“Gerta” by Katerina Tuckova

Gerta Schnirch is a teenager living in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Her mother is of Czech heritage, her father of German. Her focus in life is her friends, her school, and especially her art class. It’s the late 1930s, and Gerta will never know another tranquil period in her life. 

Nazi Germany gins control of the Sudetenland, effectively disarming Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter comes the invasion and the establishment of the German “protectorate.” Her father and older brother are jubilant; this is the triumph for the country Germans, who have been a large minority in the nation since World War I. Her father raises the salute to Hitler; her brother joins the Hitler Youth. Gerta has a different experience – the loss of friends, her beloved art teacher, upheaval at school. 

 

For a time, there are benefits to the being German under the new regime. Gerta’s brother joins the army, supposedly headed to the Eastern Front. Her father continues to bully her mother, Gerta, and non-Germans. And then comes the turn of the war’s tide. Greta’s mother dies, leaving her alone with a father she doesn’t care much for. Gerta becomes pregnant; the baby Barbora is born shortly before Czechoslovakia is overrun by the Soviet Army. Life becomes increasingly bad. German citizens are imprisoned, taken off in labor gangs, brutalized, and worse in what seems like an orgy of revenge. 

 

Gerta is forced to join thousands of other women, children, and the elderly in what becomes a death march toward the Austrian border. Thousands are raped, brutalized, die from disease, and are killed outright. Gerta is determined to survive for the sake of her child. 

 

Katerina Tuckova

Gerta by Katerina Tuckova (translated by Veronique Firkusny) is the little-known story of what happened to Czech citizens of German ancestry after the war. It is a story surpassed only by what happened to European Jews and other people at the hands of the Germans. The period after the surrender of Nazi Germany was a time of chaos; mass movements of refugees, former prisoners and concentration camp survivors; and ethnic peoples forcibly moved from one country to another. 

 

Much of the novel focuses on the period between 1938 and 1947, but it continues to include the early communist period, the Prague Spring of 1968 (followed by the Soviet invasion), the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, and beyond. It’s told through the life of one woman who does what she has to do to survive, both for herself and her child. 

 

Tuckova is a Czech playwright, biographer, art historian, and author. She’s won several literary awards in her native Czech Republic and Europe. Her books have been translated into 19 languages, but Gerta is the first to be translated into English. She lives in Brno and Prague. Her research for the novel included interviewing survivors of the 1945 death march from Brno.

 

Gerta is not an easy story to read. It’s filled with the violence of the time, violence that was often undertaken as official and unofficial government policy. The character Gerta Schnirch becomes a prism to view some of the worst humanity has to offer, and how the human spirit can survive in spite of that.