Free The Murder Farm by Andrea Maria Schenkel

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 nothingmore 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