The Ragged Edge of Night(102)

At the time, I was working at a bookstore, and told them so. “But,” I added, “I’m also a writer. I’m trying to make a career out of it. My specialty is historical fiction.”

Most people love books, and historical fiction has a broad audience. My ace worked its magic; soon I was bonding with Paul’s family over a shared interest in history, and no one skirted too close to any potentially damning information.

Paul’s eldest brother, Larry, said, “You should write about Opa and the bells. I think it counts as history, and it would make for really good fiction.”

Over turkey and mashed potatoes—and with an ever-increasing sense of being thoroughly gobsmacked—I teased out this family’s most incredible story, though it came to me piecemeal. The conversation went something like this:

“My dad hated Hitler,” said Rita, Paul’s German mother. “Absolutely hated him.”

“Well, who doesn’t?” I chuckled uncomfortably.

“Yes, but Opa really hated Hitler. I mean, he was willing to do whatever it took to get the guy’s goat.”

Getting Adolf Hitler’s goat sounded like it had to be an understatement.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, the Nazis almost killed Opa because of what he did.” I love my mother-in-law to death, but it has never been easy to extract a story from her.

“It wasn’t the Nazis,” Larry said. “It was that jerk in town. What was his name?”

“He was a Nazi,” Rita insisted. “He might as well have been. It was the same thing as being a Nazi.”

I cut in. “Wait… what did your dad do, exactly?”

“He hid the church bells. He buried them in a potato field so the Nazis couldn’t take them. They were claiming all the church bells, so they could melt them down and turn them into ammunition. But he wouldn’t let them have the bells, on top of everything else they’d done, so he hid them. And then, when some SS officer came to get them, he said, ‘Look, the bells are already gone. Somebody else from the SS took them.’ The guy was so mad, but Dad said, ‘What, you didn’t want me to say no to an SS officer, did you?’” Rita laughed heartily.

“They almost killed him for that?”

“Oh yeah. You didn’t cross the Nazis. Trust me—you think you know about the Nazis, but you don’t. They were truly evil, and crazy. They’d do anything, for any reason.”

I wasn’t about to argue. I believed her.

Larry’s girlfriend, Julie—now his wife, and my sister-in-law—spoke up then. “I thought the Nazis tried to kill Opa because of his band.”

“Yeah, that, too.” Rita waved her hand, as if defying the Nazi Party not once but twice was nothing remarkable.

“His band?”

“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.

After that Thanksgiving dinner, the years passed and I came to know Paul better—and his warm, wonderful family (all of whom are far more accepting and open-minded than I had originally assumed). As I learned more about Anton’s life, I pieced together a clearer picture of Opa and the bells. And the more vivid Opa’s story grew in my mind, the more certain I became that I would write it all out as a novel… someday.

Josef Anton Starzmann was born in 1904 in Stuttgart, Germany, to a devout Catholic family. His sister’s real name was Korbel, which my editor and I decided to change to Anita, since she plays a minor role in this novel and Anita is an easier name for English-speaking readers to manage.

Anton joined the Franciscan Order as a very young man, and was happy in his work for many years, until Germany began to alter itself subtly—and then, in 1933, not so subtly. A lifelong and self-taught musician, he developed and implemented musical programs at St. Josefsheim, a residential, Franciscan-run school for developmentally delayed and disabled children.

Anton—who, in his Franciscan years, was known as Bruder Nazarius—took great joy in his work. The order was his whole identity. I have a striking photo of him, taken when he was twenty or so, dressed in his Franciscan garb, with his little round spectacles balanced on his long, thin nose. The photo is dear to me, for my husband, Paul, looks almost exactly like his Opa, a resemblance that’s almost eerie in its perfection. Take a photo of Paul in 1940s clothing, pass it through a black-and-white filter, and even Rita would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between her son and her father.

In 1939, Hitler initiated the T4 Program, his campaign to rid the Fatherland of all people physically and intellectually disabled or delayed. The measure began with forced sterilization of adults, but soon progressed to “euthanasia,” carried out in Germany’s many death camps or in hospitals where Josef Mengele and his ilk performed their experiments. As the tide of war slowly began to turn against Hitler, he ramped up his extermination of the disabled and developmentally delayed. Sometime in 1940 or 1941, the children of St. Josefsheim were taken and “redistributed to other homes.” Anton, of course, knew what that meant. I’ve been unable to learn whether his particular order was disbanded at that moment or whether he left of his own accord after the children were seized. Rita and her sister Angela, the only remaining members of Anton’s family—and the only two biological children Anton and Elisabeth shared—don’t know whether their father left on his own or was forced out of the friar’s life by decree of the Nazis, as so many other friars, monks, and nuns were.