Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch – Tučková Kateřina (2009)

The night of May 30 to 31, 1945. Gerta Schnirch, the mother of a several-month-old daughter, is "deported" with only her personal belongings along with other Germans from Brno towards Vienna. The exhausting march ends in Pohořelice, where many of the exiles succumb to an epidemic of typhus and dysentery. Gerta and some other German women save themselves during forced labor in southern Moravia, where they remain even after the transports end. After regaining Czechoslovak citizenship, Gerta returns to Brno, where she experiences further tumultuous events of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the painful questions of guilt, retribution, and forgiveness between Czechs and Germans that this extraordinarily vivid and impressive novel raises, we witness an unconventional relationship between mother and daughter, which is distorted not only by the limited environment in which they, as German Czechs, were allowed to move on the margins of society, but also by mutual misunderstandings between two generations, difficult communication, and the impossibility of conveying personal experience. The unmistakable atmosphere of the story is enhanced by the genius loci of the dynamically developing Brno.