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Page 23.
 Frau Jones nodded. “If only he had shot himself when it was over for the Nazis in Croatia, like Hitler did in Berlin.” She paused to sip her coffee. “Anna Maria was a simple, empty-headed young girl. She married Chetko, and lived all her life here in the village until she died not long ago. She never drove a car, and the farthest she ever traveled was Heidelberg. She was a true villager, a peasant. They had two daughters, one of them Stanislava, the other a girl named Karin who ran away as a teenager and never came back. She died far away years later Now comes the most terrible part of this story, apart from the death of your baby sister Klara.
“When Stana was about twelve years old, back in the early 1960s, her parents had been married for years, and Chetko treated his wife like dirt. She was a simple village girl and put up with it—on the surface for others to see. But Anna Maria, who was pretty, began running around with other men behind Chetko’s back.” She paused to let that sink in. “Imagine how an egomaniac like Chetko would take that.”
After a pause, she continued, in a frail, reluctant, but determined voice. “The two innocent young girls Stana and Karin were asleep in an upstairs bedroom near their parent’s bedroom. Their mother was out running around with a well-off married U.S. Army colonel from Heidelberg, who took her to fancy restaurants and screwed her in hotels down there. So Chetko, who was out a tavern with his ex-SS cronies near the main railroad station—drunk as a fish as usual, and coldly handling it well—heard about his wife’s activities. And with one of the Americans yet, whom he hated so much! In a rage, he drove back here to the village, went into the bedroom, and raped both girls.” She nodded. “Out of hate and rage and revenge, this drunken monster raped both of his children, in an effort to hurt his wife. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill the two girls.”
“Oh my god,” Hannah said. “They were how old?”
“Stana was thirteen, I think, and Karin was twelve.”
Rob added: “No wonder he hated Dan Wilson—a U.S. soldier.”
A pause descended as those around the table sought to digest this information. Hannah could begin to understand the inferno from hell that her father had walked into. He was a soldier assigned to Heidelberg, and couldn’t simply leave. He was working for a staff of men who were oblivious at best, hard-hearted and cruel at worst. Poor Daniel Wilson.
“Now you know why Karin ran away and never came back. Stana however became alcoholic like her father. It’s what they call Stockholm Syndrome. The victim identifies with the evil-doer. The whole family went into psychiatric counseling paid for by our national health insurance. For years, they were under the care of a doctor down in Heidelberg, which after all has one of the finest universities and medical centers in the world. Anna Maria and Chetko stayed together. He never physically harmed his daughters again, but he bullied his family and everyone else with his usual words and swaggering and sharp tongue and bitter sayings.”
Rob looked sick. “Why did they all put up with him?”
“We was very clever, very quick, and could turn your own words around on you. He always had words to stick into someone, like a knife, goading a person—which is what he did of course to your father as well. He rarely came in here. Nobody in the village wanted anything to do with him, even though they didn’t know the secret of his family’s horrible rape and incest.” She paused. “So Stana did not handle it well, and became an alcoholic. She hated herself, I think, as much as she claimed to love her father, who destroyed her life. She only went out with destructive, drunken, brutal young men. One of Stana’s young boyfriends, also a U.S. soldier or airman, I forget which, actually was so drunk that when Chetko kept goading him as they sat in living room, with that viper tongue of his, digging in to cut the boy at his weaknesses—Chetko was so skilled at finding out where those weak spots in the soul were, and he could cut you like a surgeon to get at your pain—that young man slit his wrists a few hours later and almost bled to death in their living room. Still, Stana never learned anything. Karin had long since run away. Anna Maria and her daughter Stana stayed with the ship as it was going down.”
“And then my Dad came along,” Hannah said.
“Yes. It is a mystery to me. I have tried to read his journal that I have given to you, but none of it makes sense. It is almost like there is a missing journal.” She pointed. “He called that one Journal II.”
“And we have Journal III,” Hannah said. “That’s the story of his happy marriage after returning to the U.S. He found happiness with Nancy.”
“Your dear mother,” Frau Jones gushed. “And you two beautiful children. I am so happy for Dan.”
“There must have been a Journal I before this,” Rob said.
“We know he was a broken man when he came home,” Hannah said. “Now I am starting to finally get a sense of what he got himself involved with. What a shame, in a region so beautiful as our Neckar Valley, to be so miserable as he must have been.”
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