In September, 1944, near the village of Hortiati in Macedonian Greece
the death of a German soldier in an ambush by a guerrilla unit brought
on a Wehrmacht retaliation that resulted in the massacre of one hundred
and forty-six villagers, sixty-nine of whom were burned to death in the
sealed village bakery, and the total destruction of the village. In this
fictionalized account of the atrocity, an American journalist seeking to
explore whether a now-prominent Austrian statesman played any part in
what happened, records the testimony of five witnesses to the act: two
villagers and three Wehrmacht officers.
Edmund Keeley is well-known as both a novelist and as a translator.
He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.