The Luck of the Weissensteiners (The Three Nations Trilogy) (9 page)

Jonah would do anything in his power to bring her back to full blossom. When she was not reading
, he made her sit down by his side in the workshop and they would sing a mixture of their favourite folk songs from the shtetl, cheerful tunes and some gruesome ballads as well.

Greta soon started to help with the big wall carpet for the Countess, feeling too restless to watch everyone else working hard
without putting her hands to work as well. Additionally, every so often, Jonah would take his sad daughter to one side, hug her and assure her that all would turn out just fine. “Und es ward alles alles gut!” he would quote in German which was from the end of one of her favourite Eichendorff novels. 

Had it not been for missing her little Karl
, Greta could have stayed with her father for much longer. After three years with the Winkelmeiers she had forgotten how close a family could be. It was a real treat and did wonders for her but in the end the thought of her little one becoming alienated from his mother was too much of a burden. Johanna had asked her to stay away until she was feeling better and could give her son her full and cheerful attention. Greta thought she was ready for that now and one evening simply showed up at the bookshop with her suitcase so that she could walk home with her husband. However, when she got to the bookshop Wilhelm was not to be found.

“Excuse me,
” she said, addressing the grey haired man who appeared to be in the shop all by himself. “I am looking for my husband Wilhelm Winkelmeier. Could you please tell me where I could find him?”

“Oh you are Wilhelm's wife?
How very nice to meet you. My name is Andrej, I am new here. So sorry to hear about what happened but God works in mysterious ways, you know. We just need to believe in Him and trust his gracious will.”

Greta really wanted to spit in his face f
or springing his religion on her but somehow managed to control her anger.

“Thank you very
much, Andrej, for your kindness,” she replied. “Wilhelm has never told me about you. How long have you been working here?”

“About two months. Tuesday and Thursday evenings
only when they leave me all alone here when they go to their meetings,” he said.

Greta felt utterly stupid and humiliated by the fact that all this time Wilhelm was attending some clandestine meetings and she had no idea about it, let alone what kind of meetings they were. She had already embarrassed herself by not knowing about them in front of this new
co-worker of her husband, it was too much to admit to her ignorance about the meetings as well, so she decided to pretend she did know.

“Oh yes, of course. How
silly of me. The meetings. Could you tell me where the meeting is today, so I can surprise my husband and join him on his way home?” she asked.

“Of course
. It is right next to the offices of the Grenzbote by the main station, the meeting hall of the German Sudeten Party,” answered Andrej shyly. “I can take you if you don’t know the way but I don't think you can go in there tonight, it is a members only meeting. The guards can tell your husband that you are waiting.”

“Thank you so much, Andrej.
I know where it is. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“Any time Frau Winkelmeier. We
rarely get to see such beautiful women in the shop.”

I
nstead of waiting outside the party headquarters alone at night, Greta decided to go back to her father. How could Wilhelm never have told her about his membership at the German Sudeten Party? He had never taken any particular political views; he was too busy reading books. Admittedly he had always been interested in philosophy and finding the right way to live but why would he not have told her that he was turning this into an active political role? He had claimed to work late and to be busy at the shop, but he had lied to her and there had to be a reason for this secrecy. She was not going to confront him in front of his party members and when she arrived back at the workshop she just said that she had missed Wilhelm and was going to leave tomorrow on her own instead. Everyone who knew Wilhelm’s committed work ethics had to be surprised at this statement and Jonah and Wilma certainly raised an eyebrow but they were happy to have one more evening with their beloved Greta and did not question her any further.

The next morning Greta walked back to the farm on her own and found nobody in the house but Roswitha, who was preparing lunch.

“Oh hello Greta. I did not know you were coming back today. Are you feeling better?” she asked while stirring the contents of one of the pots.

“Thanks Roswitha,” she replied. “Yes I do feel much better. Where is Karl? Is he asleep?” she asked.

“Johanna has taken him to the lake to feed the birds.”

“On a weekday?”

“Yes, I know it is strange, but she is completely besotted with the boy and she promised to take him out to see the birds if he manages to go potty by
himself. He did it three days in a row and the silly woman thinks he is specially gifted. The boy is almost three,” Roswitha said with rolling eyes.

Greta felt a surge of jealousy when she heard that she had missed such a stepping stone in the development of her child and she started to realise the
extent to which Johanna had taken over the role of mother. She was close to tears but she could not afford to let them show. If Roswitha told anyone about her crying she would be banished from the farm again and from seeing her son and she couldn't let that happen.

When Johanna and Karl came home a few hours later Karl was too exhausted from the walk to take proper notice of Greta and Johanna took him to his bed for a nap.

“You don't have to worry about him,” she assured the worried mother.  “He is having a great time with his auntie Johanna. There is no need for you to rush back and make a big drama. It is better if you take your time and gather your strength. Losing a child is the ultimate ordeal a mother can go through and it must have taken its toll. I know Benedikt pushes everyone to go back to normal as soon as they can but I think it is wrong. Karl must never see you down like the way you were. Are you quite sure that you are ready to take him on again? He is quite a stubborn little prince. I am glad I had three children of my own to deal with his little schemes.”

“I am fine, Johanna. I miss him. I need him back and he needs me,” Greta said less confidently than she would have liked.

“I know that is what every mother thinks but it is not true,” Johanna contradicted. “A child does not necessarily need his mother but someone who acts like a mother and knows what she is doing. You may need him but that may not be a good thing for him. He comes first,” she said with dramatic emphasis and paused before adding, “… and then you. This is how we Winkelmeiers handle child rearing.

“That is a lie!” Greta almost screamed at her.  “You brought up your children in exactly the opposite way. Your children are last by a long way in the pecking order and they always have been.”

“They needed to be and they still are,” said Johanna not in the least impressed by the emotional outburst.  “If it was their life or mine to save I would always chose theirs. That is what I am talking about. You are no help to your son if you can't pull yourself together and put his feelings first. You are not thinking about his best but about your own best. ”

“Don't worry about that. I am fine now,” Greta replied with as much strength as she could muster.

“We will see. Just don't let yourself go again, do you understand?”

Close to tears but determined not to let Johanna break her spirit she sai
d. “Yes, I understand. So what needs to be done?”

Greta spent the rest of the afternoon in the cow shed.

“If you are as recovered as you say then that should not be a problem.” Johanna had said triumphantly after lunch. “When Karl is up, I will tell him that his mother is going to bring him to bed tonight.”

However, when the evening came Karl was not ready for his bed at all. Johanna had let him sleep far too long for his afternoon nap and he was cranky and wound up. Greta wondered if that had been deliberate to show her up as the bad mother Johanna wanted her to be. After several attempts to
get him changed in to his night-gown had failed, Greta stood embarrassed in front of her smug audience and had to admit defeat.

“Maybe we can let you stay up until your Daddy comes home if you stop screaming and if
you agree to put on your night-dress,” Johanna negotiated, obviously knowing what offers did the trick because within a minute little Karl was changed and quiet.

“You'll learn eventually. Believe me, when you have the next child it will be much easier,” Johanna said patronisingly.
“If you are going to have another one.”

Greta ignored the sti
ng of that last remark and said. “The Doctor said I should be fine. We might have a whole bunch, lots of beautiful young boys I reckon.”

“O
f course that is what he said, the way you were screaming the place down he would have said anything to shut you up,” Johanna said with a grin.

Shocked by the sudden nastiness in the person she had only recently started to think of as a
friend, Greta was unable to reply and started to work on the dishes.

About an hour later Wilhelm finally came home.

“There you are my darling,” he said. “I heard you were looking for me at the bookshop yesterday. Why did you not come and see me at the meeting?” he asked. “I was worried about you when I heard this morning. For all I knew you could have been attacked on the street.”

“I went back to my father for the night,” she replied. “It did not seem safe to be out in the streets on my own.”

“You would have been fine,” he said. “We have a lot of security guards at the meeting hall. It is the safest place in all of Slovakia.”

“When did you become involved in the party?” Greta asked.

“How could you not know?” asked Jo
hanna with a grin and poorly faked surprise in her voice. “He told me about it months ago. Do you not listen when your husband talks to you?”

“Wilh
elm, when did you join?” Greta repeated her question when they were alone.

“Three months ago. I didn't have a choice really.
One day Kling and Mohr, the owners of the shop, both grilled me about my political views, about a Pan German state and about the legitimacy of the Czechoslovak state. They can be very intimidating. So I stated my main concern as a German was the safety of us Germans here in Slovakia. Once I had said that, they led me with more and more questions into a corner where I had no way out but to ask to be accepted for membership at the Party. It was like in one of those dialogues of Plato. They kept asking leading questions and before I knew it I was stuck with a lot of answers I would never have given in the first place. Now I am even part of the local committee.”

“Why did you not tell me?” she asked.

“I was too embarrassed,” he said shyly.  “You know I don't really have strong political convictions but now I have a party book that begs to differ. It certainly secured my position at the shop that is for sure.”

“What would they think if they knew that I am a Jewess? What kind of Nationalists are they? Are they like Hitler and the NSDAP?” she asked concerned.

“Don’t be silly, of course not,” he reassured her. “We are Nationalists and you are not a Jew any more. Remember? You are a Catholic now.”

“But the Germans don't care about the Jewish faith, they care about the Jewish race,” she explained. “I can never erase that and you know it.”

“I don't think they will ever find out,” he said. “Now, please let me sit down and read for a little while.” 

Once she had recovered mentally from the loss of her unborn child, Greta regained her positive spirit and learned to consider herself lucky that the Winkelmeiers had always treated her like a full member of the family. Johanna may have successfully secured the role as the predominant mother figure in Karl's life but now that she had achieved this goal, she had stopped harassing Greta. The phase of sniping remarks and continuous criticism disappeared as quickly as it had arrived and the two women were back on relatively good terms with each other.

Greta of course wo
uld never be able to forget the nastiness Johanna had been capable of during that period and remained on her guard, yet the extra time she had gained from Johanna’s extensive involvement in looking after Karl became a blessing for her marriage. She was once again able to read a little in the evenings and share her views about books with Wilhelm. She was no longer reading her romantic literature but now joined his serious 'quest for philosophical wisdom' and late at night they would talk about what they had read. The entire family sighed with relief when Greta announced after only a few months that she was pregnant again. Everyone – including Benedikt - went out of their way to make sure she was always rested and fed, and that no harm could come to little Karl’s future sibling.

Greta now worked exclus
ively in the kitchen. Johanna even gave up her favourite seat in the living room in the evenings so Greta could sit as comfortably as possible and not develop problems with her veins. Johanna had heard from a woman on the market that this could be a problem for pregnant women who worked physically. Secretly, she still wondered if Greta’s miscarriage a few years back had been caused by too much farm work and if she herself was partly to blame for the misfortune. At the time she had made herself agree with her husband that the accident was just a sign of God’s will and that it had nothing to do with Greta’s farm duties. Still, Johanna felt a little responsible for adding so much to the woman’s workload in those days and, as if to compensate for her previous neglect, she now ordered her to rest, gave Greta the biggest portions of food at every meal and worked extra hard to ensure that the young woman would not feel a need to exhaust herself.

The inclusion of Austria into the German Reich was a foregone conclusion and rumours were already running wild about the Germans invading
Czechoslovakia once they achieved that goal. Every day more Jewish people crossed the border into Czechoslovakia from the neighbouring countries and the stories they told about life in Germany and Austria were frightening. Greta spoke excellent German which had been perfected during her time at the German school in Bratislava; she could easily pass for a German woman. The synagogues no longer held lists of their congregation so that an invading Nazi army would not be able to use them to round up the local Jews.

Being on the farm amongst a German family
, she knew it would take a while before she could ever be uncovered as a Jew - if at all. However, in the event of a German occupation, despite her conversion her prospects were grim. She had big concerns about her family who were living and working in the middle of town and who were much more in the public eye than her.
Were they on any list? Did anyone know about them? Did they have enemies who would tell on them? Were they in danger already?

Greta did not get to spend much time in town
anymore and saw little of her family. She offered to help Johanna with the shopping and the trips to the market, but Johanna had almost become obsessed with the health of the unborn baby and considered such a trip too much of a hazard. 

Wilhelm however had a lot of contact with the German community through the book shop and his party membership
, and he was painfully aware of the growing tensions in the population of Bratislava and the anti-Semitic politics. Publications on the Aryan and Jewish Race were becoming popular and the shop started to stock some of this propaganda material. Although he was involved in the party at a high level, he did not know that much about racial politics. Reading these leaflets, for the first time in his life Wilhelm heard about the inferiority of the Jewish genes, a 'scientific' explanation for Hitler’s racial politics. The pamphlets also mentioned the existence of a 'degenerate' gene in all Jews and claimed that most diseases were carried and transmitted only by the Jews.

While his rational mind found it hard to believe these accusations at
first, he gradually succumbed to accepting these stories as truth - after all they were so frequent and consistent. He could not believe that nobody ever had told him about this before. Did people not know or had they carelessly let him marry a Jewess without as much as a word of warning? Well, he must have been very lucky then that his blond and blue eyed son Karl had not been affected. Wilhelm started to worry whether his next child, which currently was growing in his wife's belly and which should be born at the end of the year, was going to be so lucky and escape the nasty genetic predisposition.

Of course Greta seemed entirely healthy and sane, he could not imagine that she had inferior genes, but one of the pamphlets he had read stated that su
ch genes could in fact be carried by the Jewish mother without her showing any symptoms and might still come into effect in her future children, casting a huge shadow over the life of his yet to be born baby. Then there was the issue of Greta’s sister Wilma that concerned him. She didn't have any of the soft and beautiful features that her sister had at all. Wilhelm assumed logically that this was a sign of the Jewish genetic disease showing in one sibling and not in the other, as the pamphlet had explained could happen. If the theory of genetics was true it would all make a lot of sense. Greta carried but did not show the signs of those wrong genes and fortunately had not passed them on to Karl, but she already had miscarried one child and her sister was very visibly affected in her inferior looks. Greta was such a beautiful feminine woman, whereas Wilma had more mannish and harsh features. No wonder she had never been courted.  Over the course of the new pregnancy he became increasingly worried about the health and looks of the child in Greta’s belly and hid himself away in the book and party work to avoid letting his increasingly distant and anxious feelings show.

Greta on the other hand enjoyed becoming a mother again. Of course she had wondered if she would ever have another child after she
had lost the last one and now that she had become pregnant she was quite concerned about another miscarriage. Relations with Johanna however were improving rapidly which made life a lot easier.

Her hostess could not do enough for her and even Benedikt was feeling very generous these days, content with the way the farm was running. Forgotten
were the times of scolding, anger and shouting. Living here had once again become a blessing for Greta and being able to concentrate on her pregnancy without any worries made her very happy. It was easy for her to put her worries about the political developments to the back of her mind and think positively.

Wilhelm did not share her optimistic views. He clearly saw the writing on the wall and felt that living in Slovakia and on the farm was becoming the opposite of a safe place for him and his family.
He had followed the newspaper reports and party rumours about the German tactics with Austria very closely and he knew that it was only a matter of time – and probably not that much of it either – until Hitler crossed the borders into Austria and Czechoslovakia and would implement his racial laws. Although these ideas were not the official party line of the German Sudeten Party, he only had to listen to his fellow party members to know that they were open to such policies. His marriage would be annulled and his son Karl would be treated like any other dirty Jew; there probably would be nothing he could do for Greta or her family once the Germans were here. The longer he thought about it, the clearer it became to him that he would have to try and see if he could save little Karl, get him out of the country and into safety, wherever that may be.

Wilhelm would worry
himself sick about the dangers that lay ahead of him and his family, but then nothing would happen again for weeks and he would calm down and feel silly to have got into such a state of panic.

Then the news reached him that
the Austrian Chancellor had resigned on Hitler's request and that the Austrian army had not offered any resistance worth mentioning when the German troops marched across the border in April. According to eye witnesses, the population had greeted the soldiers with flowers and enthusiasm. In Vienna there had been immediate acts of violence towards Jews.

It wouldn't be much different over here, he suspected, so he had to make plans. The summer had been surprisingly uneventful politically. Konrad H
enlein, the leader of the German Sudeten Party, was strongly supported by German diplomats and was increasingly able to make more and more blatant demands to the government. An Austrian plebiscite gave Hitler a clear mandate as the new master of the Ostmark, as he renamed Austria, and that gave the Sudetengermans further encouragement to voice their demands for autonomy or inclusion into the German Reich. Even in those parts of Slovakia where few Germans lived, the campaign was vocal.

I
n September, it was announced that European leaders would meet in Munich to come to an agreement with Hitler about the future of the German minority in the Czechoslovak Republic. Greta would have to make up her mind soon what she wanted to do, stay here with her family and take a chance with their lives or flee with him and little Karl and seek safety elsewhere.

For some time it had been well known how horrendous
ly the Jewish people in Germany were being treated and the reports about work camps had become more than just a vague and unconfirmed rumour. Hearing about deportations and beatings in Austria from refugees was particularly shocking because the anti-Semitic government had only recently been installed and was already very effective in persecuting Jews. Houses were raided, shops closed, officials dismissed or arrested and people were beaten up randomly in the streets. There was chaos and nobody knew if a missing friend had been arrested or had succeeded in fleeing the country. Soon the German tax for evading the country, a Reichsflucht Steuer, was introduced in Austria as well and now even the rich had difficulties raising the funds to be allowed out. Jewish passports were confiscated and returned with a “J” marked in it which was a request from the Swiss border police to make their life easier. Anti-Semitic sentiments were now more openly shown in Czechoslovakia as well; not just by Germans in the country but also by Nationalists and sympathisers within the Czech and Slovak community.

“Where would we go?” Greta asked Wilhelm when he broke the issue of leaving the country to her.

“We have a few options I think,” he replied. “Our first step would be to cross the border to Poland and from there travel to England or France or wherever we can travel to. It is more difficult to get a visa now because there are so many refugees but it is not impossible.”

“Could we not just stay in Poland?” she wondered.

“Poland is not safe either,” he replied. “Silesia has a German minority population. Hitler must have his eyes on it already. Poland can only be a stepping stone to our next destination. Hitler is sure to follow there once he is done with Czechoslovakia.”

“Where do you think we stand the best chance to live in peace?” she asked.

“Portugal, Spain and Italy are all dangerous places with their fascist governments. Sweden is trading with Hitler a lot, so Scandinavia seems risky too. That leaves Holland, France and England. The best place would be America but we don't have the kind of money to make that a realistic goal. Besides, when things improve politically in Europe it would be difficult to return from there. It is far too expensive travelling even in one direction.”

“Do you think it
will ever become safe for Jews in Europe?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so,” he said. “Sometime in the future it will be safe again. Right now of c
ourse that is hard to imagine but don't worry. You are not a Jew everywhere in the world.”

“What about Wilma and the rest of my family?” she asked with concern.

“They should think about escaping themselves. I hope they are making enquiries of their own,” he said coldly.

“Couldn't we get away all together?” she
suggested. “Couldn’t we help them?”

“We stand a better chance on our own,” he said. “I am German. My passport is genuine.
Every passport applicant in Germany has to prove their Aryan ancestry. It would be possible to get a forged one for you and Karl that won't identify you as Jews. We would cross the border as a regular German family. The fewer people in our group at the border the smaller is the risk of the patrol spotting a forgery. With Karl and me being blond I hope that we won't have any trouble.”

“What about Wilma, Egon and my father? Do you think they could get false passports too?” she asked hopefully.

“I can make enquiries for them but with their looks they might have more problems and be subjected to a thorough inspection. It would be far too risky in my view for them to travel,” he replied in a matter of fact manner.

“Will they get out with their own passports?”

“Officially yes,” he informed her, “but you know the Polish are not very keen on their Jews either and might stop le
tting any more in at any time, especially as there are ever more of you these days. Every country fears being overrun if they let in just a few of you. For Germans travelling, it will be a lot easier.”