CHAPTER FOUR

STORY OF LENKA

I stopped at Sauersack, an abandoned concrete plant with a long story. It was built under the German occupation for the mining and processing of tin ore. At the beginning, the tin was mined by the locals. Once they left for the war they were replaced by prisoners. When the war ended the factory had been left derelict. No one cared about the concrete ruins. It was left to slowly crumble.

I sat down on a broken step. Instantly, the atmosphere of the place took hold of me. No matter how many times I came here, my mind always filled with questions about how things must have been back when the factory was still running. How many men had died here, at the precise spot where I could now walk freely? All because of one man’s absurd desire to conquer the world who knew how to seduce crowds.

I thought of Oma, who must certainly have remembered Sauersack being built. She would have been around twenty years old at that time. What a shame, she was no longer around. She could have told me so much about this place and I could have asked about every detail of how life was back then.

As a child, Oma’s life had seemed as simple as the rice pudding she used to make for me as a treat. It never occurred to me that she had once been young and that she would have suffered many hardships. Just as Mrs Richter had said, there must be so much I didn’t know and never thought to ask. I suppose I could ask Maminka, but she didn’t seem to know much either. Perhaps I should go to that meeting after all.

I stood up and walked over to an old cylindrical tank, filled with stagnant water. I leaned over and peered inside seeing nothing but my own reflection on the green slimy surface.

A middle-aged couple approached and passed me, one of them with a map in their hands. From their conversation, I picked up that they were visiting the wartime sites of the Ore Mountains. They had just come from Svatava. I had never visited Svatava myself because there was not much to see, except an ugly statue. But I had been to another concentration camp: Theresienstadt in Terezin. When I was in my third grade, we went on a school trip there. I remember how excited we all were getting on the bus. Our excitement was probably due as much to the fact we were getting out of school for the day as to our fascination with the horrors that had taken place there. Horrors that as children we barely understood.

Before we set off, our teacher gave us thorough instructions about how we were to behave and described what we would see there. She told us to be respectful at all times and that we were not allowed to run around or scream.

One of my school mates, Ivan, a boastful boy who had gipsy heritage, said he had visited Theresienstadt before and that his guide had been an old woman who was one of the survivors. Ivan, we all knew, was prone to making things up, so none of us knew whether to believe him or whether this old woman was just a figment of his imagination. Secretly, though, we all hoped that we would meet the old lady and that she would be our guide. We arrived at the main gate, chatting and laughing. Above the gate was the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei – Work sets you free. An added insult to the many who laboured and, far from being set free, had suffered and died here.

Inside the gate, we were greeted, not by the old woman of Ivan’s story, but by a young man in his thirties, who specialised in accompanying groups of school children. We all sighed with disappointment and were swiftly told-off by our teacher.

Our guide explained how Jews, Communists and gypsies were arrested by the Nazi regime and sent to concentration camps like this one, built all over Europe. At the camps, prisoners were forced to work and were eventually put to death, he explained. He didn’t go into detail about conditions in the camps, or how they were killed (details which I learned to my horror some ten years later, when I visited Buchenwald in Germany). Because this was the communist era our guide talked in terms of ‘bad’ Germans and of the ‘good’ Russians, who were presented as our liberators, the saviours of the Czechoslovak people.

We walked around in groups. The only thing I really remember were dormitories with bunk beds to which some visitors had tied small bouquets of roses. Afterwards, we went to a nearby restaurant where the teacher ordered pancakes with strawberry jam. I ate three and was sick on the bus the whole way back.

When we arrived back in Kraslice, it was Oma who came to pick me up at the bus station. On the way home, she asked me about the excursion. I told her that I now knew what she had been doing when she was young, that she had been killing Jews, Communists and Gypsies because that was what Germans had done during the war. She looked at me with horror and slapped me hard across the cheek. Oma had never slapped me before. Not really understanding what was going on, I covered my sore, red cheek and started to cry. I promised her I would never say anything like that again. Inside, I also made a promise to myself that I would never tell anyone that Oma was one of the ‘bad’ Germans, a traitor to the Czechoslovak nation.

Later that day Maminka explained to me that not all German people had supported the Nazi regime or worked in the concentration camps.

‘Sudeten German were not traitors. They had lived in these regions for centuries and had to leave for Germany after the war. Because your grandfather was Czech, Oma was allowed to stay here.’

‘But didn’t she let Hitler in?’

‘Lenka, darling, it is much more complicated than that. There is so much you don’t understand. Did you know that our region was liberated by the Americans and not the Russians?’

‘The Americans?’

‘Yes, darling, the Americans. They came to liberate Kraslice and Pilsen. But we are not allowed to talk about it, so keep it as a secret and never mention anything to anybody.’

‘So who are the fallen soldiers whose graves we cover with red and white carnations every May?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And why are we not allowed to talk about it?’

‘Because we have to do what the Russians say. Our country is occupied by them and we are under their supervision. But you must not talk about it. Promise?

‘Yes, I promise,’ I hugged Maminka tight to express my loyalty.

‘If you say to your teacher we were liberated by the Americans, she could report me and I might even go to prison,’ she warned me one last time.

‘I understand. I’m a big girl now, Maminka. I know you adults are lying all the time. I swear I won’t tell anyone Oma is German either, so she won’t end up in prison.’

Maminka looked at me tenderly, but I could sense her unease.

That day I learned that speaking my mind could be dangerous and I decided that to be safe I would stick to saying only what others wanted to hear.

Two weeks after I came back from the school trip, Oma found out she had breast cancer which had already spread throughout her whole body. She had less than nine months to live.

Nine months didn’t seem a long time. And yet in that time, a child can grow from just a cluster of cells into a complete human being. In Oma’s case, the process was reversed and she went from being a fully functioning human being to becoming increasingly dependent until she was like a baby herself. Eventually, there was really nothing left of her and she disappeared altogether. It seems so strange that a human being can just disappear, but no more strange than the way we start our lives, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. I wondered what the child might have been like. Now, of course, I would never know. But did it still exist somewhere, that potential life, waiting to be born? With all my heart I hoped it did.