Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  “A hundred, maybe two hundred, who died of dysentery?” Gerta said, looking at Karel in surprise. “And what about the others? The ones by the road. There must have been at least fifty women they pulled out of that barn on the farm near Pohořelice, where those Romanian, or whatever soldiers they were, tore into us! How were those recorded? Also under ‘dysentery’?”

  Karel stopped short. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know about that. The official numbers, however—”

  “Whoever wrote down the official numbers was probably not on the road walking from Brno to Austria that night and didn’t stop in Pohořelice. I’m telling you what I saw, even though I can’t give you an exact number. But thousands would definitely be more accurate than the hundred or so tallied up by some office clerk at his desk. I’ll never forget those bodies. Back then, I almost kicked the bucket too.”

  Gerta was all worked up. They settled back into silence, walking slowly in the direction of Věstonice. From far away, they could hear the rumble of plowing tractors.

  “Why did you come, Karel?” she said, breaking the silence.

  For a moment, he didn’t answer.

  “I wanted to see how you were.”

  “So now you’ve seen what you wanted to see. Are you satisfied?”

  “Would you like me to arrange for you to come back home?”

  IV

  Home. A city that barely resembled the one in which she used to live. Her home no longer existed. Her apartment belonged to someone else; her old street was missing entire buildings, not to mention residents. The shops she used to frequent had disappeared, as had their former owners. Of the old-time residents who used to live in her neighborhood, almost none were left. The few who remained no longer lived in their apartments. Caught up in the whirlwind of events, they took refuge among shabbier walls, because the best homes and apartments now belonged to the victors. The doorbell nameplates along Pressburger Straße, Schöllergasse, Köffillergasse, Sterngasse, Französische Straße, places that before and during the war she knew like the back of her hand, were either blank or bore the Czech names of new state-owned organizations. Apart from the Böhringers and the Bürgers, whom Jana Tvrdoňová had mentioned to her, and apart from Johanna, Antonia, and a few others whom she had met in southern Moravia, she didn’t know of a single German Brno resident who remained. The change in Brno was palpable, and finally it was confirmed in print. Barely more than a thousand had stayed in the city, she read. A mere fraction of Brno’s Oberschicht, the elite upper crust among whom, during the war, her father and Friedrich had proudly counted themselves.

  “Everyone was there! There must have been some sixty thousand German hands saluting von Neurath. If only the two of you could appreciate the unity, the power of the Reich,” her father had exclaimed back then in the hallway, just returned from a rally and all wound up, dazzled by the sheer volume of the crowd.

  “Everyone. And so many fellow sympathizers! There must’ve been over a hundred thousand!” Friedrich made a gesture with his arms that seemed to indicate all of Adolf-Hitler-Platz before he and his father sequestered themselves in the dining room where they turned on the radio. Gerta always stayed at home with her mother; they simply didn’t belong in that crowd.

  And now, at the beginning of 1951, there were only some fifteen hundred of them left. Germans who hadn’t turned themselves in, probably because they had no reason to feel ashamed, and who were so hung up on their heritage that they were prepared to suffer injustices for it and openly acknowledged their nationality even now. Like Johanna, for instance. But Gerta wasn’t one of them, which was why, the year following her return to Brno, as she was filling out the endless pages of the first postwar census, she left blank the column where it said other nationalities and didn’t count herself as German. She saw no reason not to take Karel’s advice and checked off nationality Czech next to her and Barbora’s names.

  “Why would you want to complicate things? It’s time to deal with reality and not make things harder for yourself. Besides, you always claimed you were a Czech. Like your mother. So go ahead and put it down,” he’d said.

  So Gerta did, although no one ever treated her like a Czech. Not during the war years in Brno, and not later in Perná, where she had been just a German, based on the first identity card she had been given that had already been filled out, no one having bothered to ask her any questions beforehand. On the Residence Permit for Non-nationals, which she had been granted in 1947, when an attempt had finally been made to differentiate between the last of those who were still to be deported and those who had been granted permission to stay in Perná, they had written Gertruda Schnirchová, nationality German, and the same for Barbora. In that way, once again, they emphasized to her that she didn’t belong, and now here in Brno, it was no different, even though on her freshly issued identity card, her nationality was listed as Czech. Her first name would always give her away, even if it were to be followed by Němcová, as she would sometimes imagine with a certain sense of irony. At most, it might help Barbora. But as far as that was concerned, Gerta tried to make sure that not even her own last name could do her harm. It was largely because of her that she checked off nationality Czech, even though by now she no longer identified with it either. After those years in Perná, she felt stranded in a no-man’s-land between nationalities, with a disjointed relationship to everything around her. Her world was confined to Karel and to Barbora, and to the walls of her new apartment, where politics couldn’t harm her. At least for now, she said to herself, remembering how effortlessly the outside world had reached in behind the walls of her childhood bedroom back in 1945.

  Barely over a thousand, she found herself repeating over and over, as she walked through the streets of Brno. Everywhere she went, she saw how the city had changed. The Germanic spirit was gone, along with the people, and could be detected only in details—on building facades, in the names of a few minor streets, in the Brno Hantec slang, or on the menu of their factory canteen. Pressburger Straße, now called Bratislavská, and its neighboring streets had, in the earliest days right after the war, quickly filled up with new Czech inhabitants. Now, six years later, a growing number of Roma were arriving from the surrounding regions and from Slovakia, gypsies who, whether they wanted it or not, were being resettled here as part of some crazy social plan. They were assigned to the yet again newly vacated apartments, which their short-term Czech tenants had fled for the new housing developments on the outskirts of town. But not everyone. Naturally, there were still some whom not even the postwar winds had managed to blow away.

  One Sunday afternoon in May, she and Barbora were making their way down to the river. Walking along Sterngasse, which was now called Hvězdová, they passed right by the corner of the building in which Gerta had spent most of her life. She stopped under the plane trees that still spread their outstretched branches like a canopy over the small square. The square looked exactly the same as when she had last seen it, on that evening six years ago, when she had been forced to leave Brno. To this day, the buildings bore traces of the final years of the war. In the gray, dusty facades, there were still bullets embedded in the crumbling plaster, leaving behind tiny craters. Only the debris and rubble on one end of the square had long been cleared away. In its place sat an empty lot fenced off with barbed wire. The plot stretched halfway up the left side of Hvězdová and was now obviously being used as a garbage dump. Its uneven mounds were overgrown with tall grasses and lilac bushes, their fragrance these days filling the whole street, as well as with ash seedlings, whose tall, slim trunks were already shooting up. Their roots had forced their way undeterred even through the soil that was littered with shards of broken glass, old tires, and the metal frames of baby carriages and sofas whose outlines were disappearing beneath a sprawling tangle of morning glory vines.

  Just as she was pointing out to Barbora where they used to live, the front door of the building opened, and a man wearing a long, loosely hanging, unbuttoned linen coat stepped ou
t. He wore a hat and was carrying empty milk bottles in a yellow mesh bag. Gerta caught her breath. About to walk right past them was the caretaker, his indifferent gaze focused beyond her, on the side of the square with the empty lot. His glance fleetingly grazed past Gerta’s face as he scanned the horizon from left to right, and then abruptly, in a horrified moment of recognition, he looked back at her. At once, he pulled his hat down lower over his forehead and quickened his step, disappearing behind her back, looking away in disgust toward the opposite side of the street. He pretended he hadn’t seen her.

  She felt like a louse. The memories of those last days in her apartment came flooding back to her: the unwashed bedclothes in his bedroom and the shallow, guttural grunts he emitted, signaling the end of each tawdry round of sex.

  The new old Brno. The same city, and the same web of streets and memories connected to it. Except now it was Deutschfrei, German-free. Germans were no longer welcome. Not even those who were freshly minted as Czech nationals. For Gerta, Brno would never again feel warm and cozy, would never again be a place that felt like home.

  V

  He didn’t know, but he could find out. In his position, it was possible. Her never-ending questions drove him to it, and as it turned out, the search for answers itself wasn’t the hardest part. Keeping it from her was much harder. She didn’t pressure him. She didn’t even know that he had embarked on the quest. He hadn’t promised her anything. At first, it was for no particular reason, just for himself that he tried to find out the truth. Had there been two hundred or a thousand? And what had happened to them?

  He collected all the information he could find. He read the reports about the expulsion of the Brno Germans that had been written up by Louis Nissel and Willy Kapusta, the report from Pohořelice that had been presented on June 5 by the chief health officer, Dr. Julius Mencl, and he spoke with Vladimír Matula, who had been chairman of the Central National Committee in Brno at the time. He was given access to everything: the minutes of the Central National Committee meetings, including private communications to Matula, even grievance letters in which civilians complained about the luxurious living and working conditions of Germans who even after the war refused to conduct themselves more modestly. He even sifted through the petitions from the Zbrojovka factory delegation led by Josef Kapoun, calling on Matula to expel the Germans, and Matula’s letter to the National Security Guard issuing the order, a copy of which was also sent to Josef Babák, the chief of police. He had access to everything in terms of Brno’s records. And the results as well.

  During the last year of the war, there were reportedly 58,375 Germans living in the city, but how many of them disappeared during those final days of evacuation, when German defeat was imminent, nobody knew. Those who remained were assigned by decree to work in the labor camps on the outskirts of Brno; the rest were to be marched out of the city. Effective May 30, 1945, point of departure, the assembly place on Mendel Square. On the official National Security report, he found a note written in pencil, stating that due to the chaotic circumstances and the lack of any administrative apparatus, as well as due to the ongoing, uncontrolled transfer of the population, the data quantified in several of the paragraphs was being provided primarily for reference purposes. In the body of the report, it stated that on Mendel Square, 17,014 individuals were lined up into a marching column of exiles, mostly women, children, and people over the age of sixty, to which, as the group passed by Modřice and Heršpice, the National Security Guard added between two and two and a half thousand more individuals from the thirteenth police precinct, and finally another fifty from Líšeň. That same night, 853 men and boys fit for work were taken to the labor camp in Maloměřice, where they were thrown in with German prisoners of war and collaborators, of whom at the time there were approximately five thousand, dispersed among the various camps. Altogether, 575 individuals were declared unfit for deportation by a medical commission and were either left in St. Anne’s University Hospital or permitted to remain in their homes. Of this total number, 1,226 individuals, on the basis of certified documents, were subsequently granted exemption from the so-called Anti-German Measures and were allowed to return to their homes. These were predominantly women and children from mixed marriages, and individuals who had been verified as having been anti-fascists. Karel personally recounted the results: 1,226.

  He further determined that the march had been put into motion at ten o’clock at night and that the last members of the marching column left Mendel Square at five o’clock the next morning, all of them escorted by roughly three thousand Zbrojovka Arms Factory workers under the leadership of Josef Kapoun, and 125 men under the command of Staff Captain Bedřich Pokorný from the third military division. In the report submitted by the latter on June 2, 1945, he read that additional Germans being expelled from southern Moravia were integrated along the way into the column of expelled Brno Germans, so that the total number of expelled persons was estimated at about twenty-eight thousand, perhaps a few more. On the evening of June 1, the column, made up at this point of about one-third of the expelled Germans who hadn’t yet crossed the border into Austria and were still marching, was stopped. Approximately seven thousand individuals ended up in the abandoned concentration camp near Pohořelice, of whom later fifteen hundred remained with farmers in Mušov, five hundred in Perná, six hundred in Věstonice, and eight hundred in Dunajovice, where they were given room and board and assigned to agricultural work, as per Ministry of the Interior orders.

  Some of the notes suggested that three members of the march died along the way, victims of an unfortunate mishap during an uncoordinated discharge of warning shots. Subsequent deaths were recorded only in the Pohořelice camp, where some of the German refugees were sheltered in outbuildings beyond the town and succumbed either to dysentery or typhoid fever from having drunk contaminated water along the journey, or to marasmus senilis in cases of the elderly. There was no record of any other acts of violence, apart from the three accidental deaths, and no further documentation was available, because once the last of the refugees arrived in Pohořelice, the entire squadron of Zbrojovka workers returned to Brno. In time, some two thousand individuals followed them back, after it was proven that they had been expelled without justification, namely against the wording of Article 7.

  To Karel, the official reports seemed plausible. Furthermore, he had already heard a thing or two about what had happened. From Podsedník, from Matula, and even from Otto Šling, who in the end criticized Zbrojovka for the organization’s rash actions, something the arms factory leadership held against him for a long time. Back then, Germans simply could not be permitted to remain in Brno. Not while they were living in better apartments, holding better jobs, and eating from a limited food supply, even though the ration allowances had been immediately reversed during the earliest days of May. Brno couldn’t afford to feed them back then as it was; there had been a proliferation of looting of German homes and murdering of German residents, and when they had tried to defend themselves, counterclaims had been filed against them. The Germans had to be removed from the city. At least for a time. Until first the international and then the local situations got sorted out, they needed to stay away. Preferably outside the city, somewhere in the countryside, supporting themselves in exchange for work. With any luck, if they wished, they would end up moving to Austria of their own accord. Agent Skalka, who was sitting in his office at the Central National Committee and had been a member of the Committee since the earliest postwar days, made broad gestures with his hands as he spoke, and it all seemed perfectly clear.

  “And if every so often somebody would give them a kick, well, what would you have done, comrade, if you recognized people who’d knocked off your neighbor or, God forbid, a family member, huh? You know it yourself. After all, by then you were already back—those days you could practically cut the tension with a knife; that’s how tangible it was. After six years of terror under Protectorate rule, those emotions needed an outlet, an
d they were supposed to flush away those years of humiliation. People were taking revenge for their own destroyed destinies, their own broken dreams. Naturally it was also a time for the riffraff. There were those who went on the rampage to improve their own prospects, or who saw an opportunity to get rich without worrying about consequences. During those first few days, it was hard to keep the mob in check. You witnessed it for yourself. Still, the important thing is that it happened. Just imagine if they’d stayed, and by now they’d be back to their scheming. Once was enough, wouldn’t you say?”

  Karel had been there, of course. But only as of the beginning of June, after returning from the Hostýn Mountains. He didn’t know exactly when the Germans disappeared from Brno. And he hadn’t paid attention. Anything to do with the past, with the Germans, he wanted out of his mind. Or he would have had to think about Gerta. He had other work to do; he was looking ahead. He joined the Regional National Committee and was a founding member of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the KSČ, and back then, there had been so much to fight for. It was possible that, caught up in the middle of it all, he might have missed something, something that Gerta had experienced and that he had only been involved in from the other side.

  When she talked about it, it was as if she were describing a completely different experience from the one that had found purchase in the consciousness of the rest of present-day Czech Brno. That one corresponded to the reports he read. And a thought occurred to him. He could compare those reports to what might still be found in Pohořelice. He hadn’t expected it, but they had sent him the complete Register of Unusual Deaths for 1945. Amazing, he thought to himself, the power of the proper rubber stamp. Also attached was a copy of the list of the interred that had been kept by the gravediggers Julius Hochman, Jan Kresa, and Jan Skala, who had been the ones to bury the bodies of the Germans from the Pohořelice camp in a field outside the town. They had divided them into five plots made up of thirty-four rows, in which 356 identified individuals and 97 individuals who remained unidentified had been buried. All told, a total of 453 people. Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, that was already more than was reported in the classified files. More than the proverbial two hundred that seemed to be fixed in the mind of every witness who had ever talked about it. On the other hand, those who might have had something to say about it had already left Pohořelice on the day immediately following the expulsion.