by Erich Hackl
“Look, Gisela, in my case there’s nothing they can prove, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here, but if he said that to you, then don’t wait any longer. Get to safety. Run away. Go on, run!”
“I can’t,” Gisela said.
“Why ever not?”
“Because then they’ll go and get my family, my parents, Leni, even Hermann.”
THAT SAME EVENING the surviving women were herded on foot to Schörgenhub, to a half-finished hut in the grounds of the so-called work-education camp, which had been set up in spring forty-three for forced laborers who had escaped and been caught again, were refractory or otherwise accused of lacking in discipline. Now Resi and Gisela were in the same cell together with other Upper-Austrian women from the resistance—an old woman who had only been arrested because she was the mother of the communist official Franz Haider; a maid from the Mühlviertel who had been made pregnant by a farmer who then, because he wanted to avoid having to pay maintenance, had accused her of having had an affair with a Pole; a store-owner who had hung a white flag out of her window too soon; and recalcitrant female workers from Poland, Russia and the Baltic states. It was there in Schörgenhub that Gisela, on April 23 and 24, 1945, wrote her last letter, this time to her sister, illustrated by a self-portrait in which she’s warmly wrapped up. She had intended to give it to a woman who was released on the 25th, but was afraid she might have to submit to a body search first.
“If they find it, it’ll be used as evidence against her. Will you please take it,” she said to Resi. “Then if you get out you can take it to my mother.”
“Of course,” Resi said, slipping the letter up her sleeve. “You can rely on me.”
Dear Lentschie,
Four letters all suddenly arrived at once, Hermann’s drawings, Albert’s letters, from Mother & from you. Well, you can imagine my joy at getting them. Now the days are dreary, rain & wind, cold—we spend almost the whole day just sitting on our beds, I’ve got everything on apart from my shoes—who knows what might happen any moment? Hermann would be astonished if he could see his Mommy!—I’ve got a little abscess on my tooth and have wrapped my scarf and a pair of white trousers around my head, I’m sitting on my bed bundled up in blankets, I keep on having a look out of the window in case one of you should come. So what does my little boy say to a Mommy like that? But, hey, are you with the ‘mucky little pup’ in Linz? God I’d really love to be able to give the little fellow a real hug, how often do I dream of it, but something always gets in the way—but I’m not going to waste my time on dreams as a matter of principle, because reality suggests I’ll be able to marvel at the two little ones soon. Resi told me how Peterle stuck one piece of garlic after another in his mouth like candy. Quite calmly and carefully, as is his way. And didn’t make a face at all.—Oh, Leni, I just hope there’s going to be a happy reunion. How often do you all go to have your photo taken, Peterle for his birthday with Mother? I often think it’s incredible that Hermann can draw like that already, I can hardly believe the great progress he’s making. But when I come, he must love me even though I come empty-handed—yes, here in Kaplanhof I’d been keeping an Easter present for him and Peterle, colorful Easter eggs with candy (that from Resi!). But since none of you came before the holidays, on that tragic Saturday it was blown up with everything else—pity. It seemed a miracle to us survivors that we’re still alive. —Another day’s over again, it’s Tuesday already, I ought to remove my muzzle now, because the pain’s already wearing off, but it’s so warm, so why not!—I spend so much time thinking of all of you at home, the way you live, hoping you’re all well.—The stupid thing is that my track suit was burnt, because I’d just washed it. There were 15 of us in our cell, 8 were killed, 3 seriously injured, perhaps they’re dead already, & only the 4 of us escaped unharmed. Resi’s unharmed too. It was all so horrible I don’t want to think about it anymore.—Where is Albert now? His letters are a sign that he’s OK, unfortunately there’s quite some time between them & you don’t know what’s happened in between. Oh well, & Andi as a carpenter, that’s really funny, but I imagine he gets better food than we do here, for it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s often not fit for pigs, no salt, etc, etc, no matter, I just hope this state of things will soon be over. I often wonder now what things are like for Pepe & where he is. Does he write? And from Villach? You can put letters in the parcel as well, perhaps I’ll get them. But you can put newspapers & other ‘trashy novels’ in, they do help to pass the time. Sewing things, my stockings and leg-warmers are full of holes!! Yes, when Mother was here with Hermann, I didn’t recognize them at first, he was so tall—God, if I don’t get out of here soon, he’ll really have shot up.—How’s Father—at work & in his free time? I’m looking forward to a letter from him!! And you, Leni, you’re lying in bed all day, ‘seriously ill’, just get locked up, you can lie in bed all day—then you’ll get fed up with it. We’ve got a midwife here too, from Hohenfurt, delivering a baby’s great fun when she’s there!!—It’s just occurred to me, tea in a bottle, if one of you should come. Boiled potatoes, otherwise whatever you can manage—if only it wasn’t such a long way out to this lousy dump! I’m giving you so much trouble, it often drives me hopping mad!
Pencil, writing paper, please.
PERHAPS THE FIRST to see it, three days later, was one of the women who went to fetch the drinking water in milk churns from the men’s camp. Another who had just wiped the floor in the sickbay (a shack that didn’t deserve that name). A third who, like Gisela, was was longingly keeping a lookout for her family through a crack between the planks nailed over the window. Or all of them together, when they came back from gathering stones on the Welser Heide. (No, the gathering of stones was earlier, gathering and piling them up, now they weren’t taken out of the camp during the day anymore.) Namely that a detail of prisoners, supervised by a man in uniform, was busy outside the sentry hut. But so late, that was unusual and aroused their suspicion. Therefore Gisela and Resi requested permission of the woman guard to be excused. The latrines for the women’s camp were ten or twenty yards back, on a low rise. If you climbed up onto the toilet seat and stood on tiptoe, you had a view of the whole of the camp as far as the sentry post through the skylight. They saw that the prisoners were digging a pit. Then the men, shouldering their pickaxes and shovels, marched back through the barrier into the camp. But two shovels were left propped up against the wall of the hut.
On April 17, 1945, at four in the afternoon, perhaps one hour later.
On that same day the Provisional Government in Vienna had proclaimed the independence of Austria and an infantry regiment of the US 7th Army was advancing on Dachau from the west. But the women, returning to their bunk beds, didn’t know that, and even if they had known, it would have been of no help to them.
“Why dig a pit, unless they intend to—”
It is not known whether those words were spoken. Usually the late afternoon was their favorite time of the day. Take off your shoes, climb up onto your bed, think about your loved ones, chat a little about things at home. But that day, according to Resi, there was a tense silence. Just two women whispering to each other, two or three sentences, a question, then falling silent.
“Something’s going on. You can sense it.”
Silence. Until footsteps could be heard outside, a male guard flung open the door, bellowed three names. “Line up! Take blankets! Follow me!”
Höllermann, Tschofenig and a third woman, whose name has not even survived, a Jew, said to come from Vienna, who had been brought in two days previously. Perhaps until then she had managed to remain in hiding somewhere and been picked up during a check in the street or an air-raid shelter. Risa Höllerman belonged to the so-called Wels group of the Communist Party, she had maintained the contact with their comrades in Vienna until she was arrested on September 8, 1944, in the Wels station restaurant. Risa was the first to get to the door. Gisela was squatting down, quite calmly, as it seemed, tying her walking boots.
&nb
sp; “Get on with it, Gisela,” Risa urged. “Hurry up, otherwise they’ll beat us again. You know how nasty they are.”
“Don’t rush me,” Gisela said. “I need my boots. Who knows, we might have to run.”
Finally she stood up.
“Right, that’s it,” she said quietly, giving Resi’s hand a squeeze as the guard came back.
Sleep was out of the question. One of the remaining women walked up and down the cell, restless like a caged animal, the others strained to hear what was happening out in the twilight. “Well, and suddenly we heard shots,” Resi’s voice says on Kammerstätter’s tape. “Every one went right through you: For God’s sake, what’s going on out there. It’s an execution. And again. Then they run past. Then they run past again. Six times it went on like that.”
The woman who couldn’t bear to stay sitting on her bed had been peeping through a crack. Then she went over to Resi and whispered, “After every shot they carry something past in a blanket.”
“But they won’t have the bodies in them,” Resi replied. “Probably an item of clothing or something.”
“Yes,” the other woman said, “it’s as if they’re carrying a bundle.”
That was the first night without Gisela. The next morning Resi saw one of the woman guards wearing her friend’s boots. Then she knew there was no hope left. The camp emptied. The last women, there were still twenty of them, were released on the third of May. Before that the guards had made off in a truck. Resi took old Mother Haider and the pregnant maid from the Mühlviertel with her to her mother-in-law, who lived in a little house in the Neue Heimat development in Linz. Herbert, her son, was there as well.
Two days later units of the Third Army arrived in Linz. At first there was just the fear, then the certainty that her husband Karl had been murdered in the gas chamber of Mauthausen on April 28 together with Teufl, Haselmeier and forty other comrades from Upper Austria. Risa Höllermann’s husband had already been shot by the SS on September 18, 1944. Greti only arrived back home in the middle of June. Because she had been working in an armaments factory, the American authorities had delayed her return for a long time. In court she exonerated her colleague in the Board of Works who had informed on her. She said the woman hadn’t been aware of the consequences of her action. And she, Greti, had experienced what it meant to be locked up and she wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even her worst enemy. There was no real feeling of joy at the end of Nazi rule. The women threw themselves into Party work, reconstruction, the daily struggle for food. But the people around them seemed incorrigible. And the dead remained dead. They felt, as one of their comrades, the worker-poet Henriette Haill, said, as if a gray pall of misery had descended over them.
They arranged to meet in Schörgenhub on the thirteenth of May. Karl Taurer procured a cart and a few shovels, and engaged three or four colleagues from the railroad, until recently fanatical Nazis, to accompany him. Resi was there before them. Also Karl Kastner, the husband of her sister Mitzi. Beside the sentry box they found a barrette that had belonged to Gisela. Four meters away the ground had been recently disturbed. That is where the group or prisoners had had to dig the pit on the twenty-seventh of April. One of the railroaders, a strong, tall, young man, was sick when they came upon the first corpse. On top were three men, the women underneath them. Gisela was the last, which meant she was the first to have been shot. She was the only one lying on her side, her left leg over the right one of the woman above her, as if frozen during violent movement, she’d probably still been alive when the pit was filled in.
They put the bodies on the cart and buried them in Kleinmünchen Cemetery. It was decades before the identity of the men who’d been shot was known. After a report in Stimme der Frau, a reader from Floridsdorf, a certain Michael Rackwetz, had written, “Dear Editor, I read the article about Gisela Tschofenig in your paper. I was deeply moved by it, not just in the way all decent people would be bound to be moved, but even more so, since in my family I also have victims among my nearest and dearest. My brother and my nephew were executed at the same time as Gisela Tschofenig. It says in your article that three unknown men were executed on the same day as Gisela Tschofenig. It is possible that my brother, Theodor Rackwetz and my nephew, Thedi Rackwetz, listed by the Gestapo with the first name of Rainer, were among them. All we know is that they perished in Mauthausen, but not precisely when or under what circumstances. I would therefore very much like to ask you to publish the pictures of my brother and my nephew, perhaps someone who was in Mauthausen will recognize them and can give us more details of their death. Many thanks in anticipation.”
But father and son Rackwetz were in fact murdered in Mauthausen itself and that on October 15 and 16, 1944. The three men in Schörgenhub, who were shot shortly after Gisela, Risa Höllermann and the unknown Jewish woman, were called Leopold Hessenberger, Heinrich Stadler and Franz Popp. Stadler and Hessenberger came from Gmunden; one of them, a bandmaster, had been arrested together with his wife and other musicians for anti-Nazi comments, the other for communist activities. Popp, a farmer from Molln, had been accused of listening to enemy radio stations and having invited a Polish forced laborer to join him. The Pole was murdered in Schörgenhub as well, on the sixth of April, and Popp’s wife at the beginning of May in Mauthausen, by drunk SS officers, it is said.
Then there are three pages full of upright handwriting that Gisela’s mother had torn out of a lined school exercise book, in which Hermann had drawn steam locomotives and trucks:
Hermann, your mommy was arrested on September 25, 1944. Hermann, Leni and I knew why, it was terrible. Your mother in the Gestapo hell. It was our wish to have you. And on April 27, 1945, at 8 o’clock in the evening, your mommy was shot by the SS camp commandant and the Hungarian sentries. Aunt Resi heard everything, there were two other women and three men. Hermann, on May 13 we, that is Aunt Resi, Kastner and I, shoveled the rubble on the mound away and we came to the bodies. Hermann, we were glad that we got the bodies, your mommy. That we knew they were asleep. Hermann, now we’ll go and search for Leni and Peter, search until we find them. Hermann, your mommy was buried on May 15, 1945. You were there, you know, with the dead woman and her little boy, she had a lovely room with lots and lots of flowers, electric light with lots and lots of bulbs. She was buried without Leni, without Peter, without Albert and Andi, but you were there, you threw some beautiful daisies in for her. Hermann, I don’t think I can see Albert and Leni again, I think my heart’s going to break. Hermann, what will you do then. Peter, Leni, Albert, Andi, Grandmother, no one there.
They were all there, soon after. Leni and Peter were the first to return; they had gone out to a village, to Leni’s mother-in-law, because of the air-raids. Then Albert appeared at the door. Because he’d been recruited at the last moment by the SS, he had simulated mental illness and was in a mental hospital when the war ended. Finally Andi and Leni’s husband Franz were released from the prisoner-of-war camp. Now the family was complete again. Only Gisela was missing. Casting a shadow over the family that Hermann didn’t notice at first. And that is his sixth memory, being picked up out of bed, at night, by a total stranger and pressed to him, so firmly he can’t breathe. The rough material of his jacket, the scratchy stubble of the stranger, who is his father, frighten him.
He doesn’t understand what the grown-ups are talking about. No one tells him that his time with Gisela’s parents is limited. His grandmother and Aunt Leni fulfill his every feasible wish before he’s even mentioned it. Andi plays his accordion for him. Albert makes him a toy railroad with rails, switches, barriers, signals, station buildings and switch towers, all out of pearwood, for wheels his uncle used empty cotton reels.
In the summer of forty-six his father comes to fetch him. He’s accompanied by a woman. Their relationship is not mentioned in Hermann’s presence, and he doesn’t want to know anyway. Only two years later does he begin to suspect what it’s all about.
IMMEDIATELY after his return from Dachau, Pepe had been
elected chairman of the Carinthian Communist Party and was sent to join the Provisional Government with responsibility for internal security. After the elections in November forty-five, in which the Communists did considerably better in Carinthia, with eight per cent, than overall in Austria, he was a member of the provincial parliament until 1949. As well as that, after the thirteenth Party Convention in February he was a member of the Central Committee. The difficult situation with the supply of food and other essentials, the constant conflict with the British military authorities, the territorial demands of Yugoslavia, with its counterpart the constant hate campaign against the Slovenian minority, the unresolved problem of displaced persons, strikes and dismissals in factories, the half-hearted denazification process that very quickly had obstacles put in its way—all that took up his time and energy. After his many official duties during the day, he would bury himself in files, complaints, situation reports until deep into the night. Perhaps this unremitting activity suited him, in that way it was easier to bear the phantom sorrow in the emptiness of his heart, that was presumably eventually filled. Whatever the case, Magda Fertin was soon at his side.
Hermann thinks that the two of them became closer through working together. In Klagenfurt, in the Party offices where Magda worked as an official. A young woman who of necessity remains faceless for me, almost bodiless as well, she was powerfully built (but not fat), Hermann says, a bit chubby according to his friend Hans West, who was later on to live, with his parents, next door to the Tschofenig family in Vienna. Although during her working life she was employed solely by the Party or by a firm belonging to the Party, there is no material on Magda in the Party archives. Not a trace of her in the various papers on the operations of the Slovenian partisans in which she was involved. Only in the Documentary Archive of Austrian Resistance is there a statement by Pepe from 1966, taken down by Tilly Spiegel, according to which Magda had been a member of the Communist youth organization since 1938 and after 1943 in Klagenfurt had liaised with the partisans operating in the Rosental, to the north of the Drau. At the beginning of October forty-four she had been arrested, he said, and sent to the provincial court in Klagenfurt but, with the help of some police officers and friends had been able to escape to Köstenberg by Velden, where the partisans had a base. After going into action several times to the south of the River Drau, she entered Klagenfurt with her unit at the beginning of May forty-five. Dispersed troops of the so-called Vlasov Army, which had fought on the side of Hitler, had made a continuation of the war necessary until the beginning of June, he explained.
