The Last Shot. Hugo Hamilton
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was Theresienstadt, not far from Louny, Czechoslovakia’s Nazi transit camp where the ashes of 20,000 Jews were said to have been thrown in the river.
All I really wanted was to see Louny. There are places like that where you just want to be able to say: I’ve been there, I’ve seen the place.
There was little to see in Louny. Coming from West Germany, as I did, the place looked uninteresting, like a faded water-colour. The place that history left behind.
The shops were sparsely stocked with tins of beans and tins of stew. Everywhere in Czechoslovakia, I saw these neat pyramids of cans in the shop windows. There was a queue outside one of the shops in Louny. From Prague, I had learned that the sight of a queue was the sign of something worth buying. It seemed to be a bookshop.
I went into the pub U Somolu on the main street and had a drink, knowing that all Czech pubs have a habit of closing early. I would have spoken to some of the men in the pub, but they spoke neither English nor German and I didn’t have a word of Czech. They looked at me. They must have wondered too what brought a German to Louny. I would like to have told them where I was really from. But it was too complicated.
I walked around the streets for a while. In the square, I sat down beside the statue of Johann Huss. The warm October sun hit the square at an angle. After a while the shadow of the buildings edged up across my face and reached the base of the façades on the other side. The loudspeakers which hung around the square suddenly came alive. First with a crackle and a lot of background noise, perhaps that of someone fumbling with the microphone, the voice eventually boomed out over the square. I had no idea what it was saying.
I tried some more people with English and received a bewildered stare each time. Then I wondered if this town, on the edge of the Sudetenland according to pre-war maps, might still have some old people who spoke German.
People shrugged a lot. I could see that they were dying to help me but were unable to. One man kept asking me questions enthusiastically in Czech. At the post office, somebody eventually pointed to an old woman who spoke a little German. I asked her about the garrison outside the town, at the top of the hill. She shook her head.
‘You cannot go there,’ she said. ‘Nothing for tourists.’ She waved her index finger.
I asked her what it was being used for. Who occupied it now?
‘Russen,’ she said.
It was not something she wanted to elaborate on. I had already asked too much. She walked away.
Since there was nothing else to do in Louny, I decided to walk back beyond the bus station up the hill to take a look at the garrison. It seemed like an impossible place to defend, surrounded only by a low wall and some rusted barbed wire. Around to the front of the garrison, along the wall, there was a large red star. That was as far as I went.
The journey back to Prague takes around an hour. The bus was full of workers commuting back to the towns along the way. A girl beside me kept falling asleep with her head repeatedly sinking on to my shoulder. Perhaps she was a factory, girl. She wore overalls underneath her coat. Every now and again she woke up and realized that she had begun to lean against me. But she soon fell asleep again. Whenever the bus stopped, she sat up, startled, looking out through the windows as though she had gone too far.
According to the diaries of Bertha Sommer, an impeccably written account of the life of a young woman who reached the age of twenty when the Second World War started, she was born with a trinity of strong values: faith, honesty and cleanliness. There was nothing Bertha liked more than to wash her feet in the evening. She liked clean feet. Her faith and honesty helped her through what she called ‘the turbulent times’ in which she lived.
Born in the small Rhineland town of Kempen, she was brought up in a family devoted to the Catholic faith, except perhaps for her father, Erich, who was more devoted to cynicism and a good joke. In any case, both cynicism and Catholicism combined to place the family at odds with the new ideology of Nazism, and with the people in their town who had risen to prominence out of nowhere.
Up to then, Bertha’s father had been a prominent businessman with a fine toy and stationery shop on the market square. He had a prodigious disregard for the most elementary notion of profit and loss. He refused to join what he called the ‘Brown Wave’. His standing with the people of the town was based on the old values of gentlemanly wit. ‘God save us from sudden wealth,’ he would say, to the amusement of his followers, who shared his taste for wine, song and humour, along with his compulsion for practical jokes. One Sunday morning he borrowed a brown Nazi cap and climbed up to place it on top of the St George monument at the centre of the market square. Then he went and apologized for offending St George.
But Germany had lost its sense of humour. Nothing could save Erich Sommer from the plummeting Weimar economy, the accelerating age of fascism and his own progressive ill-health. The pulmonary illness which he had brought back from the First World War got the better of him. He bowed out just before the Second World War, leaving behind his wife and five daughters, a trove of unsaleable toys, a hoard of initialled silver cutlery which was eventually sold off for nothing, and his inimitable sense of humour. Bertha writes how he asked her to bring him a mirror on his death-bed, where he looked at himself in silence for a long time before he said: ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Erich.’
With little else to share among them, the five sisters held on to some of their father’s humour. They had a propensity to break down laughing, often until the tears rolled down their faces. His remarks were repeated as a comfort to their mother.
Bertha’s mother, Maria, a professional opera singer who had given up her art for marriage, tried in vain to salvage the business. She resorted to giving singing and piano classes instead. If nothing else, the house was filled with laughter and music. Five girls and a mother who had once sung in the opera. They all sang arias, Schumann, hymns, love songs, pop songs like ‘Lili Marlene’, nursery rhymes – everything. In winter they placed a lighted candle into the grate to give students the illusion of warmth. But the demand for piano lessons had begun to diminish in a country preparing for war. The family eventually came to depend on social security under the new National Socialist state.
Life in Kempen became harder to explain. The Jews in the town disappeared. Families to whom Bertha had often been sent to buy gherkins had gone overnight. Once, on a trip to an aunt in Düsseldorf, Bertha records in her diary how she and her mother saw brand new shoes and leatherwear flung into the streets and how her mother said, ‘What idiots. They’ll regret this some day.’ Shortly after that, the social security payments were mysteriously withdrawn from the Sommer family and life became impossible.
Plans had to be made to ease the burden. Grandmothers and aunts all conferred to make the best decisions for the five girls. Husbands were sought for the two eldest. The two youngest continued at school. Bertha, right in the middle, went to work as a secretarial assistant at the employment exchange, where she went on to obtain excellent references praising her enthusiasm and attractive manner. When the war came, her attributes were welcomed into the service of the army as part of the civilian personnel.
Bertha spent most of the time on the French coast of Normandy until the British arrived. She used the years in France to help her family, regularly sending home money to her mother and regularly arriving home with suitcases full of French fashions – dresses, blouses, hats, lingerie – all of which were quickly claimed by her sisters.
Shortly before D Day, she left France for the last time, with her cases stuffed to the gills. The trains were packed with girls coming home with their belongings, all evacuating back from the Normandy coast. The bombs were already raining on Germany. Bertha prayed hard. When they heard the planes overhead, she prayed for her life. And for her suitcases.
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