Forget Me Not

When Hans’s shattered body is found below the Dead Mountains’ highest peak, there is little reason to think of anything but an accident. But Rosi Oberlechner, the young innkeeper of the remote Austrian village of Grimmendorf, cannot shake her suspicions that there is more to her grandfather’s death. Toni Aschenbrenner, the old village cop, is skeptical. Then, though, more villagers die, and even Toni cannot ignore the forget-me-nots and the photos of young men placed near their bodies or on their graves. As someone who had a huge ax to grind with most of the villagers, evil-tempered Fritz Mayerhouser, Grimmendorf’s richest man, is the prime suspect. Yet, there’s no evidence against him, and leads implicating others turn out to be false.

Rosi falls in love with Leander Gerber, a history teacher. But she must turn to another man for help after the Alpenrose’s snow-laden roof collapses. She leases the ruins to Fritz in exchange for his promise to rebuild the inn. With Fritz ridiculed by the inn’s rough male crowd, she thinks his motive might be to rub their noses in his new status. Weighing her suspicions about him against wanting to see her regulars back, she decides to help him anyway. She coaches Fritz until he can smile through a whole evening of serving their guests. And as they begin to accept him, he slowly starts to change into a quirky object of rough affection by the men who scorned him.

It’s Rosi’s discovery of a dossier in the attic of the mayor’s office that leads to the murderer. The file, entitled “The De-Jewification of Grimmendorf, 1939-1940,” documents how the village’s eight Jews were mobbed, stripped of their belongings, and sent to concentration camps where most died. Her horror grows as Oskar Bürscher, the village patriarch, tells her and Toni that the fathers of Toni and Hans, Rosi’s grandfather, were among the perpetrators.

Rosi had already stumbled upon troubling indications of Grimmendorf’s dark secret. She finds an SS death-head ring in Hans’s desk drawer. Then, a Kiddush cup used in Jewish religious celebrations is unearthed in the inn’s courtyard. Once she finds the dossier, she can no longer ignore both her family’s and the village’s Nazi past. And after Oskar’s testimony, the connection with the murders begins to emerge.

Fritz is eliminated as a suspect when he, too, is killed. He, Hans, and a third victim were members of the village band. So were their forebears who had sent the Jews to the camps. The grandfather of the fourth victim was also a band member back then. It seems that the killer is seeking revenge on their descendants, and with one of them Toni’s father, he will likely go after the old cop as well.

Trying to focus one night on happier things, she thinks of her date with Leander, then sits up in her bed, her heart in her throat. Oskar had identified one of the Jews as Leon Berger, the accordionist of the village band, and had told them that he had sworn vengeance on future generations. Leander plays a beat-up accordion in the band. His handwriting matches graffiti on the inn’s wall warning of retribution. And his last name is Gerber. A check by Toni confirms that Leander’s great-grandfather was Leon Berger.

About to be exposed, Leander binds Rosi and tapes her mouth shut. She frees herself and warns Toni. Leander confesses, leaving Rosi grappling to understand how the man she loved was also a murderer. But then, she realizes that the Holocaust trauma that possessed him made him as much a victim as Grimmendorf’s Jews were, as well as those who died by his hand. In the end, the village comes to terms with its Nazi past with a monument to the Jewish victims erected in the main square. It bears their names and an inscription by its Jewish sculptor. It reads “.חטאי אבותינו אינם חטאנ.. החטא הוא הכחשתם” — “The Sins of our Fathers are not our sins. Denying them are.”