Letters From the Lost (32 page)

Tini had been forced out too. She had been given three hours to pack her bags and leave. What the Czechs did to the Sudeten-Germans was akin to what the latter had done to my family.

For many years, the Sudeten-Germans were not allowed to enter Czechoslovakia. The Communist government refused to let them in. The closest to Strobnitz that these former townsfolk could come was to a hillside in Austria. From there, on a clear day, they could see Strobnitz. Every year, they came, from Austria, from Germany, from Belgium and Holland, and from wherever they had found refuge. At two o’clock, on the second Saturday in August, they gathered on that hillside in Austria. There, they held an outdoor church service and gazed across at their hometown.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Sudeten-Germans have been allowed to return. Now, they meet in the church in Strobnitz every year at 2 p.m. on the second Saturday in August.

“How did you find us?”
a voice asked.
“Who told you we’d be here today?”

I shook my head in wonderment. This was beyond coincidence. What unseen hand had guided my footsteps? What chance had brought me across the ocean on the second Saturday in August? What had led me to this church at ten minutes to two? Ten minutes later, these people would have already been inside the church and I would not have known of their existence.

Not only had I come from afar, I had arrived after an interval of more than sixty years, and had uttered the name Waldstein, a name unspoken here in all that time.

Small wonder that faces had blanched. Even to myself, I seemed to be an apparition, a revenant, a ghostly incarnation of voices long silent.

Two elderly women approached. One gently tugged at my sleeve.

“My name is Lucy. We knew your grandmother. She used to call us into her kitchen on our way home from school.”

“She used to give us Buchterln fresh out of the oven. She loved to bake.”

“Mitzi, do you remember a thin kind of bread she gave us just before Easter?”

“Oh yes. That was good. Especially when she smeared it with goose fat. But I don’t remember what she called it.”

I knew immediately. It was Matzos, the unleavened bread eaten during the week of Passover. How ironic that she would remember the item of food that was perhaps the only way in which my grandparents celebrated their Judaism.

Meanwhile, the well-dressed gentleman had introduced himself. Alois Bayer. He offered to show me around. Pointing to an empty lot overgrown with weeds that lay just behind the church, he declared this to be where the house of the “lower Waldsteins” had stood. The lower Waldsteins? Who were they? I had never heard “upper” or “lower” used before my family name. Alois was eager to fill me in.

“The lower Waldsteins were your grandfather’s brother and his family. Their house was at the bottom of the hill, which is why we called them the lower Waldsteins. Their son Erich and I were best buddies. The two of us were motorcycle mad. We used to spend every spare moment repairing and riding the machines we cobbled together from old parts that nobody wanted.”

I stood dumbstruck. My grandfather had had a brother, right here in this village. My father had had an uncle and an aunt and cousins and had grown up with them in this very place, yet he had never spoken of them.

Now it was Alois who was eager for information.

“Do you know what happened to Erich? Is he alive? What about his brother Walter?”

Alois (right) talks to a villager in Strobnitz

His questions drove home the enormity of all that had been lost. I knew so little of my father’s family, and what little I knew came from the letters. Cousins and an uncle and aunt living in the very same village! I was eager to learn more and agreed to join the group at a coffee shop in the next town.

Unlike the welcoming places I had enjoyed in Austria and Germany, the
Kaffeehaus
was nothing but a rundown roadside tavern. It was a shabby structure whose dark interior reeked of stale smoke. Seated on uncomfortable wooden chairs, we gathered around tables too small for our numbers. The menu featured only one item:
Palatschinka
. Many in our group were already digging into plates of the jam-filled pancakes. We did have a choice of beverage: beer or coffee.

Alois suggested that beer would be a better choice. Beer is plentiful and good in this part of the world that gave birth to Pilsner and Budweiser. However, the combination of lukewarm beer and cloyingly sweet Palatschinka, especially in the crowded, smoke-filled room closed up my
gullet. I sat pushing the rubbery roll from side to side, listening to the din of voices in a culture where everyone talks at once. I had so much to think about, yet so much still to ask.

We agreed to meet up again with the group for dinner in Austria. Alois told us to follow him as he wove along country roads, stopping only at a border crossing manned by a single guard whom he seemed to know well, and then continuing directly to a picturesque Bavarian-style restaurant. We were back in Austria. Flowers cascaded voluminously from boxes and balconies. Rich cooking smells greeted us, along with the cheerful sounds of an accordion. There were even red-checked cloths on all the tables, as well as the usual assortment of cuckoo clocks and stag heads between the alpine scenes that covered every inch of the log walls. A welcoming place, or so it seemed initially.

At first, a number of individuals came by our table to speak to me. One man introduced himself as “the village chronicler,” and asked if I would like him to send me a copy of his history of Strobnitz. I said I would be delighted. Still, I felt uneasy. Jumbled thoughts filled my mind.

Where were these people when my family was taken away? Were some of these people the looters Tini had described? I remembered her words:
“They all came, the people from the village of Strobnitz, even the people to whom your grandfather had been kind, the people to whom he had given credit when they couldn’t pay their accounts. Now they came to steal whatever they could lay their hands on.”

Certainly, no one in this festive group wanted to remember the Jews and what had happened to them. I sensed a shrinking back as I continued to ask questions. These people had attended the same village school as Martha and Elsa and Arnold and Otto and my father. They had played together and had grown up side by side. Had they also been among the neighbours who came to fill their arms with towels and sheets, with pots and pans, with whatever had been left behind? Had one of these grey-haired women raided my grandmother’s kitchen? Had someone stirred his morning coffee with one of our spoons? At the very least, each person here had pretended not to know.

I looked at Tracey and saw that she understood.

“We’ll go whenever you like,”
she said softly.

Alois saw us rise, and bustled over.

“You cannot leave now. You have not even eaten yet. Did you order?”

“No. Our server has been busy bringing steins of beer. We haven’t even seen a menu.”

“But where will you go? To a hotel? Everything for miles around is filled with our group. You will not find a bed anywhere. You must stay at my house. Come to the mill. I will phone my wife and tell her to expect you.”

“But that would be an imposition. Would you even have room for three?”

Someone snickered.

“We have lots of space at the mill. Besides, I want to show you some of the pictures in my photo album tomorrow. You must do this, because I cannot leave now and I want to tell you more about the past.”

And so, we found ourselves once again following Alois’ directions, along the road to a turn-off through the woods. We wove among the trees, the lights of Martin’s Mini barely illuminating the long, deeply rutted path.

A dog barked. The car rumbled over a wooden bridge and rolled to a stop. A door opened and a grey-haired woman stood framed in the light. She descended the stairs and approached, still drying her hands on an apron as she walked. She opened my door and I saw a radiant face framed with grey hair swept back into a knot. A mature face, wise and welcoming.

This was Lotte. She sensed my emotional exhaustion and took us directly to our quarters, a converted mill opposite the main house. We mounted the stone stairs and entered a high-beamed living room with deep comfortable sofas lit by the warm glow of reading lamps. Open doors led to several bedrooms. In the centre was a table with a thermos and carafes and covered plates of food.

“I thought you’d be tired and might like privacy tonight. Tomorrow at breakfast, I will welcome you properly in the main house. Then we can talk.”

I looked again at her beautiful face and remembered the portrait of an angel on my bedroom wall back in Canada.

We slept soundly and wakened to warm sunshine and the susurrus of water running over the dam almost below our floorboards. Lotte was already in her garden, watching for us as she plucked and snipped. In the
main house, our coffee awaited, along with platters of cheese and Wurst and real rye bread and butter. The aroma of a freshly baked coffeecake wafted invitingly from the sideboard. Alois was already at the round table with its crisp blue and white cloth, waiting impatiently as he leafed through photo albums and papers.

He hovered restlessly as we got acquainted with Lotte, who had her own tale to tell. Many years before, she had fled from the former Yugoslavia, eager to leave both communism and the centuries of hatred between groups barely held together by the magnetism of a single charismatic dictator. Croatia, Kosovo. Serbia. Even as we spoke, “the Allies” were bombing bridges and killing innocent civilians in an effort to oust Milosevic, the latest dictator. Lotte’s own sons were being asked to kill people who had once been their neighbours, people with whom they had gone to school, people who had been their soccer mates and friends. History was being written not in abstract concepts but in blood not far away

At last, Alois got his turn. He had found memorabilia of himself and my cousin Erich. Again he told us that they had been motorcycle buddies, and that as teens, they had spent every spare moment repairing bent wheels and discarded parts in order to create the roaring machines that were their passion. Martin and Tracey asked all the right questions while I pondered the fact that I once had had cousins named Erich and Walter and that I had not even known it.

Alois led us back out to the mill and showed us his own private motorcycle collection. He was particularly proud of one that he said was exactly like the one that had been Eric’s proudest possession. I could but wonder when and how Alois acquired this machine.

Alois kept saying
“Ich war nur ein Bub. I was just a kid.”

I was terribly uncomfortable. Later, Alois confided that he had been in the
Hitlerjugend
.
“We all were,”
he said.
“It was the norm. Everyone my age was in the Hitlerjugend.”

I reflected once again upon the dangers of doing what everyone else is doing. Is it reasonable to expect a boy of thirteen to wonder what had happened to his friend rather than to rejoice at the acquisition of a new motorcycle? Is it reasonable to ask anyone to swim against the tide of mainstream
opinion? Walking in his shoes, would I have had the courage to stand alone?

My thoughts made me restless. Despite my interest in every word and every detail, I was also eager to leave. Fortunately, I had a train to catch.

————

THE TRAIN I HAD PLANNED
to catch would take me from Budweis to Prague. For most people, Budweis is simply the name of a popular beer. For me, it had always been just the specific place of my birth. On this Sunday afternoon, it seemed no more than a convenient place for Tracey and Martin to drop me off. I would take the train to Prague where I had agreed to meet Steve, and they would return to Linz to prepare for the working week.

My conscious mind had not registered the fact that my parents and I had taken that same train in 1938. Besides, I was still trying to digest the encounter in Strobnitz plus all that Alois had told me. My mind was elsewhere as Martin found his way through a maze of lanes with small industrial buildings, all uniformly grey and flat on this cloudy day. He parked near the railway station and we decided to use the remaining time to walk to the town square.

The town square of Budweis is enormous. It may not compare in actual size to the Place de la Concorde or to Saint Peter’s square in Rome, but for a town the size of Budweis, it struck me as disproportionately large. No café tables with bright umbrellas lined its sides, and no pedestrians crossed that vast cobblestone stretch on this sunless Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, I imagined that I heard the sound of marching feet and saw the flash of polished black boots. I knew that this square had once trembled to the click of Nazi goosesteps and resonated with shouts of
“Heil Hitler!”
I wanted neither a final coffee nor a beer.

“You two go home now,”
I told Tracey and Martin.
“Just get my suitcase out of the car and I’ll wait for the train while you head back to Linz. ”
Fortunately, they chose to ignore my advice.