Andrea Maria Schenkel

I spent the first summer after the end of the war with distant relations in the country. During those weeks, that village seemed to me an island of peace. One of the last places to have survived intact after the great storm that we had just weathered. Years later, when life had gone back to normal and that summer was only a happy memory, I read about the same village in the paper.
My village had become the home of “the murder farm”, and I couldn’t get the story out of my mind.
With mixed feelings, I went back.
The people I met there were very willing to tell me about the crime. To talk to a stranger who was nonetheless familiar with the place. Someone who wouldn’t stay, would listen, and then go away again.

Johann Sterzer, aged 52, farmer in Upper Tannöd

Hauer was waiting for us just before we got to the house. We all went up to the farmyard together. I saw at once that the door of the machinery shed was open. Hauer knows his way around the farm since that business with Barbara. He was in and out of the place a lot back then. “We can get into the barn through the shed. There’s a door into the cowshed from there, and we can go into the house from the cowshed,” he said to me and Lois.

He told Hansl he’d better stay outside. That was all right by Lois and me, so it was just the three of us went into the shed. Sure enough, there was a little door there. On the back wall of the shed, but it was fastened shut with a hook or something on the other side.

I was going out again to see if there wasn’t some other way into the house. But Hauer took my sleeve. “That door’s so flimsy we can just push it in,” he says. Lois agreed with him, so the three of us braced ourselves against that little door. After a while, yes, it did give way, and there we were in the barn.

It was very dark inside. The only daylight came in through an open door on the left-hand side of the barn. On the right-hand side hay was stacked up, and the other stocks of feed, and there were piles of straw everywhere against the back wall and the left-hand side. But we couldn’t really see much in that dark barn. It was more like guesswork.

The bellowing of the animals in the cowshed was getting louder and louder. “There’s a cow there!” Hauer saw her first. The cow was standing right in the doorways.
“Come on, come on, she must have torn herself free.” Hauer went over to the cow in the doorway. My eyes weren’t really used to the darkness in that barn yet. I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t fancy being left behind on my own either. So I followed Hauer. Looked like Lois felt the same. But as he started off after Hauer he stumbled. Managed to catch himself up in time, though. I am about to tell Lois he’d better watch where he was going, and then I see this foot in the straw.

Lois grabbed my arm. Grabbed it tight.
We both stood there just staring at the heap of straw. We didn’t neither of us move, not Lois and not me. We simply stood there. May heart was beating like it was fit to jump right out of my chest. The ground under my feet wouldn’t hold me up any more. I was so weak at the knees. I clung on to Lois with all my might, and he clung on to me. It was all so hard to grasp, it was unspeakable.

The Hauer pushed the straw aside. Freed them of the straw, one by one. Danner. Little Marianne, her grandma, and last of all Barbara too. They were all covered with blood. I felt such dread. I couldn’t really look at them. Everything around me was ghastly. Like in a nightmare. Like the Trud was sitting on you squeezing the air out of you. I wanted to get out of there, away from that place.