The Ragged Edge of Night
Olivia Hawker
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In this work, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party), has been abbreviated as “NSDAP” or referred to as “the Party” or “the Nazi Party.” The Schutzstaffel (a paramilitary organization under the NSDAP) is usually abbreviated to “SS.” Certain factual elements, including the timing of some events, have been altered for the sake of storytelling.
PART 1
FATHERLAND
SEPTEMBER 1942
1
The train picks up speed as it leaves Stuttgart. He grew up here, amid long shady streets footed in ancient cobblestones and gardens bright-spotted with afternoon light, but it is no longer the place Anton knew when he was young. Stuttgart is slowly falling, its gray innards exposed, blocks of cement cracked like bones, and the bowels of shops and houses ripped open, spilling into the streets. Dust, like ash, hazes the air. How many bombs have fallen on the city of his childhood? He lost count long ago. It is not the place he knew as a boy, but no place in Germany is the same.
He presses his forehead against the window and looks back. The wire rims of his spectacles tick against the glass. In the train’s wake, he can just make out, if he strains hard to see it, the long black line of the track. Straight, perfectly straight, like the road to Riga, crossed by a whirl of cold gray cement dust, bomb dust, dancing this way and that, as if anyone has reason to dance.
He cannot help but feel some affinity for all this gray. It hasn’t been a year since he put away his friar’s habit; gray still suits him, still offers mute comfort, even when he finds it in the corpse of a city. There was a time, those first weeks dressed in an ordinary man’s clothes, trousers and shirt, when he told himself that this would not be forever. When the war ends, he told himself, the Catholic orders will be free to practice again. I will be a friar again, and everything will be restored, will go back to the way it was. That is a story he no longer believes, a tale he cannot tell himself. Someone has remade this world—this place we, the people of Germany, once called home. What passed has passed, and gone is gone. He wears trousers every day now.
Anton straightens in his seat. The newspaper in his lap, neatly folded, rattles its few dry pages together. He lays his hand upon it, palm down, like a friend’s hand falling on your shoulder or a priest’s quiet blessing.
The last small houses at the edge of Stuttgart fall away. The scar of the city lies behind; here the earth’s flesh is whole and blooming—fields of barley ripening, browning in the late-summer sun, and cattle in their pastures, standing belly-deep in green ponds or arrested in their slow progress to the milking shed by the rapid perspective of the passing train. Color and life, sudden and everywhere, lift the pall of silence from the train car. Conversation picks up—tentative, low. Who does not speak quietly in public these days?
In the seat behind him, a woman says, “I wonder if the White Rose will come here, to Stuttgart.”
Her companion, a man: “Hush.”
“I only wondered,” the woman says. “I didn’t say—”
“Hush all the same.”
You know it isn’t safe to speak of resistance. Not in a place like this, the narrow confines of a train, where anyone may hear and no one can hide. In this country, dissenters emerge like ants from every dark crevice. They are small and scuttling, but before they are crushed, they will bite the descending heel and leave a painful sting. The White Rose is not the only party of resistance. The Social Democrats—the Sopade—may have been banned when Hitler seized power, but despite the imprisonment and murder of their leaders, despite their dissemination by exile, they have not left us entirely. The Freie Arbeiter Union have not forgotten the part they played in the November Revolution. Their pamphlets have been outlawed—merely to possess one could mean death—but still they are printed, still they are read. Catholics and Protestants, who refuse to see eye to eye on matters of doctrine, have joined hands in this cause. It seems that every week Anton hears of another speech given by some brave Father in a public square, another treatise written by a preacher or a Jesuit or a doomed, earnest nun exhorting the German people to listen to reason, to heed the cold, choking voice of their own hearts.
Resistance is everywhere, but the White Rose is, perhaps, the most poignant incarnation. It is a children’s movement—or, at least, Anton can’t help but think of them as children. Half his age and braver than lions, braver than he ever was. The young students of Munich have taken to the streets with pamphlets and paint. Since June, they have covered brick walls with their slogans, imploring their fellow Germans to resist: “Widerstand!” They have covered the streets with their leaflets—God alone knows who prints those subversive and deadly things. In the three months since these children have risen to their feet, Anton’s mood has grown darker and his sleep more restless. 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.