The Danube (44 page)

The town of Grein on the left bank of the Danube is the place where ships tied up and took on river pilots before attempting the treacherous onward river journey. By a hotel on the river front I ask a woman cleaning windows the way up to the castle, and note from her accent that she is as much a stranger as I am. She's from Chechnya, she says, a refugee with her husband and small child, recently granted asylum. Could she tell me her story? She hesitates, and asks her husband. No way! He is polite but firm. There is another family of Chechens, however, a little up the valley. Maybe they will talk.

I follow their directions, and find a courtyard awash with clothes on pegs, and children – from Somalia and Afghanistan. The Chechens live upstairs. Seda Atsaeva is eighteen and speaks the best German. She lives in two rooms, with her father Umar, mother Hava, two younger brothers and a sister. They fled Grozny in 2004, because of the war, she says. They got as far as Poland overland, through Russia and Belarus, spent ten weeks in a refugee camp, then decided to move on – on foot. They walked into Germany carrying rucksacks – her mother pregnant with Adam. Seda was ten, her brother Djochar six, and her sister Rayana four. They walked at night, at 2 a.m., through a river, the water up to her father's chest, as he carried the children across one by one on his shoulders. Then they walked through a forest, and finally reached Austria. ‘My husband has a very good sense of direction,’ Hava says proudly. ‘When I was a child at school in Grozny,’ she explains, ‘I had one lesson of German a week. So when we decided to flee Chechnya, I decided we should come to either Germany or Austria.’ Hava has already passed one German language exam, and has started on the higher level. Seda is in her first year at business school and wants to work in a bank. The other children are at school in Grein. The six of them live on 720 Euros a month, and anything their Austrian friends give them. ‘I can hardly believe how kind people have been to us … They help us so much,’ says Hava. But their existence balances on a knife-edge. After seven years of paperwork, their application to stay in Austria was finally turned down, and it looked as though they would have to leave. ‘But how can we go back to Chechnya? Our house was destroyed, and my children don't speak Russian – they don't even know the alphabet!’

Within two months of our meeting, they expect to hear the result of their appeal. Apart from the uncertainty, life is not easy for the Chechens,
even beside this idyllic river. ‘Three months ago, my sister sent me a text message that our father had died. I had not seen him for eight years, since we set out. That was very hard. I went down to the banks of the Danube and cried. After a while, the river took away my sadness. My heart felt lighter after that.’ Each evening the family walks beside the river. As a treat, they occasionally take the ferry to the other side and back. Her hope is to work as a teacher, in a kindergarten, or as a carer in an old people's home. Umar, who was a policeman in Grozny, could work in construction she says – but they will only be allowed to work if they get their papers. ‘I would like to look after people,’ says Hava, ‘because I have been through so much myself. I know how much help people need in their lives.’

In the early morning, 6 a.m. at Ottensheim, the first sign of life on the old cable ferry is a thin column of smoke from a chimney as the church bells peal out across the river. Then I see movement on the bridge of the boat.

Captain Hermann Spannraft speaks stylish, almost aristocratic, English, and loves his job, shepherding his ferry to and fro across the Danube. He's been doing it for twelve years. The cable ferry has been in operation at Ottensheim since 1871, and the first model lasted a modest ninety-one years, until 1962. The ‘new’ one was built in the shipyards in nearby Linz, and has been in service since 1963. It uses no external power, just the force of the current in both directions. ‘Not quite in all weather conditions – but almost,’ says the captain, puffing on a freshly stoked pipe, and spinning the huge polished wheel through his hands. ‘The steering of the ferry depends on the height of the water – the more water there is, the faster the ferry, and it's a little problem when the water is low …’ On the rare occasions when there is not enough strength in the Danube, he has a small, ninety-horsepower outboard motor to push the ferry the last stretch towards the right – Wilhering – bank. The current is stronger on the Wilhering side, and that can also cause problems if the wind is blowing from the west. Once or twice the ferry has been blown on to the bank when the outboard motor was not enough. Then the ferry had to be pulled off by another boat, though no harm was done.

Crossing on a Sunday morning, with only a couple of cars and cyclists, our progress across the Danube is almost completely silent. I lower the window on the bridge in search of sound. Just the distant chimes of the
Sunday churches, and the lapping of the water against the steel hull. ‘There used to be more cable ferries of this type, in the days when there was not a single bridge between Linz and Krems. Now just four are left, at Ottensheim, Spitz, Weissenberg and Korneuburg.’ Each weighs ninety tonnes, and can carry twelve normal-sized cars. It might look quiet now, he says, but on a busy weekday they can hardly satisfy demand, as drivers try to dodge the morning rush-hour traffic on the way into or out of Linz and schoolchildren queue to get to and from school. ‘Very occasionally, we have to admit that Nature – the water and the wind – is stronger than the technology and the knowledge of the captain, and then we have to suspend the ferry for a while,’ says the captain. He steers, while his mate Refik keeps an eye on the passengers, ties up the ferry, and lets the cars and passengers on and off the boat. Refik is tall, with big hands and wrinkles of laughter round his eyes. He was a soldier on the Bosniak side at the start of the Bosnian war, and came as a refugee to Austria in October 1992. ‘We must think positively, and just look forwards, not back now,’ he says. ‘This job is very peaceful and beautiful. It's the best job in the world!’

I notice a small blue and yellow Bosnian flag on the bridge, and a copper pot for brewing Turkish coffee, beside the stack of firewood – the source of the smoke I saw rising from the chimney in the early morning. Thanks to Refik and his family's presence here, Ottensheim and Vinac, near Jajce in central Bosnia where they come from, have become twinned towns, with numerous visits between the two. Hermann himself is just back from a trip there.

By this time we have crossed back to the Ottensheim side of the river, and a frequent traveller, Julia, comes up on the bridge to see her old friends. She used to cross on the ferry every day to the gymnasium on the other side. Today she has just been across for extra maths tuition. ‘We make so many friends among the regular passengers,’ says the captain. A rather smart woman with four little girls comes aboard, and her daughters rush excitedly from side to side in their Sunday frocks. The captain blows the ship's horn in farewell, and Refik stands with Julia on the deck, waving goodbye.

CHAPTER 13

Oh Germany, Pale Mother

I
HAVE
to reach the concentration camp before it closes at five, and as I drive up the road from the Danube past the granite quarries, I realise I'm not going to make it. The irony is not easily dismissed; I'm rushing to get to a place which 200,000 people would have given anything to get out of. I want to see Mauthausen in Austria before I reach Germany.

Digging through the past or present of any people is like sifting through the garden of a house in a small provincial town. One finds jagged edges of glass and concrete, fragments of bone, traces of lives destroyed and loves lost. Each newspaper I buy in each country I travel through is full of tales of perverse adults and abused children, corrupt politicians and gruesome traffic accidents, of human stupidity and cruelty. Nevertheless, after the beauties of the Wachau valley, after the tentative buds of the apricot blossom and the garish glory of last year's fruit, after the solemn dignity of the war memorials to Austrian and German soldiers, it is hard to grasp the enormity of Mauthausen.
²

In Budapest I have met Hungarian Jews who survived the forced marches to Mauthausen in the dying months of the Second World War. The Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was on a death march from a
concentration camp in Bor in Serbia, the site of the copper deposits which gave birth to the Vinča culture, towards Mauthausen. Some of his saddest poems were found in the sweat-stained pocket of his jacket after he was shot in November 1944, unable to keep up. He has contributed – in German – one of the most memorable lines of Hungarian poetry, ‘
Der springt noch auf
’ – ‘That one will get up again’ – a line used about him by a German guard, as he lay, three-quarters dead from exhaustion, in a ditch by the roadside just inside Hungary after three months on the road.

He did ‘spring up’, as it turned out, but not for long. He died, shot in the head, at Abda, near Győr, three days later. There's a small monument to him, and the twenty-one others who died in the same ditch beside the Rábca river.

It's too late to tour the camp, but a friendly girl lets me into the bookshop and gives me time to buy a map and a booklet. There is even a sense of relief, that I don't have to visit the gas chambers, the crematoria, or look at photographs of the gas van that travelled between Mauthausen and the satellite camp at Gusen, killing people as it went along; that I don't have to ask what happened in the inmates’ brothel, or what card games the SS guards played in their pleasant guardrooms. It will be enough to listen to the wind whistling through the hedge which grows where the ashes from the crematoria were dumped. I will not be able to see the two surviving ovens, where people, not figurines, were baked. The March twilight seems an appropriate time to visit a place where time has stopped. I look down at my watch. Only the second hand moves, round and round.

Mauthausen opened as a concentration camp in August 1938, just five months after Austria was annexed by Germany. Walking above the granite quarries, I take refuge in my mind in the worn, granite hills of Dobrogea, two thousand kilometres downstream. There is no railway here. None
could have achieved the stiff climb up into the hills above the Danube. Images of railway tracks and cattle wagons, packed to the roof with human beings, are so closely linked to Auschwitz and its particular machinery of death that Mauthausen seems appalling in a different way. That inmates were marched here on foot, one by one, under the watchful eyes of gun-toting guards. Or driven in trucks, each with a driver who knew what he was taking his prisoners to. The hardness of the human heart that made Mauthausen possible seems harder than any ancient rock, chipped away by human hands. They could have brought granite for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games from here, presumably. But granite from Dobrogea, from a different, albeit still active dictatorship, was safer.

The bored, intelligent expression of Adolf Eichmann looks up at me from the shelves through his ungainly spectacles in the concentration camp bookshop. It is a photograph taken at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, from an exhibition on display at the County Court in Linz. The designer of the brochure has drawn a red square on the black and white picture around Eichmann. Oak-man. One hundred and ninety five thousand people were sent to Mauthausen over a seven year period. One hundred and five thousand of them died, worked to death in the quarries, in the armaments factories, or at satellite camps set up throughout upper Austria. Half of those who died did so in the last months of the war, crushed by the death-throes of the German war machine. Hundreds more died after liberation by US soldiers on 5 May 1945, three days before the last German soldiers and civilians died, fighting the Red Army near the town of Stein.

‘
O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter
,’ reads the final verse of a poem by Bertolt Brecht, engraved on the wall of remembrance outside the concentration camp:

The poem was written in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power.

The forty countries whose nationals were killed at Mauthausen each have their own memorials. The statues from eastern Europe, erected in the
1950s, display the same lock-jawed brutality that State Socialism and National Socialism had in common. But Germany's statue is shockingly tender – sculptor Fritz Cremer's portrayal in bronze of Brecht's ‘Pale Mother Germany’. A seated, more than life-size figure, her breasts barely distinguishable beneath a crumpled shawl, her hair short, her head straight, her right hand in her lap, her left hand dangling beside her, as she half turns on her bench. Someone has placed a small red carnation between the fingers of her large right hand. Her chin is raised. It is the position a mother might take at a kitchen table when one of her grown-up sons appears unexpectedly in the doorway. Two copies of the statue exist, one on the grass next to the Berlin Cathedral, another at the cemetery in Magdeburg in eastern Germany at the site of more victims of fascism. Below the road and the memorials is a tall, weeping willow tree, beneath which the ashes of Russian inmates are scattered. The tree is magnificent in its late March colours, turning from grey to green. Its wands absorb the last light. It must have stood here when Mauthausen was a prison camp. The German-speaking peoples always understood trees.