The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

How long can resisters hold out? Once Hitler turns his flat, cold stare on Munich, the White Rose will wither and fade. The Führer will pluck those tender petals one by one and grind them underfoot. Anton could almost accept it, if these were grown men and women. But the founders of the White Rose and the students who follow them—they are too young, too precious. The whole of their lives lies ahead. Or should lie ahead, if God had more power in Germany than Hitler.

“A funny thing, to thank God,” says the man beside her. “What do you mean by that?” Silent, listening, Anton watches the countryside pass by. A hedgerow of sunflowers splits a mown field. He remembers playing among the sunflowers as a boy—their dry-smelling stalks like a palisade, the whisper of their leaves. Yellow light that came down, filtered through the petals. His sister made a playhouse among the sunflowers: Anton, you must be the father of my house, and tell my little children: if you don’t wash up for supper, Mother will be cross! “I mean,” says the man, “there isn’t any sense in bringing God into the war. What has He to do with any of this? Don’t tell me you think anything the Führer has done is part of God’s plan.” The woman does not speak. Nor does Anton. The sound of his sister’s voice vanishes from memory. At length, the woman says, “You talk as if you don’t believe in God at all.” She sounds as if she might cry. Her companion is quick to answer, quick to defend. “It’s only this: I’ve never seen God. Why should I credit Him for a blessing, or leave Him any blame? Men are quite capable of destroying the world on their own, as we can plainly see. They don’t need any help from above.”

You must be guided by integrity, mercy, and justice. You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words. That is what the Lord asks of us in every role: father, mother, brother, child. Neighbor and friend—nun and friar. That is all the Lord asks—that we live by Christ’s example.”

Father Emil makes an evasive gesture, not exactly a shrug. Anton understands. The Bible tells us there are demons, and what sort of Christians would we be if we didn’t trust in God’s word? But in these times, what terrors can we find in the common threats of Hell? There is an old, old saying: One man is devil to another. Among the Tommies, the words are different, but the meaning is the same: Man is wolf to man. In this world, evil heaps itself on evil, and the spire of unchecked power climbs higher by the day. This is a tower of man’s own building. Around its base the wolves circle, greedy and grinning—white, cold eyeteeth bared, numberless as stars.

I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.

“Any time you need help,” the eldest says, “I hope you’ll call on us, mein Herr.” These days, everyone is inclined to band together, even in the cities. Now we look out for our fellow man. We anticipate needs and give small tokens of comfort. We offer the milk of human kindness, free to drink all you will, for every other kind of sustenance is rationed on the stamps, with never enough to satisfy. The brothers disperse into the crowd, eager to join in the celebration while it lasts. Anton watches them go. He thinks, If we had taken up this habit of kindness long ago, before we fell into darkness, what suffering might we have spared the world and ourselves?

There is, he believes, a purpose to all the Creator’s ways. But the mind and heart of God are beyond the understanding of Man. You can know your suffering serves a purpose—that the suffering of others plays some inscrutable part in the grand drama of Creation. But knowing brings you little comfort. When night drops its heavy curtain across the world, darkness is cruel and unforgiving. The way all your happiness can snuff itself in an instant, like the flame of a candle pinched between a licked finger and thumb—it can shake your faith, or strip faith away entirely, if you let it.

have known, and we have heard—but somehow, we thought it could never happen to us. Or perhaps we willfully blinded ourselves, preferring ignorance and fantasy to the terror of reality. And one day, you look out the window of the classroom to see the gray bus arriving, with the handprints of ghosts clouding its windows, and the trucks emblazoned with the swastika, and men with guns and deadened eyes.

When the music is gone, when he has played out the last wringing ache of memory, Anton walks back to the house. The cornet hangs from his hand; it drags through the tall grasses that grow along the irrigation ditch. He has no strength left to raise the instrument. In the distance, small and pale against the night, he can see Paul and Al herding the milk cow into the pen beneath the old cottage. Locking the animals up for the night—life on the old farm goes on, whether Anton is there with his family or no. Life everywhere continues. It is inexorable, and in its persistence, mysterious and infuriating. Life proceeds stubbornly, heedless of one’s wishes, as long as you avoid the men in black uniforms and keep your curtains closed by night.

“It seems there is no greater power. I’ve almost come to believe that.” The tears are falling freely now, but he is not ashamed. The Spirit doesn’t allow for shame, in His healing and holy presence. “You have almost come to believe, but not entirely.” Anton shakes his head, slowly. For the moment, he is bereft of words, hollowed by awe and relief. “There is a greater force, Anton—I promise you. There is a power in this world that no evil can overcome.” Day after day, it rises. Like a tide, it swells. Every outrage, every death, each new act of inhumanity wrings from us another drop of resolve, even when we think our spirits dust dry and deadened. We flow together; we merge; the burning-salt wash of our tears and the breath of our sobbing voices, the tension of our tightened jaws, our current of despair. We are a river eroding its banks. We will no longer be contained. There is a greater force. Its name is Widerstand, resist. We call it White Rose, and Grauer Orden; we call it Non-Compliance. In the streets of Munich and Berlin, the boys, unbroken, take fists to the faces of the Hitler Youth, and we call them Edelweiss Pirates. We call the force Unbowed, Unbent, and Father Emil, and Anton. “Will you do it? Will you carry my words? The pay is very good, I can tell you.” He nods. What else can he do but accept? “I won’t do it for the pay, though—not only for that.” Again, Emil smiles. “No, of course you won’t. You of all people—you listen to the voice of the Lord.” Truly we a...

There is nothing exciting about a soldier’s life. He wants to tell them the worst parts, the grueling, dull hours, numberless and blank—the way the nothingness grinds away your spirit and erodes your judgment, your humanity. Worse than the dullness are the times when you must see suffering close at hand—when you must cause it yourself, if you are unlucky. But Anton is wiser than to speak of it. His sons won’t listen; boys never listen to the grim lectures of older men, men who know better than they. If he wants to prove to his boys that there is a better way to be, something to aspire to beyond soldiering, he must take a different tack.

“It might be fun to hunt,” Al admits. “But it’s far more manly to be a soldier.” Anton covers his mouth with his hand, trying to hide his frown. How to tell them—how to make them see, in a world that praises the unfeeling killer as the height of masculinity? We celebrate the man who bristles with arms, who paves for himself a path of violence. But there are other men, other lives, other ways for a man to be. What of the teachers and the priests? What of doctors and artists, who heal and create where other men destroy? What of our fathers? And how do I tell them, he wonders, that the soldiers they revere sweat beneath their helmets and wake screaming in the night? How do I tell them that the Party leaves their soldiers little choice, or none at all? By force, the Wehrmacht commit such acts that destroy their souls, as surely as a bullet destroys flesh. By force, the Führer manufactures ghosts that will haunt forever those who serve him.

Anton strolls home in the blue twilight with Al and Paul at his side. Paul carries the cornet, which the boys will share; he can’t resist squawking out a few notes now and again, and every time he does it, a rabbit bolts from the road’s verge or a flock of partridges clatters into the air. Anton can scarcely recall feeling so satisfied. His heart brims over with a rich, warm sense of accomplishment—and the certainty that he has laid the foundation for something miraculous, something he will build. He had expected it would only bring him pain, to stand at the head of a classroom again. But he needn’t have feared. In a world steeped in sorrow, he has found a small portion of joy. It’s worth more than gold, in times like these.

“I only hope I gave the Horniks more happiness than I got from them. God willing.” “You did, my darling—I’m sure of it.” “Then I will be well.” She pauses. Crickets sing in the silence; from the sleepy orchard, a night bird calls. She says with a small, rueful laugh, “I’ll be well once I stop worrying about them. Frau Hornik and I have promised to write at least once a week. I need only wait until she’s settled in and sends me her address.” “I heard,” he says with a chuckle. “Such oaths you made to one another, I have no doubt the mail carriers between here and Cologne will soon be staggering under the weight of all your letters.” The thought makes her giggle. It’s such a girlish sound that it startles him. He has never thought to hear the like from his sober, quiet wife. It brings a smile to his face; soon Anton is laughing, too. This is a small happiness, in a mad and dangerous world. But it’s better than gold, better than music, to know you made another person happy. To know you’ve kept them safe.

“But I knew, Elisabeth—I know what they did, what they still do to the men who wear the uniforms. Those men are victims, too—some of them, anyway. Not all are consumed by evil. Some do only what they must, to spare their own children from death. Knowing that, I stepped aside. I didn’t resist as forcefully as I could have done, because in that moment, I couldn’t choose between the soldier’s pain and my own. But I made the wrong decision. I know that now; I have known it every moment I’ve lived since then. I should have forced that man to kill me. I should have made his every move an agony; I should have plagued him with guilt. It wasn’t his choice, to take the children, and he took no pleasure in his work. But who suffered? Who died that day? The little ones. The ones I was meant to protect. God may forgive me someday, but I will never forgive myself.”

Albert says, “I don’t like to see the nest like that, all covered in snow.” The poor boy has been unable to forget the stork since the day the steel door opened. Anton can only imagine what violence fills his son’s dreams—visions of red ripped through white. “What do you suppose it means for us now,” Al says, “since the stork is gone?” Paul sighs heavily, kicking his feet in the snow. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but Al persists: “Father Emil said it was the luck of our town.” “There is another stork,” Anton reminds them. “The other one still lives.” Paul blurts out an answer suddenly, as if, all at once, something has loosed his reservations and freed his little spirit to confront that senseless death. “But the other stork will never come back. Father Emil says they mate for life. It will never come back because the nest reminds it of its dead mate, and it will never take another mate, either, because it’s too heartbroken now.” Maria stares at her brother for a long moment. The vapor of her short, rapid breaths rises ever faster as she struggles not to cry. She gives up the fight and covers her face with her hands, keening. Paul blinks and shuffles his feet again. He wipes away his own tear. “Is it true?” Maria clings to Anton’s hand. “Vati, is it true?” “No, darling. It isn’t true.” He bends to stroke her hair, to kiss her hot forehead. “Storks do find love again. In time, when it’s not so sad, ours will take another mate. Perhaps they will even come back here, to o...

“We’ll all be back together soon,” he says. But he can feel Al’s hard stare as he says those words. The boy can tell when he is being deceived. Anton takes Albert’s hand, as you would do with a grown man. “I’m proud of you, son. Proud of the man you’re becoming, the man you’ll be someday.” He removes the watch from his pocket. Albert takes it, startled, and turns it over and over, tilting it so the polished casing gleams. “My father gave this to me,” Anton says. “I want you to have it now.” Al nods. He closes his fist around the watch. “I’ll try. I’ll try to make you proud.” The boy is struggling not to cry, fighting with all his strength to hold back his weeping. Anton takes him by the shoulder and leans close, so only Al can hear. “Men cry, son. All the time. Never be ashamed of your feelings. Your feelings are your compass. They guide you to what’s right.” The tears break at last, spilling down the boy’s freckled cheeks. “I won’t tell them what’s really happening,” he says. “Paul and Maria.” “Not until they’re old enough to understand.”

“Father?” Emil turns. His face—Anton has never seen the priest look this way, hard and tight-jawed, fixed with a determination he seems to know is as dangerous as it is futile. His lower lip, tense, pulls open to reveal a set of bulldog teeth, small and crooked with shadows in between, avid to bite. A second before he sees the trowel in Emil’s hand, Anton smells the cement—wet and cool, with a grainy note of mineral dust. “In mercy’s name, Father—” “There’s nothing to say, Anton. I’ve had enough.” He turns back to his work. Lifts another thick pat of cement from the bucket at his feet and slides the trowel down the line of the door, pushing the stuff deep into the crack. He smooths it with care, and with a graceful, competent motion of arm and shoulder, as if he’d been made to set bricks in mortar rather than men on the path to righteousness. “Is anyone in there—in the tunnel?” Anton’s detachment does him no credit. If soldiers are within, creeping blindly through the earth or huddled in a small white kerosene sphere of lamplight, they are still men. Men who will reach their destination after hours of terror, only to find a door that refuses to open. Men—unless they’re loyal to the NSDAP. What do you call a person, a creature, who loves our dear leader more than he loves what is good? Emil says, “If so, they’ll turn around and walk back to wherever they came from.” And if someone has sealed the door on the other side? Anton can’t bring himself to think of it.

Dear little brother, I was only too happy to meet your Elisabeth and the children when they came knocking on my door. She gave me your note. You mustn’t apologize for surprising me this way, and you mustn’t feel any guilt. Of course I will take your family in, Anton, and give them all the care and protection I am capable of giving. We make a tight bundle here—Elisabeth shares my bed, Albert has the sofa, while Paul and Maria sleep on the floor at night. But we are cozy, and no one is ever lonely. I think we can count that a great blessing in times like these. Your children are dear to me already; I love them as much as if I’d known them all their lives. I never looked to be an auntie, but now that I am one, I’m glad to be. Elisabeth means to write you, I know. But she has been so sad. She cries all the time—I don’t tell you this to hurt you, only so you will know how much she loves you. I will see to it that she writes you soon, so you will have some word directly from your wife. I know from your note, and from what little Elisabeth has told me, that there has been some fearful trouble. I don’t like to think of my baby brother in that sort of trouble. But whatever has happened, whatever you have done, I know you have done it with your whole heart, and with righteousness your aim. You mustn’t worry about your family, Anton, whatever may come. I will care for them and love them, even if there comes a day when you cannot. We will meet again, Brother, in this life or the next....

It is easier to hope with Elisabeth beside him, but still Anton wishes she were back in Stuttgart. Winter gives way slowly to a gray, wet spring. The crocuses bloom, painting the milk cow’s pasture and the yard at the foot of the stair with strokes of purple and white. There is no one to build the rabbit garden this year, but with the few coins that remain to him, Anton buys a bar of chocolate from the bakery and sends it to the children in Stuttgart. The crocuses fade, the season of resurrection passes, and still the papers bear witness only to the Führer’s immortality. But where there is love, there is hope. In his moments of despair, Anton takes Elisabeth’s hand. He tells himself, Be patient. In hope, we are saved. Hope that is seen is no hope at all; who asks for what he already has?

He woke to a sound, and it comes again—so faint, so distant, that he mistakes it for a memory. He’d heard the toll of a bell, and it had sounded like a boy’s voice calling. “Father!” The voice is closer now. Louder. And there is no mistaking to whom it belongs. “Father! Vati Anton!” Albert. Anton could swear he has actually heard the boy, out among the orchard or running down the lane. He sits up slowly, but the movement is enough to wake Elisabeth. She stirs, yawns, and rubs a knuckle in her eye. “Anton? What is it?” “I thought I heard—” He won’t say, I thought I heard our son. They have lived without the children for months now—four cruel months, when it seemed winter would never end, a new spring would never come. Every day he has seen the pain in Elisabeth’s eyes. Every day he has known what it costs her to be here with him. He won’t raise hope without cause. But she murmurs, “I had the strangest dream. I dreamed I heard Albert calling for me.” Then, waking fully, she hears the boy again. They both hear. “Father! Mother!” Elisabeth stares at Anton for a moment, pale and frightened. He can read her thoughts, for they are his own. Is this a trick of the Devil? Or has the boy died? Is our child’s spirit trapped between Heaven and Earth?

Frau Hertz is running from the farmhouse, waving something above her head, something white and black and fluttering. A newspaper. “Anton!” He looks up, and there is Anita, in her laywoman’s dress, hustling down the lane, red-faced and puffing. There is an auto parked behind her, round-hooded, soft gray. She jingles a set of keys in her hands, as if to say, Look what I’ve got; are you jealous? Then she squeals with happiness like the girl she used to be, catching him in a tight embrace. She spins him around and around. “Look at you, in your nightshirt. You slept in too late, Little Brother. You missed the news!” “What news? For goodness’ sake, what has happened? Why are you here—and the children?” The children squirm out of Elisabeth’s arms, run to Anton, and throw their arms around his body. He is squeezed and patted to within an inch of his life, and he laughs—laughs with the gladness of it until he is wheezing and breathless. “You haven’t heard yet?” Albert cries, face alight. “It’s done now. It’s all over!” “What? Speak sense!” Frau Hertz arrives then. She thrusts the newspaper against Anton’s chest. He takes it and holds it out—he hasn’t put his glasses on, and he can barely read the neat headline. But through his blurred vision, the words seem to advance upon him, resolving with startling clarity. FAREWELL TO HITLER “He’s dead,” Anita says. She laughs wildly and thrusts a fist in the air. “We heard it quite late, yesterday evening. The Party tried to suppress the news...

When the first shovel strikes bronze, the crowd goes still. They back away; Anton jumps down into the pit and clears the last of the earth with his hands. The first bell shows itself through wet black soil, its proud height and strong curve, its domed crown gleaming. A great shout goes up from the townspeople. They cheer with one voice, and the echo of their gladness rebounds from the blue, blue hills. “A parade,” Emil shouts. “Let’s have a parade!” The villagers cheer again. The Kopps bring their two great flatbed trucks out into the field. The people of Unterboihingen lift together; they raise the bells up. Children pick armfuls of flowers and greenery from hedges and ditches, and skipping and singing, they strew petals over the earth; they cover the bells and the beds of the trucks in sweet, bright swags of green. “Albert,” Anton says, “run to every house. Knock on every door. Bring all the children here with their instruments. You heard Father Emil; we must have a parade!” When the bells are all but buried under wreaths of blossom, the band assembles. Anton heads toward his students, intending to lead the march—but Emil catches him by the arm. “Let them play without a conductor today. You’ve taught them well enough; they can manage.” He gestures to the nearest truck bed. “You belong up there, my friend—up where the whole town can see you.” Grinning, accepting the praise, Anton climbs up beside his bells. Flowers and new leaves cling to his wet shoes and to the cuffs of...

“He started a marching band to keep the town’s boys out of Hitler Youth,” Larry said. “That didn’t make Hitler very happy.” “I imagine not.” “Anyway,” Rita said, “they still remember my dad for what he did. He’s the hero of Unterboihingen.” In fact, after the restoration of the bells to St. Kolumban’s tower, Anton wrote a beautiful song celebrating their music and history, which is still performed annually by St. Kolumban’s choir in remembrance of Opa and the bells he helped save. In early 2017, I had the privilege of translating his lyrics, titled “Bell Song,” from German to English. As far as I know, it’s the first English translation of the work.