Anna Parker Extract from Cottage

Anna Parker

Extract from Cottage

My Czech family’s holiday cottage (in Czech, a chalupa) sits halfway up a modestly sized mountain, in front of a pine forest that is so dark green that, viewed from a distance, it looks blue. A low stone wall divides the uncultivated meadows that lie around the cottage from its large garden, in which enormous daisies like fried eggs offer their faces up to the sky. Its brown and white wooden frame is subject to a seemingly never-ending reconstruction project led by my uncles, who come up from Prague on the weekends to mix cement, lay bricks and paint timbers. As they lug power tools back and forth across the porch, they politely greet the stream of passers-by taking the road up towards the mountain’s peak. During these weekends, our neighbours from the cottages on either side of us often appear unexpectedly inside the house, striding uninvited into the cool dim living room to question my uncles about the mechanics of each repair. This mountain region of north Bohemia has not always been a quiet backwater. Located on the edge of the Czech lands, on the border with Germany and Poland, our cottage sits in an area once called the Sudetenland. The Sudetenland had been occupied by ‘ethnic’ Germans since the sixteenth century, when they moved across the border to Bohemia and founded a thriving glass industry in the dense forests. Thus, when Hitler rose to power in 1933, he saw the Sudetenland as an easy landgrab, eventually seizing it in the summer of 1938. From this base he went on to occupy the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939. During the Second World War, the Czech government, safe in exile in Britain, put together plans to rebuild the Czech nation without

German influence. They agreed to strip all Sudeten Germans of their citizenship and property, and to expel them from the Sudetenland. Although the exact numbers of those displaced in the post-war period is disputed, in 1996, Czech and German historians working on a shared commission estimated that by 1946, 1.3 million Sudeten Germans had been deported to West Germany and 80,000 to East Germany. An estimated 15,000 to 16,000 Sudeten Germans died in the process, either murdered by Czech neighbours or killed by severe deprivation. A further 3,600 Germans died by suicide, preferring to take their own lives rather than be exiled from home. Numbers do little to convey the reality of forced migration. One Sudeten German, expelled together with their daughter and two grandchildren on the 20th of June 1945 recounted their departure to an oral historian: “At 5am [we] gathered with all our belongings that we were allowed in rucksacks. The rest of our possessions, including valuables and other assets, with great sorrow we had to leave behind, so naked we had to leave our homeland.” When I picture this family leaving their cottage in the rising dawn, it is the smallness of their rucksacks that makes me feel the greatness of their grief. In every expulsion, the person forced out had to part with their house, their land, and their livestock. Packing up to leave in the dark early hours, this family had no choice but to leave behind the possessions – spoons, bed linen, crockery, odds and ends – that their house would have layered up, like a protective shell, over generations. It is impossible to rebuild a home from the contents of a rucksack. Remarkably, our cottage was not part of the reprisals. An old German man lived there with a goat, and, when the expulsions began, he was able to prove to the Czech government that he was a committed anti-fascist. The cottage directly downhill from us on the mountain’s slope was occupied by a German woman who had also made a successful appeal to stay. Given its location, I saw this cottage most often from behind, and never beyond the dense net curtains that hung on the windows. It was painted black and white, and it crouched in the deep shadow of a pair of enormous linden trees that swung

wildly during storms. The cottage seemed ominous enough without my parents telling me that this was where a very old German lady lived. This information was delivered with a knowing tone that suggested – infuriatingly – that I should understand its significance, although, being a child, I could not. After the German lady died, her cottage lay empty. We returned one summer to find one of the linden trees had crashed down onto the building below. The thick trunk had cleaved the roof in half, its branches stuck through the rooms on the upper floor. Immediately after the expulsions, the Czechs set about cementing their hold over their newly cleansed land. Key to this was erasing all memory of Sudeten Germans from the region. The Nazi practice of removing gravestones from the Bohemian villages and towns that they had flattened was now turned against the local German community. Gravestone desecration is a favoured tactic of occupying forces because it directly challenges the grounding power of history. Gravestones memorialise the names of those lost, and, through dates of birth and death, count out a family’s connection to one place over generations. By desecrating local graveyards, the Czech pulled many centuries of German life in the Sudetenland back out of the region’s soil. Stripped of their homes, citizenship, and of their family graves, the Sudeten Germans were left with nothing that said: “so many of us once lived here”. How strange it must have been for those who remained, rootless. The eradication of German history from the Sudetenland was, on the surface, a great success. To my Czech family – the settlers of reoccupied land – our cottage is a place of joy and peace. So too for the visitors we bring with us. One year, my family arrived for the summer. It was the beginning of August. The long grasses in the meadow were torched gold. Dust kicked up by cars loaded with mountain bikes had dulled the green leaves of the birch trees. We were caught in the disorder of moving in our suitcases, reacquainting ourselves with the space by walking from room to room, identifying what was new and noticing old pieces of décor, that, seen again against the context of another year of life, suddenly stuck out and became more interesting than before. In the hall, my great-aunt was energetically emptying

a cupboard of its clean bed linen, shouting a series of instructions in Czech to no one in particular. My boyfriend, who I had taken to the cottage for the first time, was unflustered by her barrage of sound. His rucksack still on his back, he stopped and turned to me. With the earnestness for which I loved him, he told me that the cottage had an atmosphere that was deeply kind. A brightly coloured bedsheet came flying through the air. Although it is beautiful to pass through, the Sudetenland is a place where it is difficult to fully dwell, in the sense of a long-term home. The displacement of industry, culture and thousands of people quietly haunts the land. Very few people stay permanently. Even in the height of summer when Czech tourists fill the holiday cottages, the centres of the many little towns are quiet. Pastel pink buildings stamped with art nouveau script decay gently, the floral plasterwork peeling off their dirty facades. People in groups of two or three drink bottles of beer together, sitting in the sun in the children’s playground and watching passers-by with idle interest. Restaurants establish themselves one year and are shuttered the next, opening and closing with the regularity of the seasons. A home, once broken apart, cannot shelter new inhabitants. A house always remembers what has happened within its walls, even if the housed do not. One bright afternoon like any other, my uncles were digging in the back garden. One shouted out, calling us over. They had unearthed a gravestone, lying flat, face-up under a shallow layer of soil. The day was shattered with frightening speed.