Five Wehrmacht officers stepped out of a second vehicle, black, with the top folded back. The men all shook hands. Other soldiers followed—guards, Magda guessed—followed by a motorcycle with a sidecar. The passenger in the sidecar jumped out, camera in hand, and snapped photos. He had a blond caterpillar mustache and wore dark-rimmed spectacles. Some from the delegations posed; others did not. Slowly the group moved around to the front of the house and out of sight. A few moments later, voices sounded from the dining hall door. The women positioned themselves in the kitchen, trying to look normal. Magda remained hidden, however. That was agreed upon. She would remain as close to the door as possible, and that was optimal, as the stove was on the far wall anyway. She grabbed the bowl of spaetzle and ladled a little bit of the hot water in to keep them warm and from clumping together.
The officers walked into the dining room, and tables and chairs were pushed together, scraping against the wooden floor. Magda gasped a little when one of the German officers stuck his head through the hatch and, without smiling, took a look at each of them. Magda kept her left cheek facing the wall and nodded her acknowledgment of him.
“Smells good,” he said in German, as if testing them.
Magda pretended not to understand, giving him an apologetic weak smile. Natalia and Ula also smiled politely and nodded. Ula asked something in Polish, and he threw her such a disgusted look that Magda knew this man should be avoided at all costs.
The owner was busy helping the delegation set up, talking nonstop about how happy he was to have them all here, handing out bottles of beer. Almost all the German officers declined. Her view through the kitchen hatch was limited, but one man rolled out maps. She glanced at Natalia and Ula, both of whom gave just the slightest nod. They had seen them too.
Another body moved before the hatch, then two hands on the counter and the soldier who had asked for Magda’s papers peeked in. His look landed on her, and he smiled.
“I was thinking…” He waved an index finger at her. “You remind me of someone.”
Magda forced herself to keep a blank gaze on him. She frowned a little and gave a shake of her head.
He squinted and waved that warning with his finger again. “Don’t worry. I’ll remember by the end of the night.”
Moments later one of the German commanders called the meeting to order. It was all official and serious. Magda found herself slowly drifting toward the hatch, trying to catch the words. Ula looked over at her and jerked her head toward the stove. Magda stepped back. It was difficult to hear anything with Natalia working on slicing the apples, the knocking of the board on the counter interrupting what snippets of conversation Magda was hardly able to catch. The men were purposefully keeping their voices low. If the women stopped working now, they would look suspicious. Magda widened her eyes at Ula and Natalia, and Natalia nodded over the next apple.
The owner pushed in through the door, the crate of beer empty. “The patrols will eat in shifts. Six will take soup now, and the others will go afterwards.”
Ula cocked her head toward the kitchen hatch. “And them?”
The owner shrugged. “Not yet.”
Magda moved to the pot of soup and ladled the first six bowls for Natalia and Ula. They worked steadily, hardly looking at one another. Her friends were going out there, would finally get a glimpse of what was available to them in the dining room. Maps were good, but they needed more than that to figure out the Nazis’ next moves.
Natalia and Ula left to serve the patrols outside, and Magda leaned against the wall behind the door. Ula suddenly moved in front of the kitchen hatch. She motioned to Magda and whispered, “They’ll take soup in here now.”
Magda hurried and ladled the bowls and served them at the hatch. Natalia appeared, winked at Magda, and took two bowls as well. When they returned to the kitchen, Natalia squeezed Magda’s shoulder.
“You need to go out there next,” she whispered into Magda’s ear. “With the spaetzle. Just stay behind them all and be invisible.”
Magda stared at the door. Be invisible. It was all she had ever wanted, all she had really practiced her entire life, and had never quite succeeded.
They were all quiet, Ula smoking her last cigarette. The dishes were piled up everywhere. Car doors slammed, ignitions turned, and motors revved. Crickets chirped outside the open kitchen window. Natalia caught her bottom lip between her teeth and held Magda’s gaze. They heard the front door of the guesthouse open and men marching back in. The women darted looks at one another and straightened. The kitchen door flew open, and the soldier who had reviewed Magda’s papers stood there with his blond companion.
“You remember now?” He pointed at Magda, very excited. “Didn’t I tell you that was her?”
His companion blinked his eyes. In the dim light it looked as if he had no eyelashes, no eyebrows. “Yeah.” He tipped his head. “You were right. Why didn’t I see that before?”
Ula and Natalia shifted and positioned themselves slightly in front of Magda. Outside the window, Magda noted that the first convoy truck drove away, lights slicing through the dark. Next to her on the counter was a glass of water. She inched the glass off the edge and then scrambled to try and catch it. Glass shattered. Water spilled everywhere. Natalia and Ula moved slightly away.
Magda grabbed a rag and bent down to wipe the water, pretending to pick up the splinters near her right foot. Her hand brushed the top rim of her boot. The sound of the motorcycle disappeared into the night, followed by another vehicle. There were only eight of them left now.
Footsteps moved in her direction, and Magda looked up. It was the blond. He stood over her and cocked his head again, uninterested in the spilled water, or the broken glass, or the fact that she was squatting on the floor. Instead he reached down and shoved the scarf back off Magda’s face.
Magda froze, her glare meant to cut through him.
The soldier looked surprised. He looked at his companion. “No, she doesn’t. Bruno’s sister didn’t have this mark on her face.” He stepped back and returned to his companion, punching him in the shoulder as he pushed past him. “You lose. That’s a beer you owe me.”
Magda and the brown-eyed soldier stared at one another. She waited, her right hand still near her foot.
“Come on,” his companion called. “They’re waiting for us.”
The soldier remained staring at her. She would do this. She would do this if she had to. If for some reason he no longer thought of her as Bruno’s sister but recognized her as a wanted woman—Obersturmbannführer Richard Koenig’s housemaid—she would shoot him. There were only eight of them left. She had eight bullets, and she had important messages to return to the commanders of her division.
The soldier’s eyes skittered from Magda to Ula to Natalia.
Ula stepped before Magda again, crossed her arms over her chest, and cocked her head.
Magda watched him turn around and march out of the guesthouse, only then releasing her breath. Ula and Natalia reached down and helped her up.
The owner walked in from outdoors. He opened his arms, wholly unaware of the state they were in. “And? What did you find out?”
The women looked at one another, stepped around him, and went out into the yard. The taillights of the vehicles grew minute as they headed northwest. Magda turned around, cast one more look at the silhouette of the guesthouse owner in the doorway, the dining room lights still blazing, the glasses and dishes scattered on the tables outdoors and indoors.
“It’s curfew,” Magda called. “Better turn the lights out before the bombers set your guesthouse aflame.”
She turned southeast, Natalia and Ula behind her. They would spend the night in the empty barn they’d found on the way, wait until dawn, and skirt around the front to get back to their division.
Before they settled into sleep, they whispered the puzzle pieces together until they had the complete picture. Prisoners from the concentration camps in the east and west had been moved to Theresiensta
dt. Thanks to blown-up rail lines, many of the relocated inmates had died in death marches. Underground tunnels had been fortified in Poland, Germany, Bohemia, and Morovia to house manufactories, out of sight of the Allied planes. Magda told Natalia and Ula about the mining tunnels in Litoměřice. The Germans needed the Ukrainians, but Natalia had overheard two of them saying that as soon as they could, they would abandon the Nazis and try to find Tito and his men in Yugoslavia. The Ukrainians did not trust the Nazis. They knew the Axis powers were losing. Then this. Orders from Berlin were to hold Litoměřice at all costs. The bridge at Litoměřice was the last to the west. Officers and soldiers hoping to land in the American or British zones needed to get across the bridge and move west. Avoid the Soviets at all costs at the risk of being immediately executed. Execute prisoners if need be. Destroy all papers. Do what was necessary to cover everything up. This never happened.
That was the information they would debrief their commanders with the next day. Magda lay down in the hay, thoroughly exhausted. She would not get much sleep, however. She was too tense, too thrilled by the mission she and her friends had accomplished. She surprised herself when she realized the first person she wanted to share her experience with was Karol.
Magda hurried out of central command with Ula and Natalia after the debriefing. She returned her revolver from her boot to its holster. She was dressed in her breeches and army blouse again, and the women were heading to pack up the hospital as ordered. The division would be ready to move out as soon as their units broke through the lines. That would be easy now that the Germans were leading their units to make a run for it. The Soviets would soon be on their heels.
The officers were already heading to the commander’s for the debriefing. Magda spotted Taras heading her way with a few others, but no Karol. She told the girls she would catch up with them later and waited for Taras to reach her.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” she called cheerfully. She was still thrilled with what she and the girls had accomplished.
He stopped before her, smiling uneasily. “Good morning.”
“Where’s Karol? I haven’t seen him.”
Taras’s face went dark. “I’m sorry, Magda…”
“Sorry about what?”
He looked around and sighed. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? What are you talking about?” Magda’s voice cracked.
“He deserted.”
“He did not.”
“He did though. I took him with me on a detail, and he disappeared. Just like that. I haven’t seen him. I’m pretty angry with him. That slippery Jew got the best of me—” He narrowed his eyes, then placed his hands on her shoulders and rocked on his feet. “He wasn’t any good for you anyway. Shame though. He was a damned good soldier, but you can never trust the J—”
Magda wrenched free of his touch. “I don’t believe you. Was there violence where you were? A skirmish? Did he get injured? Did you leave him behind?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Taras said acidly. “I mean, I do have some honor, you know?”
Magda clenched her jaw. This could not be true. Karol wouldn’t just disappear. He wouldn’t just desert. Not without telling her. Would he?
Magda tore away and ran to Karol’s dugout. Some soldiers from his squad were already packing their things. She asked them what happened on their detail.
One scratched his head. “Strangest thing. We were heading for that Ukrainian settlement, you know?”
“Yeah,” the other one said, his eyes shifting. “Then Karol and the lieutenant broke off to check out some farm on the way. They sent us on and said they would catch up.”
“We reach that settlement,” another said, “and it’s completely empty. Nobody there. It’s been picked through a few times as well. And the lieutenant shows up. He’s stark-raving mad. He said Karol gave him the slip. Just disappeared.”
“We offered to go look for him, but the lieutenant said if we found him, we’d be forced to execute him for desertion. He gave us the choice. We decided to come back. None of us wanted to shoot him.”
Magda glared at them in disbelief. This smelled suspicious.
They looked at one another guiltily.
“Orders are orders,” one said quietly.
Magda would not cry before these men. She turned and ran all the way back to the hospital. She burst into the tent. Ula looked up from a sack of bandages, took one look at Magda, and threw her arms around her. A moment later, Natalia joined Ula. They walked with Magda out into a field. Magda fell to all fours and pounded the ground with her fists, railing against the world and the war that had taken the last person she was never meant to let go of.
16
April–May 1945
Planes strafed the skies overhead. The horizon was on fire. Whistles, horns, and alarms interrupted all trains of thought until one simply stopped trying to process anything at all. Magda stayed far behind the soldiers. She stopped asking questions. She no longer cared where they were going, how they would get there. She lined up and moved when and where the division moved. She changed bedpans and bandages, spoon-fed anonymous mouths, held the hands of the dying without really feeling them. She did not think. She did not react. She functioned. She was a machine.
The roads were littered with the debris of losses that come with someone else’s victories. Blackened and mummified corpses were scattered outside of bombed vehicles. German prisoners of war, shot once in the head, reclined in their final resting places: in a ditch, in a field, against a tree, across Magda’s way. Sometimes just one, followed by a second. Other times, a group on the ground, like children who’d held hands and spun around until they were so dizzy, they’d fallen backward onto the earth. One soldier—so small he had to be a teenager—was sprawled headfirst in a field, his right knee bent off to the side, his left arm outstretched toward the horizon he’d tried to flee toward. A family had died together in a vehicle, liquified into one molten bronze-like sculpture.
Magda passed all this without comment, without much thought. This was the new normal. Her reality. A long, long time ago—as if she had read it in a book—there had been a figure, a figment of her imagination, who had brushed her teeth each morning, drank tea while reading a newspaper, washed dishes after supper, and hugged her mother and kissed her father good night before going to bed.
When the division arrived in Ústí nad Lebam, thirteen miles north of Litoměřice, Magda was assigned to a nurses’ station in the hospital housed in a Dominican monastery. As more and more injured showed up from the east, Magda felt something within her stir. Her eyes darted over the bodies of men, and she struggled to protect that wall she had built. Each time a dark-haired figure in uniform appeared, she missed a beat, missed a step. This enemy within her—this evil thing that called out to her to stop, to look, to listen—made her lift a bandage on a man’s face to witness the wreckage beneath. But the chin was wrong. And the mouth. The corners turned downward.
Magda was like a flickering candle flame placed before an open window. As the days went by and more men came to the hospital, any hint of Karol Procházka blocked the draft from the window for a millisecond. Not his hands. Not his torso. Not his nose. Not his eyes. Eventually, the candle was extinguished.
So when the doctors announced that Hitler had shot himself in Berlin, that the Soviets had surrounded the capital, that the war was officially over, Magda set her tray of supplies aside, walked out of the overflowing hall of wounded and injured souls, dropped onto a cot, and succumbed to the fever of grief.
For two days and two nights, Magda dreamt of a wrinkled face, kind blue eyes, a steady, calming voice. In the background, someone called a name, Brother Bohdan. Yes. Bohdan. Brother. And Magda’s inner enemy led her into a darkened room featuring an old flickering reel of memories. Laughter. Throwing hay. A boy named Bohdan. The hot sun above a span of field. A whitewashed cottage. Lace curtains. The sweetness of cherries. Bohdan picking her up and spinning her like a butterfly in full flight—
up and down, her arms outstretched… A beautiful face. Full lips. A laugh as pure as the apple blossoms in the backyard. A washing line with flowered dresses and crisp white coverlets softening in the breeze. The scent of herbed soap. Magdalena, you’re flying! A guitar. A father. A table. Two boys playfully fighting over the first piece of hot fried dough. Bohdan grabbing it. His grin. Magda, the youngest of three, too small to compete. Bohdan tearing the sweet bread into three equal pieces, handing one to her first—the slippery warm oil on her fingers—then to their brother… Miloš…Miloš… as their mother dropped a second one onto the plate.
Natalia and Ula appeared before her one morning. Magda’s temples still throbbed, and her clothing was crusted from sweat. A bowl of soup steamed on the floor next to her. Natalia’s concerned look made Magda turn her head away. Her neck felt wooden. She looked beyond the arcade at the sky above the open alcove. It rumbled, although it was bright blue. Planes crawled across the expanse like flies on a windowpane. She shut her eyes.
The two women moved to either side of her cot and squatted down, and one took in a deep breath.
“Magda.” It was Ula. “We spoke with the commanders. The division is heading straight to Prague, but we’ve asked for special permission to be dropped off in Litoměřice.” She paused. Magda pictured Ula checking with Natalia, Natalia giving an encouraging nod. “We could go to Theresienstadt and be on hand when it’s liberated. We could be there first, to look for the Taubers.”
Magda squeezed her eyes harder. Not his nose. Not his chin. Not his eyes.
Natalia tried next. “A squad will drive us down. There’s a team of doctors coming up from Prague, and the Red Cross is already on its way. Apparently it’s mayhem there. That concentration camp? The one they established for the factories in the tunnels? There’s been an outbreak of TB. The Thirty-Third Guards Rifles and the Fifth Guards Army are heading there already. There are concerns that the officers and commanders have already fled the city.”
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 47