Gerta Read online

  PRAISE FOR GERTA

  Winner of the Magnesia Litera Readers’ Award; short-listed for the Jiří Orten Award, the Josef Škvorecký Award, and the Magnesia Litera in the prose category.

  “I think [Gerta] is beautiful and relevant. One of its basic themes is the expulsion of the German population from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, but as a whole the novel carries a much broader theme that seems crucial to me today—that the mutual problems between people and nations will not be solved simply by an acknowledgment, and not even by an apology. An apology is just the beginning. We can admit our own guilt, take it on ourselves, but an even more difficult and important step, which is not spoken of so much and for which there are no laws or entitlements, is forgiveness—whether toward others or toward ourselves. For me, Gerta is a book about forgiveness.”

  —Alice Nellis, director of the Czech TV adaptation of Gerta (English translation by Véronique Firkusny)

  “A great book . . . Immediately after reading, [Gerta] is unforgettable . . . Kateřina Tučková wrote a novel that should be required reading.”

  —Jan Hübsch, Lidovky

  “The central story of Gerta Schnirch can be captured in one word, the clichéd adjective powerful. Its power lies particularly in its vivid depiction of frightful experiences immediately after World War II, experiences resembling terrible nightmares. To achieve this, the author did not need to make use of cheap effects or explicit, detailed, or shocking descriptions.”

  —Petr Hrtánek, iLiteratura

  “The author describes, with a great writing talent and empathy for human suffering, Gerta’s life from the moment she stood at her mother’s grave in 1942 . . . We have read of various marches, but few are as dreadful as the one depicted with deep compassion by Kateřina Tučková. The story is as forcefully described as if [Tučková] were Gerta, experiencing it all firsthand.”

  —Milena Nyklová, Knižní novinky

  “[Gerta] masterfully fulfills one of the potential and important functions of literature. It is a means of self-reflection for a particular community, in this case the Czech nation.”

  —Pavel Janoušek, Host

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Kateřina Tučková

  Translation copyright © 2021 by Véronique Firkusny

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch by Host in the Czech Republic in 2009. Translated from Czech by Véronique Firkusny. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2021.

  Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542043151 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542043158 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542043144 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 154204314X (paperback)

  Cover design by Kimberly Glyder

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  PART II

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  PART III

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  PART IV

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  PART V

  I read it . . .

  INDEX OF LOCAL PLACE NAMES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My thanks to the survivors of the death march who spoke to me with such openness. My thanks also to those authors whose expert texts and research helped me to flesh out the story, especially historians Jan Perníček and David Kovařík. Thanks to the latter for inspiring me to write this book and for the thirty kilometers we walked together at night in memory of the victims of the transport.

  PROLOGUE

  The edges of the rough road crumble into the ditch. Grass grows through the gravel, and the wheels of the baby carriage bump over the stones. Her left foot has just slipped on the loose pebbles; there’s a dull throbbing in her ankle; perhaps she’s pulled a tendon. She tries to avoid putting her full weight on the foot. For several hours now, they’ve been walking slowly, shuffling along, their baby carriages side by side. From time to time, they steady each other, take turns pushing. For a long while, it’s been impossible to make out the road clearly. Only every so often do the beams of a flashlight or the headlights of a truck sweep over them, but then they huddle even tighter, hasten their steps, and throw their coats over the carriages to cover the children.

  She can’t tell for certain how long they’ve been walking. It seems as though their journey has taken ages. And yet dawn hasn’t even broken, so it can’t have been more than a few hours. She’s tired, and so is her companion. Should she try to stop and rest?

  A few times they have passed people sitting either on the ground or on the suitcases they have been dragging along. Several times they have also seen one of the armed youths rush over and bash in these people’s heads with the butt of a rifle. She was scared to stop. In spite of the stitch in her side and the pain in her left foot, she forced herself to keep taking steps.

  The young mother walking beside her was whispering about being thirsty.

  Gerta said nothing. She had hidden away some water for herself and her child, but she couldn’t offer any, not knowing what still lay ahead. Although she, too, was thirsty, she remained silent and shuffled along, step by step, only God knew to where.

  God? She had lost faith in him long ago. Once upon a time, she had prayed to him, begged him to help her, to do something—anything—that would have changed her life. Then, little by little, she realized that God wasn’t about to do a thing for her. But by then, it was too late.

  From that moment on, she had stopped praying and didn’t think about God anymore. She wanted to be self-sufficient, even at times like this. Because God had no idea where they were driving her; only tho
se crazed schoolboys knew, and maybe in the end, not even they. Those harebrained brats—she choked with rage; their voices would reach her and then disappear again, becoming lost in the cries of the people ahead of her. A few times, she caught a glimpse of them riding in the backs of passing trucks. With their upraised, tangled weapons, they reminded her of Medusa and her twisted hair of snakes. A seething, raging Medusa, a murderess with the sinister, drunken maw of vulgar riffraff. Look upon them and you would die. You would turn to stone, or they would shoot you. She hated them, but that was all she could do. Only hate. And above all, not let it show if she wanted to survive. She walked meekly beside her companion and kept her mouth shut. The night was inching toward a gray morning, and ahead of her stretched a column of quiet, exhausted people. The sounds of their steps, the swish of winter coats, and words uttered in low voices were interrupted only by the shouts of the guards, the moans of the wounded, and occasional gunshots. How many? Gerta could no longer keep count.

  Where exactly had this nightmare started?

  By the time the flowers had fallen to the bottom of her mother’s open grave, everyone was already sensing it, as if they already knew. Even her father was getting anxious, although he still blindly believed.

  When Gerta shot him a sidelong glance, she saw how he was holding himself together, how he was clenching all the muscles in his face, keeping his eyes fixed and then hiding them behind a profusion of blinking, how hard he was trying not to cry. But he should cry, thought Gerta, he should. He should smear the top of his bald head, from which the last wisps of fair hair were receding, with the earth from her mother’s grave; he should rub the earth onto his face, let it mix with his tears, and, above all, cry for forgiveness. That he should do. Not stand there preening in his uniform like a pigeon on a perch with his chest puffed out, watching her mother’s coffin disappear under clods of dirt. Stop! Gerta wanted to cry out, but Friedrich held her back. He grabbed her arm so abruptly, it startled her. Was Friedrich not crying either? But of course, how could he, faithful image of his father that he was? Gerta looked again into the deep hole, where by now the dark gray of the coffin was showing through only in spots. It had been a modest funeral. But this, after all, was not where it had started. This funeral was just one link in a chain of calamities that had come month by month, year after year. All through the war.

  And yet the life ahead of her had once seemed so full of promise. And not just her life—Friedrich’s, too, and her father’s and her mother’s, and Janinka’s and Karel’s; all of their lives had been meaningful and had made sense. They had all been moving as a unified whole toward a future, the contours of which Gerta could make out perfectly. Yet by the winter of 1942, when Mother disappeared beneath the Schnirch headstone, that vision of the future was already disintegrating. The last semblance of security would be trampled by the mob on the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1945. But first, a whole series of other events was still to come.

  PART I

  Living Through the War

  Branded a Schnirch

  I

  Janinka was delicate, almost translucent. She was like the green lacewing with its pellucid wings woven with golden threads, its tiny pistachio-colored body, and its exceptionally long antennae with which it was fencing against the glass of the windowpane, trapped in a corner by the windowsill until Gerta released it into the warm July night. Janinka, delicate as eiderdown, was a tall, lanky girl with slightly rounded breasts, skinny legs, and flaxen, shoulder-length, carelessly cropped hair that fell across her face like a veil. The first time Gerta met her, she was quiet, and it wasn’t because she was shy. She was, for the most part, always quiet, lost in her inner world full of tropical flowers, brilliant butterflies, exotic fauna and flora whose tendrils entwined to form ornamental canopies of fantastic designs. She would allow Gerta and the other children to approach the outskirts of her inner landscape, but it was Mr. Kmenta whom she liked best, and he was always the first one she invited to enter. He would creep in among the foliage of the primeval growth, densely populated by flowers with jagged and smooth, elongated petals. Mr. Kmenta always seemed deeply affected by the aroma wafting from the thickly painted sheet of paper. He would stand over it for a long time and with a slight smile would wander along the pathways of her inner topographies that exuded tranquility. Then he would stroke Janinka’s blonde hair and convey an unspoken compliment to her questioning blue eyes, at which she would lower her stubby, pale eyelashes and smile at her creation. After that, the others could come and have a look as well, to see what Janinka had conjured up this time. Gerta stood beaming proudly behind her, as if it were the work of her own hands, as if her work and Janinka’s were one and the same.

  “Very good,” she’d say.

  And of all the children, Gerta was always the last one to return to her table to complete her own drawing of the pitcher with flowers, or the palm of a hand, or whatever the lesson’s assignment had been. Janinka’s illustration would then sparkle among the plain pictures like a precious gem held by two clothespins on a long line stretched along the wall. It would dangle in their midst like the eye of an eagle among the blind, a jungle of flowers amid the crudely drawn stumps of human arms and the misshapen forms of angular pitchers.

  Afterward, she and Janinka would head home, making their way along the wall of St. Jacob’s Church, past the Jesuit church, through the park stretching from the Künstlerhaus to the intersection of Pressburger Straße, then on past the first few houses until they reached Blatná Street. Gerta would be talking and swinging her canvas bag carrying all her watercolors and her set of brushes in rhythm with her steps; Janinka would be following along, always a few steps behind. Throughout the prewar years, they had returned home together the same way, and then suddenly everything came to an end. Mr. Kmenta vanished from their lives, and back then, her mother had said that it was bound to end anyway, because Gerta was starting secondary school, and that made her too old to be listening to schoolmaster Kmenta’s stories about famous artists, like Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and to be bringing home drawing assignments.

  Janinka could have gone on taking Mr. Kmenta’s class for another year, but the school secretary had abruptly declared over the telephone that this year Mr. Kmenta’s courses weren’t open, that they weren’t even going to be taking place, and that as for where else Mr. Kmenta might be teaching his art class, she had no idea. Gerta sadly hung up the receiver in the public telephone booth at the post office. Janinka’s eyes welled up with tears, and her gaunt little hand trembled. Afterward they sat together on a bench in the park, hand in hand, Janinka silent with her head hanging, looking down at the dark blue shoes that encased her narrow feet, Gerta staring out at the bushes that were slowly turning into golden cascades. It was 1939, Indian summer, and the disappearance of Mr. Kmenta and their art class, for which they had been signed up since the end of the previous school year, had perhaps been foreshadowed by her mother’s enigmatic words, now so often heard in their home.

  “Everything’s going to be different now, and no one will be as happy as they were before,” said Gerta, turning to Janinka. Janinka kept the heels of her shoes tapping against the footrest of the bench in a steady rhythm. She nodded her lowered head as if she understood, and remained silent.

  II

  The war was long. It began inconspicuously, with Gerta barely noticing, and then spread until by the end, it had infiltrated every corner of their lives. It had begun with the cancellation of Mr. Kmenta’s art class and then crept along until it reached into their home, right inside their kitchen, where Father chortled as he read aloud from the paper about a Jew who had been stripped and chased out of the Esplanade Café, running so fast that he fell and broke his neck on the steps. That time, her mother burst into tears over such an undignified ending to a human life. This didn’t go by without a quarrel, just as when she had given half a liter of milk to Mrs. Goldstein next door, who hadn’t managed to go shopping during the hours designated for Jews. Back then,
Gerta thought that these were only domestic disasters, earthquakes happening within the walls of their apartment, threatening the peace between her parents. In her room, she would then pray that Mrs. Goldstein wouldn’t come to them next time she needed milk, prayed that her mother wouldn’t soften at the sight of little Hannah in Mrs. Goldstein’s arms, her big dark eyes like freshly peeled chestnuts. Or she prayed that the people sitting on the sidewalks alongside carts heaped with furniture would disappear from the city soon. They always brought such sadness to her mother’s face, as did every encounter with Mrs. Kocur from next door, whose son, Jirka, had shot himself because of the “betrayal in Munich.” That time, Gerta couldn’t understand why her father sent her mother away to their bedroom while he explained the situation to a dismayed Friedrich, who in Jirka had lost a classmate. He dispelled his misgivings with a single word: sissies. And Friedrich, that Aryan apple of his father’s eye, their little Friedrich, understood, as he always did. Nothing could come between him and his father.

  So the war advanced, step by step, while Gerta stubbornly strove not to allow any of the changes that were happening into her life. Except with Janinka, whom she had invited to share her bedroom when Janinka’s own was taken over by relatives who had been expelled from Frývaldov.

  “They had to make room for people like you,” Janinka explained quietly with downcast eyes before refusing Gerta’s offer, not even wanting to tell her what was now being said in her house about the Schnirchs. Gerta shook her head, not understanding. What did she mean, people like you? After all, hadn’t she always been just like Janinka? She had attended drawing class, was about to start secondary school, and rather than being interested in the pictures of Hitler lit by flickering candles in apartment windows, she was much more curious, in the darkness of her bedroom, about the delicate nipples budding from the areolas of her naked breasts. In short, she was absorbed in her own life, which now, as she was about to start attending a new school, had become so engrossing.

  Every October morning during that first wartime year, Gerta woke to an inky-blue darkness, unpierced by the slightest glimmer of light, full of curiosity and eagerly anticipating the new day. The window through which she looked out onto Pressburger Straße while she was getting dressed offered her only a view of deep shadows, darker where silhouettes of massive plane trees blocked the approaching light. Gerta never stayed at the window longer than it took her to dress. She was motivated to hurry by the thought of her mother’s kind smile at breakfast, heralded by the muffled clinking of cups and spoons that floated to her from the kitchen.