The pilot pushed the control column forward, causing the plane to plunge earthward. He turned to see his passenger’s reaction. He was not disappointed as he saw Frank’s eyes the size of saucers and his arm braced against the fuselage.
When readying the plane for takeoff, the pilot had asked Frank how long he had been a paratrooper. Frank had volunteered for the Luftwaffe when he was seventeen and was starting his third year as a Fallschirmjäger. He told the pilot he too had wanted to fly but had been turned down by the doctors. He was excited to finally have the chance to go up in an airplane. The pilot remarked at the irony of a member of the Luftwaffe never having flown, and decided to give the young man a first flight he would never forget.
As the plane hurtled earthwards, it gathered speed, the air roaring over the wings causing everything to vibrate uncontrollably. Watching the earth, Frank saw a farmhouse rapidly growing in size. Just as he was sure they would crash, he felt a tremendous pressure on his body, like a giant hand pushing him down into his seat. As the pilot pulled the plane out of its steep dive, Frank felt he could breathe again. But the relief was short-lived. The plane turned on its right side, wings perpendicular to the ground, pressing Frank against the fuselage. From the cockpit came the sound of laughter.
Franz was furious with the Czech in charge of the court office. The man had examined the birth registration form, written a short note in the margin, and filed the document away. The man had not had the decency to say anything; he’d acted as though the name Franz meant nothing. It was an insult to the old emperor’s memory.
Franz had to let all the arguments he had prepared slowly dissipate without being spoken. His longing for the old days was painful. The Sikoras had once been among the town’s large landowners, part of the local ruling elite. The Sikora farms had produced food for market and provided employment for others. Their horses were so prized that the best were sold to the Habsburg monarchy.
But after the Great War, the Sikora farms had been taken from them by the new Czech government. Like other large landowners, most of them German, their family farms were split into small parcels and given to landless Czech peasant farmers. With the loss of their land followed the loss of the status and prestige it had brought them. The payment Franz and Josephina received was a fraction of what the land was worth. Franz had nothing against the Czech peasant farmers, but he believed the Czech government and the Allied powers lacked sympathy for Germans. During the chaos enveloping Central Europe after the Great War, three million Germans from Austria-Hungary and Germany became minorities in lands annexed and awarded to Czechoslovakia, Poland, or France. The Allied powers decided to slice off parts of Germany and to dismember Austria-Hungary. The new Czechoslovakia contained regions with large German minorities.
The changes in Teschen affected Germans more than any other ethnic group. In the time of the emperor, the Habsburg policies supported cultural and linguistic diversity and a degree of cultural autonomy. An uneasy peace reigned in the country. For the most part, the Germans of Teschen were landowners and took care of the government and administration, while the Czechs were active in business. The Poles mostly owned smaller farms and the Slovaks were often labourers and peasant farmers, many tending to pastures in the nearby Beskydy Mountains. In this rich cultural mosaic, a Jewish population also co-existed, its membership in the community and religious rights respected. Small communities of Romani wandered the countryside in their horse-drawn wagons, itinerant labourers who came seeking work. The different ethnic communities in Teschen continued living tolerantly after the Great War. But the loss of prestige among the Germans following the creation of Czechoslovakia had at a deeper level upset this peaceful co-existence among the region’s social classes and ethnic groups. Freistadt was on the surface still a quiet town, but the German population struggled to adapt to the new reality, a struggle the Sikoras exemplified. In this town of about five thousand people, predominantly German, many had difficulty accepting the loss of wealth and social position.
The town square in Friestadt (now part of the city of Karviná, Czech Republic).
Reproduced with the permission of photographer Lumír Částka (www.loomeer.cz).
Frank was oblivious of the upheaval his family was going through. His boyhood was an idyllic time. With other boys from different ethnic groups, he played in Freistadt’s cobblestone roads, running down the narrow streets lined with medieval buildings, many of them more than seven hundred years old. In the town’s Central Square stood a tall clock tower, a reminder of a time centuries earlier when it was a bulwark against invaders. Farmers from the surrounding countryside came to Freistadt’s market to sell homemade cheese, curds, eggs, and poultry. In summer, the farmers brought berries to market and in the fall wild mushrooms, picked by women from the forests carpeting the Beskydy Mountains. Poachers from nearby Poland arrived in Freistadt to sell rabbits and venison from the forests to the north.
The rolling countryside surrounding Freistadt was made up of fertile farms and forests. The lush forests were playgrounds for children of all backgrounds. Frank attended a German school, and his fellow students included the Jewish children of Freistadt. Life was not a Garden of Eden, but it certainly seemed it to Frank.
The cold mountain streams cascading through the forest were full of fish. Trout and crayfish brought high prices in the market. But the rivers were protected from fishing, preventing city boys from fishing outside of town without a licence. Luckily for Frank, the local game warden was a family friend who finally relented and issued him a fishing licence. It was a prize to have one, although it only permitted Frank to catch minnows and chub. His fishing equipment was a simple hazel branch, a few metres[2] of ordinary string, and a hook. His fishing license didn’t even allow him to use worms as bait. Frank spent most spare time in the forests, walking to favourite fishing spots with his homemade rod over his shoulder. He would return hours later, usually without any fish, but having spent time in nature doing what he most enjoyed.
While Freistadt seemed a near-perfect setting to grow up in, his parents came to realize there was little future for them there. With their lands gone and the small remuneration they’d received used up, the small family struggled. The court office was small and his father’s paycheque never seemed adequate. Franz found himself passed over for advancement in favour of Czechs who came from elsewhere. With the family grown to include a daughter, Eva, Frank’s parents decided to move to the larger city of Ostrau, a few dozen kilometres west.
Their parents told Frank, who was eleven, and Eva, seven, that life would be better in Ostrau. Franz would stand a better chance of obtaining a promotion. To children, moving to a new city meant making new friends, and on arriving Frank immediately noticed a glaring difference. In Freistadt, everyone mixed together, regardless of their background. In Ostrau, German and Czech children tended to keep to their own groups, each having their own schools, praying in their own churches, and frequenting shops run by their own people.
Ostrau’s court office, where Franz worked, used German or Czech, depending on the language of the legal participants, as was the case in Freistadt. This was emblematic of the thorny issue the Czechs faced, between granting more autonomy to Germans or trying to draw them into an active role in Czechoslovakia’s government. Allowing greater freedom in the country’s German regions, the Czechs worried, might eventually move Germans there to seek union with Germany.
In the early 1930s, many German Czechs were thrilled when a party came to power in Germany whose policies included the return of territory taken away after the Great War. The National Socialists took power in the German Reichstag through political opportunism, violence, and duplicity. By 1932, their leader had become the chancellor of Germany. He was an Austrian who had fought in the Great War and who, until the mid-1920s, had been a minor right-wing political figure. His name was Adolf Hitler.
While jailed in the 1920s, Hitler wrote a book describing his views on the causes of Germany’s problems. He used a visible minority as the principle scapegoat for the loss of the Great War and the country’s economic problems. The book was Mein Kampf, and the group he targeted was the Jews.
By March 1933, Hitler had consolidated political power in Germany, eliminated his major