Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

The louder the commotion around her grew, the wilder the gesticulations, the more menacing the fists, the higher the leaping of the boys, barely out of school, eager to prove their readiness to start liquidating Germans, the smaller did Gerta’s own desire for revenge become. It shrank and shriveled up, until all that was left of it was a small, hard, dense ball in the pit of her stomach. Fear.

  Punish the Germans? All the Germans? Or punish the Germans who were guilty, who had helped build the Reich, who had tried to snatch more for themselves of what rightfully belonged to the Czechs or the Jews? Which Germans?

  “Punish the Germans!”

  “Germans out!”

  “Germans out!”

  The square thundered with the clamor of thousands of people. Gerta buried her face in Barbora’s hair and pulled her in toward her chest, into her belly, into herself. In sheer terror. Because at that moment, amid all the shouting and whistling around her, she realized that she could never be part of that crowd, that mass of individuals who would relieve their pangs of conscience and the pain of losing family members, friends, and acquaintances, by taking revenge. Revenge was something that she would never be able to take. Against whom would she take it? Who were the Germans? She, Gerta Schnirch, thought of herself as Czech, but at the same time, she was the daughter of Friedrich Schnirch, a clerk in the Oberlandrat office, fully half-German, a former member of the League of German Girls, one who had volunteered for the Winterhilfswerk.

  XIX

  Naturally it had occurred to her even beforehand: the Germans would have to be paid back in their own currency. What other way? There had been plenty of talk about it, after all. This was also why, when it became clear that the Germans weren’t going to win the war, some of them had fled like rats abandoning a sinking ship. How many shops and apartments were now empty? For instance, the formerly Jewish grocery store on the corner of their street that had been confiscated, or the villa of their erstwhile Sterngasse neighbor Mr. Hovězák, who when the war started had suddenly become Herr Hortek. The likes of him had all taken to their heels. But this was also why Gerta had stayed. What reason did she have to flee, she whose mother was Czech, and who, up until the beginning of the war, had attended a Czech school as well as Mr. Kmenta’s art classes, for as long as she possibly could? Why should she leave Janinka, Pressburger Straße, where she had grown up, their apartment, where Barbora had been born? Why should she go away from here, when after all, she was one of those whose conscience was clean?

  But she hadn’t taken into account that there would be no opportunity to explain to anyone how she had lived and what she had thought. That there would be no time to assess people based on their actions, that there would only be time to flip through the certificates of race and separate out the people whose papers were stamped with a capital D. And judging by that, she was German. And like all other Germans, she was an object of the loathing with which all the Czechs in Brno were seething, even boys barely old enough to be out of school. Gerta’s hair stood on end as she thought of the fanatical zeal with which these boys, their teeth clenched in anger and their fists balled, had been leaping up in the crowd below the balcony. Just to show Beneš how bold and ready they were to carry out his plan. She had often witnessed the same zeal during the war. But this time, it was inciting people in the streets to chant, “Death to the Germans! Germans out!”

  How naive of her to have thought that instead, they would be chanting, Out with those who took action against our Republic! Out with those who are guilty! How stupid to assume that by now, passions had cooled. She had spotted Mr. Kmenta in the crowd in front of the New Town Hall, but in that setting, she couldn’t approach him for help. With half of the city running amok, how could she explain to him that she thought of herself as Czech, just like her mother? Whom could she turn to? Who could vouch for her credibility? Who could get her the piece of paper that these days everyone was after?

  She thought of the caretaker. He, after all, had known her family and had lived through everything with them.

  If offering herself to him and allowing him to do whatever he pleased to her meant that in the end she would have that paper, then she would think of those two weeks as a survival strategy. Afterward she would try to expunge them from her memory. By then she would have secured her apartment, which she would eventually exchange for a smaller one where she would raise Barbora, and she would find some kind of work. She wouldn’t waste any time worrying about what had become of her father. She wouldn’t worry about Friedrich either; it had been, after all, what he wanted, and as for Karel and his broken heart, it no longer mattered either. Janinka was the only one she would try to find again. Nothing else from the past, from the war years, would be welcome in her new life. Everything else she would bury somewhere deep down inside herself, for good.

  For two weeks, she went down to see him regularly. She would leave Barbora upstairs alone on the bed, swaddled in a blanket and surrounded by pillows so that she couldn’t roll around and fall off. It never took more than a few minutes; she wasn’t gone long.

  He promised to get her a certificate that would allow her to stay in Brno. He promised to testify that she had always spoken Czech, that she was Czech like her mother, that she was dependable and an anti-fascist. He promised to vouch for her and not let her and Barbora go down with those who had Sieg Heiled, informed, seized Czech or Jewish property, or been avid supporters of the Reich. He said she could rely on him, because, after all, he knew how things had been at home. All she had to do was to show him a little affection now and then, and wait for the certificate of credibility to arrive from the town hall, where the new National Committee had established its seat. She needed to be patient and wait.

  While she was waiting and going to work clearing away rubble, spending fourteen to fifteen hours a day moving around the city with Barbora strapped to her back or to her chest, barely managing to find enough food to feed herself, she was witness to a perverse drama. Those who had once greeted her father by raising their arm in a salute were now standing behind the ranks of toiling Germans, kicking them to make them work faster, or beating them for no reason at all, just on a whim. Even Gerta caught a few kicks, and from people she knew well; she did all she could do to keep Barbora out of their way. It was as if they had never set eyes on her before. And who was among them? Petr Pitín, Friedrich’s Hitler Youth buddy, who with the butt of his rifle smashed in Frau Mayer’s head because she looked at him in surprise. Mr. Vlk, who during the war had always signed himself Herr Wolf, and the one-armed Mr. Bednařík, whose sleaziness had made even her father spit on the floor once he’d walked out the door. But Mr. Kmenta and Janinka’s father were also among the supervisors, making sure to mete out fair punishment on the bony, hunched-over backs of those who were feverishly working away. These and others like them stood by the heaps of rubble on Bratislavská Street or along the tram tracks on Cejl, where Gerta worked. These days, the law was in their hands. They were the ones to decide who would be paired with a ten-year-old child to haul away heavy, collapsed beams or slabs of a stone staircase, who would collect and clean off bricks, or who would pull a fully loaded cart. Occasionally, they would beat up someone just for having a coughing fit in the dusty surroundings, or for having eyes bloodshot with conjunctivitis, or they would fire a random shot into the midst of their stooped bodies. Sometimes they would stand a woman up with her face to the wall and hit her across the back of the neck with a cudgel so hard that her nose would become a shapeless blob in the middle of her face, spurting blood down her chest all the way to the ground. That spring, Gerta saw for the first time the sheer horror in the eyes of mothers forced to strike the faces of their own children when their supervisors felt they were working too slowly. The more tentatively they hit, the harder the club would end up coming down on both of them. And she witnessed the despair of women whose daughters were led away from the rubble heaps to go peel potatoes for the Russians or wash their laundry on the platforms of the Židenice train station. Eve
n Gerta was chosen for such tasks. And always she would return home, her back raw, and welts and bruises on her thighs, depending on how hard she had tried to resist. A woman who, in the eyes of the Ukrainians and Kazakhs, had ceased to be a person. But at least she had Barbora, and she was still alive. Unlike others, who every day would be taken away, never to be seen again by any of those who regularly showed up for work on the corner of Cejl and Koliště Streets.

  It went on like this for the rest of May. Each day she would receive from the caretaker’s hands ever-dwindling ration books, stamped with a large letter D. At night, she would barricade her front door with a wardrobe, just as she had done in the days before liberation, when she had gone from being a resident of Brno to being a second-class citizen. And so it continued up until May 30, the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1945, when the caretaker appeared waving the decree in front of her face.

  PART II

  When Felling a Forest,

  Splinters Will Fly

  I

  Justice does not exist. Until recently, she had believed that it did and had thought it was somehow related to a person’s degree of guilt. Until recently, she had thought that in the end, truth would prevail. How wrong she had been!

  Gerta looked around for familiar faces among the people who, along with her, were taking such ignominious leave of Brno, driven toward an uncertain future. The informer Frau Braun was plodding along a few steps ahead of her with her daughter who was barely fifteen. Between them, they were dragging a suitcase wrapped around with a cord that was tied together on top in loops just the right size for their hands to slip through. Every so often, they would exchange a nod, set the suitcase down at the edge of the road, and switch sides. Every so often, Frau Braun would nod and grab both handles herself, hauling all that was left of her possessions on her own. Gerta lost sight of them when she and the young woman, who had been pushing her child in the baby carriage alongside Gerta’s since they had set out from Brno, dared to stop for a moment by the side of the road, just before daybreak.

  Herr Liebscher and his frail, stooped wife shuffled past them. In less than an hour, Gerta would in turn pass them, but wouldn’t dare look back as a youth with maniacally blazing eyes stood over the old couple, curled up together in the grass by the side of the road, firing one shot after another, one to the right of the old lady, one to the left, between the sprawled legs of Herr Liebscher, until a blasted clod of earth buried his trouser leg. Gerta didn’t think that those two, cradling each other’s heads and huddled together as once upon a time in a lovers’ embrace, would get up again. She didn’t want to see it. She would keep walking, walk faster, quicken her step like the young woman beside her. Better not to look; after all, she had Barbora with her—better to get away fast, and above all, inconspicuously.

  Just then, Frau Freiberg passed her. Frau Freiberg had a little fabric shop on the corner of Schöllergasse and Pressburger Straße. Or once had. She was the one who had pointed out that Annie Goldová, who up until then had managed to avoid the transport, was in hiding with Mr. Šrámek, the button maker. It was because of her that Annie Goldová had jumped out of the window, that was unless she’d been helped along, although supposedly Mr. Šrámek had tried to protect her with his own body. Still, nobody knew what had really happened. Then even Šrámek disappeared. A German white-collar family moved into his empty apartment and very soon blended into the neighborhood. So now it was the turn of the Germans to be on the move, thought Gerta. Her own suitcase was loaded onto the netting underneath Barbora’s baby carriage, and they were being moved somewhere to the south, vaguely characterized as being outside of the city, because within the city, Germans, even those like her, were no longer welcome.

  Holding her breath, she wondered what might be lying in store for her and Barbora.

  Would they be trampled underfoot? Would the two of them become casualties on a victim list, names in the column between two black lines where one always found the names of the executed? Victim? That was not what this list was going to be called, she thought wryly as she looked around at the armed youths.

  Neither she, nor Barbora, nor the young woman beside her—none of them was marching in a procession of victims, she thought to herself. No one would bother to count them. For that matter, all through May, no one had counted them, and no one had bothered to inform them, the Germans who remained and were clearing the streets, about what had happened to the ones who disappeared.

  Gerta stopped. She felt sick to her stomach. Her unsteady legs gave way beneath her, and suddenly it seemed as if the world around her had been switched off. It stopped making sound; it stopped being audible; it stopped being visible, and as her limbs grew heavy, it seemed to vanish somewhere above her, flying up as fast as she was falling down.

  She was aware of a blow to her head. Then there were just a dull ringing and darkening circles spiraling in toward the center of her vision, narrowing as new ones formed around the outer edges.

  She felt a smack, first one and then a second. The flat palm of someone’s hand was slapping her face. Slowly the world started to come back into focus. The dull ringing separated into distinct voices; the black circles slowly took on contours, and out of their dark, symmetrical curves emerged a round face framed with blonde hair. She was staring into the eyes of the young woman whose face was right up against hers. She could smell her hungry breath as the muffled waves of her voice wafted past her nostrils. Slowly she began to discern the words as well.

  “Get up, you hear me! Get up. Pick yourself up. You can’t stay lying here.”

  She was frightened.

  Little by little, Gerta recalled what had happened. She began to feel sick again, felt the rising pressure in her stomach and the acidic saliva rushing into her mouth.

  “They’re going to do something to us. To get back at us for everything that happened . . . they’re going to do something to us. They’re not just sending us out of the city; they’re sending us to our deaths, I’m sure of it,” she rasped.

  “Hush! What’re you saying?”

  “We’re marching to our deaths; they’re going to shoot us—what else do you think they’re planning to do with us? They want us to die like dogs, do you understand? We can’t go on.”

  “You’re crazy! My God, what’s wrong with you? You have to, you hear me? You have to go on. I don’t have the strength to help you, so come on. You have to keep going. They’re not going to kill us; why would they? They’re just taking us to the border; it’s not that far.”

  “Then why are they taking the old people who’ll never make it that far? Don’t you get it? There are too many of us here. Once we get past the city limits, they’re going to shoot us!”

  “Don’t shout, you hear me?” said the girl, looking around in alarm at the people who were passing close by.

  Gerta couldn’t hold herself any longer. She rolled over on her side and began to retch, spewing pungent gobs of sour phlegm and half-digested bits of food from her mouth.

  The young woman stood up, grabbed the handlebars of both baby carriages, jiggled them as if she were quieting the children, and looked around. Then she quickly dropped back down to kneel beside Gerta.

  “Come on, get up, quickly, before they see us. Right now, you have to keep on walking; we’re leaving the city, you understand? We’re only leaving the city, and then they’re going to leave us alone. Or they’ll take us across the border. I have an aunt in Vienna. We can stay with her until my husband comes. They’re not going to kill us. Get up!”

  But Gerta saw it. Saw how even this young woman, who now was standing up again and rocking the carriages, all at once had grown afraid. Afraid that what she still believed for now might in one hour no longer be true. As had been the case all through the war.

  Gerta slowly sat up, wiped her mouth, and got to her feet. Her head was ringing, and the cramps racking her stomach compressed it into a hard, shriveled-up ball. It was as if a walnut were now lodged in her bowels, chafing the wa
lls of her other organs with its tough, gnarly shell. She brushed off her dress and grabbed hold of the carriage in which Barbora was sleeping. Her knee joints seemed to have turned into gelatin. Unsteady, as if lacking the support of bones or a spine, she leaned, feeble and limp, on her companion’s shoulder.

  “What good are we to them in the city? They just want to get us out. We’re in the way, understand? Lots of people have come back since the war ended, and there’s no place for them to live. We just have to make room for them, just until it all gets sorted out; they just need to get us out of the way, that’s all,” whispered the young woman, shaking her head as if trying to get rid of a pesky fly buzzing by her ear. She grabbed Gerta around her waist, put her other hand on the handlebar of her own baby carriage, and slowly set off again.

  Gerta followed her. She felt empty. Figuratively and also literally, her stomach was in knots.

  “We have to come up with a plan. We have to think,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Helga Bartl.”

  “Gerta. Schnirch. We have to figure out a way to get out of here. To get away, as quickly as possible.”

  II

  But it wasn’t just Frau Freiberg and the Brauns; there were others as well, those who had steered clear of the political situation all through the war, and who, now that the war was over, still held no political interests. Even so, on that May night in 1945, before being driven out of the city, they all stood in the same long line of people that wound from the Augustinian cloister across Mendelplatz, all the way past the brewery where it disappeared into the dusk, and stretched in the other direction past St. Anne’s University Hospital and continued beyond the bend of Annagrund Street.

  The Liebschers, Granny Pawelka from Köffillergasse with bleeding earlobes, from which moments ago her earrings had been ripped, the shopkeeper Frau Mayer with little Ingrid and Irma, who spent school holidays sitting around on stools in front of the grocery store—they all stood in the same crowd. The girls huddled together, cowering at the loud yelling of the armed Revolutionary Guards, and right near them stood Herr Tomaschek, Herr Gollo, and a few others whom she recognized from the Winterhilfswerk. What had Frau Mayer ever done to anyone, or Granny Pawelka, or Gerta, or Barbora, to deserve being lumped together along with the likes of those others and driven out of the city? What had Gretl Schumann ever done, slumped against the cloister wall on top of her small suitcase next to her husband on crutches and their twin boys, who at the checkpoint soon would be taken away from her anyway, once it was discovered that she hadn’t given their real age. What more would they still put her through? And how much more could Gretl still bear? Mere hours had passed since old Frau Herrscher decided not to come along. Supposedly they had all been there, even the twins, standing around the bathtub as Gretl cradled her mother’s head and her husband cut. Into the clear water spurted two red threads, swirling in meshlike eddies around the outstretched forearms, and they said the old lady just kept on smiling. She wouldn’t have made it very far; she wasn’t well, and who knew what would have happened had she stayed behind in the empty apartment. It would have depended on who walked in first.