and steps led down into the cellar, stone-walled all around, with bins on the dirt floor for potatoes and root vegetables for the winter. She turned the switch and two bare light bulbs came on.
“Good,” he said. “I’ve come to inform you that we’ve assigned twenty prisoners of war to this house. They will be working in the local agriculture. You are to house them but not to feed them. They will be picked up in the morning and brought back at night.” He turned and looked at the open cellar door. “They’ll enter here and they’ll leave here. They are not to have access to the upstairs or to tools or matches. Straw pallets will be provided. Is that understood?”
“Do you have Colonel Leonhardt’s permission for that?”
“We do not need your husband’s permission for anything, Mrs. Leonhardt. This has nothing to do with his command.”
That night in bed she began bleeding massively, and she crawled to the bathroom and on the way there she lost the baby. She lay on the wood floor in the hall, crouched on the boards as in supreme supplication before this cramping horror her body was committing, and the baby came out, nearly fully formed, too large already for one hand.
Anna heard the screams and she came to find her sitting in blood holding this baby and with her finger wiping blood and mucus from the tiny, tiny monkey face, a creature dead and alien as if fallen from some distant star.
Anna turned and left, and she came back quickly with a basin of hot water from the stove and with the sharp paring knife and bedsheets fresh and clean from the linen shelf.
SHE WROTE TO HIM, but the letters never arrived. So ferocious was the assault in the west that Holland, Belgium, and France all fell within weeks. At Dunkirk the tanks and the Stukas turned away from the retreating British and French forces and kept moving south with such speed and relentlessness that Berlin became worried and issued orders for them to slow down.
Near the end of the campaign he was injured by a bullet. He was standing next to the heavy machine gun in the tracked command car in dust goggles and helmet, speaking into the microphone to his driver, waving his arms and pointing, he said, when the bullet struck high in his left side and knocked him down.
At the rolling field hospital the surgeon stitched him up and they taped his arm in place so that he could carry on while the injury healed.