The Luck of the Weissensteiners (The Three Nations Trilogy) (40 page)

There was no further interrogation or examination, all prisoners were treated equally and two officers with machine guns separated
out the few remaining men amongst them and led them into their own part of the camp. At the far end of the field stood several small barracks that Greta had not seen initially and she wondered if this was one of the camps the Germans had built.

“At least we are safe from the beatings and the raping!” she heard a women nearby say. “My neighbour was a very pretty girl and she got raped by at least four different soldiers in one day and then beaten to a pulp by the mob
that put us behind bars. Whatever work they are going to make us do I feel almost safe in here.”

Another woman disagreed. “I have seen a group of male prisoners on the road. They had to carry rocks and debris from bombed out buildings and looked as if they were already close to collapsing. I fear we are in for a nasty surprise. They want to show that the shoe is on the other foot now!”

When their little group got to the barracks the best beds had already been taken and there were not enough spaces left for all of them in one and the same barrack. Edith and Esther joined a hut that had several children in it and invited Ernst to stay with them. Wilma and Greta found two beds in a larger wood building which appeared to house other infirm and ill detainees. Greta explained her sister’s condition to the fellow inmates who refused to put up with such an inconvenience.  After the beating in the cinema she was determined to find a safe space for her sister.

Only afte
r a further lengthy search did the two secure bunks in a barrack where the inhabitants were willing to take them in. Or rather, one of the women was happy to have them and invited them in, the others had admittedly been much less forthcoming, but did not try to intervene. After the humiliating march from door to door, looking for a place to stay, the sisters were willing to settle for being tolerated, as the absence of resistance was probably as good as it would get for them in here.

The situation in Brno meanwhile was equally volatile for the Germans. The rage of the Czech people
here easily surpassed that of the Russian liberators, who by now had exhausted most of their thirst for violence and retribution on their way through the Ukraine and the Baltics. The Red Army moved on towards Prague, which still had not surrendered and the remaining units in Brno only rarely interfered with the revenge activities performed by civilians.

The Russian s
oldiers searched German houses for valuables and pretty girls but by and large that was the extent of their cruelty. Russians and Czechs had both been called to orderly behaviour by the army leadership and government officials after first reports about their conduct reached the authorities and the foreign press, but there were no effective processes in place to punish those who transgressed those directives.

Every time someone new arrived a
t the farm where Jonah and Alma were staying they had further stories to tell about the on-going looting, beatings, humiliations and rapes. People had been thrown into rivers from bridges, tortured, beaten to death and even hanged - many just because they were or appeared to be German - without a trial or as much as the tiniest proof of committed crimes. Even amongst the Ukrainians in the camp – many of whom had been forced to work on German farms - there was some sympathy for the victims of this blind revenge.

Not every one
of the exiled workers from the east had been mistreated by their German bosses and many had seen the difficulties which non-conformist German families had suffered since Hitler’s invasion. Many Sudetenlanders had been living in Brno for generations and had wanted nothing to do with Hitler and his plans for Europe but were intimidated by the German military force. In the aftermath of the war, such differentiations and considerations did not matter to people whose lives had been ruined by the Nazis. To Russian soldiers – many of whom had liberated concentration camps on their way - such actions were certainly understandable and did not tempt them to interfere.

Once the fighting had stopped, the German Reich had completely surrendered and even the last partisan uni
ts had laid down their weapons, the Allies were beginning to address the issue of the displaced people in Europe, but seemed to be taking their time to come to agreements.

The Czechoslovak president
, Benes, who had led the government in exile during the war, immediately called for a rapid expulsion of all Germans from his country but the Allies were reluctant to agree to that policy. Czech and Slovak citizens therefore started their own initiatives and many cities in the Soviet occupied parts of the country confiscated all German property and forced the inhabitants towards the border.

Three weeks after the end of the war all Germans were expelled from Brno and brought
to the Austrian border in the south. Russian soldiers refused them entry on orders to await a joint decision by the Allied forces about the fate of all displaced people in Europe. The Germans had to walk back to Brno, by now so weakened that many died of dysentery on the way. Because of the high number of casualties the survivors named the event the Brno Death March. Czechs who did not agree with the violence and had sympathy for these civilians had to be careful not to become objects of hate themselves.

In the absence of a clear
decision by the politicians, some Ukrainians and Poles considered returning to their countries by themselves, either by rail or by foot. They were disheartened to find out that rail traffic for civilians had been suspended and those desperate to go home had to do so on foot. Some of these started their journey immediately; many others however were quite reluctant to go home to a Soviet satellite state. Some Ukrainians had seen the Germans as liberators from Bolshevik rule and even though they soon realised that they had merely exchanged one dictatorship for another, they were still unhappy to go back to what they perceived as their old oppressors back in control. A large number of the inhabitants on the farm – which had turned into something more resembling a big camp by now - were happy to stay in Czechoslovakia, if only the Allies and the locals would let them.

Alma and Jonah were almost enjoying their time in the camp. After twice hiding in dark basements for long periods of time they were pleased to be out in the fresh air and not having to hide any more. The place was guarded by soldiers and there was no forced labour or hunger – as there was in the camps for the German prisoners.

Alma befriended a young woman, Halyna, the mother of two children who had been taken away from her by the Germans. She was desperate to find out what had happened to them but neither Czechs nor Russians were particularly forthcoming with help. Halyna had worked herself into a state of hysteria in the year since her children had gone missing, trying to convince herself that they were living happily with a German family somewhere as had been rumoured to have happened at the later stages of the war in an attempt to repopulate the country with Aryan looking children. As disgusting as this thought was to her, it was preferable to the idea of her children being experimented on in one of the death camps like Terezin.

People on the fa
rm had started to avoid her because of her uncontrolled and continuous whining. Jonah and Alma, with their experience in dealing with Wilma, were perfectly suited to her as friends.

With her gentle and loving manner
Alma was able to help Halyna sit out her panic attacks and anxiety. Once calmed, the Ukrainian woman was able to talk sensibly about her fears and become more pragmatic about her situation. Halyna was grateful for the attention and Alma, in turn, was happy to have a project to take her mind off her own uncertain future.

Jonah and Alma cherished the blossoming friendship because they too had been isolated from the rest of the community on the farm. Even though Jonah
’s family had come from the Ukraine he was quite visibly Jewish, which for many of them was a good enough reason to avoid him. Tsarist Russia had seen several violent waves of anti-Semitism and the sentiment had not dramatically changed since. The farm camp held a lot of workers who had welcomed the German forces and had volunteered to leave their home and work in the west. The Nazis had been stopped but it was not the end of troubles for the Jews, as Jonah and his lover experienced regularly.

One day several military trucks arrived at the farm and Russian soldiers gestured for the residents of the camp to pack their belongings and get on the vehicles. Not trusting men in uniforms the people were scared to follow the orders as they associated such transports with
deportation to death camps and once again being at the mercy of an unpredictable military power.

The hesitation irritated the soldiers and made them appear more brutal than they had been to begin with. Screams and panic spread across the crowd and one officer fired a warning shot into the air.

In the silence that followed he ordered the people around him onto the trucks and - resigned to their fate - the first few did as they had been told. Soon the transports were full and disappeared, leaving Jonah, Alma and Halyna behind with about thirty others.

“We will have to get away soon,” Alma said in panic. “If we get sent to the Ukraine we will never get back to Bratislava and find Egon.”

“If we could get past the guards we could walk to Bratislava. Maybe we can bribe someone to let us go,” Jonah said hopefully.

“We are taking Halyna with us, aren't we?” asked Alma.

“Naturally. If only this place had a proper commander we could explain that we are Slovaks from Bratislava. It is ridiculous that we can't argue with anyone about this but have to accept whatever is decided on our behalf. Do we have anything we can use as a bribe? Maybe our wedding rings?” suggested Jonah. He had given Alma his late wife's wedding ring when they left the estate and it seemed a huge but probably necessary sacrifice for their freedom.

“Yes, I am afrai
d that is the only thing we have left that is worth anything. Let me try tonight. My Russian is better than yours and I think they always find women more difficult to refuse,” Alma suggested.

“I am not sure about that. Please don't do anyt
hing silly. We don't even know where the trucks took them. Maybe there is some proper camp where all refugees are being kept,” Jonah said.

That
evening Alma approached the guard she considered the softest. He offered her a cigarette and showed her a picture of his young baby boy. Slowly she started to tell him about their situation and that they had no business in the Ukraine. The officer seemed to feel for their predicament but when Alma suggested he should let them out of the camp he refused her, saying he would not risk being reprimanded and possibly not seeing his son for her. Nothing could persuade him, no begging and no wedding rings. Defeated she returned to Jonah and Halyna, who suggested they should try to get away over the fence in the dark. The camp was not very well secured and she had seen some people escape before, even though they had been younger and quicker than Jonah.

While they were discussing this option another soldier came
over to the three of them, ordered them to take their belongings and led them to the gate. Scared that they would now be punished for their attempt to bribe a Soviet soldier they followed his orders fearfully and prepared themselves to be taken away to an unknown fate. Instead of some cruel sadistic retribution however the guard offered them their freedom in exchange for the wedding rings. Apparently the first guard Alma had approached had told this other one about the incident and he did not possess the same scruples as his colleague. Shortly after midnight they were free and on their way to Bratislava. Jonah was so happy he kept jumping for joy during the walk; his mind had been fixated on the task of finding out about Egon and how to go about it.

They chose a route
away from the main road to avoid being picked up by 'helpful’ soldiers who might try and off-load them later into just another camp. Halyna's documents and her accent identified her as Ukrainian and Jonah and Alma would be considered the same by association. The couple had no passports on them and although they could prove their nationalities by local knowledge and language, this might not be of any use with foreign soldiers. Halyna would not part with her documents because she needed them to find and fight for her children. Jonah was very frustrated. Because of the detour the journey would take much longer. Both women warned him however never to become complacent in this chaos and always to err on the side of caution.

After a few days they
reached Bratislava without any incidents and headed directly for Benedikt and Johanna's farm, which luckily was on their way into town anyway.

Jonah almost did not recognise the building when they got to it. Presumably in an act of revenge the family house had been set on fire and only its stone parts were still
intact. The animals seemed to have been taken away as the huge stalls were completely empty. There were people out in the fields working, of whom some seemed to use German army trucks to bring in the harvest. Clearly Benedikt and Johanna were no longer living here but Jonah wondered if they had been kept on to work or if they had fled.

Alma approached two of the workers who she thought were speaking in Polish and asked them in German and in Russian if they knew what had happened to the owners of the farm. Assuming she was a relative trying to lay claim to the property they gestured for her to go away
and shouted “confiscated”. Scared that she might be mistaken for a German or a collaborator she left the scene. The three decided to try the workshop on Gajova to see if Egon had reappeared or if anyone there had heard from him.