Hugo Hamilton - The Last Shot

Officer Kern moved towards the door, but instead of opening it himself, he allowed her to open it and peer into the corridor to see if anyone was out there. All clear. She let him out and felt there was something terribly clandestine about doing so. Something which bound them together in a subversive liaison.

‘Sleep well,’ he whispered.

‘Good night,’ she replied, as officially as possible. Sleep was not the right word.

By the time Bertha woke up the following morning of 7 May, the German High Command had surrendered officially on all fronts. The ceasefire was set for midnight of the next day, the 8th. They could fight away to their hearts’ content until then. General Schörner again didn’t agree, and sent out a radio broadcast saying that reports of capitulation were nonsense. During the morning the Americans personally flew a German messenger from the German High Command into Prague airport in order to convince Schörner to give it up. He didn’t. SS men went on the rampage in the city, killing and ordering civilians to dismantle the 2,000 barricades they had put up in the streets.

The battle for the Hriskov arms dump was eventually won by the German troops from Laun around midday on the 7th. But it was an empty victory because they immediately began to flee back to Laun from the approaching Russians, leaving dozens of dead and wounded comrades as well as Czech insurgents behind them.

Sometime during the day, General Schörner took a plane and flew to Austria, where he crash-landed and handed himself over to the Americans, leaving his troops still fighting off the Red Army.

Nobody slept much the next night either. After the ceasefire at midnight, the Czechs were told to shoot only when fired on.

On the following morning, the 8th, the Germans in Prague eventually agreed their own ceasefire with the Czechs. The terms were such that the troops would keep their weapons until they got to the German border. They would not sabotage the weapons but would leave them by the roadside along with all ammunition. The retreating German troops would take only enough food to last the journey and leave everything else intact behind them. In return, the Czechs would allow them to retreat unhindered. The people in the towns would make way for a peaceful withdrawal.

By early morning, the first trucks began to move out of the garrison at Laun. The square was filled with the smell of diesel. The first and last trucks of the convoy carried Czech hostages. Bertha Sommer and Officer Franz Kern were somewhere in the middle. Kern was still monitoring the radio to keep the units informed about the position of the Russians. They were coming from the north and could only be around thirty kilometres, even less, behind them.

The convoy of trucks drove through the town of Laun and out along the road to Postelberg. The people of Laun came out to see them leaving. Some of the men had thrown out the old German street signs, forcing the German trucks to pass over them. A small group of women and children stood on the square, watching. They had really gathered there to welcome the liberating Red Army, who were expected to arrive very soon. The people were silent, waiting to cheer the arrival of the Russians. The only one smiling was a boy with Down’s Syndrome standing with his mother in the square, waving his hand with excitement at the German trucks as they disappeared out of the town.

The roads were already crowded with people on the move. Everything moved slowly.

Around lunchtime, the hostages were released in the town of Postelberg, about twenty kilometres away. Officer Kern heard further reports on his field radio that the fighting in Prague was continuing. The Germans were bombing the city from the air. One radio report said the Hradċany palace in Prague had been deliberately set on fire by the SS. But this turned out to be false.

Officer Kern then heard a message go out to the Czech people telling them to clear the way for the Russian troops so that they could head off the German withdrawal. The free Czech radio appealed to the Russians to give chase.

‘Catch the German murderers and kill them if they resist.’

I didn’t get back to Czechoslovakia again until October 1989. Nothing had changed. If anything, the place had become more and more bleak and despondent. There was no energy. The wildest imagination could not predict the fall of communism.

But there were signs of change in Prague. The city was already full of East Germans escaping on the freedom trains to the West. The West German embassy was besieged by young people climbing over the fences. No régime could fight off the lure of the free market. TV enlightenment. It was like forcing people to believe the earth was flat when every small child knew it was round. In Czechoslovakia, they still had to believe the lie. Perhaps the memory of tanks on Wenceslas Square in 1969 was still too vivid. Prague was still paralysed by silence, by fear and by the dim yellow lighting in the streets. Nobody could imagine change. Nobody, except maybe the young students with their candles and guitars quietly congregating on the Karls Bridge; too young to remember tanks.

I looked over the bridge into the Vltava. As with most rivers, I wondered how many people had fallen in or been thrown in over the years. At night, it looked black, under the illuminated façade of the Hradċany palace.

I had spent the afternoon in the most under-used building in Prague – the Museum Klementa Gottwalda, named after the founder of the modern communist state of Czechoslovakia. It seemed like the last place anyone would want to visit. The posters and postcards on sale at the reception inside all bore stern faces of idealists, men and women at work on tractors or in factories under blazing red banners. An impervious old woman sitting in her apron behind the reception desk interrupted her knitting to listen to my requests. I was looking for information on the Second World War resistance movement in Louny. Safe information about an old revolution that was fifty years in the past by now. They found an old man with a pipe who was only too happy to dig out the files for me.

The bars in Prague closed around 9. I spent the evening walking through the poorly lit squares and medieval streets looking for one that was still open. Like most tourists, I crossed the Karls Bridge five or six times, back and forth. All the time I heard the footsteps of pedestrians. It’s the one thing you remember about Prague; the sound of feet.

At a bar below the Hradċany palace I met a man called Mírek who told me there was no point even talking about freedom in Czechoslovakia. Why depress yourself with the thought? He changed the subject to talk about writers. He had read all the banned Czech writers in dog-eared photocopied editions passed around furtively at the university. He dismissed them, throwing his arms out towards a group of vociferous drinkers at the next table. They all talk like that around here, he said. We’re all quasi-philosophers.

I took the bus to Louny the following day. Nothing had changed there either in the last four years, except for one thing. The town had a new building. Right across the road from the bus station, and equally out of proportion with the rest of the town, they had erected a large red-brick office block. It turned out to be the headquarters of the Communist Party in the Louny district, and had the familiar red star over the entrance.

The town itself was as grey and dismal as before. This time, it seemed colder. Once again, I made attempts to speak to people in German, in English, in sign language. At the post office several people shrugged their shoulders. In the square, a young woman with a pram almost ran away to avoid me. An old man eventually directed me straight back to the Communist Party headquarters, the spanking new building at the end of the main street.