OVER CHRISTMAS OF 1942 she and her mother would leave the children with Anna while they went to see the newsreels at the small movie house at the back of the post office in St. Töllden. She never caught another glimpse of Albert and she had no idea where he was now, but on the screen it was always good news on all fronts. Their soldiers were gaining ground everywhere and liberated people were welcoming them and tossing flowers at their tanks. The war would be won any day now, the announcers said.
“I know a man that’s hiding on a farm,” whispered Mrs. Dorfer, the milkwoman. “He walked away from the eastern front, imagine, all that way and he says the war in Russia is going very badly. He says the entire sixth army is surrounded. No medical supplies and no food. They don’t even have fuel for their tanks, he says.”
The radio reported that a student organization called White Rose had been secretly distributing anti-government leaflets. A brother-and-sister team had been behind this act of treason. The Gestapo had found them all and executed them. Nearly a hundred students in their early twenties, said the radio.
In June 1943, she recorded in her notes that banks had to report all private money, and unless one was well connected to the party, all money was confiscated in exchange for War Bonds. Food was scarce, even with stamps, and all manufactured goods were of ersatz quality. Bread came blended with sawdust, coffee was made from dried figs and acorns, clothing was of the poorest cotton mixed with wood fibres, buttons were of pressed cardboard. Glass, steel, wood, and metal were unavailable.
In St. Töllden two men came to the house, showed official papers, and said that everyone had to hand over whatever gold they owned for the war effort.
“Your wedding bands,” they said. In exchange they gave them small iron rings with an inscription that said, I gave gold for iron.
Two days a week she toured on her bicycle from farm to farm to trade cigarette stamps for goat milk and goat cheese and for the rare piece of meat, mostly rabbit.
In Italy, in June, Mussolini was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council. He was arrested and taken as a prisoner to the Gran Sasso Hotel in the Abruzzi Mountains.
“The Italians at least have the sense to get rid of these people,” said her mother. “Why can’t we do the same?”
But no sooner was Mussolini locked up than he was rescued by German paratroopers and taken to northern Italy to live in hiding.
The Allies landed in Italy in September, and Italy capitulated. The radio said that unemployed Italian soldiers had formed gangs of partisans and were fighting their former allies from the rear. Those same partisans later found and arrested Mussolini near his hiding place at Lake Como. They killed him along with his mistress, and they hung them from their heels like game in a market square in Milan. The public spat at the corpses and threw rocks at them.
The Americans built bomber bases in Italy, and from March 1944 on the raids came regularly. Oil refineries were hit, and railroad points, and factories of any kind.
For the St. Töllden file she noted that in the beginning it seemed that homes were not being bombed on purpose, only by mistake. But six months later smaller urban centres too were set afire in planned raids, day and night.
On March 23, 1944, the cardboard tube factory in Burgenland was hit. Also hit in that same daylight raid were Albert’s former base, and three of the cottages in the village, including the one she and her family had lived in. The munitions depot and buried gasoline tanks exploded and not much was left of any part of the compound. The cardboard tube factory, it turned out, had been making rocket parts, and it burned to the ground. The Polish prisoners there all died; the ones working in the fields, including the professor and the thin blond one who had played the harmonica, survived and were taken that night to another basement in the area.
IN JULY 1944, the generals’ plot against Hitler became the sixth known attempt on his life. People learned the name of Colonel Stauffenberg along an underground chain of rumours and whispers.
“A hero,” Mrs. Dorfer said, leaning on her bicycle. “Finally. Thank God.” She put her finger across her lips. “What a brave man. And did you hear? Blind in one eye and one arm gone.”
But the thing had failed, and in its wake perhaps a thousand army officers and their families were killed by the SS.
“Shot, hanged, stabbed, garrotted, their heads hacked off,” the announcer said firmly on the radio, and she wrote it down word for word, for what it said about the spirit of that time.
When in later years the assignments from Dr. Hufnagel in Geneva gave her access to Nuremberg files, she spent weeks at the warehouse where the files were stored. She sat at one of the small desks in the research room and went through box after box of records and sworn depositions that gave a clear picture of the event.
Stauffenberg had placed his explosive briefcase under the conference table at Rastenburg and had left the room. Someone kicked the briefcase over, and the bomb went off but the heavy table acted as a shield and Hitler suffered barely a scratch.
Many officers had been involved in the planning of the plot and of the subsequent surrender to the Allies and the running of the country. The more famous ones were Generals Speidel, Fromm, Olbrecht, von Witzleben, von Böck, Höpner, and a dozen more. Even Field Marshal Rommel was accused of having known of it. General Fromm, who was the one coward and the weak link, switched sides when the bomb did not kill Hitler. He betrayed the plotters to the SS.
All the generals involved were killed, as were many of their subordinate officers, and in many cases their wives and children and parents also. Stauffenberg on Fromm’s orders was shot dead in the ministry yard. In his punishment of the men whose acceptance he had always craved but never received, Hitler ordered some generals to be beheaded. He brought back the broadaxe for that purpose, and the hooded axeman dressed in black.
“A block of wood from some mythical five-hundred-year oak,” said the sworn deposition. “In a basement room, with tiered benches for those who were ordered to watch.”
Rommel, because of his fame and popularity, was promised that his family would not be touched, and he was given the choice between a pistol and poison. He swallowed cyanide, did so in the passenger seat of the staff car, not far from his house.
Other officers chose the handgun, the standard Walther P38 9mm parabellum. A pistol like Albert’s. They filled their mouths with water and stuck the barrel in there, and the bullet and gas expansion combined with the hydrostatic pressure left almost nothing of their heads for Hitler’s deputies to ridicule.
And Albert, because he had been one of Field Marshal Rommel’s favourite officers, was sent from Yugoslavia straight to the Russian front, where the average survival rate for newly arrived officers was one day and a half.
Such was the year of 1944. By then SS Obergruppenführer Bernhard Heydrich was also dead. He, mastermind of the Final Solution, of the death camps in the East, and of the SS Einsatzgruppen that had murdered Jews in the occupied territories by the hundreds of thousands. He had been killed by Czechoslovakian partisans, and in revenge for his killing the SS had murdered the entire male population of the town of Lidice, men and boys, all.
She never knew that Albert had been sent to Russia. She had no idea where he was, and never heard from him after they left the base in Burgenland. She wrote to the last field post number she had for him, poured out her heart and sent the letters off like messages in a bottle.
Writing was still saving her. Even just getting ready to set pen to paper forced her to think clearly. The discipline of following one thought in linear ways past all distractions to its conclusion. The absolutely all-important attitude of As-if.
But what she thought late one evening in November that year had nothing to do with Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, or Husserl. Nothing to do with any of the poets and writers she had studied and learned so much from, these kings and queens of words and ideas and emotions. It did not even have anything to do with her own notion of philosophy as a mental structure and house to live in.
What she thought had to do with the churchbells. She realized that all this time they had been faithfully tolling the hour, tolling Vesper, tolling Sanctus, tolling the hours of the healing of souls. And it struck her that somehow from the thousand-year stretch and more when Christian religion had been at the centre of lives in the western world, had been the source of most art and music and morality in western civilization, it had come to this.
She thought this, sitting in the children’s bedroom, the two of them asleep with the blackout blinds pulled all the way down and pinned to frames and crossbars, and not so very far away the sky was filled with the drone of squadrons of B-17 bombers flying toward the cities in the valley.
It was too far away to hear the air raid alarms, but before long she could hear the bombs, could feel them more than hear them by the rumbling and trembling of floor and windows.