We parked our car and took a brief walk up the village road, deserted during the early morning hour. Two elderly women dressed in black were heading in our direction. As he had done since crossing the border several days earlier, Edi greeted and engaged them in conversation. Their exchange became more and more animated as one of the women pointed to what appeared to be a storage building a few hundred meters up the road. Then one of the elderly women, perhaps nothing short of ninety, ambled over in my direction, gave me a hug with tears in her eyes.
Edi looked over to me with a wide grin.
“This building used to be one of the textile factories owned by your maternal grandfather before the war; now being used for storage of pharmaceutical products. Both of these ladies were born in this village and worked for your grandfather in the textile factory.”
I squeezed both of their hands and asked Edi to convey my pleasure in having met them. I knew this trip down memory lane with both Edi and Simon would remain as one of the more poignant moments in my life.
It would be almost a decade before returning to my home town, this time with a specific purpose in mind.
Liberec, October 2006
We had driven from Vienna to Liberec, a couple of days prior to my appointment at the library in Bettina’s modest but capable VW Golf. Unlike my earlier visit with Edi and Simon, the hotel ‘Goldener Loewe’ had been renovated to international standards since. Gone was the grey and drab interior and our rooms on the first floor were exquisitely furnished and not lacking for amenities.
Bettina, my ‘kissing cousin’ from Vienna as I jokingly referred to her, had been an infant, when her parent’s family had fled to Austria in the summer of 1945. Although she had no memories of her birthplace, she had agreed to join me on our exploration of a common past.
It was Sunday evening with most restaurants closed. A row of illuminated windows on a cobble-stone side street off the main city square had held out some hope. The surly waiter had given our table a quick wipe and placed a couple of gigantic, leather-bound menus in front of us.
I looked around without trying to be conspicuous.
“Do you notice anything unusual?”, I asked Bettina.
She moved her head slightly in the direction of my glance.
“No, not really.”
“You’re the only woman in the place.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky.”
“I remember from the last time I was here with Simon,” I continued unperturbed. “It’s a Slavic thing – on Sunday night, the men go to the pubs and restaurants on their own, leave their wives and girlfriends at home.”
The waiter had again materialized next to us, serviette draped over his left arm, his hands holding a notepad and pencil poised for action.
“Lady and Gentleman, please, your order.”
“Do you know what you want?” Bettina inquired.
“I think I should have one of everything,” I responded.
Indeed, much of the menu held the promise of my mother’s cooking when I was a child.
We ordered a couple of Pilsner-Urquells and begged for more time. I sensed the waiter’s expression moving from surly to mildly hostile.
“As you wish,” he muttered, paper and pencil disappearing into the pockets of his vest.
It took a while for him to return and we quickly settled on sharing an order of paprika goulash with potato dumplings and another order of venison, bratkartoffeln and red cabbage.
At the library the following day, I had noticed a placard for a performance by the Liberec Opera Company of Jacques Offenbach’s ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’. I managed to get a couple of tickets on the mezzanine floor, 2nd row. During the lively performance of the can-can dancers, throwing their skirts up in the air and exposing their posteriors to the audience, I noticed that there was barely a change in the dour expressions of the middle-aged Czech audience around me. Surprised at their stoic reaction, I asked the girl at the hotel reception for an explanation the following morning.
“After a generation of communist rule, what do you expect”, came the laconic response.
“Even now, so many years later?” I added incredulously.
The blank facial expression of the girl behind the counter remained unchanged.
“I guess so,” I muttered to myself.
The massive building housed the new library. The sweeping roof was built into the side of a steep elevation, located only a couple of blocks from the location of the old library. At the bottom of the hill, high-speed elevators swept upwards from several levels of underground parking toward the steel and glass reception hall. The grand foyer extended upwards to the roof three floors above. Once past the reception and information counters, visitors had their choice of another bank of elevators to the right of the turnstiles. The more adventurous would ascend the first level on a floating staircase made of thick transparent acrylic steps suspended from shiny steel cables.
A wide escalator to the left of the entrance provided access straight to the second and third levels of the library. It was mid-morning, just after opening and the reception hall was quiet and devoid of visitors. Late fall sunlight was streaming through the glass facade facing the town square, basking this area in a warm and diffused light. Facing the escalator was the information and registration desk. I walked across to ask for Katerina Trojanova. Moments later I was seated at one of the large research desks in the modern library. I opened and re-read her letter.
“Dear Sir,
Thanks many for your interest in our collections. You may prefer newspapers or magazines - some of them are in our stock but unfortunately fire destroyed many periodicals in 1954. Otherwise you must also search in regional archive - their collections not affected by any natural elements.
Austrian collection contains documents published nowadays, also in Germanica you can find historical studies published both in the past and the present. Please try to use our on-line catalogue.”
Best wishes - Katerina Trojanova – Librarian
‘P.S. We have found this entry in the Adressbuch der Gauhauptstadt Reichenberg published for years 1941-1942:
‘Hugo H. Jahnel - Elektrische Apparate und Anlagen - Adolf Hitler Platz 43 this means that if it is your father’s firm, it was in the former library built close to Town Hall.’
I had been corresponding with her for several weeks. Her knowledge of English appeared sufficient to grasp what I was looking for.
My thoughts drifted back to the last time I had been in Reichenberg almost ten years earlier. I had visited the old library in my grandfather’s building with Edi and Simon..
Veronika Juçek, the head librarian at the time, had escorted us through the three levels of rows upon rows of shelves filled with thousands of volumes. I smiled, as I remembered Simon’s excitement exploring the structure that had housed his family’s business more then half a century earlier. She had talked to us in glowing terms about the fund raising efforts to build the new library. And now I was here to search for more information into my family’s history.
More than just another library, German and Czech Presidents Roman Herzog and Våclav Havel had commissioned the structure as a building of peace and reconciliation under their joint patronage. A Jewish House of Prayer had been included in the new library site. The grand old synagogue across from my grandfather’s building had fallen