Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  Then all Jewish children, including Anna’s friends Rosa Erhmann and Jacob Stein, were forbidden to attend school. The Reich Protectorate Office ordered Jews to leave the protectorate. Thirty thousand had to get out by the end of 1939, another seventy thousand in 1940. Rosa told Anna her parents did not know where they could go. France wouldn’t accept Jews, and neither would Switzerland or Canada or the United States. South America was a possibility, but Rosa’s parents knew no one in Argentina or Brazil or Paraguay. Her parents’ bank accounts were frozen, and their house had been given to a Reich German family; there were now two classes of citizens in the protectorate. Reich Germans lived and worked in Czechoslovakia but as Germans received privileges denied to Czechs, who as Slavs were termed Untermenschen by the Nazis, which meant subhuman, a word no moral person would use.

  Rosa’s family moved into her grandmother’s small apartment. Rosa’s father was ordered to place a sign in the window of his pharmacy that said he could serve only Jewish customers. Jewish families were not allowed to keep pets, Rosa told Anna, and no one would love their cat as much as she did. They had never been religious, but now her family observed Shabbat and went to synagogue. Anna and Rosa had been sitting on the stairs in the entrance hall of Anna’s house. Anna went upstairs and got her cat, Milo, and came down and put him on Rosa’s lap. When they were younger, she and Rosa, and sometimes Jacob, had played a game in the hall that Anna had invented, in which they could step only on black floor tiles or only on white tiles. A misstep meant you had to walk backward up six stairs with your eyes closed. Another game involved the skeleton in her mother’s office. They pretended he was chasing them down the hall, past the storage-room door and the door to Anna’s father’s workroom at the back of the house. The skeleton’s bones clacked, his toes clicked; Anna and Rosa giggled and said if he touched them, they would die.

  They should have more sense, Sora told them. In Germany, a long time ago, she said, people in a village saw skeletons tumbling out of a dark, threatening sky. It was a warning of bad things to come. “You need to think what you’re playing with,” she said. “Some things are better left undisturbed.”

  It was only a game, Anna had assured Sora. The skeleton would never hurt them. He was a three-dimensional lesson in anatomy, a useful reference, her mother had told her. Henri, which was the name Anna and Rosa had given the skeleton, had no malice in him. But maybe Sora had been right and those games of pretend with Henri had brought bad luck, not just to their house but to Prague.

  If she closed her eyes, Anna could picture Rosa. She had small, perfect features, silky dark hair cut in a fringe, blue eyes, smoky black eyelashes. Rosa and her family had left Prague to travel to Palestine in August 1939. Rosa’s mother had decided they would get there if they had to walk. In Palestine, they would have a house of their own again, and her father could open another pharmacy. Anna and her parents should come with them, she had said. They weren’t Jewish, Anna had pointed out. But Anna’s mother was a doctor, Rosa had said, and doctors were needed everywhere.

  That same month Jacob and his family had emigrated to New York City, where Jacob’s uncle lived. Jacob’s father was a surgeon. The Nazis had revoked his hospital privileges and banned him from lecturing at the Charles University. Anna’s mother had submitted a formal complaint to the hospital’s administration. In response she had received a letter warning her that she was compromising her own professional standing and would be disciplined if she did not desist. She had ripped the letter in half and burned it in the fireplace.

  * * *

  They should have gone to Palestine, Anna thought later. Weeks before the occupation of Czechoslovakia began, Franz had tried to convince their parents to emigrate to England or Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Anywhere out of harm’s way. Their mother had said she couldn’t abandon her patients. Their father had believed that if they remained quiet, reasonably obedient, never calling attention to themselves, they would be all right. And so they stayed. In 1940, Reina and Franz began volunteering to assist Jewish people with obtaining visas and exit permits from a new office overseen by an Austrian Nazi named Adolf Eichmann. Anna suspected Franz and Reina were helping in more illicit ways as well. They belonged to a Czech hikers’ club that, as was generally known, functioned as a cover for partisans and secretly published anti-Nazi pamphlets and met at secret locations after dark to set up portable radio transmitters that beamed the BBC’s Overseas Service to radios in Prague. Listening to these broadcasts was forbidden, punishable by execution, but how could the Nazis know what was going on in your living room, if you kept the shutters closed and the curtains drawn? Even Anna’s parents listened, the radio turned down so low that exiled president Edvard Beneš spoke to them from London in the sibilant whispers of someone underwater.

  * * *

  Rosa left Prague in the same month that Anna’s cousin Reina came to live in Prague to attend university. Reina had grown up on her parents’ farm in Zürau. Her mother was Anna’s aunt Gisele. Her half aunt, really, since her mother and Aunt Gisele were half sisters. Anna had adored her cousin, and when she visited the farm, she had followed Reina around, watching as she cleaned out barns and chicken coops, scythed grass, and helped her mother in the house and with the younger children. But the Reina who arrived in Prague had changed. She dressed in silk blouses and tailored skirts she had made herself from patterns Aunt Vivian Svetlová had mailed to her. Her curly auburn hair was in a smooth twist at the back of her head. Occasionally she smoked a cigarette. She got a part-time job at the bookshop where Franz worked. They went to coffeehouses together, met with fellow students and professors, discussed literature, philosophy, poetry—but politics, never. Not, Franz said, with SS officers at the next table listening. At least, one of them listened, a tall man no older than Franz, perhaps also a university student. He seemed conversant with Kant; perhaps he’d studied Kant before ditching any conception of a moral imperative. Perhaps he knew more on any given subject than Franz and his friends, but he was what he was, that SS officer; he had made his choice. For the first time, Franz said, he realized he could kill another man in defense of his family and his homeland. No, he could not, Anna’s mother had said. And he must never repeat what he’d said to anyone, ever. A thoughtless word, a wrong look, would be interpreted by the Nazis as sedition, a crime punishable by death. Franz had said it himself, she pointed out: they lived in a police state. At the hospital she’d seen boys younger than Franz who had been beaten and tortured by the Gestapo. She saw their parents waiting in hospital corridors to learn whether their sons had any chance of recovering from their injuries, if they would ever be the same again.

  * * *

  At first, when Reina came to live with them, she and Anna shared Anna’s bedroom, which was large enough for two beds, two wardrobes, a dressing table, and a desk for Reina. A muslin curtain on a rail separated Anna’s side of the room from Reina’s side. Immaculate in her appearance, Reina scattered clothes, shoes, books, and half-finished term papers everywhere on the floor. She read late at night, her lamp shining directly—deliberately?—in Anna’s eyes. She walked in her sleep but denied having got out of bed during the night. One night, Anna woke and found Reina in the hall, at the top of the stairs, swaying unsteadily. Anna took her hand, and Reina turned and slapped her face. Reina let Anna guide her back to the bedroom and got back into bed, still asleep. Anna lay awake, her face stinging. In the morning, when she looked in the mirror, she saw a faint bruise on her cheek. At breakfast, her mother said, “Anna, let me look at you. Are you sleeping well?”

  “Yes. No,” Anna said.

  “And you, Reina?” her mother asked. “How are you sleeping?”

  “Why, what has Anna been telling you?”

  “Nothing,” Anna said.

  “Aunt Magdalena,” Reina said, “I am very grateful to be living here, but to be honest, sharing a bedroom with Anna is impossible. If I read at night, I disturb her. She hides my books, my clothes. I can’t find any
thing. She’s always watching me. I have no privacy whatsoever.”

  “That’s not true,” Anna said. “Anyway, if I didn’t watch you, you would fall down the stairs and break your neck.”

  Later, her mother told Anna that sleepwalking wasn’t all that unusual in young women Reina’s age. “Could it be she’s homesick, I wonder,” her mother said. “Perhaps she misses her family more than she lets on. Be especially nice to her, won’t you?”

  She was nice to Reina, nicer than Reina deserved. In the morning, she brought her coffee in bed. She collected apple cores and used coffee cups from Reina’s bedside table, picked her clothes up off the bedroom floor and took them to Sora to be laundered.

  “Where’s my sweater, the dark blue one with silver buttons?” Reina demanded, slamming a drawer shut.

  “It’s there, in the drawer. Look again.”

  “You have no business touching my things, Anna.”

  “Then pick up after yourself.”

  “Don’t be rude, Mousekin,” Reina said.

  “My name is Anna.”

  “I know what your name is, Mousekin.”

  Anna’s parents decided to let Reina move into the bedroom that had belonged to Anna’s grandfather. “A year ago, even six months ago,” Anna’s mother said, “it would have been too soon, but it seems a shame not to use the room.”

  It should be her or Franz moving into that bedroom, Anna thought. Reina had never known their grandfather as well as they had. She had never fished with him from the riverbank or walked with him across the Charles Bridge to Wenceslas Square to have ice cream at a café. Their grandfather’s name was František Jacobus Maria Svetla. He had thick silver hair and a mustache and wore high collars and three-piece suits. As a young lawyer, he had been employed in Vienna at the court of the Emperor Franz Joseph. He had told Anna that Franz Joseph began work every morning at five o’clock, and at the end of the day the emperor dusted off his own desk with a camel-hair brush he kept for that purpose. What a punctilious man he had been, her grandfather had said; what a shining example to his subjects.

  When, in the last year of his life, illness had kept her grandfather confined to his bed, Anna would sit with him, and he would tell her about his land in Western Bohemia. His one regret was that he would never again see his fields of sugar beets. His orchards. The timber house he had built with his own hands for Katharina, his first wife, who had died of a hemorrhage of the brain when Anna’s mother was six and her brother, Emil, was four. In the spring following their mother’s death, Anna’s grandfather had taken his children to Karlsbad. Every morning they bathed in the hot springs and in the afternoons strolled around the town, sometimes falling into step behind a young couple that kept stopping to poke around in flowerbeds, apparently hunting for insects, leaves, snails, moss growing on a stone. When he encountered them in the lobby of the hotel where they were all staying, he said good day and commented on the weather. One evening, he invited them (he had learned they were brother and sister) to join him and the children at their table.

  Max and Eva Nagy were from Hungary. They lived and worked in Troja, near Prague. Eva had fair hair and blue-gray eyes and was soft-spoken and rather shy, but not as shy as her brother. Max had a square, ruddy face and tended toward stoutness; he was by profession a soil specialist. Eva had a degree in botany. She told Magdalena and Emil that trees, mosses, flowering plants, millipedes, and sparrows coexisted in a mutually beneficial environment, sharing sunlight and moisture and nutrients in the soil. She amused them with stories about timid field mice, pugnacious beetles, and frugal ants. On their walks, she held insects in her hand for Magdalena and Emil to see up close. She taught them more than their father felt entirely comfortable with about the mating habits of the voles that burrowed into gardens.

  They hiked up a hill and stood gazing down at Karlsbad’s festively colored buildings and at the Teplá River flowing past in the valley. Eva told the children the hot springs had been discovered when the emperor Charles V’s hunting dog fell in the scalding water and had to be rescued. This story was almost certainly apocryphal, she added, and then had to explain to the children that the word meant something that might or might not be true. Magdalena asked whether the poor dog had drowned. No, Eva said, the dog was—he was a water spaniel. Eva had a dog called Bruno, a Russian wolfhound. She promised Magdalena she could meet Bruno someday. Magdalena invited Eva and Max to come home with them, and her father said, yes, they must visit his farm very soon. But it was a year later before Eva and Max came to the farm. They stayed for two weeks. The year after that, they stayed for a month and brought with them Bruno, the Russian wolfhound. And the year after that, František Svetla and Eva Nagy married. Max Nagy spent a few weeks every summer at the farm. He collected soil samples and later analyzed them at the Pomological Institute, mailing the results to his brother-in-law. One summer, he gave Magdalena and Emil two handsome Belgian rabbits with dusky-blue fur, liquid-brown eyes, and razor-sharp claws.

  A son, Maximilian, was born to František and Eva, and two years later, a daughter, Gisele. But here Anna’s grandfather faltered. Anna always wanted to say, “Don’t tell me. Tell the story in a new way, with a better ending.” But no one could undo the past. Three days after giving birth to her daughter, Eva became ill with a fever and died. She was buried in the churchyard beside Katharina Svetlová. Bruno quit eating, and he too died, and in the night, while the children were sleeping, František dug a grave for him not far from the churchyard fence.

  Within the year, František sold his farm and moved to Prague with the four children. He had let Max know and had given him his new address. Max visited them in Prague once and later wrote to say he’d taken a job managing an estate in Pomerania. That was the last Anna’s grandfather heard from him.

  The house her grandfather bought in Prague, where Anna’s mother and her brother, Emil, and their half siblings, Maximilian and Gisele, had lived, was the house Anna’s family lived in.

  Did she know about the Belgian rabbits? Anna asked Reina one morning. Did she know about the rabbits her uncle Max brought to their grandfather’s farm in Western Bohemia? Reina, filling the kettle at the kitchen sink, turned off the tap and said no, she knew nothing about Belgian rabbits and didn’t especially want to. Her parents raised rabbits. They were pests, in her opinion, and had to be treated constantly for fleas and tapeworm. And she wasn’t all that fond of rabbit meat, either.

  “You have to understand what it was like for me,” Reina said. “All my life, I had to share a bedroom with at least one of my sisters, and sometimes all three of us slept in the same room. On a farm you work all day, and yet the chores never get done.”

  She would never go back to the farm. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to get married. Franz had given her Charlotte Garrigue Masaryková’s Czech translation of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women to read. “I agree with him. With John Stuart Mill, I mean. Without female equality, no society can hope to succeed. Franz says that is a self-evident truth. I intend to have a profession, like Aunt Magdalena. Not in medicine, though, because I can’t bear to be around sick people.” She took the teacups to the sink and rinsed them. “Are we friends, then, Anna?”

  “We are cousins,” Anna said. “And, yes, friends too.”

  * * *

  In January, a farmer—a neighbor of Reina’s parents—came to Anna’s house with a delivery of two dozen eggs and a large parcel of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with string. He wore a long overcoat, the collar turned up, and a cap low on his forehead, very incognito. Anna had been too surprised to ask his name or even thank him. Franz carried the parcels, which were from Reina’s parents, up to the kitchen, and Sora unwrapped them. Anna’s father said they must share this unexpected bounty. He telephoned Magdalena’s aunt and invited her and her husband to dinner. Then Franz invited Ivan and Marta. Sora, whose late husband had owned a greengrocery, still had friends in the trade who were more than willing to sell her certain commodities
under the counter: a five-kilo bag of white sugar, a tin of baker’s yeast, a slab of dark chocolate. Anna, Reina, and Franz ate the chocolate slowly, savoring it. Sora baked bread and vanilla cookies and used the last of the chestnut flour to bake the Italian cake castagnaccio.

  Anna and Franz lit the candles in the candelabra on the dining room table. Anna slid into the chair beside Aunt Vivian, who told amusing anecdotes about the SS wives who came into her shop to buy hats. Reina said the same wives patronized the bookshop, stocking up on romance novels and snooping for banned titles they could report to their Nazi husbands. Some of her customers had chauffeurs to carry their purchases out to their cars, Aunt Vivian said. It made her want to slap their faces. “The wives or the chauffeurs?” Franz said. Aunt Vivian laughed and said, Both.

  Franz put Mozart on the gramophone: Eine kleine Nachtmusik; Anna’s father said the grace, giving thanks for the generosity of Reina’s family and the fine meal they were about to enjoy. Then he uncorked the wine and poured a glass for everyone, even Anna.

  On their way to dinner, Ivan said, a few flakes of snow had begun to fall.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Uncle Tomáš said. “Didn’t I predict snow?”

  Anna’s mother said, “Ivan, your face has healed nicely. The scar is almost invisible. Such a shame it happened. Most of those SS men had the benefit of a good upbringing and should know better. But thank the Lord it turned out all right.”