Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  “It has to stop,” he declared sternly one evening after dinner, having folded his napkin and placed it on the table.

  All the blood seemed to have drained from Freddy’s veins. He shot a glance at Gerta, who sat rigid and stunned, and then at her, his own mother, as if she were a spy and a traitor. That was the moment she lost him for good.

  But Gerta stuck by her. It had been her own decision not to renounce the Czech language; she, Barbora, never would have dreamed of forcing her. Gerta made her decision because she loved the language; it was what they spoke at school, and it was what her friend Janinka spoke, she who barely spoke at all. She made her decision with the recklessness of a child and let all of Friedrich’s commands go out of her head. How often had he brought her home in tears, having caught her on the corner whooping happily in Czech with some of her girlfriends? Barbora tried to convince him not to be so hard on Gerta, but he didn’t let up. In their household, ridicule and contempt for all things Czech became the norm. If a Czech, then a flunky; the Czechs were a nation of sissies, easily bought off. They had no honor. He said this, looking straight into her eyes, the eyes of his wife, and she didn’t say a word. Not even on those nights when he ordered her out of their bedroom. She said nothing, just took her quilt to the couch in the kitchen. Stared at the ceiling for a long time, unable to sleep, wondering where the gentleness with which they used to hold each other through the night had gone. Those loving, tender caresses with which he used to take her body, where had they disappeared? What remained were sullen, gruff gestures with which he would grab her for a moment, and then, as if ashamed of his weakness, would move away to the farthest edge of the bed and turn his back on her in silence. Barbora didn’t understand. All she understood was that she mustn’t cry, because even silent sobbing would infuriate him so much that he would order her into the kitchen again.

  About the pain in her chest, which appeared out of the blue toward the end of November, she said nothing to anyone. As it was, she had heard enough about how weak, lazy, and good at lying the Czechs were, and besides, she didn’t want to worry Gerta. Coming home from school these days, she seemed different, somehow more grown up. It’s the age, Barbora thought, contemplating her daughter who had suddenly transformed from a child into a young woman. Could she be in love?

  Who would have anticipated how quickly she would grow so weak? She, the youngest child born to a farmer from Moutnice married to the daughter of an old Austrian tenant-farming family, whose dowry had been stamina and strength. But it overpowered her, nonetheless.

  Yet maybe it wasn’t just the pain that had settled in her chest. Maybe it was also that her love of life was evaporating like air seeping out of a carnival balloon. She knew she should make an effort, that she should rally and find the will to live again. But for whom, other than for Gerta, who stayed beside her, devoted, vigilant, hugging her burning, sweat-soaked body? Like this she had only one other desire—to sleep untroubled by thoughts of the present or future.

  Never would she be able to apologize enough to her daughter for abandoning her, for cutting short her adolescence, for hurling her into real life. No amount of regret would ever suffice. But going on had become simply impossible.

  VII

  It happened a few months after her mother’s funeral. As if her death had brought devastation down on the whole family. The embrace that had held everyone in their household together had fallen away. They scattered, and silence settled into the apartment. What remained of their family life was a deliberate passing of each other through the vacant rooms and scraps of paper with orders that her father started leaving for her. And one day, a draft notice appeared beside them.

  First her mother, she thought, and now Friedrich. Freddy, the family’s prize stallion, apple of his father’s eye, the boast of his German blood. Hitler Youth squad leader, standard bearer, the most dashing Turner in the city of Brno.

  For her father, it was a terrible blow. His own Friedrich, whose career path he had been paving, toiling to secure a better place for his own blood at the banquet feast, all for nothing, as now even his Friedrich was being sent to the front. Hell, he should be there already, Gerta thought to herself after she got home from school that afternoon and was tucking Friedrich’s draft notice behind the cupboard glass.

  A few days later, she watched her father firmly set his jaw and jut his chin forward, determined to take this civic obligation like a man and to be proud of this calamity. It was, after all, an honor.

  “It’s your duty, boy,” he said through clenched teeth on March 23, 1943, the day Freddy reported for duty at the German House on Adolf-Hitler-Platz, the day they had to say goodbye to him.

  How had her father so far managed to grease all the right palms without ever missing the mark? Gerta wondered. What had happened? Why was twenty-year-old Friedrich, up to now a seemingly indispensable minor clerical worker, suddenly being called to the front? Could it be that all those SS men from Stuttgart and Vienna, for whom her father, at Schwabe’s orders, had obligingly danced, were by now too comfortably settled in their posh villas in the Černá Pole neighborhood? Were there no more wishes left to fulfill? Was no one lacking for anything? Or had someone wanted to take revenge, someone from under whose nose he might have snatched a coveted apartment vacated by persons who had been displaced, or had he perhaps displaced the wrong families? Gerta was aware of how her father and brother took advantage of their official posts. By the fourth year of the war, it was obvious to Gerta why they were never lacking for meal tickets, sugar, or meat. During those evenings in the kitchen when they tried to keep her out of their discussions, they were wrong in thinking that Gerta was either hard of hearing or couldn’t understand anything. She knew as much as they did about those nets of theirs, which they would cast randomly over whomever they pleased, reallocating apartments belonging to families that had not yet been displaced and trafficking in their belongings. Human traffickers, scavengers, she thought to herself as she listened to the insatiable urgency with which they bartered people who were still passing them in the street, shopping at the same grocery store, going to the same movie theater. But from the moment Friedrich was drafted, her father was left alone to his double-dealing. Gerta felt not even a shred of pity. On the contrary, she found herself feeling a wicked glee. As he did unto Mother, so may God do unto him, she said to herself.

  From the window, she watched them—her father and his son, her father and her brother—as they left the building on March 23, and never shed a tear. She felt nothing. Had it been Karel’s back she was watching instead of theirs, she would have felt something. Or Janinka’s, had she been sent away to one of the labor camps in the Reich. But everything else left her feeling empty. Even the question as to when the war would end, which was on everybody’s lips. And who would be the victor, now that Hitler had set out for Russia? For Gerta, it all went in one ear and out the other. She had been indifferent before and was indifferent even now, since her mother had died. And she was indifferent when it came to the future, even though her brother was now in the war. She felt no fear for him. She feared only the loneliness that was about to close in on her and keep her inside the apartment alone with her father and his pedantic ways, harsh commands, and uncompromising rules.

  She stood by the window that March morning in the middle of a war with no end in sight, four months after she had buried her mother and mere minutes since her brother had gone. In that moment, she still had no idea how radically her life was about to change. Had anyone told her that her father would make her join the German Winter Relief Program, most likely she would have laughed out loud. But back then, there were still an untold number of things that she, Gerta Schnirch, faithful to the Czech legacy of Barbora Ručková, never could have imagined, not even in a nightmare.

  VIII

  A few weeks after Friedrich’s departure, Gerta stopped showing up at the League of German Girls. She couldn’t stand that stifling heroic feeling to which she couldn’t relate. And Anne-M
arie was insufferable.

  Papa Oskar Judex, at his daughter’s request, had ordered a giant map of Europe to be put up on the clubhouse wall, with movable pushpin flags to indicate the front lines and tiny German flags to mark the major cities that had already come under the Reich’s control. Each week, these would be adjusted by an Ordner who would accompany Anne-Marie and her driver to the Handelsakademie and make sure that they were kept up to date. All the girls would reverentially listen to Anne-Marie, tears in her eyes, as she used a pointer, its tip hovering over the region of Volhynia, from where Friedrich’s first letters had begun to arrive.

  Very soon it became practically fashionable to have someone at the front. Anne-Marie basked in the aura of Gerta’s brother, a crusader for their future, and with a suffering expression would drape her arm around Gerta’s shoulders and lay her head against Gerta’s in a display of commiseration of grief that not even Adina Mandlová could have portrayed more convincingly. At the same time, in the Brünner Tagblatt daily newspaper, there were always photographs of the Regierungskommissar surrounded by his family at festive gatherings in which there was invariably a tall and handsome SS officer standing at Anne-Marie’s side.

  Gerta could do without having to listen as letters from her brother or from some of the other girls’ relatives were read aloud. She wasn’t interested in being part of the Nordic Heroes fan club or in cheering every time a little red flag on the map moved. Instead of attending the League’s assemblies, she took refuge in the art studio. She didn’t even need to make up excuses. The zeal with which her father had initially overseen her pro-German activities had long since dissipated. Occasionally he would ask her where she’d been, and Gerta would say that she and some of the other girls had been in the studio, which sometimes, when the League assemblies would take place during art period, was even true. Then she would quickly turn the conversation to the map in the clubhouse on which they were trying to keep track of Friedrich’s footsteps, and that was all she needed to do. Her father would immediately be overcome by a surge of pride and concern that would occupy him for the remainder of the brief moment of interaction with his daughter.

  During this period, Gerta was happiest when she was working with clay. She delighted in its consistency, pliable as plasticine, its slickness in her wet hands, the way it would slip between her fingers, gradually growing warm under the intensity of her touch. It would become more and more malleable, until it allowed itself to be shaped into forms. At first simple ones, based on prototypes Frau Wirkt would give them to copy, then eventually more complex ones, and finally a bust, in which she struggled to capture her mother’s likeness. Was it possible that she had already forgotten the details of her features?

  When everyone was gathered in the studio with the Führerin, Gerta found that she couldn’t concentrate. She would toss the clay from one hand to the other, pull on it and squeeze it into a ball while listening to fantastic visions about the future of the Reich. Back then, the girls were still trying to outdo one another in their praise for the nation, cheering upon hearing the names of new cities through which the front line had passed on its way to Russia and expressing concern when the colorful flags on the map moved backward toward the west. Forward and backward, it was like a game that was running them ragged. Indoctrinated at home with blind faith in the Führer’s genius and in his mysterious secret weapon, they speculated about Hitler’s strategies and dreamed up various scenarios.

  “Girls, listen up . . . Hush, listen, here’s what I know.”

  “The entire German race has joined forces . . . There’s only one way it can end—within a month, Moscow will belong to us!”

  Or:

  “Endsieg, final victory, we’re almost there! Moscow is practically ours, and the Führer is sending them on to Stalingrad!”

  Or:

  “I heard the business in Kharkov was a ruse, that at first they retreated, then doubled back and attacked with renewed force, and in the end, those Stalinists lost a million men! A million! Now, that’s a massive blow!”

  And then also:

  “Have you heard, Goebbels wants to divorce Magda? For Lída Baarová . . . Yes, seriously!”

  Or:

  “Did you know that in the Caucasus Mountains, there are Jewish tribes that kill every firstborn child and drink its blood?”

  There were more and more such stories going around, implausible, surreal, and always ending with the girls exclaiming the same surefire victory: “Whatever happens, in the end, victory will be ours!” Apparently, Gerta was the only one looking on with any consternation as the little red flags inched back westward. The other girls would all cluster around a different point on the map and would whisper conspiratorially about confusing the enemy, about the Wehrmacht finally proving itself, that this was no retreat, but just a shift from offense to defense, just like Goebbels said, and they would go on to discuss next steps, tactics 100 percent guaranteed to succeed. They grew increasingly frenzied, and their language escalated. What had started out as a quest to liberate the racially pure German people and provide them with Lebensraum, living space, had turned into a battle against Jewish Bolshevism and forced de-Germanization. The Wunderwaffen—miracle weapons—that were supposed to rescue besieged German folk living outside the Reich’s borders turned into Vergeltungswaffen—weapons of retribution; targeted Blitzkrieg warfare turned into totalen Krieg, all-out war. The level of agitation was steadily rising.

  Meanwhile, Gerta’s father was coming home more and more seldom, and often he was drunk, perhaps because Friedrich had virtually stopped writing. When he did write, his letters were terse and spoke only of retreats or the fight for a particular city somewhere in Volhynia.

  Everything was in a terrible state of turmoil. The wheels of war had been set in motion; they were gaining speed and spinning at full tilt. For Gerta, it was unfathomable, as if they were moving simultaneously in every direction, yet hurtling inexorably from one major event to the next: Moscow; Kharkov; forward and backward, then forward again; Stalingrad; the offensive in the Ardennes; Normandy; backward and then again forward. The wheels were turning somewhere far away, in other countries, on foreign soil, but the groaning axles and popping bolts, their threads worn out, could be heard all the way back to her street in Brno.

  What was even more puzzling to her was that Karel seemed to be living in the same state of heightened excitement and zeal as the League girls from the Handelsakademie. A state of excitement in which he talked to her long into afternoons that spilled into days, during which her excitement kept pace with his, even though they stood on opposite sides of the barricades.

  “To stal’n’selth,” he wished her in the entrance door to their building on New Year’s Day.

  When she asked him what sort of gibberish that was, he gave an impish smile.

  “To Stalin’s health, huh?” he repeated, shaking his head at her slowness.

  She hated that. At such moments, he reminded her of her father when he had tried to indoctrinate her with the proper worldview. Suddenly, he was shouting out similar slogans, and then, during the final days of January 1944, he changed completely. He became exuberantly optimistic, spent much less time with her, was up to his eyeballs in work but couldn’t talk to Gerta about any part of it, and finally it was she who found that she could no longer talk to him. Everything snowballed, grew bigger, swelled, and finally burst, and Karel disappeared, perhaps to avoid being deployed, but most likely because of her. The wheels were in motion, spinning, spewing gravel and grit, and then one day, before too much longer, they came to a grinding halt.

  IX

  Catastrophe hung in the air. The lack of success was visible not only on her increasingly stooped father, but even on the faces of the people in the streets. Gerta walked alongside them like an automaton, unable to break out of the orderly ranks that carried her along, until she found herself standing in the collection center at the German House, where they hung a money box around her neck and sent her and Ulrika Kö
hnerová into the streets. Ulrika was a true Aryan. Blonde and well built, and above all she radiated enthusiasm. What did they call it? Being active and engaged. She was typically the one to collect the lion’s share of what went into the Winterhilfswerk kitty for the German Winter Relief fund. Her father sat on the executive board of the arms factory, and her mother was the chair of the Brno branch of the Nationalsozialistiche Frauenschaft, the National Socialist Women’s League.