The Luck of the Weissensteiners (The Three Nations Trilogy) (39 page)

Then one soldier
held up an old Austrian passport. Edith’s face froze. She had forgotten that she had sown her old passport from the times before the Anschluss into one of her coats. Back then she had wanted to preserve it in case it might prove useful at a later date. Now it proved to be her ruin.

“Nemecky” he shouted.
German.

“That's not a German passport
, it is Austrian,” Edith tried to explain, but the guard again just threatened her with his rifle. None of them were allowed to speak. They were ordered on to the truck with gestures instead of words. One officer stayed behind with the horses, presumably to sell them in the next village. Their luggage and clothes were left behind on the road.

The truck drove
further east and on the way picked up more people from the side of the road as it had done with Greta and her entourage. The patrol rarely let people go, only those with Czech papers it seemed and even from that group some were ordered on the truck. According to their stories the fellow prisoners were Czech but had German sounding names. Many Jewish names sounded German to the Czechs and regardless of their nationality they were usually arrested as well. They were particularly upset to come out of their hiding places and now find themselves arrested by their alleged liberators.

By the aftern
oon the truck was bursting with people, many of which were Germans from Austria-Hungary, pleading that they had nothing to do with the Nazis and that their families had lived in the area for centuries. The guards were not in the least interested, only in the riches they had been able to appropriate for themselves. No response or remorse could be read in their faces, only disgust and hate.

The truck took them back to Pilsen. Everywhere in town hung red posters informing the Germans of something which Greta could not decipher from the moving vehicle. The car finally stopped in a suburban road and unloaded its human cargo at an underground cinema building. Greta expected there to be a reception of some kind where they could clear up the obvious mistake that had been made and where there would be apologies to the Jewish people that had been arrested by mistake. Nothing of the sort occurred. The same guards that had been ignoring them throughout the whole journey were now pushing them down the stairs into the big auditorium wh
ich was already almost full of people.

Then the doors were locked from the outside and only a small light from the projector room was visible. Children were screaming, voices were whispering but for the first few minutes the prisoners in the cinema were waiting for something to happen. There were arguments over seats between newcomers and those who had already been here longer.

In the semi darkness it was difficult to make out people and seat rows but many men and women gave up seats for the elderly, children and pregnant women. Others insisted on staying in their seat, fighting off even those who only tried to get past them to find a space somewhere else.

Wilma's sedatives were
still on the road where the truck had picked them up and the darkness combined with the slightly volatile aura in the auditorium threatened to set her off again. Ernst held on tight to Esther who had started to stay by his side all the time now so that Greta could take care of her sister. They had not seen any spare seats and sat down at the bottom of the theatre between the first few seat rows near the screen.

“Find the light switch!” someone shouted in German.

“The switches don't work!” an answer came back.

“Let me through I am going to be sick!” a voice shouted in panic not far from
their group. “Let me through, let me through!”

A series of swear words and apologies followed and from their growing distance Greta estimated that the voice had made it halfway to the top before it was to
o late. It smelled awful.

The
new prisoners started to get more animated and loud as the waiting continued, while established ones had resigned themselves to their fate.

“We
have got to get out of here. They are going to kill us,” shouted one woman.

“Calm down, we have been here all day. Nothing is going to happen to us,” someone called back. “Shut up!”

“How would you know?” the woman's voice asked.

“One guard told me we will be here until the trains are ready to bring us to Germany,” another woman answered.

“They can tell you anything. They beat me up. Me, a helpless woman!” shouted the first one back. “Those animals! I lost a tooth from his rifle.”

“Let's find the projector-
room and get some light in here,” someone else shouted in the dark.

“Save yourself the bother. It is locked. We tried that already,”
came a reply from right next to Greta.

“Do you know what those red posters in town were for?” she asked in the general direction of where that last voice had come from. Her eyes had still not adjusted to the darkness enough to see anything but vague shapes.

“All German men had to report to the main square this morning. They were brought to the factories to do the hard work or to camps like this,” someone answered.

“How do you know what happened to
them?” Greta asked.

“I don't know,”
came the answer. “It is all just rumours but there are some guards here who feel sorry for us and who know that most of us have done nothing wrong. Occasionally one of them will bring in some food, let us have a cigarette or speak to us.”

“How long have you been in here?” she asked the voice, whom she believed to be an elderly German woman.

“Since yesterday morning.
We came here from Silesia with what was left of our family. We spent a week in a refugee camp set up by the German Army somewhere near Carlsbad. When we heard about the capitulation we took off but we didn't get far. At first we were in a heavily guarded open air camp just outside of Carlsbad but yesterday that was taken over to intern more dangerous prisoners from Prague. We all got transferred in the morning and ended up here. It is not too bad once you get used to the dark. In the other camp some of us got beaten. Here we seem to be left alone.”

“Is there a doctor or a nurse?” asked Greta, thinking of Wilma who may not last long before having another fit.

“Not that I know of,” the woman replied. “Maybe one of the newcomers is. It won't be long before someone takes charge. Yesterday there was a fight between two grumpy old men who both had a Fuhrer complex. They wanted to hold an election. An election in the dark! We asked them what they wanted to be leaders for and they said to be a spokesman for the group. To negotiate with the Czechs, as if there was any bargaining power for us here. If it was not so sad it would be really funny.”

“Maybe if there was someone in charge they could make sure that the ones in need get to sit down and not t
he ones who shout the loudest,” suggested Greta.

“You try and do that. Good luck to you,”
came the cynical response.

“What happened with those two old men yesterday? How did the situation get resolved?” Greta asked.

“It ended with a fist fight. One of them held quite a speech about the future. He said he was sure that we were all innocent in here and that none of us were party members but in the dark there were several remarks to the contrary. One woman hit another who she thought had made a nasty comment but the other claimed it was not her. It is difficult in the dark. Even after two days I still can't adjust to it.”

“My sister is not very well. She gets attacks when she is in the dark for too long. Is there anywhere with more light? What about the toilets?” Greta wondered.

“The toilets are right by the entrance. There is light in there but in a way it’s not very good because it takes a long time to adjust your eyes back to the darkness. We ran out of newspapers yesterday by the way. I would not want to go there. Why does your sister not like the darkness? Were you hiding? Are you Jews?” the woman asked with an increased interest in her voice.

Greta did not want to answer that question at all. On the truck here most people had sworn to their prison guards that they were innocent, resistance fighters really, Czechs or Jews, hoping to be released on those grounds.
In here - without the guards - the situation was entirely different. What would she risk if she said she was Jewish? That woman had not let on whether she had sympathy for the Jews or not. Her entire story had been told in a matter of fact way and so it was difficult to judge what consequences the revelation of the truth would cause.

“No, of course not.
She has always disliked the dark since she was a child,” Greta quickly lied.

“Good,”
came the answer from the dark. “I hate the Jews. They got us into this mess.”

Edith had heard the entire conversation but decided not to partake. She felt responsible for the group being captured. If only she had chosen a different coat to take with her on th
e journey they might have got away from the patrol. Greta had tried to calm her and insisted that they would have been captured anyway. Those soldiers had not been particularly friendly and seemed keener to fill up the lorry than to hold a fair trial. To them any person on the road was presumed guilty and just their suspicion was enough to prove them guilty.

Regardless of such reasoning Edith felt awful and when she heard the woman in the dark blame the Jews for her misfortune she had t
o control herself not to respond. She turned back towards Esther and Ernst who were telling each other fairy tales, making use of the dark by tickling each other at appropriate moments in the stories and by using exaggerated voices for the characters.

“No wonder you were an actress once,” said Edith to her lover. “You are very good at telling these stories. I am glad you are here with us.”

“I am glad you are here too,” replied Esther. “Don't blame yourself. Without your help we might have even made it this far. Let’s hope that this nightmare comes to an end soon.”

The group was sitting huddled close together but Wilma at least had managed to position herself so that she could lean agains
t the bottom of the screen and drift off to sleep. The first night seemed to be never ending. There was no more attention from the guards and there were no more new arrivals. A few voices still emerged every so often predicting death and spreading panic but usually somebody around them grew tired of it and made them to be quiet by one way or another.

Then suddenly and without warning the lights in the auditorium came on bright. Czech soldiers with machine guns walked in and started to pick out all the men from the auditorium. Greta looked around her to see if she could
find the woman she had the conversation with last night but they seemed all too young to fit the image she had formed of that woman.

There were only little boys and elderly men in the cinema and it depended on the mood of the soldiers which ones were asked to leave and which were allowed to sta
y. Greta estimated that less than 5% had been spared, the rest were hurried towards the exit, regardless of how fragile some of them were. Wives and daughters screamed and begged for mercy and some mothers had to say goodbye to what appeared to be boys of only ten years of age. The guards threw in a few sacks of bread, then they left and turned off the lights. The darkness did not encourage honesty amongst some of the inmates and even though, as far as Greta could tell, the distribution of the bread was done in an almost orderly fashion soon there were loud complaints and calls that there had been foul play and some had missed out completely.

Wilma was unsettled by the hostile shouting and tried to get up and out. Esther and Greta tried to hold her down but Wilma pulled away and fell
over some of her fellow prisoners, one of whom hit her hard in the face.

“You stu
pid cow!” the woman shouted. “You stepped on my hand. Are you completely mad?”

Greta tried to intervene but Wilma was too far away and in the dark she could not get close enough to her sister. More people got involved.

At last a fe
w rows up a woman seemed to get hold of her and with some help pinned her to the floor.

“Take this!” Greta heard being shouted and then the landing of a few heavy blows. She finally managed to get to her sister and wanted to shout: “You beasts!”, but before she could say anything she heard a nasty voice next to her.

“Keep her under control or else. We can't have that kind of madness in here. It brings everyone down. Next time I will finish her off.”

For the rest of the day Wilma was quiet and made no sound. Esther and Greta took turns to hold her but the poor soul was completely unresponsive until the next morning, which fortunately
, at last, saw the end of their ordeal in the dark.

The lig
hts in the cinema came on very early and this time everyone was ordered to march out of the stuffy auditorium. The prisoners were loaded onto a series of trucks and then driven to a big open field outside of town that had been secured by barbed wire. Everyone was given a white arm band that identified them as Germans and prisoners were warned that taking it off would be punished severely. Greta tried to protest that none of her party was German, but she was not alone in trying to change their captivators’ mind. The large number of people claiming not to belong in here rendered her efforts unconvincing and useless.