The scream wakes him. He sits up in bed, bathed in sweat.

The dream is repeated night after night. Sometimes his wife is lying dead on the bed before him. On other nights the girl has taken her place, or the little boy.

He stands up, goes to the window, looks out into the cold night.

Maria Sterzer, age 42, farmer’s wife in Upper Tannöd

When my husband and Alois got back to our farm, they didn’t need to tell me anything. I could see something terrible must have happened from the way they were walking, long before they arrived. And when they were back sitting in our living room, both of them so pale, I knew it. You could read it in their faces, the horror. For the first few nights my husband kept waking up. The sight of the dead wouldn’t let him rest.

To think of such a thing happening right out here. You can hardly imagine it. Not that I’m surprised to hear old Danner didn’t die in his bed.

One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, so I don’t like to talk about those dead people. We live in a small village here, you know. Any kind of tittle-tattle gets passed on, so I’d rather not say much.

All I will say is, I didn’t like the folk at that farm.

Loners, every one of them, and the old farmer in particular wasn’t a good man. You couldn’t get close to them, and I didn’t want to either. I haven’t even spoken to them since that business with Amelie.

Amelie was a very nice girl. She was a foreign worker on the Danner farm. That was still in the war. They made the POWs and all kinds of other people do forced labor on the farms. We had one from France here, our Pierre.

The men were all away in the war, except for Danner, he somehow fixed it not to get called up. He was thick as thieves with the Party people back then.

There were strict rules about the treatment of the foreign workers. But I didn’t stick to them. Our Pierre worked on the farm. I could never have run the place all on my own with the small children and my mother-in-law, God rest her soul.

My husband was at the front, and later he was a POW; he didn’t come back until ’47. And thank God he did come back in the end!

Our Pierre liked working on the land. He came from a farm himself. Without him the place would have gone downhill fast, he worked as if the farm was his own. We all got on well. We didn’t have much ourselves, but we shared what little we had with him.

When a man works as hard as that, you have to treat him decently. I mean, he’s a human being, not a beast of burden. That’s what I said to the mayor. I told him so to his face when he tried warning me off.

All he said was, “You’d better watch your step, Frau Sterzer, many people have been strung up for less.”

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.