Necessary Lies(52)
“Your father fell in the war,” his mother told him. “At Stalingrad, Willi. Your father died at Stalingrad.”
He kept looking at her, but he didn’t hear what she was telling him. He was listening to the music.
As the train rolls through the outskirts of Wroclaw, Anna watches the city with suspicion. Old pre-war German houses are easy to spot, big, grey, solid, in spite of the forty-five years that have passed from the day the war ended. Old German working class districts with their red brick, soot-covered fa?ades and tile roofs. She can tell where the ruins have been for that’s where the post-war slab houses stand now, the ugly concrete constructions of Communist Poland, like scars. Whole blocks of them, sinister, beginning to crumble the day they were built.
Warm and kalt, she can still remember black Gothic letters on round, white bathroom taps in the house she lived in. Briefe on the heavy brass flap through which the postman dropped blue envelopes and faded yellowish postcards with workers saluting their leaders on the First of May parade. Underneath the thick, yellow wallpaper she helped her father strip, the walls were pasted with German newspapers, their black, incomprehensible squiggles forming yet another layer that had to be removed and washed away.
She ran with other children through the ruins, wielding stick guns, yelling at the top of her voice, in the heat of play. How many German words they knew then, already! Raus, H?nde hoch, schneller schneller. Get out, hands up, faster, faster. Polnische Schweine. Polish pigs.
Ta ta ta ta ta taaaaaa! Deutschland Deutschland über alies, Hei li hei la! Hei li Hei la!
Drang nach Osten. Lebensraum.
She remembers a boy holding a piece of white chalk and drawing the spidery arms of a swastika on a grey, bullet-riddled wall. Then, slowly, as if to test their endurance, filling in the spaces between the lines, turning the upturned cross into four innocent little squares.
Hitler kaput!
“The Wild West,” her father said. “It was like the Wild West.” But all Anna remembers is how terrified he was to walk through the streets.
“The Recovered Territories!” he had read. “The land of opportunity.” Newspapers painted pictures of opulent villas abandoned by fleeing Germans, houses fully furnished, equipped, businesses waiting for Polish settlers, new pioneers, as if this land had no past and had to be reclaimed from nature. “Go!” he read. “Tomorrow may be too late.”
In June 1945 her father was alone and had nowhere else to go. “It took one bomb,” he said. Anna thought of the incredible luck that made him miss the last tramway home before curfew and stay with his friends. From his distant relatives who had survived the war, he had collected small pale photographs of his family — men, women and children with hard-to-make-out faces. “This here is your Dziadek Stanislaw. Your Babcia Helena.” Everyone in these pictures was someone’s son, daughter, brother or sister, and everyone’s fate had already been sealed. The web of relationships between the pale sepia figures seemed absolute to him, and he was always surprised when Anna and Yan mixed them up.
“How can you forget?” he asked them, ready to explain once again, but all they wanted to hear about was the story of the missed tramway, a mattress on the floor in his friend’s room that had made their own existence possible.
Tata had come to Wroclaw in a crowded train, with a leaking roof and a broken window, sitting on the cardboard suitcase he had tied up with a leather belt. The train arrived late in the evening and he had to wait in the station until morning. He heard gunshots, screams, a wave of rattling noises, spoons and ladles hitting tin buckets and iron pans, a warning to the looters, he was told, a show of support. The city was under curfew. He was cold and wet. At dawn, he climbed into a tramway in which all the windows were broken and seats torn out and he rode a few stops along empty avenues of this strange, abandoned city, past rows of unsteady houses, still smouldering, still hot. In streets covered with red dust and littered with broken furniture, German and Russian helmets, and bundles of rags, only the rats moved without fear.
He told Anna and Yan how he had crept past fallen trees, entered emptied buildings looking for a safe place to stay. He described the motionless bodies in the streets, the overturned trams, barricades made of broken tables, chairs, credenzas and beds, the stink of the ruins — of burnt flesh. Terrified of the emptiness of the suburbs, he found a room in a sort of boarding house near the station, a bed infested with bugs. His meals came from a barrel of pickled meat with an off-smell that made his stomach turn. “I’ll go back,” he thought, unable to admit that he could ever live here for long. “Soon,” he promised himself, “to Poland.”
That’s what he had said: “To Poland.” For in his mind then Lower Silesia was no man’s land, a magical robbers’ den for the dispossessed, a haven for marauders, a chance for the politically suspect. One could disappear here, Tata said, but one could also die from a stray bullet or a knife in the back.
“Why? You ask me why? For the oldest of reasons, Anna. Revenge, greed, despair.”
The trains leaving the Wroclaw Central Station every day were filled with would-be settlers, one-day pioneers who took away with them whatever they could find, rob, or trade from those Germans who had not yet fled. Furs, jewellery, pots, sewing machines, lamps, typewriters, layers of white embroidered sheets, silk lingerie and dresses of Westphalian linen. Jars with Pfeffer, Salz, Zucker on them, Rosenthal cups, Meissen porcelain, earthenware beer Seidels with tin or silver lids that could be lifted with a thumb. But the contents of these bags, bundles, and suitcases were just a drop in the general exodus of things. The Red Army, waiting for Stalin’s decision on what to do with these lands, was securing its share of the spoils. Trucks leaving Silesian towns and villages for the Soviet Union were filled to the brim with the best of furniture, farm equipment, the insides of entire factories. Settlers spoke of copper wires torn out of the walls, kilometres of railroad tracks removed, buildings with holes in the concrete floor from which the machines had been torn out, where not a screw was left in place.