The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

How deep into the heart of Germany has the tumor spread?

These same bells have rung since long before the Reich existed. And they will ring still, even after it has fallen.

All is in your own hands, just as much as God’s. And whatever your hands may do, do it with all your strength and will.

Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.

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?

a fairy tale about a funny old witch who lives in a house with chicken legs. Where did he hear it first?

Music eases every pain we don’t know we carry. It banishes the fear that is so commonplace now, we have grown

inured to its shadow and chill.

How are we to know when our lives are good and when we are blessed, if we have no sorrow, no deprivation for comparison’s sake?

Music is a way of transporting emotion from one breast to another. It is a way of knowing the unknowable, of feeling what we can never allow ourselves to confront in any other way.

birds.

We have sat by, complacent or disbelieving or relieved that it was happening to someone else, not to us—not to the people we love.

But everyone knows, everyone sees (even in our blindness) that those called “life unworthy of life” are only redistributed to their graves.

“I can’t. I can’t just . . . let you. You know this is wrong. You know it’s a sin. You know you’ll answer to God for it, someday.”

“I have a wife. I have two daughters, nine and twelve. They told me . . . they said .

That was why he let them take his children away: to save his own life. What redemption can he ever hope to find for such a sin?

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.

How can we insist on living when so many are dead, when we did nothing to save them?

“But you will learn. Everything depends on it—everything depends on all of us being as clever and as careful as we can. Only with great caution will we carry out our mission. We all wish for a speedier conclusion

to this mess, but haste makes waste, as the Americans say.”

“Some of us are spies, yes. Some of us transmit whatever intelligence we can glean to the Tommies and Americans—anyone at all, provided they might help us undo what has been done to Germany.

chains of cellars and attics and spaces between walls.

are hard at work on the most dangerous and most important task of all.

it comes down to seconds in this business—heartbeats.

Widerstand

the resistance.

there is a resistance,

Germany has retained, in the smallest, thinnest capillaries buried deep inside its flesh, a lifeblood of essential goodness.

“They call us the Red Orchestra,

It’s because the whole village hears them, too.

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed, without opposition, by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today, every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?

“We will not be silent. We are your guilty conscience. The White Rose will never leave you in peace.”

If you do what’s easy, instead of what’s right, will you ever hold your head up again when your spouse speaks your name?

Hate is a foul and useless thing. It taints too much of this world.

Like a toad roused from its burrow and jabbed with a stick,

Music is the great key; it can open any lock. My

A length of black pipe, not much longer than a human heart,

filled with jagged things like fear and nails, shards of glass and desperation, capped on either end by the hopelessness of forced silence. But there is the problem of access, now that the July attempt