Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  The memories of the residents of these valleys begin to revolt, they rise up and take over. After the end of Nazism, they still knew their stories, they told each other what they had lived through, they could recognize themselves in another’s suffering. But then the fear sets in that they’d be excluded because of their stories and seen as alien in a country that wanted to hear other stories and dismissed theirs as unimportant. They know their history is not mentioned in Austrian history books, certainly not in Carinthian history books in which the region’s history begins with the end of the First World War, is interrupted and takes up again at the end of the Second World War. Those with stories to tell know this and they have learned to stay quiet.

  Now, however, they dig up what they remember, pull it out of the sack, let it fall as if casually, in the hope that someone listening will pick it up. There could be someone out there who wants to learn more. It’s about time.

  Admittedly, no one is asking at all insistently about their past. Those who do ask are circumspect, as if they didn’t want to touch old wounds, as if they were afraid of learning too much, perhaps even about their own families. Very quickly, the old fear washes over those about to tell their own stories, the worry that these stories could be used against them, could revive buried antagonisms, could betray friendships, or could make them appear suspicious somehow or other.

  And so these almost-storytellers quickly stuff back into the sack what they have let fall and act as if their remarks had slipped out by mistake, a blunder, they won’t open their mouths if there are strangers in the room. I am considered a stranger, I know that.

  And yet, a few of these silent men and women are waiting only to be asked for their stories to come tumbling out. They don’t know where to begin, the force of their memories disconcerts them, they stumble from one person to the next, from year to year, cannot follow the chronology, confuse names and places, assume that everyone knows what they mean. They talk about ghosts, about farms and smallholdings that no longer exist, that were overgrown with brushwood or razed to the ground long ago. They can even recall the stories of others, all the things that could have happened, the things they had feared most.

  When the erratic narratives become too much for me, I wonder why these stories crumble to pieces in the tellers’ consciousness, with no connection to a larger context, as if each person were left with his or her own war, as if the isolation of the witnesses were part of oblivion’s strategy. I start asking questions and searching for connections. What I hear eats away at me. It merges with the childhood stories trapped inside me. I am constantly circling the abyss of history into which everything seems to have sunk.

  THE WAR seems to have retreated into the forests of our valleys. It has made the fields and meadows, the slopes and hills, the mountainsides and streambeds into its battleground. It has ripped the houses, stables, kitchens, and cellars from their purpose and turned them into bastions. It has taken the landscape into its clutches, sunk its teeth into the earth, it has read the geographical map as a map of war.

  The battlefield is no longer visible, ambushes threaten everywhere, what is trusted changes, familiar faces appear in masks. War’s territory is camouflaged. Like the battle itself, it has no borders or limits. The slaughter fragments into skirmishes. The field of honor is the farmer’s larder.

  The enemy fights with bread and water, with clothing and meat, with work and silence. The Gestapo put on the disguise of partisans, the Slovenian language is their cover. The front passes through the most vulnerable point. Fighters are dragged from the forest by the hair on the heads of their wives, their children, and their parents. They are fought against through their families standing in the fields and not in the trenches. They are punished threefold for their resistance and are left to ask themselves, until the ends of their lives, if the fight against the Nazis was worth the cost of engaging in this conflict and delivering up their family members to the Nazis’ collective punishment. It is on the farms that the most superb battles are fought and the most summary trials executed. Minor stories to which no one can bear witness, human lives, quickly seized, sooner discarded. No one saw, no one wanted to believe. Things seen could rob you of sleep and speech, but the Gestapo wants people to speak; all bandits seen and recognized must be reported in the right language. The partisans, on the other hand, demand silence, no one must know they had come, and no sooner come, they are gone.

  That’s how it begins after the first two hundred Slovenian families are evacuated from their farms on Himmler’s orders. It begins with bread for the partisans, with soup for those resisting – bread becomes a weapon. Here, the enemy wears aprons, skirts, school uniforms. Without knowing they have become combatants, they wear their hair peacefully braided, have never once held a gun, yet they are accomplices of these terrorist bandits, one or more times, they have offered the bandits food, shelter, or another form of assistance. They have lost their honor. They have abetted enemies of the Reich and are therefore condemned to death. They are dishonorable for all eternity.

  What remains are the children who must listen as the police harass and beat their mothers, screams in their ears, leaflets in their milk canisters, secret messages in their braids, letters in snowballs, lice in their hair. What remains are footsteps in the snow that the children wipe away, the stink in the school where they are beaten because they can’t speak German. Carinthians speak German!, and they all shit their pants when German is beaten into their fingers and heads with slaps and caning. They still greet each other the same way today, hey, shitter, smelly-assed crybaby, you still scared?

  History crumbles to pieces: Father to the Wehrmacht, Father deserts, Mother to Ravensbrück, younger brother, older brother to Dachau, to Stein an der Donau, to the Gestapo prison in Klagenfurt, to Mauthausen, Lublin, Moringen, Auschwitz. And Rosa’s mother who gives food to a snitch because she believes he is a partisan. When she realizes her mistake, she grabs her three children and escapes into the forest, hides there, runs to find the partisans, children sent to stay with their grandparents, children who watch as other children are led away chained to a grown man, Mimi and her boy, barely ten years old. And children who hug their mother when they stop by at night to get clean clothes, who want to go with her into the enemy forest.

  Father fallen in battle, fallen for Hitler. And Stanko who watches as the Vivoda family and Šopar and Brečk families are taken away, and Simon who refuses to go, who drinks himself unconscious and is thrown onto the hay cart by the police, so they can get him off his farm. The dead cattle in the Mikej farm meadow with their swollen bellies, their legs sticking up in the air, starting to stink after a few days, the stable burned down, the farmer’s family all gone to join the partisans. The fighter shot dead in the snow, buried under branches, the dangling legs and heads of the dead when they are driven off in the hay cart. Herding the cows near freshly dug graves, war, summer, snow.

  Didn’t recognize her brother’s shoes after the police shot and covered him with dirt, Vinzenz, buried next to his sister’s stable, she didn’t recognize the shoes sticking out of the pit. Only later, weeks later, did my grandmother, my Bica, realize it was her brother who lay under the eaves, he and an unknown partisan behind the house in the meadow, buried in the snow. In the spring, the bloody pile that won’t thaw, and Bica who can’t get out of bed, she lies in bed dead-tired, like a corpse. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t eat. The children take care of the animals and cook for their mother. They urge to get up, to finally get out of bed, to finally be as grown up as they are.

  The police hunt partisans by day, never at night. The houses surrounded, an entire patrol, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty men against women and children and shadows in the forest. The sounds of combat in the house, in the fields, in front of the stable, farms in flames, the hole in the chest of the dead partisan, mown down by a machine gun next to the front door of the house, Anna’s screams as she runs around the house until she collapses, exhausted, until she admits defeat by this war t
hat ambushed her in her kitchen. The green slime that Mirka vomits when she learns her husband has died in Auschwitz. The young girl the SS hung by her legs who is later forced to watch as the partisans threaten her father. The slaps, the aching heads of the children, while the police empty the larder so there will be nothing left for the bandits who are everywhere, in the hay and in the stable, in the storage shed, foodstuffs buried to save them from raids by the police, by the partisans. The fighters, shot and bleeding, in the cellars and bunkers and rooms. No light in the kitchen, the partisans’ trembling bodies in the dark, rubbed down with vinegar, rubbed with vinegar all night. Kach’s cattle, leaving the barn in quick step, the farmer’s wife and her sister ran to the partisans and died fighting, the men, Juri and Johan, arrested with Maria and Anna. More ashes from Ravensbrück, from Lublin, died of, deceased on, the eight names of the dead in front of the empty farm, looted clean, that cannot be revived after the war and finally falls to ruin. Battles near the school, the children huddling on the classroom floor, trembling with fear, two Germans drinking milk at Dimnik’s and shot in the field, blood flows from their jackets, milk drips from their bellies. The women from the Vivodas’ farm, chased into the forest, deported to Ravensbrück and to Auschwitz. Remained in Auschwitz, Klari. And again cows confiscated in Vellach, the whole family in the bunker, their grandfather with a gunshot wound in the stomach, their father turned gray with the partisans, lost his hair almost over night. Torture in Burggasse in Klagenfurt, others are forced to listen, to get them to betray where the rest are, passersby who spit on the prisoners being taken to the train station or back to the prison. Marija, proud Marija, for whom Mother’s skill as a seamstress is no help, the embroidered aprons she receives as gifts at Christmas or Easter. She believes the men who claim they know her brother Johan, the first partisan, Kadrovec the Green, they want to rejoin him, they need her to help them. She helps them, she believes the renegade fighters who claim to know so much, she trusts them completely until the sitting room at the Golob farm fills with neighbors and activists, until she realizes they’re surrounded by the Gestapo, who arrest her, and the jails in Klagenfurt and Begunje fill up. A good haul, right into the net, in Zell a list of sympathizers is found, both local and from the surrounding area, punitive action is taken. Marija, the serene beauty of the summer of ’42, the unconscious beauty, beaten black and blue, before the Freisler tribunal, not a square inch of her skin unbruised, a silent body to whom chilly April brings death in 1943, the ax decapitates her, her brother follows her in death, in the Vienna Civil Court. The family torn apart, the mother sent to Ravensbrück, the father to Stein an der Donau, all that’s left is the rosary from the camp, the beads that glide through fingers are formed from dried chewed bread. The war has shredded all the brothers, too. And Jurij from Lobnik Valley, who, before his decapitation in Vienna, stitched in his handkerchief the words I wait, I believe, I hope, I love – čakam, verujem, upam, ljubim. Two partisans in the Bistričniks’ sitting room, the house surrounded by the police, the aunt shot dead before the door, behind the house a dead resistance fighter whom they had tortured at the neighbors’, the partisans’ corpses, naked and disfigured, for whom graves are dug under the spruce trees, on the far side of the fields, at the edge of the forest. The graves in the snow and the putrid corpses. Blood in the lower cellar, brains spattered over the turnips, blood on the shelves, the bellowing farmhand, beaten to death by partisans. The Piskernik girls, whimpering before the secret partisan court sentences them to death, the deserter, Franz, shot by partisans in the Hrevelnik bunker. The three Blajs brothers, Jakob, Filip, and Janez, who treat a wounded partisan, are arrested by the Gestapo, and whose ashes return to the orphaned farm. Escape after arrest, the many varieties of escape.

  Johan Hojnik escaped after his arrest, his grandfather, father, and mother, killed by the police, shot dead, he saw the bloodbath with his own eyes, the bodies on the manure pile, burned. Paula fled after her arrest, after her father was tortured to death in the Gestapo prison in Klagenfurt, dead of a ruptured bladder, of kidney failure; fled after her mother gave birth in Aichach, a baby girl, a sweet thing, fled after the police confiscated thirty head of sheep, twelve head of cattle, and two horses, escaped on the way to prison as her brothers Josef and Jakob would later, or rescued at the last minute like Ivanka, Malka, Marija, and all the rest. That’s how women become partisans. The children in the orphaned homes waiting for their parents to return, picking lice from their hair, their visits to the prison, their begging, their pleading, their tears. Children who no longer recognize their mothers after they return from the camps, the strange, aged women, the peculiar, silent fathers. Bernarda Hirtl, born in Ravensbrück, survived. Thanks to Tinca, who brought the mother home with her five-month old child. The Peršmans’ bodies, left to rot, moved days later to the Rastočniks’ place, behind the stable, swarms of flies on the stinking coffins. No one is willing to dig graves for the family, only the parish priest, Father Zechner, digs tirelessly all night with Marta until others begin to mourn and to hope the nightmare will end, that this affliction will come to an end forever. The partisans hounded in the last winter of the war, victory almost within reach, no more if or maybe, they want to be supported, the saddle must be brought out, the bull butchered, bread baked, the cows milked, doughnuts filled, laundry cleaned, a dance organized, victory is certain, death is certain, all-pervasive suspicion reigns, each suspects the other, interrogations of supposed informers, secret execution squads, shovels and spades, the trigger-happy commander.

  The miserable life of a fighter, constant hunger, disgusting raw meat that cannot be cooked because a fire would betray them, no milk, no vegetables, oozing wounds, the cold, the filth. He could only bear it all because he knew he was fighting the destroyers, Tine says, because of the confidence that they were fighting the Nazis, that they were doing something to resist their “total war.” Three years a partisan, three years fighting the Nazis, no one can tell him anything on this front. It gives him strength in times of doubt, nothing more, nothing else.

  HOW do the survivors return after the end of the war? Illegally, fleeing from the farthest corners of the continent? Do they emerge from the forests and camps and make the trek home alone or in groups? They approach their plundered, ruined, or burned down homes cautiously. Still fleeing, still feeling they are doing something wrong? Are they the victors or the vanquished? Will they remember the names of the dead or would they rather forget them? Will they find words for their suffering, which should be victorious but instead brings desolation?

  They sense that others will come and occupy the space of their experience, others who can tell a more coherent story, while they only have sparse and scattered fragments. They sense that among them, among the survivors and the victors there will still be winners and losers. They sense that they will have to rein in their hope, that it will suffice only to make ends meet, no more than that.

  The British will search their homes for weapons and propaganda, because former partisans in their families could threaten the border with demands for an annexation to Yugoslavia.

  Yesterday’s allies become adversaries. The Slovenian Communists will separate the wheat from the chaff among the fighters, he’s one of ours, they’ll say, but he is not, this one is a dedicated fighter, that one is not, that one hesitates, doesn’t trust us, this one believes. The Austrian Communists will exclude Slovenian Titoists from the Party, the Church will threaten the partisans’ families with excommunication and at Mass will tell them to their faces that there is no place for them in church as long as they believe in the partisans. Mobs will attack the first Slovenian cultural events. Regional authorities in Carinthia will open investigations into whether or not the partisans committed murder and who had denounced, arrested, and killed opponents of the partisans of the war, but nothing more, nothing else interests them, there is nothing else they want to expose, investigate, remember. They spread a cloak of silence over the rest. Those are private matters.
<
br />   Is the plunder divided up in peacetime? In peacetime must one be afraid of losing one’s reason, of turning away a friend and embracing an enemy?

  The hesitant, the cautious, the wounded, the horrified, the silent, the distraught will all be at a disadvantage. The politics that brought about the war will deny them compassion. Those wounded on many levels will trail behind. So as not to provoke the majority of its citizens, the Nazi sympathizers and the German-nationals, the new Austrian state will distrust those who fought against National Socialism. Because, it is argued, what is dubious about their resistance is not that it was directed against the Nazis, what is objectionable about it is that it allowed them to form their own opinions about the Slovenian community’s role in Carinthia’s future, opinions that then had to be respected during the negotiations for the Austrian state treaty, that’s all we need, a law giving generous protection to a minority as a countermove to Yugoslavian territorial claims, according to the wishes of the occupying powers! And all the while, Austria had nothing to do with the Nazis, Austria itself was a victim, didn’t understand what was happening, didn’t join in, it wasn’t even a country in that difficult time. No one in this country so gifted in dissimulation ever welcomed the Nazis, no one longed for the Greater German Reich, no one made themselves guilty, no one assisted the Final Solution, they just took part a little bit in the shooting, the assassinations, the gassing, but that doesn’t count, nothing counts.