Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  The city was huddling in the deep craters of its mutilated streets, but within its bowels, a spine-chilling drama was being played out by the most sundry ensembles. The local Czech players included prisoners who had streamed out of the gates of Kounic College, having survived interrogations by the Gestapo, and mothers with their children who, as Gerta witnessed, in an onslaught of euphoria threw themselves at the legions of haggard and exhausted foreign soldiers, who with hungry eyes kept on demanding more slivovitz. Also participating were the self-important men who were busy organizing the Revolutionary Guard and the National Committees, and finally the youths running wild through the streets, wearing helmets far too big for their small heads and with hands full of found shells and unexploded grenades. Then there were the local German players, the ranks of enfeebled women and their children bending over the rubble for whom the bell had begun to toll, as it had for their husbands and fathers. The few German men who still remained were taken outside of the city and interned in camps, where it was said they were worked to the bone in retaliation. And then there were the Red Army soldiers and the Romanians, those who hadn’t followed Schörner’s army on to Prague. They, too, had a part to play. Meanwhile, solo parts were divvied up among those who had returned from forced labor or concentration camps, as well as among opportunists and fortune seekers who picked through any leftover German property, people with no history who were just passing through the city on their quest for new horizons.

  The city was regrouping, reorganizing itself. Occupied apartments were being vacated; vacant apartments were being occupied; new jails were cropping up on its outskirts. Brno floundered in the postwar chaos, transforming day by day. The city no longer belonged to its inhabitants, accustomed to straddling its Czech-German feuds and rivalries; every day it was becoming more foreign.

  XVII

  May 12 found Gerta standing at the edge of a crowd. She had positioned herself at the corner, right under the Church of St. Michael’s baroque statues that looked down on her from the edge of its terrace platform—St. Paul seemingly with compassion, his head bowed, a book tightly clasped to his breast. She leaned sideways against the flaking masonry. In the midst of this large gathering, she felt lightheaded; perhaps she shouldn’t even have come.

  But she couldn’t allow herself to miss the opportunity to find out what lay in store and what was to happen next. She hadn’t been able to resist, so she’d set out on her own, not wanting to rely on reports skewed ten different ways from neighbors, at least those who for now were still talking to her. She wanted to hear it for herself.

  She stood, periodically switching Barbora over from her right arm to her left, shifting the weight of her body away from the wall and in toward the street. She studied the sidewalk beneath her feet up to where it disappeared under the heels of the densely packed, restless crowd. It was mostly broken up into bits, and any paving cubes that remained had been loosened. Full of gaps, like drum notes, her mother would have said.

  Gerta was frightened. Extremely frightened. The fear sat deep inside her chest, resembling a spider with eight legs spread into every part of her body. The heavy, massive, broad body of this creature swelled inside her chest, against which from the outside she pressed Barbora, whose little head bobbed back and forth, again and again, in time to her rocking.

  She knew she was violating the decree issued the day before and that failure to comply had been declared punishable by death. The only Germans now allowed to stay in their apartments were infirm old women, and even they were forbidden on pain of death to look out of their windows. Forbidden to look out of their windows! Outrageous. What would they do with her for violating the decree and attending the rally on the Rathausplatz?

  If someone recognized her, if they swarmed around her and dragged her off to the Revolutionary Guard, those burly men sporting the big, red letters RG on their shirtsleeves, it would all be over. She would disappear, as had so many others from her neighborhood over the past month. The situation had affected everyone; not a single person remained who hadn’t lost an acquaintance or a family member. In the best-case scenario, they found out where the abducted person had been dragged off to. Worst case, one day the person simply didn’t return from their rubble-clearing work and disappeared without a trace. Among the Germans Gerta knew, fear ruled, and each new regulation was treated with reverence.

  The previous day, for the personal safety of President Edvard Beneš, the authorities had decided that all Brno Germans would be removed and placed outside the city limits. No one dared to protest this new decree. Nor did they protest when their apartments were cleared out, nor when they were assigned to labor for which they weren’t paid a crown or given an extra crumb of food. No one dared to complain; everyone just waited. What would this retribution, about which Beneš had spoken from his London exile, look like, a retribution to be sealed in blood and imposed in the near future? For this reason, no one resisted, and word came uneasily through the grapevine to comply with the orders of the decree. Word had reached Gerta as well, but she decided not to remove herself to any camp.

  If old women were allowed to stay at home, then why couldn’t Gerta also manage to go undetected and stay in the city so that she could hear what was being planned? After all, she, too, was Czech, through her own free will but above all through her mother, and she carried her birth certificate with her at all times as proof. Besides, during the war, she hadn’t begged anyone to stamp her food ration coupons with the letter D.

  She only feared those who might recognize her, identify her as Gerta Schnirch. Those who would take satisfaction in seeing the daughter of Friedrich Schnirch—who had managed to make plenty of enemies in the northern part of Brno—being led away by the Revolutionary Guard, or getting beaten up and having her child taken away. That thought gave Gerta pause. What if they took Barbora away from her? What if they beat her up and dragged her off and left Barbora lying someplace on the street, someplace where no one would notice her? What if no one fed her because she was the child of a half-German mother? What then? She would go out of her mind, that much she knew.

  Still, she took the risk. She had to know what was coming, what the future held for her and for Barbora, as both Czechs and Germans. Nothing would happen, she reassured herself, and on the afternoon of May 12, she put on the best dress she could find, picked up Barbora, and walked slowly toward the Rathausplatz. In her pocket, she carried her father’s old glasses and the scarf her mother used to wear to church on Sundays, hoping this way no one would recognize her, even if they were walking right beside her. Besides, she had Barbora, about whose existence barely anyone knew. She would be Gerta’s protective shield.

  So at five o’clock, Gerta was standing beneath the edge of the terrace surrounding St. Michael’s Church in a crowd buzzing with excitement, waiting for President Beneš to step out onto the balcony of the Neues Rathaus, now known once again by its Czech name, the Nová Radnice, or New Town Hall. Then the doors opened, and the crowd’s murmur swelled into an aroused clamor with the occasional victory whoop or shout of good luck thrown in.

  XVIII

  On that next-to-last evening of May, Gerta came home after a grueling day of work and sensed that something was brewing. All this time she had been waiting, and suddenly now, on this day, the city abuzz with whispers, guards loitering on every street corner, policemen patrolling up and down Bratislavská Street in pairs, everything seemed to indicate that something was imminent. Now the predictions of the frightened neighbors would come to fruition; now the worst fears harbored by all those who wore a white armband with a large black N for Němec, the Czech word for German, would burst through the floodgates. They had been suspended in the air, taking on contours with each new account of yet another neighbor, or friend of a friend, gone missing, each newly reported suicide, each successive execution.

  Gerta had been expecting it any day, ever since that late afternoon on May 12, when she had returned home terrified by the rally at which Beneš deliver
ed his rousing speech. What a fool. He had turned that mass of ordinary people into servile dogs, those petty officials, workers, shopkeepers, those frightened little people, who all through the war had striven to maintain civil relations with the Germans. She had observed it hundreds of times, and hundreds of times had felt ashamed for those neighbors, and even the strangers, who had come around subserviently in the evenings to seek out her father. And who among them was now being viewed as a collaborator? Not a single one. They were all just Czechs, pure and simple Czechs, who had suffered under the yoke of occupation. And that some of them had grown fat as maggots under that yoke, that they had gotten their hands on handsome properties, acquired what otherwise they would never have been able to acquire, that was of no interest to anyone.

  It would have been of no interest to Gerta either, as she was all for live and let live, except now the riled-up mob had it in for her and for Barbora. Her father? Fine, let him reap his just deserts for what he had helped to cook up, wherever he might be, even if that was Kounic College, as the caretaker had relayed to her when her father hadn’t come home after that first night following liberation. Let her brother pay his dues as well; both of them deserved it. But this? Such fervid zeal? Germans out? All Germans? With this Gerta did not agree.

  At home, she locked herself in the kitchen and was just getting ready to warm up Barbora’s bottle of milk, when she heard the thud of heavy boots all over the building, followed by pounding and shouting. Right away she knew it was upon them, the rage that had surged in the breasts of those Czech nationalists on the Rathausplatz, drummed into them by that new revivalist, who, when things had become dicey, had run off to London. Now, someone was knocking on her door, and Gerta knew that Beneš’s threats and promises had caught up with her.

  She opened the door, and there stood the caretaker. He waved a piece of paper right in front of her face. It took Gerta a moment to bring it into focus.

  Decree . . . Germans living in the district of Brno, meaning women and children, further men under fourteen years of age and over sixty, as well as those who are invalids or infirm, are to be expelled from the city. The aforenamed persons are permitted to take with them only what they can carry, with the exception of jewelry or savings books . . . effective on this day, May 30, 1945, at 9:00 p.m.

  She read no farther. The caretaker’s hand holding the paper went limp, and for a moment he stood there, awkwardly staring into Gerta’s wide-open eyes. His jaw slackened as if he were about to utter a long ahhhh, but then he just said in a hoarse voice, “There’s no other way.” He turned on his heel and sped down the stairs without looking back.

  Gerta slowly shut the door, leaned back against it, and slumped to the floor. Before a single sob could escape her throat, she heard Barbora’s loud cries echoing through the apartment. She ignored them. Through her mind there again flashed the words that two weeks earlier had flown down from the balcony of the New Town Hall to a tumultuous crowd, the same ones that one day later, in the silence of her kitchen, Beneš shouted at her from the newspaper she had bought. Printed there was his entire speech, which on that stifling afternoon, as she was leaning against the wall of St. Michael’s Church, she hadn’t been able to hear in full, as it was partially delivered behind the closed doors of the assembly room in the New Town Hall, packed with attentive city officials. Now, at this very moment, two weeks after that May 12 rally, his rhetoric had become reality.

  Do you remember how, already in the spring of 1938, Hitler was getting ready for us? Do you remember, starting already in 1934, the actions of Henlein and Frank and their entire party, whose ranks included at least 80 percent of the German people in Czechoslovakia? Do you remember the Nazi hate speeches against us at the Nuremberg Rally in 1938? Do you remember, how on September 26, 1938, Hitler rudely insulted me, calling out to his followers like a town crier and telling them that they had to make a resolute choice between him and me? Do you remember all his wartime speeches, from the fall of Poland to the occupation of Belgium and Holland and France, and the attempted occupation of England, to the attack on Russia, to his declaration that Russia had been decimated, that the Red Army no longer existed, that the Balkans had been surrounded, and that the Caucasus and Africa would be next?

  The crowd had rumbled; here and there, exclamations had rung out; and the buzz had turned into a roar from which curses against Hitler and the Germans rang out on all sides. Beneš had waved his hand dramatically in the air and, full of anger and indignation, had gone on with his speech, knowing full well its ramifications. He had kneaded the crowd below him as if it were made of dough, soft and pliable, ready to be molded.

  And do you remember his wartime speeches, when supposedly he had defeated practically everyone and had crushed all his adversaries, and his raving about how the Third Reich would last through the next millennium? Do you remember the crude threats made against our nation over seven long years, the gruesome marauding, the infamous Petschek Palace headquarters, the Gestapo jails and torture chambers, the concentration camps, the annihilation of Lidice and Ležáky, and all the massacres and executions?

  Gerta remembered leaning back against the wall of St. Michael’s Church as if suddenly she needed a sturdier support to help her bear what was to come. The harsh words kept coming, landing with precision in the fertile soil of memories that were still fresh. And real. Somehow everyone had known; even Gerta had heard rumors, but they were always said to be grossly exaggerated. People, after all, had seen with their own eyes the Jews making their way to the assembly points and waiting to be taken away, whole families. And everyone had also seen those who couldn’t wait for them to be gone, circling them and calling them Jewish swine. And Gerta had even seen small boys chasing after people wearing a yellow star, pulling on their suitcases, trying to trip them, pummeling them. That was before the Jews had disappeared completely, from the streets, from the shops, and from the cafés. Had it just been a matter of moving them east and their needing to wait in camps playing soccer all day, as she’d once seen in a newsreel at the cinema, they probably wouldn’t have worn such expressions on their faces. And Anička Goldová wouldn’t have felt the need to jump out of the window, unless someone truly had helped her. At least, that was what was rumored later, but who knew what really happened. Yet having listened to Beneš, she thought that it most likely had been suicide after all, even though she was reluctant to believe everything that emigrant with his mopey wife, Hana, at his side was saying.

  And the daily dismantling of our culture, our schools, our national pride, the daily insults against our people, the way they kicked us and spat at us with their talk of the enlightened Herrenvolk, the master race!

  The crowd had roared.

  Those were words no one ever wanted to hear again. Enlightened Herrenvolk, Superman, Aryan. Gerta felt a peculiar tingling in the very pit of her stomach at the sound of them. She remembered her father repeating them like a mantra.

  Gerta recalled the people around her seething with genuine rage. She could relate to them, to their raised fists and incensed voices. She, too, was one of them, one of the outraged, one of the vengeful, one of those who wanted retribution for all those long-suffered humiliations, countless concessions, and irreparable losses. The loss of her mother. Even Gerta wanted to condemn the past that she had in common with the crowd around her, and in so doing indict both her father and Friedrich, see them both put in a pillory, and with them all the Herrenvolk and the racial purity they stood for.

  The arms raised over the heads of the people in front of her looked like porcupine quills, swaying menacingly in all directions and threatening to stab. She, too, would have raised her arm over her head if she hadn’t needed to keep on rocking Barbora who had started to cry, frightened by the commotion. She pulled the corner of the blanket into which she had swaddled her over her little head and placed her hand protectively on top of it. She tried to quiet her by jiggling her on her hip, but not even she believed it would help to soothe her. Not wh
en Gerta’s own heart was pounding like mad. It was racing, spurred on by the hatred that was pouring from the balcony where President Beneš stood with his wife. For Mother, for Mother, throbbed inside Gerta’s breast as the shouting around her grew louder.

  But now the Nazi war is over! Up to the very last minute, it drove the German people into a fanatical battle, and these people willingly went along. What seems unthinkable truly happened: The German people threw themselves into bloody murder as if they were deaf and blind. They didn’t resist; they didn’t think; they didn’t stop—they went on, either fanatically or unthinkingly, butchering and allowing themselves to be butchered. Over the course of this war, that nation ceased to be human, and ceased to be tolerable to humanity. Today it appears to us as a human monster. And for that, the nation must be forcefully and harshly punished!

  The crowd went wild.

  “Now we’ll get right to work,” shouted Beneš from the balcony, “and we’ll restore order among ourselves, especially here in the city of Brno, among the Germans and among everyone else. My plan is—and I make no secret of it—regarding the German question in our Republic, it must be liquidated.”

  Shouting erupted in the square, and the crowd began to chant.

  “Death to the Germans, death to the Germans!” rang out on all sides.

  “Liquidate!”

  “Punish the Germans!”

  “Death to the Germans!”

  “Germans out! Raus!”