I even got an anonymous letter. They were threatening to report me. All the same, I did what I thought was right. I wasn’t letting them get me down, not them.
Amelie was in a bad way. They didn’t treat her well at Danner’s farm. The old skinflint gave her hardly anything to eat, and she had to work like an ox.
And she was a delicate little thing. She didn’t come of farming stock. She was from a city in Poland, I think it was Warsaw, but I don’t know for certain.
I felt so sorry for her, poor creature. Our Pierre said Danner was chasing after her. Pestering and molesting poor Amelie, Pierre said, he even beat her. She showed Pierre the bruises, and she cried.
Seems that Danner once even hit her with a whip in the farmyard. Just because she wouldn’t do what he wanted. She had bloody welts afterward.
And do you think Frau Danner helped her? She didn’t say a word. Far from it, she tormented and harassed poor Amelie herself the whole time.
I suppose if someone’s been knocked around all their life they’ll take the chance to knock someone else about if they get it.
Amelie couldn’t bear it at the Danner farm anymore. She couldn’t run away, so she hanged herself. Poor girl. She hanged herself in the barn. In the very same barn where they found Danner himself and his family.
That’s odd, when you come to think of it.
Old Danner hushed it all up afterward, and the mayor helped him.
Pierre liked Amelie a lot. He sometimes gave her something to eat on the sly. There wasn’t much we could spare, but maybe a piece of bread, some fruit and vegetables, and now and then a little bit of sausage. He smuggled it to her in secret. Once, when she was almost at the end of her tether, she told our Pierre about her brother. He was sure to come look for her after the war was over, she said. And then she was going to tell him all about Danner. She’d tell him how badly they’d treated her on the farm, how the old man had been chasing her all the time, pestering her. Wanting her to do things she couldn’t even mention to Pierre.
At the time I wasn’t sure whether our Pierre had gotten all that right, because he didn’t speak anything but French, and German after a fashion with me.
But I haven’t been able to get Amelie’s story out of my head, not since they found them all dead. In that very same barn. Who knows, maybe Amelie’s brother did come to find her after all and took revenge on Danner for her?
He wouldn’t be the first. There are several who’ve taken revenge on their tormentors. You keep hearing such stories, off the record. There’s plenty of skeletons in closets around here. It was a bad time, and there were many bad people around then.
Franz-Xavier Meier, age 47, Mayor
It was around five when Hansl Hauer showed up at my house. The lad was quite beside himself.
“They’ve killed everyone up at the Danner farm,” he was shouting. “Killed them all stone dead.” He kept shouting it. “They’ve killed every last one of them. They’re all dead.”
And I was to call the police at once, which naturally I did.
I drove to the Danner family’s property in my car. I found Georg Hauer there, Hansl’s father, and Johann Sterzer, along with Alois Huber, Sterzer’s future son-in-law. He works for Sterzer on his farm.
After a short conversation with the three of them, I decided not to view the scene of the crime for myself.
A little later the officers from the local police arrived, and I determined that my presence was no longer necessary. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can say that might help to clear up this terrible crime.
Well, of course I was shocked, what do you think? But it’s not for me to find out what happened, that’s the business of the authorities responsible, in this case the police.
And that’s just what I told the journalists from the newspaper, in almost the same words.
Oh, don’t you start on about that woman, that Polish foreign worker! I can’t tell you anything about that. I am afraid the records of the incident were lost in ’45. My predecessor as mayor could tell you more if he were still alive.
I was a prisoner in a French POW camp at the time myself.
When the Americans came here and liberated us in April ’45, I wasn’t home yet. They took over the then mayor’s house and the village hall. They commandeered those buildings as their temporary quarters. The buildings were devastated by the time they moved out.
They acted like vandals. They shot at porcelain plates in the garden with their pistols. “Tap shooting,” that’s what they called it. Just imagine. After they left, everything was laid waste or useless. Those fine gentlemen had taken what little was still of any use away with them.
So most of the files from the time before the fall of the regime had been destroyed, too. We suffered severe damage, as I am sure you will understand.
And for that reason I can’t tell you much about the events leading to the death of the Polish foreign worker.
As far as I know, the Polish worker, the one assigned to the Danner family, hanged herself. She was buried here in the village.
There were foreign workers everywhere. We prisoners of war in France were put to work ourselves.
Do you imagine we were always well treated? I for one didn’t go and hang myself.
Nor do I see what this could have to do with the dreadful crime committed against the Danner family. This is simply an attempt to revive old stories. There are some people, you know, who just can’t leave such stories alone. The war’s been over for ten years. So let’s lay those stories to rest once and for all. Times then were bad enough.
We all suffered. Everyone has his own burden to bear, but the world goes on turning. Times change. Wondering “what if?” does no good. No good at all.
Of course there were injustices, of course there were moments of despair. Every one of us went through them. But the war’s over. It’s been over almost ten years now, time we started forgetting.
I was a prisoner of war myself, and believe you me, it wasn’t easy. I was lucky. I managed to get home soon after the end of the war. Others didn’t have as much luck, but what about it? What’s over is over.
There are plenty of other problems, after all. But slowly we’re going uphill in this country. Don’t you read the paper?
I mean, look at the international situation. Right at this moment in time, since the end of the Korean War, the tension has relaxed slightly, yes, I agree. Our fears of another war are gone for the moment. But I can tell you, the communists in Russia won’t let it stop at that. You don’t suppose this man Khrushchev is any better than his predecessor, do you?
Very well, so now the last prisoners of war are coming home. At last, after almost ten years, but that doesn’t change anything; that doesn’t change the potential danger from the East. That’s why it was so important for us to sign the Paris treaties.
We have to act as an opposite pole. If only because—perhaps most of all because—the world has changed since the war.
That chapter, I would like to think, is now finally closed.
I do beg you not to go chasing after every rumor. I can guess where you heard that one.
And was that lady’s own conduct always so far above reproach that she can point the finger at others? I wouldn’t want to judge her, but one hears this and that.
I mean, there’s her husband at the front, defending his homeland, and his own wife stabs him in the back, has a relationship with a Frenchman. He’s fighting for the Fatherland and she fraternizes with the enemy.
The enemy is always the enemy, that’s what we said at the time, and you can’t deny the truth of it even now.