Necessary Lies(70)
She takes a deep breath and gives Anna a telling look; the ending is coming and Anna would like to shrink, evaporate. “Then,” another suspension of voice, a pause, a deep breath for more effect, “the German opens the window and throws the Pole out.”
She looks at Anna, waiting for her reaction. Neither of them is meant to laugh, that is easy to tell. A nod of the head will suffice. A few moments of silence.
“Why did you leave?” Anna asks what is expected of her.
“Why?” the woman asks. “Why? I listened to my son. He was the first one to emigrate. Then he came to visit and kept telling me to sell everything and go to Germany. Why live like an animal, he said. Why line up for scraps of meat? You will be like a queen in Berlin. You will walk into a store, get whatever you want. Now he is too busy to see me. Work, work, work. Everybody works. Nothing else matters.” The woman gives another big sigh.
“Why are you going to Berlin?” she asks now. It really is an invitation to confess or to explain, but Anna stalls. She says she is only visiting.
“Family?”
“No, a friend.”
“That’s nice,” the woman says, still hopeful that this is just the beginning of a story. She is disappointed when Anna doesn’t continue. “A Polish friend?” she tries to prod her, but Anna closes her eyes and listens to the pounding of the wheels.
When Anna wakes up it is six thirty in the morning, and she is already in Berlin. Her companion has woken up, too, and she is stretching her arms. She must have forgiven Anna the disappointment of the evening for she is smiling now, asking if Anna needs any help getting to her friend’s apartment. “Oh, no,” Anna says, moved by the concern in the woman’s voice. “I’ll manage. Thank you very much.” The woman nods and wishes her a good and safe journey.
Anna has made reservations in an old Jugendstil Hotel-Pension near the Tiergarten thinking that she would prefer the marble entrance and the cobblestone street outside over another Marriott. But whatever pleasure the curved lines of the hotel’s fa?ade give her, dissipates fast. Yes, she should have gone straight home, to Montreal, she thinks. There is still time to get a few courses to teach for September. A friend at Concordia University urged her to apply. In Wroclaw there were moments, more and more frequent, in which she could see flashes of her new life. Not much yet, an ordinary walk along St. Catherine Street, a dinner party, a drive to the Laurentians. She should go back home, to her classes, her friends. To the trunk filled with emigré stories, her hopeless, unfinished quest for the patterns of escape. No, not the patterns, she corrects herself angrily. Justifications. Redeeming insights, epiphanies of flight.
Why spoil it all now, why scratch at the closing wounds?
“You are not running away” she tells herself, in her hotel room with a view of a Berlin street where she could, with great ease, imagine the ruins she has seen in the countless documentaries of the final victory. Soviet tanks rolling through the ruins, a red flag with hammer and sickle perched on the Brandenburg Gate. “Not now, not from here!”
This is the last of Ursula’s letters to William: They were fools, these hard working, silent men from the Sudeten Mountains. The land was poor there, stones and barren soil, and they worked it for centuries, holding to it as they held to their German language. They were fools, for when Hitler came and promised them work and money, paradise on their stony earth, when he told them how they had been abused and neglected, they believed him. “Look at yourselves,” he said. “You who have been driven from your Fatherland only to become the germ from which this nation that now tries to claim you has emerged. Without your sweat and blood nothing would grow here. Look at yourselves. You are not like Slavs and Jews! You do not belong to this small, weak country. Not you, not the Giants of the Sudetenland.”
“Your real fight,” their Führer told them, “is not for some puny parliamentary rights for the German minority, these monstrous children of barren democracies. You and all Germans who live outside the Reich are now the most important part of the German nation. What I want for you is to conquer the land you live in, to rule it as you were always meant to do. Your loyalty is to your nation, not to the country you live in. Protest, demonstrate, riot. Demand to be returned to Fatherland,” he kept saying. “And you will not be forgotten.”
The Sudeten Germans listened. They demonstrated against Prague. They broke windows in Jewish stores and fought in the streets. They cheered when, on the Nuremburg dais, Hitler demanded their right to self-determination. And they were rewarded.
On the 29 of September 1938, at the Munich conference applauded by the deluded Europe, Sudetenland became part of the German Reich and Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Party, its Gauleiter. The Giants of Sudetenland. This was the time of rewards, work and money, slave labour from the conquered lands in the East. A few years of prosperity, until the bodies of their dead started coming back from the front.
In 1945 the Czechs did not even wait for the international treaties to take their revenge. “You have to go,” they said. “All of you. You started the war. Your treachery destroyed the Czechoslovak Republic. Why should we allow you to live in a country you helped to kill?”
Revolutionary Guards put on their arm bands and moved into Sudetenland to take their revenge. Well before the allied forces agreed to the expulsion of Germans from the East, “wild deportations” drove away 600,000. The death marches and pogroms that ensued were payment for the delusions of one generation. They were all Germans; they were all guilty; they had to go.