by Susan Finlay
Petr nodded and followed some of the other guards from his unit who had been given similar instructions.
Hours later, after all the newly arrived Germans had been processed, the guards were shown to their various sections. Along the way, Petr passed by one section that he was told held prisoners of war and political prisoners. Glancing into that section, he noted that they all had shaved heads and wore ragged convict uniforms, obviously worn by previous prisoners. Like the Jews, according to his sources. Obviously payback.
Petr held his nose later on that evening, as he entered the children’s section. Here, many of the children had runny noses, were barefoot, and stank to high heaven. Most still wore their own clothes and didn’t have shaved heads. Many of the kids here had been in his column, arriving earlier in the day, and he felt a strange sense of needing to protect them.
“Where are your mothers?” he asked in German.
“We do not know,” a girl of about five years of age said. Her face was smudged with tears mixed with dirt.
A toddler Petr recognized was curled up on a bunk, surrounded by a boy and girl who were unrelated to him, but were trying to comfort him, all the same.
Numerous children he didn’t recognize stared at him, eyes wide with terror.
Further back, in the corner, huddled together on a narrow cot, he spotted more children from his column. The young girl he’d spoken to on the first day, along with her brothers and sisters, including the boy who had been shot in the leg. Fritz, something or other.
But where was the baby and their mother?
He strode over to them. “Where is the rest of your family? Do you know where they have been taken?”
The oldest girl said, “Mutti and the baby are gone. We do not know what happened. We are scared. Do you think . . . do you think something bad has happened to them?”
Something about the mournful look in their eyes once again reminded him of his siblings. Don’t get involved. Do your job and remember they are Germans.
He turned and walked away, looking around the rest of the quarters on his way outside. Standing for a few moments in the fresh night air, he took a deep breath and sighed. How can anyone stand it in there? The stink, the haunted faces of defenseless children, the feeling of pain permeating the air, pain from countless people who’d been trapped there over the years. Jews, war criminals, resistance fighters, and now ethnic German civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly.
Bile rose up in his throat.
He rushed back to the guards’ section and lit a cigarette, wishing he hadn’t taken this job. Had he really thought that seeing this place in person would help him get over Antonin and Rebeka’s deaths? How could he have been so stupid?
Screams permeated the air, and he ran toward them, wondering what was happening. And where were the rest of the guards? Didn’t anyone hear the screams?
He arrived at a women’s barracks and yanked open the door. The screams were deafening. He rushed forward to help.
Guards were raping women. Beating them. One poor woman was trying to fight off three guards.
Petr rushed toward them to intervene, but a burly guard yanked him back. “You cannot help them. Keep your nose out of it. If you want a turn, you will have to wait. If you want to stop it, you had best get yourself outta here. You cannot do anything.”
Cannot do anything? No one was going to help these women? He ran his hand through his dirty hair. The women were German. He got it. To the guards they deserved what they got, but it was wrong. He and his father and brothers had fought in the Resistance because they wanted to stop the evil that the Nazi party had brought to their country and to the world.
But revenge on women who hadn’t been soldiers? That made no sense. How could repeating the atrocities of the German army make Petr’s comrades any better?
He turned and slumped back through the barracks, embarrassed to look at the women who were crying and trying to hide, afraid for their lives or for their families. A baby cried, and then another.
Raising his eyes and searching the faces, he spotted several women with babies, including the mother of the children he’d spoken to earlier.
They shouldn’t be here. Where was the commanding officer?
It took Petr an hour to find the commanding officer. When he did, he said, “Excuse me, sir, I am new here and not trying to cause trouble, but I noticed women with babies in the women’s sections. I would like to transfer them to the children’s section, where I work.”
“Why is that?”
“The babies. They are children. They should be with the others. But also, the women are mothers and they can help take care of all the children.”
“Makes no difference to me,” he said, waving his hand. “Move them, if you want.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Petr didn’t wait around for the commander to change his mind. He hurried back to get the women and babies, and hoped he wasn’t too late.
With the other guards distracted by their nighttime activities, Petr had no trouble rounding up the women with babies, whispering to them that he would take them to the children’s section where they would be safer. He hoped they would.
One woman, who didn’t have a baby, reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “Please let me go with you. My children are in the children’s section.”
He remembered seeing her in his column with three little girls. They’d joined from another column a few weeks ago. “All right.”
They slipped out quietly and he led the small group of five women and four babies to the children’s section.
A guard stationed there stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, but the women and children went wild with cries of joy, hugging each other and kissing.
OVER THE NEXT two months, Petr found out that after the war ended, the Czech ‘Revolutionary Guard’ (known as the RG) had arrested soldiers from the German Wehrmacht who were marching through this area, some on their way back home, and had imprisoned them here, too. He didn’t have any access to the area where they were kept and didn’t witness what happened to them, but he had heard they were taken out of the camp daily for strenuous manual labor.
Petr, himself, witnessed guards beating elderly men and women, making children dance for them until they couldn’t even stand up any longer, burning women with cigarette butts, bullying women and children and threatening them, slapping them, beating them with boards, calling them names.
Even the supervisors were sadists, who seemed to take pleasure in tormenting the internees. Shouting at them. Beating them because they tried to sit down or lie down or because they lost their balance and fell.
It was too much for Petr to bear watching, but he sometimes forced himself to watch. Although there was nothing he could do about it, he needed to remember clearly so he could someday tell about the horrors that had come to these people, the same as they had come to the Jews.
Shame overwhelmed him some nights.
Killing soldiers during war, killing to protect yourself or a loved one, beating someone because they had personally done something awful and needed to be punished—those were things he’d done and hadn’t felt guilty about. Maybe he would pay for what he’d done. Maybe he already had; his family had all been taken from him.
What his comrades were doing was wrong, and he was pathetic for doing nothing about it, beyond keeping watch over the women and children in his section, as well as he could without drawing too much attention. There was only so much he could do.
He tried to tell himself that he was doing his best. It didn’t always help.
The worse came one day in early July. He’d finished his dinner and was on his way to the children’s section with the few bits of food he’d managed to hide away for the internees. As he neared the barracks, he heard screams. He rushed inside and found a guard attacking the girl, Christa. Her mother was crying and beating the guard, trying to pull him off her daughter, but she wasn’t strong enough to do him any damage. The guard was obviou
sly intent on raping the young girl, though he hadn’t managed it yet.
Petr grabbed hold of him, pulled him off her, then stabbed him in the chest.
The mother thanked him profusely and held her shaking daughter in her arms. The girl, barely twelve years old, was all right, but now he was faced with a dilemma. How could he explain that he’d killed one of his comrades? His peers wouldn’t see him as heroic. They would take him out and shoot him.
One of the other mothers suggested he tell no one. “Let them think the bastard ran off,” she said. “Bury him in the ground between this barracks and the next, where no one will notice.”
“That is right,” another mother said. “We will help you.”
That was his best option. He found a shovel and made haste digging the grave. All of the mothers helped him drag the body outside and dump it into the ground. None of them spoke of the incident. They were in it together, and they would carry the memory to their graves.
At the end of July he got word that most of the people who’d been brought in with his column would be loaded onto a train headed into Germany the following day.
After thinking about it overnight, he went to the commander’s office first thing in the morning and requested to be assigned as a guard on that train.
Later that morning, he packed his few provisions into his pack and went to the staging area, waiting for the guards who were bringing the Germans out.
Soon they were all walking together, like before, this time to the train station in the next town. The train was waiting for them when they arrived.
The guards squeezed as many people as they could into each cattle car. Petr could see that the cars were overfilled and that hardly anyone could move. No one would have packed that many cattle into those cars. What made them think it was all right to do that to humans? His claustrophobia would drive him insane if he had to ride like that. My God, he hoped it wouldn’t take weeks to reach their destination. At the dinner table in the guards’ quarters at the camp the night before, the men had laughed when they talked about nearly every train losing a good portion of its German ‘swine’ passengers during the trip. That’s part of what had kept him awake half the night, trying to figure out what he should do.
He reminded himself, as he slid one of the doors closed and locked it, that he was going with them and would do his best to make sure the guards didn’t kill them. As for the rest of the danger, all he could do for the Germans in his care, was pray they would have the strength and endurance to make the trip. The car he and the other guards rode in wasn’t great, but at least the men could lie down on beds of straw and cover themselves with warm blankets. He felt guilty, as he envisioned the prisoners in the cars behind him, suffering and maybe even dying.
Ilse Seidel, June-July 1945, Memmingen, Germany—
“HE IS THE most beautiful baby I have ever seen,” Ilse said, touching her son’s peach-fuzzy head. She’d given birth an hour ago, and the midwife, Ulla Stumpf, one of the Sudeten Germans staying at the house with Ilse and Karolina, had brought the baby to her, wrapped in a soft blue blanket. Aunt Karolina was seated next to her bed and leaning over to peek at the baby. “I know I should not hold him,” Ilse said. “The nuns cautioned me not to get attached. It makes it harder for a mother to give her baby up for adoption if she holds it and gets attached. But I had to see him.”
“Of course. It is only natural for a mother to want to hold her baby, even if it is only once,” Aunt Karolina said. “You have a right. And that baby should get a chance to feel his mother’s arms around him. He has heard your voice and grown used to use all these months.”
Ilse nodded, tears flowing down her cheeks and onto the baby’s head. All of a sudden she couldn’t trust her voice.
Aunt Karolina squeezed her hand. “Have you found a family to adopt him?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. She pulled the blanket away from the baby’s face slightly. “He is beautiful. Truly beautiful. Anyone would be thrilled to have such a precious baby. Anyone who could afford it, I mean.”
“I talked to a couple who live in Augsburg. They are interested. I think they will take him. I will need to call them and let them know he is here.”
Aunt Karolina didn’t respond.
Ilse turned in her direction, wondering why she’d gone quiet.
“I have thought a lot about you and the baby,” she said finally. “You are sure you want to adopt him out?”
“I am. I wish with all my heart I could keep him. That would be selfish of me. I do not have a husband and I cannot do that to him or to my family. You heard my mother.”
Karolina nodded. “There might be another solution. What if I adopted him?” She sat up straight suddenly, as if waiting for Ilse to soak in what she’d said.
Ilse studied her face. In a few short months Karolina had become a second mother to Ilse. She trusted her implicitly. Was she offering this option because she thought it was something Ilse wanted, or was it because she wanted the baby?
Karolina said, “Forgive me if I have put you in an awkward position. I do not mean to pressure you. If you would rather let that couple adopt him, I will understand. I no longer have a husband, either, and it is doubtful I will remarry or have other children. I am forty years old. Is that too old to raise a baby?”
“You never said anything before about adopting. I am surprised, is all.”
“You will move on with your life now, and the Sudeten Germans will not be staying at the house forever. Ulla and Birgit are looking for their own place, you know. The Kauffmans might stay for a while. At their advanced ages, they might be better off staying here until they can find their family. What I am trying to say is that I will be a lonely widow and I long for someone to love and care for. My oldest son—well, you know he is gone—and I have not heard about Hermann yet.”
“You really want to adopt the baby?”
“With all my heart.”
Ilse reached out her hand, and Karolina took it. “Then it is settled,” Ilse said. “And to answer your question, nein, I do not think forty is too old to raise a baby. You have years of experience, a good head, and compassion.”
“I have enough money, too,” she said. “I will be able to support the baby. I only took the job at the orphanage because I wanted to help others, and it was good for me to get out and among people.”
“I know. It has been good for both of us. We have both lost loved ones. Helping all those babies and children and the families who adopted them is something we can both be proud of, too.”
“Ja, and it helps atone for our mistakes.”
Tears trickled down Ilse’s face. “I hope you are right. I still feel guilty for what happened to Ron.”
“We all have regrets. It comes with living.”
Someone knocked on the door and peeked her head around the corner. “Is it all right if I come in?” Birgit said. “Mutti told me she delivered your baby this afternoon while I was in school. I was so hoping to be here for the birth.”
“Come in, Birgit. Shall we tell her the good news?” Ilse said, looking at Karolina.
Aunt Karolina nodded.
“My aunt is going to adopt him.”
“That is exciting. I can babysit for you, whenever you need. I am old enough.”
Karolina said, “Ja. I could use some help with him sometimes.”
“Will you have to quit your job?” Ilse said.
“I do not think so. There is no reason I cannot take him with me. And I do not think the job will last long term. We are not getting as many children now, which is a good thing.”
Ilse nodded. She’d already decided she would look for another job after the baby came. Something in a café or a shop. Away from the children and the constant reminders of what she was giving up. Away from the reminders of the war and the losses.
A few weeks later, she began work in a café that catered to the American soldiers. She enjoyed the job and got surprisingly good tips from the men. But they, too, were a rem
inder that she was finding harder and harder to live with.
One day after work, a month after she’d given birth, Ilse sat in the living room with the elderly couple, Gretel and Otto Kauffman, waiting for her aunt to get home with the baby. When Karolina walked in and Ilse heard the baby gurgling and cooing, she rushed over and picked him up from his stroller, hugging him tightly and wanting to kiss him all over his head.
What am I doing? She held him at arm’s length and gazed into his beautiful blue eyes so much like his father’s eyes and she knew then that she was getting too attached. It was time for her to move on. She needed to go away and let Karolina and baby Julian become mother and son, before it became impossible for her to leave.
At the end of the work week, after she’d given notice and worked her last day at the café, Ilse carried her suitcase downstairs and said her goodbyes.
“You do not have to do this,” Aunt Karolina said. “We are family and you can stay here and be part of Julian’s life.”
“I cannot stay. It is not fair to any of us, if I stay. It is time for me to go and start living my life.” She wiped a tear away. “I know you will raise him well.”
“You can come and visit us any time you want,” Karolina said. “You will always be welcome here. Do not forget it, and do not forget us.”
“I will never forget. Thank you, Aunt Karolina. I owe you more than I can ever repay.”
“You have repaid me a thousand times, with this precious gift.” She held Julian on her hip and pinched his cheek gently.
Ilse hugged them both, then opened the door, picked up her suitcase, and left, walking down the sidewalk toward the train station. She was going home to her family in Memmingen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Lucas Landry, September 2017, Biberach, Germany—
LUCAS BACKED AWAY from his bedroom window in Ilse Jaroslav’s house and hustled downstairs to breakfast, knowing from the daily routine they’d followed all week, there would be delicious coffee, a torte, boiled eggs, real butter, and the best German bread in the world.