They had all been standing there since nine o’clock that night, the residents of Sterngasse, crowded into a corner of Mendelplatz. All the people who wore a white armband marked with a big, black N. They stood there in the order in which they had arrived, driven through the darkening streets across Cejl, through the park at Koliště, down Dornych and Silniční Streets, all the way to the square. A small group of men not yet taken away to the camps had stayed behind. The caretaker from their building, Sterngasse 142, had turned over three families to the Revolutionary Guard. As he handed in Gerta’s papers, he looked directly over her head, as if she weren’t standing right there. He hasn’t done a thing for me, she thought bitterly.
As if to feel any more bitterness or shame was even possible after what she had been through this past month, during which she had completely lost her sense of being a person. Her sense of being a woman. What was left of her was a stooped and disfigured body, toilworn and loathsome, her face furrowed by indignity and fear. Fear above all, which forced her inwardly screaming lips to remain outwardly mute. So as not to draw attention to herself. She felt as hollow as an empty nutshell. Hollow and withered, worthless. It was only for Barbora that she was doing all this, for her alone. Her mother would have been right about that business of one’s love for one’s child. But not even the baby had softened the caretaker. That evening, under the flowering plane trees on Sterngasse, he hadn’t had the decency to look her even once in the eye.
III
From the edge of the wooden barn’s roof, which was directly above her face, a large drop fell right onto her cheek. It had rained. Out of the solid mass of dense noise, individual sounds were beginning to emerge. She was able to discern an erratic banging, commotion, shouting, and long-drawn-out weeping women’s voices. Gunshots. Male voices.
She was regaining her senses.
The soldier who had just gotten off her looked down as she rolled over onto her side, relieved finally to be able to bring her knees together, and gave her exposed buttocks a hard kick.
“Stinking sow!” He spat on her, then turned away and quickly strode off. As of the past few weeks, this was nothing new for her. For that matter, it seemed as if for her whole life it had been written across her forehead that anyone was welcome to help themselves to her body with impunity. But in this case, in contrast to when her father had done things to her, she knew exactly why she had it coming. It was because of him. Because of that German half, which came from him and was part of her.
She sat up, wiped off her face, and smoothed her disheveled hair, then finally stood to see why Barbora wasn’t crying. She really had slept through the whole thing. Gerta left her lying as she was, on her back with her arms stretched over her head. She started to fumble around the netting under the carriage for one of Barbora’s diapers, wanting to dry her soiled thighs. But then she let the diaper be and pulled out one of her blouses instead. Who knew when she would next have a chance to launder Barbora’s diapers; she didn’t have enough with her to afford to waste a single one, having no idea when and how this journey would end.
Slowly she wiped off her inner thighs and smelled the musk seeping out between her legs, her sweaty armpits, her own familiar odor mingled with an alien one, the distasteful smell of male semen. Her heart was still pounding in her throat but was slowly being drowned out by the more painful pressure of stifled sobs, which had germinated deep below her diaphragm and now fought their way up past her larynx, which had started to bob as she tried to force the first sobs back down.
She couldn’t hold them back for long. She broke into a violent weeping that came out sounding more like a desperate wailing than sobbing. The dry sobs made her feel as though she were choking, the fitful exhalations and wheezing gasps for breath threatening to suffocate her, but she couldn’t stop them. They came on uncontrollably. Powerless, she gave in to them. They were impossible to stop despite her fear that they might attract another soldier, might again betray a hiding place that had already once been discovered.
Gerta’s shoulders shook as she huddled by the wheels of the baby carriage, and this was how Helga found her. She shuffled over quietly, her child in her arms. She sat down beside Gerta, very close, practically on top of her protruding hip. Gerta spun around, doubled over, buried her head in Helga’s lap, and let her grief pour into her skirt. Helga sat motionless, made no attempt to comfort Gerta. She stayed sitting, gently rocking her little boy, while Gerta tried to master her own rage and sense of shame, self-pity, and disgust, her feeling of revulsion directed as much against herself as at the Russian soldier who had discovered their hiding place. She shook and sobbed, and then abruptly sat up and fixed her wet eyes on Helga’s profile, inscrutable in the night’s gloom. She reached out and with her hand brought Helga’s left cheek toward her. Helga stared through her and began to rock the child more intensely.
“What did they do to you?” asked Gerta.
Helga was nodding in rhythm to the rocking.
“What did they do to you? Can you hear me? Say something! Helga!”
Gerta nudged her with her shoulder.
“Can you hear me? Can you talk?”
Helga kept on nodding, making no other motion. With her hand resting on the back of the boy’s head, she went on rocking the child in silence.
Gerta freed the hand on which she was leaning, grabbed the young woman by the shoulders with both hands, and gently shook her. No reaction. She shook harder.
“Helga, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
From the other side of the barn behind which they were hiding, there still came sounds of banging, crashing furniture, and a jumble of men’s voices and women’s screams.
Gerta looked around. The hiding place behind the barn had saved them from what was going on in the farmstead courtyard, which earlier that evening the drunken guards had so generously offered to them as a place to spend the night, but it was only a matter of time before the next soldier would stumble across them, again looking for a place to relieve himself. Like the one who had wandered over a little while ago, before intending to jump on one of the women inside the farmyard. The soldiers had arrived in the night about an hour or so after the women, who, exhausted from the march to the point of collapsing, had barely managed to drag themselves inside. Also leaping out of the back of the truck were some of the same guards who had directed them here, who then just howled with laughter as they watched the soldiers light into the women. This gruesome activity was still going on in the farmstead courtyard. Gerta needed to find a better place to hide. Over where the long shadow cast by the barn ended, alongside a fence overgrown with tall grass, she spied a low pile of heaped logs.
“Do you see that pile? Helga?” No reaction.
“Grab your things. We’ll hide behind it.”
Helga didn’t move an inch, just went on rocking the child.
Gerta braced herself against the ground, threw her skirt down over her knees, and stood up. She tucked the blouse and other scattered objects in beside Barbora who was still sleeping and backed the carriage up a bit, past her seated companion.
“We’re going. I’m wheeling Barbora over there,” said Gerta, turning the carriage toward the woodpile. Staying in the barn’s shadow, she slowly moved off.
Between the fence and the log pile was a narrow gap, just enough room for two bodies but not for a sturdy carriage as well. Gerta lifted Barbora out of the bassinet and bundled her up in the bedding and the coat that she had tucked underneath her the night before. She pushed through the undergrowth and squeezed behind the logs, the slightest crackle paralyzing her with fear.
She laid Barbora down in the grass behind the logs, making a little nest for her out of the bedding and the coat. Barbora gurgled and smacked her lips but went on sleeping. The baby carriage sat looming ominously in the grass. It stood by the pile of logs so naturally, as if someone had just left it there for a moment. Gerta toppled the carriage onto its side and left it lying on the ground. The wheels j
utted into the air and slowly revolved; out of the netting and bassinet tumbled bedclothes and what was left of their provisions. Gerta angled the underside of the carriage in the direction from where the soldiers had come and placed a few branches across the wheels. This way, under the cover of darkness, it wouldn’t occur to anyone that it was anything but a discarded old baby carriage, let alone a screen shielding two huddled women.
Gerta turned back to look at Helga. She was still sitting there, rocking with her child. Gerta ran back to her.
“Come on, I’ll help you.”
Helga didn’t budge. Gerta positioned herself with her legs spread apart and reached down, scooping her hands under the young woman’s armpits to try to pick her up. As soon as Helga sensed the pressure, however, she leaped up on her own and, with her left arm clutching the boy to her chest and a frightened, semi-audible gasp, lashed out at Gerta with her right arm.
“Shh.” Gerta grabbed hold of her arm and managed to keep them both in balance. Then she noticed how the small boy’s head had fallen backward at an impossible angle, like the head of a rag doll held on only by a few remaining threads that still attached the neck to the colorful little shirt.
IV
By the time the commotion in the farmstead courtyard behind them had died down, it was almost daybreak. The deep, dark blue of night, in which one couldn’t see beyond at most a few feet, had turned into a grayish haze, and the stars had grown pale. Helga was lying behind the bulwark of branches and the two carriages, curled up into a tight ball, her forehead pressed against her knees and her heels hard against her buttocks. She was convulsively wrapped around the infant’s body, clutching him tightly in her arms, as if trying to force him back into her stomach. She had fallen into a stuporlike sleep and looked so rigid and stiff that it seemed she wasn’t even breathing. Gerta peered out from behind the barricade.
The barn that had sheltered them during the night allowed her to observe only a sliver of what was going on in the courtyard. In the pale light of the breaking day, she could see a military truck surrounded by several soldiers who were nervously snapping at each other. The words weren’t Czech; it was a foreign language, although she could have easily been mistaken since the wind carried over only snippets of words that were further fragmented by the obstruction of the barn. The nervousness and agitation, however, Gerta could make out clearly. Some of the men were standing around the truck; others were running off; still others were slowly approaching, bearing bundles that they either carried slung over their shoulders or dragged behind them on the ground. As one of the bystanders bent down to give a soldier a hand with a bundle he had just dragged over, Gerta saw that it was a human body with strangely contorted limbs. They swung it up into the back of the truck, where another soldier grabbed the lifeless female body by the armpits and dragged it deep inside the truck’s interior. He soon reemerged, ready for the next load, which the newly arriving soldiers were already heaving up.
Gerta watched the tedious process in dismay. Men kept on coming to the truck, carrying or dragging bodies. Some were so slight that all it took for the men to lift them into the back of the truck was to grab and toss them. One of the soldiers keeping watch by the open back of the truck broke into a run toward Gerta, but doubled over after just a few steps, his hunched back shuddering convulsively, and vomited. This got him a few surly catcalls, but none of the other men interrupted the frantic pace of their grim cleanup work.
From the section of the courtyard that was hidden behind the barn and that Gerta couldn’t see came the sound of a heavy motorcar starting up. The men paused. Some raised their arms and waved; others just lifted their heads and went back to work. The hum of the motor grew louder, and then the sound seemed to indicate that the vehicle was moving. In one of the outbuildings, a child began to cry. As the truck pulled out of the gate of the courtyard, which was surrounded by wooden sheds, Gerta caught a glimpse of bodies through the slats of the sides of the truck bed, bodies piled on top of each other with limply dangling arms and legs. Then the vehicle went around a bend and disappeared from her sight.
The soldiers she had been observing were now piling into another similar vehicle, also loaded up with bodies.
Gerta drew herself back behind the barricade of wooden boards, baby carriage, and branches. The gray of the dwindling night gradually gave way to dawn, and Gerta quietly wondered what to do next. She could still hear a child crying and soldiers shouting off in the distance. Her gaze darted back and forth between Helga’s sleeping body and Barbora, wrapped in her coat. Soon Barbora would wake up; Gerta knew her rhythm. What would happen if she woke up cranky and started to cry? She would alert the soldiers to their hiding place. Having massacred all the women in the camp, they wouldn’t be about to spare them. Gerta kept her eyes riveted on Barbora, waiting for her to start stirring and opening her delicate little mouth, making smacking noises. Ready for the moment when her daughter would open her eyes and make the first gurgle, Gerta slowly unbuttoned her blouse, prepared to slip a nipple into the baby’s mouth in case she woke up hungry. In the morning chill, goose bumps ran up along Gerta’s rib cage.
Several minutes passed, and then she heard the truck’s motor. She dropped down onto her knees, braced her hands on the ground, and cautiously peered out. The back of the truck was again piled with bodies, lifeless limbs protruding through the slats, just as they had from the vehicle that had driven off some moments ago. The soldiers moved to the far side of the courtyard, where Gerta couldn’t see them. She heard the sound of another motor, and then yet another. All the vehicles, the one carrying the women’s bodies and the two in which the soldiers rode, were driving off in the same direction from where they had originally come, toward Pohořelice. The sound of the motors grew fainter and then finally faded away completely. The farm was steeped in an eerie silence. To Gerta, the complex of buildings that she continued to observe seemed alive, as if the oppressive silence were merely the calm before the storm, at which point the roofs of the buildings would fly off and one structure after another would erupt in massive explosions. She waited for that suspended, practically palpable horror to descend, for the moment when it would come crashing down and when she, too, would finally be able to burst into tears. But instead, the only sounds she could hear were the chirp of awakening birds, the rustle of the breeze, and the occasional creak of something inside the wooden buildings.
Gerta crawled back to Barbora and Helga. Barbora was still not waking up.
“Helga!”
Gerta reached out her hand and touched her shoulder.
“Helga, wake up.”
As Gerta shook her shoulder, she heard a low guttural sound emerge. She didn’t let up, and Helga finally opened her eyes, and, taking deep, gasping breaths, slowly came back to life. She was breathing as if she had just finished running a marathon. Little by little she extended her legs, her face reflecting the pain of moving her stiffened limbs, and then moments later, the eerie silence of the farm was rent by a primal scream—Helga’s.
V
The way back from the farmstead to the main road leading to the town of Pohořelice took the small group of women, those who had survived the night’s rampage, just under a half hour. In the darkness, when they had been going in the opposite direction, the stretch of road had seemed endless. Exhaustion from the past night and the march of the previous day was showing on all of them.
Now they were standing on a field road amid still-green corn, where the wheels of heavy vehicles had left tracks of broken stalks, flattened into ruts. One such vehicle was steadily approaching along the main road with a convoy of slowly moving people. In the back sat several youths, and from the short distance between the intersection of the two roads, most visible were their rifles, jutting up between their seated, upright bodies.
“What’re you up to here?”
“Trying to disappear, are you?”
The vehicle pulled up, and the men jumped out of the back. An anxious murmur rippled through
the group of women. One look made it obvious that they were part of the Brno convoy. They looked just like the people trudging along in the marching column. Dirty, wrapped in as many layers of clothing as possible, with baby carriages, carts, or suitcases.
“They took us to a farm for the night,” said one of the women in Czech. “They pulled us off the march at night and . . .” Her voice broke before she was able to finish her sentence, and she burst into tears.
“You women German?”
Some nodded anxiously; the woman who was crying tried to choke back her sobs. Gerta held on to Helga and, staying in the middle of the group, observed the men. They were all still boys. They looked as though they could be sixteen or seventeen years old; they were wearing work clothes, and their rifles looked completely out of place. She could imagine them still just a few days ago, finishing their shift, removing their coveralls and hanging them up in their lockers, rinsing off their faces, and heading home to their mothers for dinner in one of the streets in the Brno-Židenice or Brno-Líšeň neighborhoods. Now, here they were with weapons in their hands, aiming them at unfamiliar women, some of whom were older, some considerably so. They appeared to be tired. Perhaps they had been marching with the convoy throughout the night, and throughout the previous day and night, and now this morning, they lacked the energy to be aggressive. Whatever happens, don’t provoke them, Gerta reminded herself, remembering from the day before what these boys, masters of the moment, were capable of. She could still see the rock in one of their hands as he used it to knock gold teeth out of an old man’s mouth. She recalled the ruthlessness with which they ripped earrings from women’s ears, some of the women fighting back tears as they placed their hands over their ears, and how the blood spurted through their fingers. How a few steps later, they sank to the ground, unconscious, and how their companions, if they had any, tried quickly to revive them, or hastily rolled them into the roadside ditch, before they themselves got kicked or slammed by the butt of a rifle. She saw them chop off a corpulent woman’s finger when she couldn’t pull off her ring. And when the woman wouldn’t stop shrieking, saw them slit her throat as if she were a hog. Gerta wasn’t about to say a word or do anything to attract their attention.
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