Free Before by Joseph Hurka Page B

of identifying photographs and documents, a search of nearly a year; he spread out other SS photographs on the long wooden tables and bent over them with a magnifying glass—these carefully documented archives of annihilation, records for the master race—hoping to find the figures of Helena and his mother in them, a hint of where they might have been taken. His early inquiries to the Western intelligence services, in 1945 and 1946, done through Dr. Kobera, had turned up nothing. He’d put advertisements in every major German and Czech publication starting in May 1945, and especially in the Plze Examiner , thinking that his mother might somehow have made it back to her old family home with his sister. He’d had flyers made with this photograph of Jana and Helena and plastered them all over the train stations of Czechoslovakia and Germany, Jana and Helena smiling beside so many other lost relatives, an ocean of faces, photographs, and messages fluttering sadly from these corridors, these walls of war-torn Europe: so many relatives lost to terror, the words LAST SEEN glaring from every flyer. Helena Posseltová, age 18, and Jana Posseltová, age 38, read Jiri’s message, of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, last seen in Kladno being taken into Nazi trucks on June 13, 1942. Please contact American Army Division, c/o Jiri Posselt, Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, Germany.
    He visited brothels throughout Munich on a tip that some Czech women, who had been brought to the Russian front as prostitutes for the German troops, were working now in Germany. Perhaps Mother and Helena survived, he’d thought, walking through the wet Munich streets one night in March 1947. Perhaps the mistreatment of the soldiers made them crazy, and they no longer know who they are. He showed prostitutes, and madams, and johns the picture of Helena and his mother and the bike, but no one recognized their faces.
    The swastika still glows when he looks over. Hitler is there, looking down on the Danube, imagining the fires he will make. Following the girl named Stefanie, hovering in ghostly orbit around her, thinking of holding her in a place where she cannot escape him.
    The sound of the first Lidice killing squad on June 10, 1942, is a terrifying crack through Jiri’s stomach.
    Didn’t he see Tika today? Didn’t he tell her about it? Did he tell her about the walls, the sound of the guns?
    He remembers that he wanted to talk to her, to tell her of how the Nazis documented what they had done. How the Nazi title burned on the screen— Instructive and Cultural Films —and you saw the abandoned Lidice crest from Mayor Horák’s office, three roses beneath a great green “L,” and near it Jiri’s father lay among the other murdered Lidice men, right arm thrown out across the ground, the hand in a fist, head turned to the sky. A Nazi moved among the bodies, pushed at his father’s body with a jackboot. Jiri, watching the film for the first time in his Nuremberg office, had been unable to breathe in the clicking, film-sprocket darkness, had bent over to try to fill his lungs, and the sergeant running the projector for him had asked if they should continue.
    Yes, Sergeant, keep it going, Jiri had said. I need to see the rest of it.
    He had wanted to tell Tika, when they were walking by the roses at the Arboretum, whenever that was. Then he had looked over at her face and she seemed so happy that he had not wanted to bring his horror into the conversation.
    Jiri turns off the light and goes clumsily to the bathroom, brushes teeth; he spits, and he is weeping, thinking of his father facing the guns. Of Marie in the truck, holding one of the crying children. That’s what she would have done. For God’s sake, what happened with Mother and Helena? He puts cold water into his mouth: That is better, cold water over his neck and face, for his head is aching. A towel. Something normal, for God’s sake. What