Magda sat up. “No.”
The Koenigs, in civilian clothing probably stolen off the back of some poor souls on the road, walking into the hands of the Americans. I am not the man you are searching for. I am just a poor Jew. Look, my son, he is…
“No,” she repeated, and rose on unsteady legs.
She lifted her rucksack off the floor, rifled through it, and touched the revolver. She stuffed what few things she had inside and eased it onto her shoulders. “When?”
Ula and Natalia glanced at one another.
“Now,” Ula said.
A monk hurried over to them, his wrinkled face creased with more concern, his blue eyes flashing with urgency. “Magdalena, you must lay back down.”
Brother Bohdan.
He placed a hand on her forehead, almost like a blessing. Magda let him. Behind him, Natalia poured a glass of water, and Ula mixed in a powder. Natalia handed Magda the glass around the fretting monk, and Magda drank it down. It coated her insides and steadied her.
The monk took Magda’s hand. “Where you are now going,” he said, “I want you to remember—God is angry, and to make it right, we must remember love.”
“Where we’re going now,” Ula said matter of factly, “we’re winning. And we’re off to save the wretched souls from themselves.”
The monk squeezed Magda’s hand. “Be an instrument of peace now. In your condition—”
“Eat the soup,” Natalia interrupted. “Sorry, Brother, but we have to go. Or we’ll miss the transport.”
Within minutes, Magda was sitting between the two women in the back of a truck. Brother Bohdan raised a hand in goodbye. Magda lifted her hand in return just as another ambulance arrived. More injured and wounded. Something tugged at her heart, and she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, they were crossing the Elbe, and then all she saw was the landscape of rolling green hills and empty, neglected fields. Karol, she told herself, had not been in that ambulance truck either.
The drive lasted less than an hour, but Magda had fallen asleep, still woozy from the aftermath of the fever. When the truck shifted gears and slowed down, she recognized that they were already on the north end of town, on Lidická Road. Magda’s limbs felt heavy, but she gathered her things. They would soon disembark in the square of the old town. Natalia and Ula watched her. They remained silent as the truck broke to a halt near the building, the Reichskanzlei.
Ula jumped down first, her hair tied up beneath a headband to keep the mop out of her face. She reached a hand toward Magda and helped her down. For the first time in almost three years, Magda stood in the old square, about where the gallows had once been, but there was no time to think about more than just that.
A hodgepodge of vehicles filled the square, red stars on most of them. The front doors of the Reichskanzlei had been thrown open, and soldiers were going in and out like ants, carrying boxes. One of the flags suddenly floated away from the building and buckled to the ground. A man whooped from the upper story window. Glass broke somewhere to her left in the arcade, and Magda witnessed a scuffle between men dressed in civilian clothing and a group of soldiers in Czechoslovak Army uniforms. One man clutched something to him and made a run for the other side of the square and darted up the alley. Looting. The people were looting. Cries of glee, cries of outrage echoed off the buildings. A woman with a child was harassed by a group of men, and she shouted something. Magda recognized the German cadence from the woman and the Czech language of those accosting her.
Ula and Natalia looked bewildered.
“The Fifth’s commanders are in there.” The soldier who had driven them pointed to the Reichskanzlei. “I’d go there and find out where they want you to be.”
Natalia bent toward Magda. “Hey, are you okay?”
Magda was not. She wanted to vomit. “The Taubers are not in Theresienstadt. They can’t be.”
“Stay here.” Natalia patted her hand. “We don’t know that yet. We’ll find out where we need to go. All right? Just stay here.”
Magda nodded, still wobbly.
An old farmer’s truck, loaded with civilians, entered the far end of the square. It backfired, and Magda ducked her head. It drove crazily toward them, the people in the back whooping and cheering. Up the alleyway, Magda recognized the sound of a tank. How was it to get through the narrow streets? There was a thundering boom, and smoke rose behind the buildings in the square. It was going to blow its way through. They were too late. They were too late. The Germans were… Koenig was headed for the Americans.
Magda ran the opposite way, past the Black Eagle. She came to the arched gate and ran down the steps to the old-town wall and stopped. She was just above the Elbe, just above the bridge. Smoke curled upward on the eastern and to the western horizons. A train was stopped in the middle of the rails facing Litoměřice.
The Germans were supposed to have held on to the bridge, and the Soviet divisions should have captured them. She expected to see a barricade set up on either side of the bridge, with a group of German officers trapped in between. She indeed found a mass of people, but they were not dressed in uniforms. They were dressed in blue-and-gray striped rags—men, all men—crossing toward Theresienstadt on the opposite bank. She saw bodies up against the guardrails of the bridge, knees pulled up, huddled men lying half sideways. The Elbe was too wide for them.
She thought of the tunnels that Ula and Natalia had told her about. The factories that the Germans had used the prisoners to build. They had reported that a newly established concentration camp had been set up in Litoměřice. These had to be the prisoners. How they had gotten herded over here, she could not even begin to guess.
Those who could were slowly stumbling along, leaning on each other as they headed to the old fort. To Theresienstadt. This could only end in disaster. Beyond, vehicles were driving in and out of the old brick fortress. Red Cross flags were hung across trucks and were raised on the flagpoles outside. Magda recognized the warning flags: TB, typhus. The red-black-white swastika flags were gone. Theresienstadt had been liberated, but Magda was certain the Taubers would not be there. They would not be there.
Magda stumbled to the edge of the wall. She vomited what she had. It was not much. She took a sip of water from her canteen, then turned around and made her way back up the alley. Natalia and Ula were searching for her, their faces pulled tight in panic. The crowds had grown. That truck that had earlier pulled into the square and backfired was pulling away from one of the buildings that had housed the armory. The doors were flung wide open, and soldiers were trying to prevent the civilians from going in.
“Christ.” Ula waved at Magda. “Natalia, there she is!”
The two women hurried to Magda.
That truck with the civilians in the back took another turn around the square, shouting down at the people on the streets, sometimes stopping and picking up more civilians. Magda stared as it slowly passed by. One woman shoved her way past Magda, waving at the driver. When Magda grabbed her arm, the woman yanked away from her hold and scowled at her.
“Where are you all going?” Magda asked.
The woman’s face turned animal-like. “Koenig and the others might have fled, but he’s left that wife and child at the villa.”
Magda glanced at the men in the back handing out rifles. “I’m going with you.”
“Come on!” The woman bared her teeth. To the passengers in the back of the truck, she shouted, “She’s coming with us. Give us a hand!”
Magda was lifted inside. She vaguely heard Natalia and Ula shouting her name. She was smashed together with a dozen or so people, and as the truck shifted gears, bumped, and jarred, it sent Magda flying into the arms of some man. He stank of sweat and alcohol. She righted herself.
“I’ll find you,” Magda cried to Natalia and Ula. “I’ll come back to you later!”
The truck soon turned out of the square and onto Michalska, on the way to Radobýl Mountain and Villa Liška. The faces around her were gleeful, jeering
. The hunted were now the hunters. For a moment, she tried to find a face she recognized, someone who would anchor her, help her find her footing in this swaying, bumping truck. But there was nobody. Nobody. And she wondered whether anyone recognized her. How could they not? If they knew her, they would know the birthmark, the broken nose, the scar beneath her eye—the latter two marks that identified her as one of them. But she did not recognize a single person.
Magda faced the side of the road, trying to place herself back into the environment that had been—for at least a little while—familiar to her, almost home. How many times had she walked this road? How many times had she watched that clock tower grow nearer, heard the bells of St. Stephen toll its sad news? How many times had she spotted the deer in the fields, looked forward to that stand of cedar trees? She envisioned that Koenig had not abandoned his wife. No. He was hiding in the villa. He had discovered that second wall that Renata had hidden in and was in there now. She was almost certain that was the case. How fast could the Germans run, with the Soviets and the Czechoslovakian units so close on their heels? Koenig wouldn’t risk that. He would stay hidden until it was safe to disguise himself and then try to reach the American zones, apply for displaced persons status—he and his wife, the poor Jewish family who’d escaped from Theresienstadt, on their way back to Austria, where they’d been deported from.
No. No. No. They were all still here.
She was going to find them herself. And then what?
And then what, Magda?
The woman from the square stood next to her.
“Who’s in charge here?” Magda asked.
The woman grinned. She was in her thirties, and she was missing a lower tooth. “The Revolutionary National Committee, that’s who. To hell if we’re going to let the Soviets take control of what’s our business.”
The truck slowed as it reached the bottom of the mountain and shifted gears to start the climb. Magda looked ahead. Two vehicles were haphazardly stopped on the road.
“That’s us,” the woman said, and some of the men nodded.
Magda recognized the mishmash of Czechoslovakian, Soviet, and German army uniforms. A man with a film camera stood off to the side and tried to wave the truck Magda was in to a stop. The revolutionaries were shoving a group of men and women—three of each—into a line on the road, their sacks and belongings scattered behind them. The couples had their hands above their heads as they were pushed and shoved to line up along a ditch. Together they turned away from the partisans and faced the northern fields and the mountains—the direction Magda and Karol had run off to so long ago. The driver revved the engine.
The people in the truck cheered and pumped their arms, some with rifles above their heads. “Collaborators! Collaborators!”
The man with the movie camera crossed before the truck, and the driver started to crawl past, maneuvering around the two cars.
Magda frowned as they inched by. She looked closer as they came level to the group. A woman among the military personnel. A mop of dark curly hair beneath a beret. The stature of a Viking. Magda tried to find her voice, to call Renata’s name, but she came up short. Next to Renata, his weapon drawn and aimed at the back of a man’s head—Collaborators! Collaborators!—was Aleš in an officer’s uniform.
“Aleš,” Magda shouted. “Renata!”
Renata turned her head, and her shoulders fell back. Magda locked eyes with her. Aleš’s pistol popped. The man before him fell. Renata said something, and Aleš turned toward the truck. But the man to his left sprinted into the field. Renata raised her weapon. The shot sliced the air. The man jerked to the left and sprawled forward. Aleš swung back and marched to the next victim. Magda saw his pistol kick back. She clasped a hand over her mouth.
God was angry. They were angrier.
17
May 1945
They were not the first to arrive at Villa Liška. The iron gate to the service road stood agape. A couple of men were smoking cigarettes in the stand of cedars, near Eliška’s play area, berets slanted on their heads. The red-and-white toadstool pattern on the stumps and the table that Aleš had painted, were faded, cracked, and peeling. Furniture from the house lay out on the sloping lawn. A handful of men loaded a dresser onto a truck. Frau Tauber’s dresser. A portrait of Hitler lay ripped and torn beneath shattered glass where it had been dropped from a second-story window. Other pieces, a foyer table included, lay broken and splintered on the stones of the veranda. Doors slammed inside the house somewhere. A woman screamed. A child shrieked.
It was happening all over again. The day Walter had led the Nazis here—it was happening again but in reverse now. Now she was one of “them.” Now she had control.
Magda clutched her rucksack and staggered from the truck. She hurried up the lawn to the parlor doors. Inside, people were looting in a frenzy. Two women stuffed books from the library shelves into bags. One wore a linen tablecloth around her shoulders and carried a silver candelabra. A man hurried through the dining room door and walked past Magda as if she were not there. In his arms, a box of china. “Put that down,” Magda yelled at him. She tried to block the man’s way.
“There’s plenty more where that came from.” He veered away with a look of disbelief.
Again the woman’s scream. Magda dashed into the foyer and halted at the bottom of the stairs. The rebels had Frau Koenig. She was trying to wrest herself from the hold that three men had on her. They dragged her from Frau Tauber’s bedroom, along the landing and to the top of the stairs. Frau Koenig’s hair had been shorn off. Robert clung to her neck, howling, his legs swinging wildly. He had grown. “Let them go,” Magda cried. She gripped the banister to steady herself as she charged up the stairs, but the men shoved her out of the way. They nearly lifted Frau Koenig and the boy into the air as they rushed down the stairs with her. Magda followed them. They pushed the woman into the dining room and then out the French doors. Was this not Magda just a few years ago?
Frau Koenig stumbled forward but regained her balance and fell onto her knees. Robert was shocked into silence, his eyes wide with fright. He stared at Magda for a second and then shrieked again.
“What do you want with her?” Magda cried. “Koenig’s left his family behind.”
The three men swung their rifles off their shoulders. Frau Koenig shrieked covering her head and bending over the boy.
“That’s right,” one growled. “He left her here for us. Put the bitch out of her misery.”
“She might know how to get to him though,” another one said.
“Yeah,” the third agreed. “We should take her in for questioning.”
Frau Koenig looked pleadingly at all three, but when her look landed on Magda, her face changed. She lifted a shaking finger and pointed at her. “You! You! You’re the reason I’m still here!”
One man, wearing a Dutch cap, nudged Frau Koenig’s shoulder with the muzzle of his rifle.
A second lifted his aim in Magda’s direction. “You know her? You two related?”
Magda shook her head. “I used to work here.”
“This is the housemaid Koenig was looking for.” The realization on the second man’s face spread.
“Is that right?” the third man asked.
The other looters gathered around them on the lawn. One woman stepped forward and spit on Frau Koenig’s head. The scalp was splotched red. Blood ran from a cut and down her forehead.
The woman who had spit on Frau Koenig peered at Magda. “Yeah, this one was wanted by the Obersturmbannführer himself. Must have done something real bad. Must be a hero.”
“I’m not a hero,” Magda said shakily.
“She’s the one who saved the Taubers’ little girl,” another woman cried. “There was a fire, and this woman here, she saved the doctor’s little girl.”
Magda stared at her. She did not recognize the woman. The only people here that night had been the family and the staff. “How do you know about that?”
The woman shrug
ged. “I just heard.”
“A real hero,” Dutch Cap said over Frau Koenig. By a tuft of remaining hair, he yanked the poor woman’s face up. “What did you do to our girl here?”
“I’m not a hero,” Magda repeated.
The third rifleman approached Magda. He held his weapon out to her. “Here. She and her husband must have done quite a job on you, by the looks of your face. You do it. Kill the bitch. Don’t you want to kill the bitch?”
Magda stared at his rifle. She did.
She reached for her rucksack on her shoulders and slowly removed it so that everyone could see what she was doing. She held the gaze of the three men surrounding Frau Koenig. She opened it and reached in. Magda withdrew her revolver.
The men sniggered, each taking a step back.
“That a girl,” Dutch Cap said.
The second nudged the third. “She’s got as much balls as we do. Go ahead girlie. She’s all yours.”
He shoved Frau Koenig, and she fell forward onto all fours. Robert fell from his mother’s arms as Frau Koenig tried to catch herself. His head thudded dully against the flagstones. He lay face upward and stared at the sky for a moment before his face contorted with his cries once more.
Frau Koenig tried to scoop her son into her arms again, but Dutch Cap kicked her in the ribs, and she sprawled sideways.
Magda moved to stand over the woman. “Where is your husband?” she asked in German. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips were hot and dry. She felt nauseated. “Woman, if you want to save yourself, you had better be prepared to share information.”
Frau Koenig gasped for air, clutching her side. Magda dropped onto all fours next to her. Robert was trying to get up, and someone moved to Magda’s left. She swung the revolver at the person. It was the second rifleman. “Leave the boy be.”
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 48