Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  It was hard to say what he imagined might come of it, being the son of a mere clerk in the Oberlandrat office, but that was no longer Gerta’s concern. Maybe he thought of himself as a Teutonic demigod—after all, he had looked like one in that procession of Turners, a chosen one not obliged to deny himself anything. Maybe he sensed a way to advance himself toward more-important responsibilities and a position beyond a career in administration or the Wehrmacht, although he had been genuinely looking forward to that. To Gerta, it was all the same.

  She existed in her own insulated world. Had the arguments at home not started and had she not met Anne-Marie—such irrefutable proof that the Reich was real—she might have remained deaf and blind to it all, hiding out on the secluded banks of the Svitava River with Janinka until the very last day of liberation. By then, she would have welcomed her looting neighbors escorted by the Red Army, oblivious to the fact that she was now one of the guilty. And the defeated. But she had met Anne-Marie Judex, and from there, it was just one more step to Oskar Judex and the red banners with swastikas on a white background, streaming down from both sides of the New Town Hall balcony.

  V

  Oskar Judex knew it in advance. Throughout the eve of the declaration of the Protectorate, he had been waiting, so that at three o’clock the next morning, immediately upon receiving the order by telephone, he and a squad of Ordners took over the municipal administrative office in the New Town Hall, where he promptly pronounced himself chief commissioner of the city. Meanwhile, Karl Schwabe, his colleague from the NSDAP—that is, Nazi Party—leadership, occupied the police headquarters on Palacký Street and, under the protection of the Fifth Army and General List, took over the office of the commissioner of police. On the morning of March 15, 1939, the residents of Brno, without even realizing it, woke up to a different city. As did the hapless Dr. Rudolf Spazier, the First Republic mayor of Brno, who that morning, arriving at work as usual, discovered upon reaching the door to his office that he was to be escorted inside by two armed Ordners. Seated in the upholstered visitor’s chair opposite his usual place, in which Judex, seven years his junior, arrogantly sprawled, sporting a fashionable toothbrush mustache on his round, fleshy face, the mayor was informed that on this day the city council as well as the municipal government had been dissolved and were henceforth forbidden to congregate, that all offices had been taken over by trustworthy employees who were NSDAP members, and that it would behoove him, Spazier, to go on furlough, before it was officially announced that the newly appointed chief administrator of the city was Oskar Judex.

  “And if you haven’t listened to the radio yet today, allow me to inform you that Czechoslovakia is now history and, as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, has been incorporated into the Third Reich. I accept your congratulations. Heil Hitler!”

  The two Ordners tapped Spazier on the shoulder and escorted him out of the building. Spazier made his way to the Czech Besední dům, where over the course of the day, other city officials who had been dismissed from their posts were gathering. Once he finally pulled himself together, he decided that he would refuse to acknowledge Judex as mayor and returned to the town hall, to which he continued to go regularly for another week. After that week, however, as a warning to others, Judex had him removed to Palacký Street just as the headquarters of that building were swarming with hundreds of Gestapo officials in black SS uniforms, who had been transferred over from Vienna and Stuttgart. These days, no one had time to worry about the fate of the former mayor. Brno was changing its colors. Buildings were being taken over, and signs were going up on street corners, calling for calm and order, and warning against any attempts to resist the course of events. Streets were redirected, and amid the confusion, cars drove the wrong way, on the right side. Over the next few weeks, this cost many pedestrians their lives, and that was just in Brno.

  But order was order. As an old patriot with an understanding of order, Spazier refused to accept the revocation of his post without confirmation by the city council and the municipal government, let alone when it came from someone who had appointed himself to the position. In the end, though, on September 1, 1939, during the first wave of arrests, he was dragged out of bed before dawn, taken to the casemate prison at Špilberk Castle, sent from there to the concentration camp in Dachau, and from there directly to Buchenwald. And Judex had peace.

  During the first days of the occupation, Judex officially accepted the position of Regierungskommissar, government commissioner, as well as personal congratulations from Hitler, who was passing through the city and chose to show himself to his people on the balcony of the New Town Hall, the Neues Rathaus, from where he blared his unforgettable speech to a cheering crowd of Brno Germans, ecstatic to be Heim ins Reich, “home” again.

  On that occasion, Anne-Marie with her mother and siblings had stood in the room behind the balcony, looking out at the backs of the great Führer and her father, who stood proudly at his side, newly in charge of the city, which now belonged to them. Hitler then paid a gallant compliment to her beauty and to her mother’s beauty, congratulated Papa Judex, this time not on his superbly executed takeover of the city of Brno but on his lovely family, sure to become a pillar of the Reich, and took off for Vienna.

  Judex, bolstered by the confidence of the Great One, went to work with gusto. He wanted to leave a mark on the history of his hometown. An indelible one. He broke ground to complete what was left unfinished of the Ringstraße, the section from Horst-Wessel-Straße, Husová Street, and the Stadthofplatz down to the train station, thus creating a complete circular boulevard, a project the Czech municipal government had been planning for years but never managed to realize. For Judex and the new city council, it was a convenient development, mostly because it allowed for their National Socialist parades to be carried out in an even more grandiose manner, circling the entire city. He put in a tram line on Französische Straße, connecting the center of the city to the fashionable Černá Pole residential district, and had a second line put in that went all the way to the suburb of Líšeň. All the roads under Petrov Hill were paved, new buildings were designed, and old ones renovated, until finally, in June 1941, a law banning all construction of nonmilitary buildings went into effect. He determined that this thwarted his plans and was detrimental to the city, so he carried on undeterred. Brno was to become the cultural center of the Protectorate, destined one day to surpass even the nearby metropolis of Vienna. Soon people would be talking about visiting Brno and only afterward Vienna. The glorious Brno Deutsches Haus, the Petersdom cathedral, Spielberg castle, a lecture at the university, and a performance in the concert hall of the German Theater on Richard-Wagner-Platz would belong on every itinerary. Such were Judex’s goals, and to ensure he could go on to achieve them undisturbed, he ordered some three hundred cultural and political public officials imprisoned, thereby giving the Brno Gestapo its first major assignment. Once the Czech universities were shut down, the Gestapo took over two university buildings, Kounic College and Sušil Dormitory, from which emerged confused students with half-packed personal belongings, those who hadn’t yet been arrested on the spot, interned, and sent directly to Dachau. The German Technical University was expanding, and the troublesome Czechs were being eliminated just in time. And as if that weren’t enough, the Gestapo had seized even the new law school building at the end of Eichhorner Straße, or Veveří Street, where they were now holding their assemblies in the hall facing the wall where, before the war, there had hung a monumental painting by Antonín Procházka depicting Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, now rolled up and hidden in some basement by Czech patriots. And it was toward this wall that they now pointed the fingertips of their rigidly extended arms, raised in a thunderous Heil Hitler! delivered with such conviction, it seemed as if they were saluting Hitler himself, Hitler-Prometheus, Hitler the hero, who had brought them fire.

  Yet how could Gerta, when she announced at home that her new classmate was Anne-Marie Judex, have known all that? He
r mother had blinked in alarm but continued her work at the kitchen table, where Gerta was helping her glaze with honey the delicate angel-wing pastries they were making for Friedrich’s birthday. Friedrich had just shrugged his shoulders, and her father had murmured, “Sehr gut,” immediately adding a satisfied, “He’s doing a good job, the Regierungskommissar.” Then he meaningfully raised his eyebrows, continued what he was doing, and with that, the subject was closed. The only thing that had changed since then was that the air in their household was now tinged with the fragrance of Anne-Marie’s French perfume, which came off not only Gerta’s clothes but also Friedrich’s.

  It was only several years later that Judex turned Brno into a city of war, marching in precise step under a baton of terror, where one could detect the odor of resistance fighters and saboteurs, cooking up their kitchen-table plots and sweating in fear, alongside the smell of money being raked in by the munitions industry and by the factories supplying the Wehrmacht. And that was just one of the reasons why some people hated Judex while others praised him, although this didn’t strike Gerta as in any way unusual. After all, it had always been like that; what pleased some people displeased others. And in the end, people said it was thanks to Judex that during the war, the city had fared so well. That it didn’t end up like Frankfurt or Dresden.

  As the industrial center of the Protectorate, it could have fared much worse. The munitions industries, rubber plants, engine factories, and textile mills that were spread out all over the city easily could have invited destruction, which not even the historical center could have withstood, had Judex, at the very last minute, with the front lines just a few kilometers south of Brno, not ordered the dissolution of the statutory law for the city’s defense. Fortification efforts were aborted. The city was declared open, and the Red Army poured in through the broad access roads that were now being defended only by the local People’s Militia.

  Both the Regierungskommissar, Oskar Judex, and the vice president of the Provincial Council, Karl Schwabe, were by then already bringing up the rear of the first wave of fugitives fleeing west. Their cars were piled high with Brno’s insignias and treasures, including Rubens’s painting The Head of Medusa, which Judex had ordered to be removed from the exhibition hall of the Moravian Gallery and had personally confiscated, so that for the duration of the war, it hung in his town hall office. They were fleeing toward Jihlava. Judex drove off in his car, closely behind an automobile laden with his personal effects, where on the seat beside the driver, wearing a silver fox fur coat, huddled the corpulent, racially pure birth mother, the fair Gabrielle Judex, and behind her Anne-Marie, her sister, Eugenie, and little Otto-Adolf, the youngest. Judex could have decided to allow the city to be torn up by the Russian swine, as he liked to say in certain settings, such as among the men in the SS units up at Špilberk Castle. Between the Wehrmacht soldiers and the armed militia, there were still enough German defenses in the streets of Brno that a clash with the Red Army could have left the city in ruins. He also could have allowed it to be flooded by the Moravian Sea, the waters of the Brno Dam Lake, but unlike SS Hauptmannführer Römer, under whose authority it also could have fallen, the order to blow up the dam above the city was one he didn’t give. In spite of his ruined career, he took off without any feelings of animosity and left the city to its fate, which at that moment didn’t seem to be particularly tragic. Perhaps he thought that developments at the front would take a different turn and that Hitler’s secret weapon would flush the allied armies out of the southern tips of the Protectorate, where they were trying to break through at any cost, and that someday he might still return. Regarding his return, he wasn’t entirely mistaken. He had about five days before he was recognized in Jihlava, apprehended, and handed over to the Brno people’s court, which on December 2, 1946, sentenced him for life. He was lucky. Schwabe had already been hanged in September 1946, mere hours after a heated trial. With his tongue lolling and his eyes bulging from their sockets, he had soiled his pants just like all those whom he had ordered strung up on the three gallows standing side by side like sisters in the Kounic College courtyard. But luckiest of them all would be their third colleague, with whom they had spent many gaming nights in the Špilberk casemate barracks. On the very last day before the city was taken by the Red Army, the head of the Brno Gestapo, Hugo Römer, still managed to order fourteen Czech civilians to be executed on the shooting range in Medlánky for having willfully damaged the city’s fortifications along the rear lines. At the same time, like Judex and Schwabe, he had packed his suitcases and hightailed it unobserved out of the city and remained unpunished, as he was never found. Judex learned all this only long after receiving his sentence, which granted him eight years to ponder how things had turned out for all his Kameraden, for himself, and for his family, who had been left with nothing but a health certificate issued for the American occupied zone, the few layers of clothing they were wearing, and a tiny Russian fang stuck in Anne-Marie’s womb, because a muzhik from the Caucasus, who had made it as far as the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, didn’t bother to ask first. And after those eight years in the Cejl Street prison, just a few meters away from the new home of Gerta and Barbora Schnirch, on September 11, 1953, he died, feeling like a forgotten hero, accustomed to being smiled upon by the gods who had stood by him throughout his life, on the Russian front during World War I and later during those five years in Siberia, which he had barely survived. And then even back home in Brno, until at the very end, literally the last few minutes, when it would have taken so little for him to drive out of nighttime Jihlava into the American zone, where he could have disappeared into the crowd, those gods had forsaken him.

  VI

  She hadn’t quite figured it out yet; there was still something childlike about her. The concerns she would bring home, the worries on her mind—a few times Gerta’s mother had genuinely had to laugh. She tried to put off Gerta’s clash with reality for as long as she could. She would gather up Friedrich’s newspapers as soon as he set them down on the table and asked that he and Freddy listen to the radio in his room, and not in front of Gerta. For Friedrich, it was a given that he would initiate their son into politics, but not Gerta, because as far as he was concerned, girls and women had no business mixing with politics. So it had been possible to spare Gerta from having to witness the calamity that was spreading through their country. And for this, Barbora was very grateful to him, although his motivation wasn’t love for their daughter, but rather disdain. A woman’s place was elsewhere, as she very well knew.

  He hadn’t always been that way. When she married him, he had been gentle, caring, and extremely chivalrous. She, Barbora Ručková, a farmer’s daughter, never would have questioned the roles of a man and a woman, as she understood perfectly well who had which responsibilities. It was therefore surprising to her when Friedrich tried to help her with everything, accompanying her to go shopping, and even discussing masculine topics with her. He would ask for her opinion on the political situation, and when he returned home from work, he seldom went out again. That was in the early twenties. By the time she gave birth to little Freddy and later Gerta, it was 1925; Friedrich seemed to worship the ground she walked on. Only much later did it dawn on her that the extraordinary level of care that her husband lavished on her had in fact been a ploy to control her completely. Little by little at first, and then after she’d had the children, with increasing rapidity (although they always kept her so busy, there was barely time to notice), she realized more and more that she had slipped into an isolation in which her only contact was with him and with a few of their neighbors in the building. She had never given it much thought, because after all, she’d had such a loving and attentive husband. So when had things begun to shift? Bit by bit, after they started listening to Hitler’s barking speeches on the radio. She disliked them from the start, couldn’t stand that modulation of his, those outbursts of hysterical shouting, at first euphoric and then moments later dark and menacing. It made her ears
ring and her head hurt. But Friedrich, after listening to those speeches, seemed practically transformed. That must have been when it started. Up until then, he had busied himself cultivating the garden of his family, never moving even a step away, and then all at once he fenced it in, put a roof over it, stuck everyone inside as if into a jail, and turned his attention to the garden of mankind, which that histrionic charlatan on the radio promised would be his. Back then, the more Friedrich got involved, the more vertically he rose. Not only professionally, but even physically. Seeing him walk around ramrod straight and with a stuck-up air, she struggled to remember how laid-back he had looked when he used to play volleyball at the public outdoor swimming pool. Could this even be the same person? The one who now, twenty years later, spoke to her only in terse commands, even behind the closed door of their bedroom? But no, she would never dream of challenging him. She was grateful to him for her two beautiful children, her respectable home, her comfortable life. She was grateful to him for her social status, one that, when she had first arrived in Brno, before he took her under his wing, she never could have imagined. She wouldn’t dare to rebel against him, not even for the way he reproached her daily for her Czechness. She wouldn’t dare, but Gerta did. It was, after all, completely natural. Why wouldn’t Gerta want to know why he forbade her to speak in Czech? They had raised both children to be bilingual. The two of them would slip from one language into the other as if it were nothing, in the same way as at least half of all the other children they knew. Wasn’t everyone in Brno also a little bit Viennese? Who in Brno couldn’t at the very least understand both languages? No one. Friedrich spoke to them in German, she in Czech. Until this cursed war changed him so completely. And it changed her too. Now she felt like a maidservant beside him, like some domestic burden that was tolerated but brought shame down on the house of Schnirch. He had succeeded, without much effort, in pulling Freddy away from her. Exactly when had it happened? When had she lost him? Her little boy, who would wrap himself in her skirts and beg for a kiss? When did her son first give her that cold look, as if she were some lowly Czech servant? Maybe even before he started trade school, when he first started attending those Hitler Youth meetings in the evenings. What a handsome Turner he then became. He even made that young Judex girl’s head spin. Several times her car with its uniformed chauffeur had pulled up in front of their house, and all three of them had jumped out—first Gerta, to whom no one paid any attention and who immediately dashed into the building, then the Judex girl, and finally Freddy, who would gallantly kiss her hand. She watched it from the window but said nothing as she set lunch on the table. They’re still just children, she had thought. This soon will pass. But it didn’t. She mentioned it to Friedrich. She might as well have doused him with ice-cold water. He wasn’t about to risk ruining his career because of a little romance his son was having with the daughter of the Regierungskommissar, who had suitors of a different rank in mind for her.