Gerta

by Tučková, Kateřina

  Another woman leaned toward them.

  “They’d better solve it quick. Just look around for yourselves. Have you seen the latrines? No? There aren’t any. And the dysentery is bad, maybe because of the water or something. They’ve dug a ditch outside, but it’s always mobbed. So people are just going, wherever they can. There’s no way we can stay here for long; the locals won’t have it.”

  “There’s something going around here, fever and diarrhea.” Hilde nodded in agreement.

  “I already told you, it’s dysentery. My brother was a doctor. Don’t eat or drink a thing around here.”

  “But for how long?” asked Gerta in desperation.

  “Nobody knows. But take a look around. It’s all women and old men. And loads of kids. They can’t just go and kill us. It would be an international scandal.”

  “These days? If they did, they’d most likely think it was just as well, a few less Germans. You’re not thinking straight.”

  Hilde’s daughter was still crying.

  “Have you seen Erna? Erna Bayer? A petite lady in her forties, might she have been walking with you?” Bending down to them was a young woman, barely twenty years old. Her face was filthy. One of her teeth had been knocked out, and her lip was split open.

  Gerta shook her head no, she could no longer remember anyone who had been walking with her.

  “I hope you find her,” said Hilde, sadly shaking her head.

  “So many people missing, families torn apart. I’ve seen so many mothers crying here. I’ve seen some dead ones too. Exhaustion. They got here last night, lay down, and never woke up in the morning. They’ve been carrying them out to that fence next to the army barracks. Maybe that way, those soldier boys will take notice and do something about it, when they start to smell right under their noses.”

  Hilde grew silent. She looked over at her mother, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “We had a little house, and my husband had his tailor shop in it. We sewed custom men’s shirts for the well-to-do families. No mass production. We did everything by hand, with white stitching along the collar. We were hoping to send the girls to school. And now we have nothing. We haven’t been back since Beneš returned and made his speech. For twenty days, we stayed with friends. Each of us had just the one small suitcase we were allowed to bring. That was before they drove us out. But my husband was in the party, so who knows where he is now. I’ve heard people talking about labor camps somewhere right near Brno.”

  She was shaking her head, dabbing the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, as if trying to avoid smudging eye makeup. Barbora began to stir.

  Trudi Lang smiled and said to Gerta, “I saw what they did to some babies along the way. And how they treated their mothers. One woman with her baby in her arms, they knocked her into a ditch. They wouldn’t stop kicking her until she stopped screaming. I didn’t see what happened next. Poor thing.”

  Gerta leaned back against the wooden wall. She cradled Barbora in her arms, rocking her gently, resting her little head against her chest. She tilted her own head back, closed her eyes, and hoped for at least a few moments of sleep.

  VII

  The road was unmaintained and full of potholes. At any given moment, the wheels of the horse-drawn cart would hit one, and its occupants would be catapulted up and dropped back down onto the hard bench. Each of the women did all she could to keep one hand either on her baby carriage, the child on her lap, or the suitcase at her feet, and the other gripping the side planks of the wagon. They were proceeding slowly behind an equally laden horse-drawn wagon, and behind them, in turn, came a line of women with older children, as well as a few men on foot. They were walking more quickly than they had walked on the march. They were spurred on by hope, opportunity, and, above all, the desire to get away from that rank field with its ramshackle wooden buildings where they had spent the previous two horrendous nights. The flow of those forced to leave Brno had let up by early evening of the day on which Gerta arrived. Most of the Czech guards had gone back to Brno. Those who remained were mainly older supervisors, a few volunteers from Pohořelice, and some Russian and Romanian soldiers, who night after night would pull women out from among them, just as they had previously done at the farm. But this time, Gerta was spared. The camp was teeming with several thousand exhausted deportees, lying or standing around on the grounds of the former brickyard, and it was rumored that there were two more similar compounds just past Pohořelice. The first two mornings, dead bodies were carried out of the buildings by the dozens. Gerta, when she finally dared to move away from the corner of the wooden hall where she and Helga had taken refuge, saw them with her own eyes. She had waited until the morning, when word went around that the Romanian soldiers were doling out soup rations, before daring to venture outside the wooden hall. She had then dashed out twice, forcing her way through the crowd, both times with Barbora clasped tightly to her chest and the cup from the woman in Pohořelice clutched in her hand. Since the previous day, when she had drunk the water from the aluminum pail, she hadn’t put anything in her mouth. Although it took an almost superhuman effort to quell her thirst, the murky water that some of the others were pulling up from the well by bucketfuls terrified her. For Barbora, she kept repeating to herself, for Barbora’s sake, she must resist.

  Not everyone, however, was able to suppress their thirst, in spite of two old German doctors among them who were giving strict orders not to drink the water because it was contaminated. People drank the water anyway and brought it back to their relatives who were lying all over the brickyard, burning up with fever. The plaintive sound of the word water echoed from every corner of the camp; there wasn’t a single person who didn’t utter the word like an incantation. Gerta could hear that word and the names of missing family members all the way in the corner of the building where she sat, not moving, trying to sleep. The most essential thing was to avoid any unnecessary exertion. Beside her sat Helga, completely immobile. She neither got up to get soup, nor did she get up to go outside to empty her bladder; the small amount that seeped out of her was soaked up by her skirt. Gerta left her a bit of soup in the bottom of her cup, which Helga gulped down ravenously, but then turned her face once more to the wall. The only change Gerta noticed was that after the first night, she no longer could see the dead baby’s body. Helga had swaddled him in her own tattered blouse. Now the small bundle was again resting in Helga’s lap, the sleeves of her blouse knotted tightly under the infant’s chin. Helga had on just her buttoned jacket. She must have rearranged her clothes during the night, while Gerta slept. That she had dozed off at all was a miracle, given the screams of the women whom the drunken soldiers were dragging out yet again from the wooden buildings. How many could there have been? And how many had come back? Trudi Lang wasn’t there the next morning, and up until the moment of Gerta’s departure when she was loaded onto the wagon, Trudi had not yet returned. Hilde Wessely had spent the whole first night lying on top of her older daughter, having hidden her younger one in the long skirts of her mother, who died later that same night. Gerta then held Hilde in her arms all morning until someone carried her mother’s body out to the fence. All three of them looked terrible. Hilde was overwhelmed by grief; her daughters, their features haggard and unchildlike, were begging for water. Their mother, however, refused to give in. The one cup of soup from that morning had to suffice.

  The wagon lurched again as a wheel hit another pothole. “Whoa,” the farmer up on the box seat yelled to the horses, and the wagon swung back up. The fields around them rippled in the gentle breeze. Gerta stared into the fresh green until her eyes stung. It all looked so idyllic and peaceful, as if the war and all the horrific events that followed never happened.

  She tried not to think about what lay ahead. She tried not to allow herself to hold out any hope, tried at the same time not to imagine what might happen if they had been lied to. Maybe they just needed to break them up into smaller groups to make it easier to exterminate them. But th
en why would they be transporting them in wagons? And why would they have so carefully picked out the more able-bodied ones? If they had just been planning to kill them, would it have mattered? Once more she forced away her dark thoughts. She had made a conscious decision to believe as soon as she heard the voice of one of the Pohořelice volunteers calling out the names of the local villages: Perná, Dolní Dunajovice, Horní Věstonice, Bavory. All of them needed laborers to do agricultural work. Women were preferable to men. The important thing was that they still had their strength. Gerta had leaped to her feet at once, had put Barbora back in her carriage, had left behind the coat, and finally also Helga, who had refused even to look at her. Gerta had shaken her by the shoulders, but when she reacted by striking out, without even opening her eyes, she hadn’t tried to persuade her. The guard had already left the building, trailed by several women with their children as well as by a few men. Anyone with their wits still about them who understood Czech must have realized that here was a chance to get away from this contaminated wooden box, where sooner or later they would all die like dogs. More and more people were scrambling to their feet. Women were gathering up the scattered contents of their suitcases, calling for their children, and the first group of contenders was already heading out. Gerta pushed her carriage along the edge of the wall. She never said goodbye to Hilde. Neither Hilde nor her two daughters were anywhere to be seen.

  Gerta was among the first to reach the camp entrance. Standing around on the dirt road were several men dressed in country clothes, talking among themselves, with riding whips tucked in the belts of their trousers. Some were smoking and intently examining the crowd assembling before them. Behind them stood teams of horses, and milling about were children, probably from Pohořelice. Although the makeshift Pohořelice camp was situated a good stretch beyond the last of the houses, several women wearing headscarves were also standing by the side of the dirt lane, looking as if they had just dropped by for a friendly chat. They stood there, folded arms tucked under their bosoms, gossiping, laughing, occasionally giving a shout to the children who were playing around the horses. Gerta raised her hand and, like all the others who were swarming around the entrance being blocked by the Russian soldiers, tried to call attention to herself.

  “I know how to work!” called out one of the women beside Gerta.

  A slew of subsequent offers followed. The main thing was to get out of here.

  “I speak Czech!” shouted Gerta.

  “I know shorthand; I studied at the commercial academy!”

  “I’m Czech; I shouldn’t even be here; pick me!”

  “I used to work in a textile mill!”

  “Pick me!”

  The first few farmers approached the soldiers. They haggled for a while, gesticulating, and then an official, holding a leather briefcase on which he had spread out some papers, said something. The farmers nodded. The official then distributed some documents among them and motioned to a soldier, who turned to face the crowd that had gathered by the gate and started picking out people from the front row.

  “State your name,” the official shouted at the first few who stepped forward.

  “Maria Niessner.”

  “Noted.”

  A farmer pointed to one of the other robust women in the front row. The soldier pulled her out and steered her toward the official.

  “Name.”

  “Charlotte Tomschik aus Gerspitz.”

  He wrote down the name on two separate documents and nodded.

  “Next!”

  Many more women passed through the main gate, some with their children, and there were also two old men, one with his wife. The official, supervised by the Russian soldier, handed a sheaf of papers to the helper from Pohořelice and turned the group of Germans over to the farmer, who with the handle of his whip pointed to the first horse-drawn wagon. Then the next farmer stepped up to the Russian soldier.

  It was thanks to him that Gerta, with Barbora clutched to her breast and her baby carriage collapsed in front of her, was now sitting in a horse-drawn cart, being jolted into the air each time one of the wagon wheels hit a pothole in the road. Beside her sat two young girls and two women, and opposite her, another young woman also with a baby carriage. Following them came the rest of their negotiated group, escorted by three volunteers from Pohořelice, and behind them another large group was already coming into view. They were heading south along the main road in the direction of the Austrian border, passing Mušov, where once, before the war, she had been on a day trip with her parents and Friedrich. And now, here she was on a glorious Saturday afternoon in June, and the sight of such serenity made Gerta want to cry.

  VIII

  Old Mrs. Zipfelová, as she now called herself, having added the Czech “ová” suffix, was a kindhearted and decent woman. She, too, had been through a lot, since they had taken away her only son to who knew where, leaving her alone with her daughter-in-law, Ida, to fend for themselves in her little cottage. While it was true that these were uncertain times, she was a Czechoslovak citizen who belonged to the Austrian minority, but having committed no crimes, had nothing to fear. On the contrary. Her son was a doctor who, before being called to the front, had done much to contribute to the advancement of the village and had saved the lives of a good many Czech and Austrian children, which all the parents still remembered very well. Zipfelová, on the other hand, since her husband had died, had never done anything more than to stay at home and tend to her cottage. It was a miracle that she’d managed to support her son in his studies. She never harmed a living soul, gave the village the gift of a doctor, and spoke Czech as readily as German, as had always been the custom in Bergen, these days Perná, since the old Austro-Hungarian days of K.K.—Kaiserlich und Königlich. She announced this right from her doorstep, as the anxious young women with babes in their arms were still jumping down from the cart and lining up with their backs against the wooden planks of the wagon, listening uneasily to her German speech. Everything she said was then repeated to them once more by Hubert Šenk, the man who had driven them there, and who let them know that they were in the hands of an old-time resident of Perná, who, in spite of her German name—“You mean Austrian,” she corrected him—was a well-respected citizen. He furthermore told them that they should go inside, get some sleep, have some food, and be ready to start work the next day.

  Ida stared at the women as if they were apparitions. In truth, the sight of them was anything but pleasant to Zipfelová. Ten women, a few with smelly, crying children; ten disheveled, haggard, exhausted, and starving women. One girl, barely grown up, had a swollen cheek, a split lip, and a missing tooth, as became apparent the first time she opened her mouth to speak. They had nothing. Most of them had arrived with only their children and the scant clothing they had on, nothing more. Two of them had baby carriages, their sole possessions. Ida was staring at them, and had Zipfelová not given her a nudge to move her along, she would have gone on gaping at them in dismay. That was just the way she was. Listless, sluggish as a phonograph that hadn’t been fully wound up, that was little Iduška Měníková from the last house in the field by the road to the village of Bavory. Hard to say what Helmut had seen in her—probably her youth. Once he got back from his studies and had hung out his shingle as a doctor, he could have had his pick. Over the next ten years, while he was hard at work, they were all making eyes at him: Jitka from the Šenk household, Maria-Rosa, the daughter of Dr. Renner from Dolní Dunajovice, and finally even the widow of Josef Theron, who had fallen off his horse and broken his neck. Nothing doing. He had waited for this tadpole to grow up. Granted, she was pretty; one had to allow that much. It was just too bad that they hadn’t had any children. Helmut had been conscripted right after the wedding.

  “You’d best have them all bathe, Mrs. Zipfelová, and wash their clothes, or better yet, burn them, and give them something fresh, something of yours or something the Heinzes left behind. You should have seen that camp. It was awful, one big pesthou
se, raging with typhoid fever and dysentery. You don’t want that coming into your house. Bathe and wash. And tomorrow morning have them ready for me at six o’clock. I need to head back and help deliver the rest. So long, Ida; see you later.”

  Hubert Šenk was a good man. He looked after the village and his farm, just as his old granddad once had done. It was said that good genes always skipped a generation. His father had more or less worked the farm as if it were simply a job, not a life. In the end, he drank himself to death, which was just as well as he had actually done Hubert a favor.

  “All right, go ahead and take your clothes off,” said Zipfelová, turning to them once Hubert and his horse-drawn wagon had gone.

  Some of the women sat down on the ground; others kept on standing with their children in their arms, looking around. One finally asked for water, and the others immediately joined in.

  “Get them some water, Ida. We’re not going to have anyone dying of thirst around here,” said Zipfelová. “Ida will get you some water, and in the meantime, all of you get undressed. It’s a nice day; you won’t get cold before your clothes have a chance to dry, and if need be, Ida will let you borrow something of ours.”

  One by one, the women started to undress. Gerta sat down cross-legged and unlaced her sturdy hiking shoes. The soles of her feet were on fire, and her ankles were swollen. She hadn’t taken off her shoes in almost five days, not from the moment that their convoy had set out from Brno. She had been afraid of losing them, because on this kind of journey, good shoes were priceless. Ida emerged from the doorway of the house, carrying a pitcher. She advanced a few more steps into the courtyard, set the pitcher down under the water pump, and started pumping. As soon as the women heard the sound of water, they abandoned their efforts at undressing and removing their shoes, leaped to their feet, and ran over to her. Those who got there first fell to their knees and held out their hands, trying to catch the liquid. They didn’t even wait for their cupped hands to fill up before they greedily gulped, then held their hands out again to catch more drops. Some even pushed the heads of their children directly under the flow. Ida wasn’t prepared for this. Startled, she jumped back, and with no one pumping, the flow of water slowly tapered off. The girl with the split lip, whom Gerta remembered from the camp, straightened up and took over pumping in Ida’s place.