“I’m Czech,” said one of the women, beside whom stood her small daughter, barely ten years old.
Gerta looked over at her in alarm. The other women stood frozen, trembling with fear, what was left of their belongings set down by their feet, waiting to see what would happen next. We’re acting like sheep, thought Gerta, as worn out and exhausted after the night of horror as the others.
The young men looked to be annoyed by this information.
“Which one of you is Czech?”
The woman held up her hand. After her, a few others also timidly raised their hands.
“So what’re you doing here?”
“They took us to a farm just off the road for the night. Some soldiers. Probably Russians. We’re just coming back. We’d like to go back to Brno; we’re here by mistake.”
The one who had asked the question was a short, pudgy youth. His dark eyes scanned from one to the next. It was obviously not easy to get a handle on the situation. Fifty filthy and frightened women with children, flocked together where the main road to Pohořelice intersected a field road, standing like pillars of salt, not trying to run away but not joining the marching column either. A furrow creased his forehead, distorting his eyebrows. By now he was fed up with everything. He hadn’t slept in two nights and a day, just trying to get these damn fascists out of town. And all without taking even one sip of booze, unlike the others, who got drunk on the very first night. What they then did to the women along the way was something he would never be able to forget. Jožka Rejsek tore a screaming kid away from one of them and tossed it into a field like a football. Then he riddled the woman’s back with bullets when she went running after it. They had all been blindingly drunk, and he alone had tried to maintain some control. After all, he was in charge. Better not to dwell on it and let it be a thing of the past. These women looked like they were German. Someone had put them on the march. Why was not his concern. Maybe they were collaborators.
“Collaborators,” declared the dark-haired spokesman for the group, and pointed to the convoy.
One of the women standing behind Gerta got shoved with the butt of a rifle. She yelled out in fright, and the flock of women huddled closer together.
“I don’t give a damn why you’re here. Whether you’re Czech or German. You’re joining the transport, now.”
He gestured to the young men with weapons and then waved at the driver. The vehicle set into motion and veered off the main road to cut across the flattened section of the field, heading straight toward the flock of women. With a frightened yammering, the women grabbed their bags and suitcases. The back row set off, after which the whole group began to move, the young men on either side and the vehicle bringing up the rear. They quickened their step as the vehicle bore down on them. The small children began to cry. As soon as Barbora heard their sobs, she made a face, opened her drooly mouth, and began to cry as well. Red-faced with anger, she wouldn’t settle down, not even when Gerta started to rock her or tried to calm her with hushed words, although her own quivering voice betrayed her. Helga walked like a ghost by her side.
“Move!”
After several hundred yards, they reached the tail end of the straggling column of people, mostly elderly, limping along, supporting one another. A convoy of the most wretched of the wretched, thought Gerta. Privately, she reproached herself for having let herself be talked into going back with the other women to the main road toward Pohořelice. As if every one of them had lost her mind. And actually, Gerta as well, since she had been afraid to remain alone in the fields in the middle of nowhere. Setting off in the opposite direction, all alone, seemed just as dangerous as risking the aim of some Czech kid who was a bad shot. And so she found herself in the middle of this flock of women, among whom were some Czechs and even some Germans who wanted to return to Brno at any cost. It hadn’t occurred to a single one of them that they might still run into the convoy of exiles that continued to stretch on for miles. Altogether how many could there be, if all through the horrific night Gerta and the other women had spent at the farmstead they had continued to flow in an uninterrupted stream along the Pohořelice road?
Gerta trudged on, pushing her carriage in front of her, with Helga convulsively latched on to the handle. They were both silent; even Barbora had quieted down. Gerta jiggled her on her left arm while Helga walked on her right, clutching the dead little boy to her chest. It was the only thing she still carried; she had left her carriage at the farm and with it all her things. It hadn’t helped when Gerta had tried to pick out and hand her some essentials; Helga took nothing with her, and Gerta couldn’t add any more to her own load. From that moment when she had come running over in the night with her dead child, Helga hadn’t said another word. In the morning, she had stayed near Gerta, as if they were somehow connected, but never altered her expression, not even when Gerta was helping to carry out the last of the dead bodies that the soldiers had left behind in the barns. She squatted down on her haunches a short distance away, watching as the remaining others brought out several young girls and grown women who had escaped the night’s horrors by taking their own lives.
Not one of the women they found lying in various places around the farmstead was still alive. They laid out six bodies side by side under the overhang of the roof and covered them with burlap, of which there was plenty to be found in the sheds. It was a grim sight.
The group of women from the farmstead slowly dispersed among the convoy of exiles. The vehicle with the guards who had forced them back into the marching column had long since passed them. Along the road stood young men from the Zbrojovka Arms Factory, keeping watch over the steady stream of exiles. They were no longer bullying. Gerta even saw them lift an old couple into the back of a truck when they couldn’t walk any farther, so that they could be driven ahead to Pohořelice. Even these war heroes had grown weary, and from time to time, the compassion within them overcame their callousness. Or perhaps they had sobered up and became aware that there would be consequences to what they had wrought in their state of victorious ecstasy. Gerta had already seen a couple of groups head back to Brno. And along with the armed guards sitting in the backs of the trucks, their heads jammed between their knees, there were some women and a few children. So not everyone was being forced to leave—there was still hope that she, too, might be able to stay, thought Gerta.
They passed a sign at the edge of the road that said “Pohořelice,” and then the first houses came into sight. This was the first time since Gerta had left Brno that she was seeing people other than exiles and their armed escorts. Since the small town of Modřice, where some other expelled families had joined them, they had walked only through fields, skirting the town of Rajhrad and the village of Ledce in the night. It wasn’t until Thursday late morning that they encountered some residents of the villages along the way. Gerta had no expectations. It never even occurred to her that something might happen. In her mind’s eye, all she saw were houses with darkened windows and deserted streets. This was why she was so surprised when they finally reached Pohořelice.
The town seemed to have come to a complete standstill; no one had gone to work. It was as if everyone wanted to be present when the procession came through. In front of the houses along the road stood women with their children, dipping cups into buckets of water at their feet, and reaching out to offer them to the exhausted and dehydrated Germans. But only rarely did anyone accept. From within the group voices warned, “They want to poison us!” And, “Don’t take it. Why do you think they are offering it to us?” Mothers slapped their children’s outstretched hands and gripped them tightly by the shoulders, making sure they didn’t stray from the middle of the road, keeping them away from the villagers. Only a few dared to drink. One of them was Gerta, who along the way hadn’t drunk from either the Modřice stream or from the well in Ledce, where those who hadn’t brought any water with them were all bending over. Later on, she even saw people bending down to lap water from puddles and ditches lik
e dogs. One time she saw a drunken guard go over and kick two kneeling old men, sending them tumbling headfirst into the bottom of the ditch. Gerta hadn’t dared to look back to see what happened next.
Along the way, she didn’t drink from puddles or streams. She took only the tiniest swallows of water from the bottle she had brought with her from home. And she did so only at night, when Helga couldn’t see. She couldn’t afford to share the little bit that might save Barbora’s life and her own. She drank from the bottle when Helga bent down over a stream, and drank when she stepped away to squat down and relieve herself. Always making sure nobody was looking. Into the empty bottle she would then express from her breast whatever Barbora hadn’t drunk. It wasn’t much; her milk was drying up. She was exhausted, depleted. Observing this, she grew panicked at the thought of her milk drying up altogether. What would then happen to Barbora?
But this time she did reach out her hand, as did Helga, for a cup filled with water from an aluminum pail being offered by a woman wearing a scarf, with two small children peeking out of the window behind her.
“Go ahead; have some; don’t be afraid. Take some; have a drink,” the woman wearing the scarf repeated in clumsy German, reaching out over and over again toward the marching column with a cup in each hand. Gerta laid Barbora down in the carriage, took the cup in both hands, and drank greedily.
“Please, one more,” said Gerta in Czech.
“You speak Czech?”
“One more, please, quickly,” Gerta begged, and hastily grabbed a second cup of water, while behind her back she could hear words full of indignation and reproach.
“Hell, you can’t trust the Czechs anymore; that girl’s going to be dead soon.”
“It’s poisoned; don’t drink any, you two,” a woman shouted at Gerta and Helga as she went by, “and watch out, there are guards right behind us.”
Gerta pulled Helga back to the carriage. They both still had cups in their hands. She managed a fleeting glance backward and out of the corner of her eye caught a glimpse of one of the young guards approaching. She braced her back, dropped her head down between her shoulders, and grabbed Helga around the waist. She was expecting a blow from his rifle butt. Instead, she overheard him ordering the village woman back into her house. And then up ahead, she saw something that the guard hadn’t yet seen—more villagers lined up in a row, extending their arms toward the convoy. She felt her empty stomach contract with hope. Was it possible that farther ahead the guards had already relented?
VI
Even though up ahead she didn’t see a single guard, no youth brandishing a weapon, even though all she saw was a crowd of curious or concerned people, the convoy kept going. No one stopped. They continued in a slow-moving and weary column right through the town, across the main square, until finally the number of houses around them began to dwindle. The more sparse and remote cottages tapered off, and in their place appeared several large buildings enclosed by a fence. When Gerta next looked up from her carriage, she discovered that the convoy of travelers had apparently arrived at its destination. Just up ahead, the course of their procession was veering off the main road onto a dirt lane leading toward a large fenced-off area full of wooden structures. Everyone was moving in the same direction, the old men, all the women and children. No one was staying on the main road. Only in the bend where the dirt road branched off and the column of people had to go around the curve was there a group of young men standing with weapons. Others stood by the entrance to the compound, and Gerta glimpsed a few more positioned along the fence line. They were no longer by themselves. Standing alongside them were small groups of Russian soldiers smoking cigarettes that they were offering around to the Czech guards. Moving in the opposite direction of the incoming column came a Zbrojovka Arms Factory truck, heading in the direction of Brno, the back full of guards.
Gerta, plodding along in the column, took a good look at them as they passed by her. They were all young, some even younger than she was, and they all looked tired and indifferent. Then she and Helga entered the fenced-off area.
There were people everywhere, either sitting or lying down. The carpet of human bodies extended to the right and to the left. It spread among the tall wooden buildings and seemed to be pulsating with voices, moans, and the calling out of names of missing family members. Gerta had never seen so many people in one place. She would have stood a bit longer to take in the dismal scene, but the ranks of new arrivals were already pushing her from behind. They pressed past her, jostling her, and Helga was swept away in the crowd. Gerta suddenly spotted the back of her forlorn figure, picking her way among the bodies lying all over the ground and moving to the left, toward the entrance of one of the barracks.
“Helga! Wait! Helga! Helga!” she shouted after her.
Her voice blended with the desperate voices of those who had arrived before her. Gerta leaned into her carriage and set off after Helga. She wasn’t sure why, as she barely knew her, and given Helga’s current condition, there wasn’t much they could really share. But she went after her nonetheless; anything was better than being completely alone.
She bumped into the feet of people who were lying down, tried to get around them, asked them to let her pass. Again and again came voices from down below.
“Have you seen my Jorkl? I lost sight of him along the way.”
“Have you seen my wife? They put her in the back of a truck and drove ahead with her.”
Gerta shook her head and pushed her carriage, trying to catch up to Helga, who had just come to a standstill by the entrance to a large wooden building. She stood there until Gerta pulled up beside her. Then together they went inside. They were met with the sound of groaning, as if they had stepped inside an infirmary.
They made their way along one of the walls until they reached the far corner, where Helga slumped down, settled her little boy on her lap, and sat motionless, staring out across the expanse of the hall.
Gerta parked her carriage up against the wall, picked up Barbora, spread out the now-soiled and foul-smelling coat with her other hand, and sat down on it beside Helga. All around sat other people talking over each other, although several were just lying there. They looked as if they had a fever. Beads of perspiration stood out on their foreheads, and their bodies trembled uncontrollably. The stench of excrement permeated the space.
“Excuse me, I’m Gertrude Schnirch from Brno, from Sterngasse,” said Gerta to one of the women seated beside her.
“You two just got here, didn’t you?” replied the woman, nodding toward her and Helga. “I’m Hilde, Hilde Wessely. We lived in Komárov, if you know where that is.”
She nodded toward an older woman lying in front of her, and two girls, sitting quietly alongside, about nine and eleven years old.
“Mother’s sick. We carried her almost the whole way. At first, she could still walk a little, but by last night, not another step. Trudi Lang helped us,” she said, pointing a short distance away to a small, stout woman who sat with her legs crossed, and smiled back at her.
“We’ve been here since last night. They brought us in around eleven, soaked by that rain. Did you get caught in it too? Since then, Mother’s been lying here, but she doesn’t look well. They say there’s dysentery going around because so many people drank from puddles along the way.”
Hilde’s daughter, sitting across from her, began to cry.
“She’s terribly thirsty; they both are. But I won’t let them drink anything. I won’t let them die of typhoid fever. This morning, the Russians gave them soup; that’ll have to do for now.”
“You got some food?”
“Those who moved fast enough. Runny slop, basically water with a bit of potato, but thank God for that. As they handed it out, they said they’d be giving out rations every morning.”
“And how long do they plan to keep us here, any idea? What’s going to happen next?”
“Nobody knows a thing. Everyone’s looking out for themselves. Except nobody has much of
anything left, no food, no water. People have been picking dandelions, but as you probably saw outside, whatever hasn’t been trampled yet has already been eaten.”
“We can’t last long here without any water. They have to move us someplace else.”
“No idea. Nobody knows. Supposedly at the Austrian border they turned the first group away. They don’t want us over there either, and besides, where are they supposed to put us, when they don’t even have enough food for themselves? So I wouldn’t be surprised if one night they just set this whole place on fire. It would solve the German problem.”
Gerta Page 11