TWENTY-THREE
Julia, Czechoslovakia, 1942
“We are filthy and smell no better than the old man’s outhouse,” Julia said, stepping around a pile of garbage dumped recently from one of the passing trains.
“Yes, but I’ll bet that old bastard and his two soldier friends smell a hell of a lot worse where they are, lying in all that crap,” Eva said, laughing.
Since turning southeast towards Klatovy they had covered six miles, hiking steadily along the snow-free railroad tracks. Walking on the level railroad bed as it made its way bending and winding around and through the hills in the open country had been a blessing to them, helping to conserve what energy they had left after their violent encounter with the German soldiers. It seemed strange to them, though, that no trains had passed during the two hours they had been walking by the tracks. This concern was short-lived as they approached a long, sweeping curve in the rail line. Julia heard the striking of metal on metal first and fell prone on the gravel shoulder to make herself less visible. Eva quickly followed. The loud clanging sounds would stop and start in a repetitive rhythm, like strange code signals being telegraphed across the frozen land.
“What is happening?” Julia asked.
“They’re laying new rails, for sure, that’s all it could be. They’re coming this way, too.”
Scrambling to her feet, Julia moved quickly with Eva away from the shoulder into a narrow winding crease between two snow-covered hills, until they could no longer see the railroad. They had moved none too soon. Within seconds a work crew and flatcar loaded with new twelve-foot steel rails appeared, moving slowly around the long curve, followed by a squad of German soldiers. Julia and Eva could hear a mixture of German and Czech voices, one shouting angrily, the others in submissive, meek tones.
“What are they saying?” Eva asked, unable to understand German as readily as Julia.
“The Germans are mad because several rails were torn loose and damaged by saboteurs, and the Czechs are working like snails to replace them. They want to get back to Klatovy, too, where it’s warm,” Julia whispered.
“The rails looked okay ahead of where we were walking.”
“Yes, but if they come as far as where we were, they will see our tracks leading away from the railroad. They will think whoever made them tore up the rails.”
“They’ll not follow us far if they do. They won’t leave the work crew unguarded and will wait for reinforcements,” Eva said, crouching low and clearing a path as best she could ahead of Julia through the heavy snow massed in the gulley. In places it was knee deep, falling down inside her boots, adding more winter misery to her already freezing feet. After about a hundred yards, she looked back at the deep footprints trailing behind them, which the Germans would easily see and use like a roadmap to find them.
Julia saw the tracks they were making, too. Unless they moved across the windswept open fields where much of the snow had melted, the Germans would quickly catch up with them. They would leave fewer tracks to follow there. Eva had realized the same strategy, and together they moved quickly to the top of a broad rolling hill on their right, daring to be seen in the glaring sunlight now sweeping across the fields and hills like a massive searchlight, the kind one might imagine God would use to make the day, when there was no sun.
Looking from a distance like tiny field rodents outlined against the vastness of the open countryside, Julia and Eva raced rapidly from one hill to the next back towards the road to Klatovy. Distant eyes had spotted them, though, within seconds after their ascendancy to the first hilltop, following every step they were taking. As they drew near the silent observer, Julia saw a head suddenly appear and disappear quickly behind several small piles of snow. Her face lit up when she realized how the snow piles were arranged in a carefully constructed square, like the walls of a fort, and its one lone inhabitant hiding behind them was a young boy. Julia stopped and nudged Eva to stop as well.
“You have a very good hiding place. May we please come in?” she said, speaking Czech to the child.
At first the small child lay still behind the snow wall, trying hard to look as if he were a part of the frozen ground beneath him. When she took a step closer to him, his head popped up again to look at her. Then he stood facing both of them, a child who looked to be about nine, trembling with his dark eyes painted over in terror. On the front of his soiled jacket was a faded yellow star telling her, and everyone else who might see him, he was a Jew. Julia sighed aloud. Coaxing him softly, she held out her arms to him.
And when he came to her she embraced him for several seconds, holding him tightly as if he were her own Anna.
“You must live near here,” Eva said, hugging the boy, too.
But the boy remained silent, refusing to look at Eva, or anywhere else, except to the motherly warmth in Julia’s face. Sensing his fear, Julia wrapped her arms around him again and whispered in his ear, “My name is Julia. Now you must tell us yours—we are your friends.”
The boy looked again at Julia then Eva.
“Joseph, but my grandmother calls me Josh,” he said in a barely audible voice.
“May we call you Josh, too?” Julia said, holding both of his hands.
The boy smiled and nodded at his new friends.
“Is your home near here? We’re tired and cold, and you must be too,” Eva said, slapping and rubbing her face and hopping around in a silly way on one foot and then the other, making Josh laugh out loud.
Still laughing, Josh pointed to some fairly level fields slightly south from the direction Julia and Eva were headed. With Julia holding one of Josh’s hands and Eva the other, the three began a new and unexpected journey together as they moved slowly over several hills leading to some open fields in the distance. Julia looked at the strange color of the sky overhead. The treasury of blue patches that had filled the sky earlier in the day was now fading into bundles of gray clouds tinged in red streaks from the setting sun. Darkness would surround them soon, maybe with rain or more snow. The ground snow had begun to freeze again as the temperature dropped, making walking difficult again. They had come far this day from the place where the plane had mistakenly dropped them. Shelter for the freezing night was their first priority. Julia knew, as well as Eva, without it, only God could decide if they would be alive when morning came.
As they crossed the top of the high hill leading down to the small valley where Josh’s home supposedly was, a thin wisp of smoke could be seen wafting upwards from below. Josh beamed and started to run towards its source, but Julia had heard the angry shouts rising up from the valley and pulled him quickly to the ground beside her. Eva had heard the voices, too and dropped down next to them. Julia motioned to her to hold Josh and cup her hand over his mouth, should he suddenly cry out. Then she slowly inched along the ground, slithering like a large snake through the remaining snow to a point where she could look down on the terrible scene unfolding below.
Julia counted five motorcycles and an armored touring car, the kind Gestapo generally used, parked next to a stone house, much like the old man’s but quite a bit larger. The German soldiers were standing in a half circle around an old woman wearing only a thin nightgown and bleeding about her face and head. Clinging to her frail legs were two small children, both younger than Josh, trying to hide their faces from the human terror crowding around them. Standing slightly to the side of the old woman was a young officer sharply clad in the black uniform of the Gestapo, shouting obscenities at her. Julia could hear every word. There was nothing she or Eva could do to stop what was coming.
“Do you want to die, old woman? I will beat you with my fists until you do, if that’s what you want,” he said, knocking her to the ground again and kicking her in the back and head with his heavy boots.
But the woman said nothing, getting slowly to her feet with the two children huddled close against her, their faces buried in her gown.
“Where did the saboteurs go? Where are they hiding?” he shouted again in a shrill voice tha
t carried far over the hills to where Eva waited with Josh.
“I swear before God, no one has been here,” the woman cried in pain, forcing the words through broken teeth dangling in her battered mouth.
The officer looked at the old woman for a moment, disgusted, or perhaps amazed, that she had told him nothing after suffering such a beating. Taking his Luger from the holster, he shot the old woman at close range in the head, splattering blood and brains over the two children kneeling beside her. Then without hesitation, he shot both children in the forehead. Waving to two soldiers standing near the front door, he barked a command to put the dead woman and children in the house and burn it to the ground. Nothing was to be left standing, not even the two field haystacks that Julia had spotted earlier for possible hiding places.
Within minutes the house morphed into a roaring furnace of its own, the stone walls encasing the flames within until they finally crumbled from the intense heat. Black smoke from the burning buildings darkened the skies for miles around, hiding the dying sun. What had taken place was only one small scene of the terrible retribution the Nazis would exact in human lives for what had happened. The railroad had been heavily damaged by a growing underground resistance operating out of Bratislava, long retreated to safety, leaving those living around Klatovy, like the old woman, to suffer on their own in the days ahead.
Julia had closed her eyes the second the Gestapo officer drew his pistol to execute the woman and children. She knew he would not leave and let them live. Peace has few boundaries, war even less where the innocent have no armies of their own. Later, when Josh was asleep, she would ask Eva what kind of a man would kill little children without hesitating at least for a second to think of what he was doing. He would be from another world, she would answer. Yet, those are the kind who walk among us, even as neighbors, who could kill a child as easily as they would a deer or a rabbit. The problem is, we don’t always know who they are, or might be, because we are still animals, too, all of us.
With the fire fully ablaze and the Germans leaving, Julia crawled back to where Eva and the boy Josh were waiting. Both were numb from lying still so long on the frozen ground and welcomed Julia’s return with chattering teeth from the cold. Eva first had spread half her body across Josh, adding warmth to the boy as well as herself. But it was not enough to hold back the cold rising from the earth beneath them. The bowels of a glacier would be warmer, Eva believed, than the ground they were lying on. After five minutes, she turned on her side and embraced Josh as lovers might do, holding his small body close to hers. When the rising smoke came into view, Eva turned her body slightly so he would be blind to what was happening, lest he cry out and struggle to free himself and run to the house.
It had seemed like an hour before Julia slowly inched her way back to the nearly frozen pair. Before she revealed to Eva the terrifying scene that had blackened her eyes with its horror, she took Josh in her arms and kissed him on both cheeks. Then, smiling through the tears drowning her heart, she rubbed and massaged his fingers and hands until a red rush of warmth returned in them. She then asked him in Czech if he understood German, which he answered “no.” Speaking German, Julia offered him a candy bar, but Josh only hunched his shoulders in ignorance at her words.
Julia’s eyes spoke to Eva before her words in German did describing the ghastly sight she had witnessed. Earlier Josh had told them, as they were moving across the hills towards his house, that he lived with his grandmother and two younger sisters. His mother had bled to death at home giving birth to the younger of the two sisters after his father had left for Prague to join the Czech army. When questioned about his father, he knew nothing, since he had been gone for three years. With no Jewish kin near, Josh was now Julia and Eva’s problem. He would go with the two women wherever the roads took them, until he could be fostered in safe hands.
As they neared the final rise where Julia had been earlier, looking down on the nightmare taking place, her grip tightened on Josh’s hand. He would want to run to the smoldering timbers and fires still burning brightly in every corner of the yard to find his grandmother and sisters. But when Josh saw the burning desolation, he stiffened and stopped. Looking neither to Julia nor Eva, only staring straight ahead, his eyes locked in a catatonic stare, not on the house, but the barn still covered in great flames. His grandmother and sisters would be fine, but not the furry pet rabbits he loved. They were there in a wire cage, somewhere, that’s all he knew. What they would become later, to his surprise, was a wholesome dinner for three—badly charred rabbits with some half-cooked potatoes found in the smoldering ruins of what had been the kitchen. At first he cried when the rabbits were found lying huddled together in the smoking twisted cage and refused to hear of anything like eating his pets, but he finally settled on the meal when Julia convinced him it was their way of showing how much they wanted him to stay alive.
As night finally came to the long day, the heavens surprisingly cleared and filled with stars, all twinkling brightly from their chosen place in the universe to the earth below. It was a beautiful night by any measure, one that would not quickly be forgotten. Julia cleared a small area on the ground next to a large cone of glowing embers where the three could bed down for the night. The immediate area around the crumbled walls of the house was no longer frozen, and actually was pleasurably warm to the touch. Josh’s eyes closed in sleep within minutes after Eva stretched out next to him on the ground, holding his body close to hers as she had before. She would sleep no more than two hours before Julia would take her place. They would alternate two times during the night, one sleeping, the other watching for any distant lights of returning German patrols. Eva had been right that the Germans wouldn’t follow their tracks leading away from the railroad. Instead, once the tracks were discovered they quickly increased their surveillance on the only road Julia and Eva could exit on from the hills and fields they were crossing. In one of fate’s strange ironies, they had become by default the saboteurs the Germans were hunting to find and kill. Julia believed that having Josh with them would help lessen suspicion from patrols and the Gestapo who might be inclined to question them. But she also believed the Gestapo would have the patrols establish checkpoints at the road’s beginning and its termination in Klatovy, and perhaps other places along the way. They were good. And British intelligence had taught Julia that once the hunt began, only a precious few agents escaped. Intelligence had trained her to always anticipate the unexpected, placing her in situations few people could imagine, daring her to go unnoticed, not to be checkmated. This was done, she knew, because intelligence and the enemy’s counterpart, the Gestapo, had always been a chess game played out on a board as wide as the world. And it was in the end game, when only a scattering of pieces and moves were left, that the impossible must happen. Few in her training had ever encountered an imagination as soaring and weird as Julia’s. Her long childhood hours of pretending and playing with Rabbi Loew’s golem had stored within her fertile brain a lifetime of all that was unreal, yet could become real if one imagined it to be. It was this same imagination that led her to the top of the class during her university years in Prague, and then at British and Czech intelligence. “A brilliance painted with two coats of common sense” was the way Erich had described it. She was smarter than he was, he believed, and everyone else around them, except maybe the professors; but even then he wasn’t so sure. In analyzing a difficult case, she would jump ahead to a tailored solution that wasn’t always in the books, yet would work, while everyone else continued fumbling around, trying to understand all the components involved. She had no ego in her smartness, only a burning pride in being who she was, a Jewish woman, and he loved her that much more for it.
Julia looked at her watch—it was near midnight. While Klatovy was temptingly near, five miles perhaps, they would never go there as the Germans expected. They would instead use the road for only a mile, leaving few tracks to follow. Traveling with Josh would be an added burden, she knew, but not before t
hey turned from the road into the hills again for the long trek south to the woods and the small mountains along the southern border. Dawn would break through the darkness in six hours and the early patrols would begin their journeys back and forth on the road. None should be stirring until then. It was too cold and the roads too dangerous with snow and ice.
The night skies were clear now, with a million stars watching over them, so tomorrow’s day would be beautiful, Julia whispered, gently nudging Eva awake for her turn to sit and watch the road. Before she took Eva’s place next to Josh, Julia discussed with her what lay ahead and the difficulties facing them traveling with Josh. What was necessary though, they both knew, and what would blacken the days to come for him, would be their revelation to him about his grandmother and sisters’ deaths. Nothing in Julia’s past was there for passing such pain to a child, and she would leave the sorrowful task to Eva, who seemed willing. It seemed to go with Eva’s philosophy about death, that at any time those who died were never more than a step away from living. Like next-door neighbors, Eva would say whenever she discussed it. She would tell Josh that his grandmother and sisters would always be that close, where he could almost touch them, waiting for the day when he would be with them again. It was far from what her rabbi said a good Jew should believe about death, but to Eva, it was far less complicated and soothed the living soul better. Nothing would be told about the horrors of their deaths, nor the burning of their bodies, only that they were dead. Should he press them for the truth, they would lie. So while they were there, staying the night, Julia and Eva carefully kept Josh away from the smoldering ruins where the burned bodies of his family lay looking like nothing more than three piles of simmering charcoal and ashes. Only the glasses of his grandmother could be seen, smudged and curled, resting atop the largest pile that hinted of a body beneath it.
Julia awoke at three. Eva had graced her with an extra hour of sleep before awakening her. They had planned to leave their stay at five but Eva refused to take the last turn at sleep, suggesting an earlier start because of the German dogs, something they hadn’t discussed. She convinced Julia that when the patrols returned, along with the Gestapo, they would bring tracking dogs that seldom failed to find a trail. Nodding, Julia quickly gathered together the rabbit bones left from their meal and carried them back up the hill from where they had first come, dropping one or two, here and there, in their old tracks. Then she pulled down the two layers of pants she was wearing and urinated several places alongside the tracks. It was the best they could do to forge a false trail that might delay the dogs longer should they come. While she was gone, Eva awakened Josh, walked him back and forth a short distance and told him to pee. When Julia returned, she wiped Josh’s face with a glove of snow, gave him the last of her chocolate bars, and stepped into the road holding his hand. With Eva in the lead to warn of black ice on the road, the three moved at a steady pace toward Klatovy.
Josh asked nothing about his grandmother and sisters, which puzzled Julia considerably as she walked along beside him. Perhaps he heard them talking when they thought he was sleeping. She decided nothing would be said until he asked about them, and then Eva would tell him. No questions would come, though, until the morning had passed and they had turned south into the hills. “Did the Germans kill my grandmother and sisters?” was his only question. And when Eva said, lying, “Probably, when they took them away,” he said nothing further. Death was no stranger to him. He had watched his mother bleed to death giving birth to the younger of his sisters. And before that, he had watched his grandfather, whom he worshipped, leave life from blood poisoning. Death to him, like it was to Eva, was a natural part of living, and had always been replaced by someone’s love. After his father left, his grandmother became that love; now it was Julia and Eva’s turn to become his dead grandmother’s proxies.
Nine hours had passed and Julia kept squinting her eyes, studying the distant horizon ahead, looking for the first faint shadows of the woods and mountains to appear. The weather was the blessing they had been waiting for. Cloudless, deep blue skies that seem to have no end ran on ahead of them for miles, no longer shielding the earth from the sun’s warmth. With each passing hour there was less snow, until none lay on the hills and valleys before them. Julia was amazed at the strength in Josh’s skinny legs. He seemed less tired than they were, asking only twice to stop for water and to squat away from them to relieve his bowels. They would stop and pause, though, every thirty minutes to listen for the baying of trailing dogs, should the Germans have found their tracks. But none came. The Germans did return, bringing dogs as Eva predicted, but they had followed the smell of rabbit bones and the urine left by Julia, and then the old tracks of Julia and Eva leading from the railroad. Sniffing along the road for a clear scent they could follow, they found none. Trucks and motorcycles had passed by earlier, erasing any evidence of Julia and Eva and Josh’s smell. Julia’s quick decision to travel another mile in the early morning darkness before leaving the roadway came from her gut this time, a feeling that distance mattered most when you were the prey and the hunter could only find you with his nose. The dogs’ handlers let them sniff everything there was to smell along the roadway toward Klatovy for no more than a mile before turning back. A mile without a scent would stop any dog, Julia had figured.
By late afternoon Josh was ready to stop this strange adventure of his, and began questioning the whereabouts of his grandmother’s body. What had the Germans done with it? Would they keep it for him until he returned? Julia would not answer him, nor Eva, except to say the Germans had buried her and his two sisters somewhere in Klatovy. Josh extracted from them a promise of no consequences, that when it was safe to return they would go with him to find his grandmother and his sisters’ bodies. His grandmother had left without kissing him, something she had never done, and he wanted to ask her why, even though she was in her grave.
Josh’s words stung Julia. She had felt the same unsettled pain when her grandfather died without saying goodbye to her. She loved him dearly, as any seven-year old would their grandfather, and he had gone without a hint of a goodbye or kiss for her. Hers was a selfish demand, Julia learned at the time from her father’s wisdom, that it was she who should have said “I love you,” and kissed her grandfather goodbye a hundred times and more through his dying days.
Julia put her arm around Josh as they walked along.
“Where we are going is not too far now, and we will rest and find something to eat,” she said.
Finally, in the honeyed light of the late afternoon, a time just before the evening shadows unrolled to blanket the earth, Julia and Eva picked up the woods and the mountains on the horizon ahead. It was a new kind of country they were entering, the dark green of the forests and the gray of rocks that lay ahead. It would be dark, though, when they reached them. A small village was hidden somewhere in one of the deep valleys, Julia knew from her map, but whether it was east or west from where they were was impossible to know. The morning would be the time to worry. For now, they would move into the woods and find the best shelter they could away from the bitter cold the night would bring.
After making their way slowly for another twenty minutes, around thickening trees and brush in the darkening forest, bright orange flames of campfires suddenly appeared at a short distance ahead of them. Julia immediately whispered to Eva to wait with Josh while she scouted the unexpected scene. Moving closer to a small opening in the trees, she saw a group of men and women, some sitting, others squatting, in a circle around two campfires. Close to them were several children hopping back and forth playing some kind of game. They were either gypsies or Jewish refugees fleeing from the north, Julia believed. But who they might be made no difference—they were warm and would have food. Slipping back to Eva and Josh, she told them of the strange sight.
“They are gypsies. We will be welcomed, for a while at least, but we must watch them. They are not to be trusted,” Eva said, cautioning Julia. Josh nodded in agreement. His
grandmother had told gypsy stories too many times for it to be otherwise.
Julia knew, too, the heavy mark the gypsies carried in Prague, where they were considered the lowest of the low, even by many Jews there. But never were they considered so by her father. No man should be thought ill of without a reason. And race and religion would never rise to the level of any sort of reason in his mind. How Eva and Josh felt was of little consequence now, because an old woman gathering slivers of loose bark for tinder had noticed Julia peering through the trees at the campfires. Saying nothing, she stayed hidden until Julia moved away to return to where Eva and Josh were waiting. At that time, she walked quickly to a man standing alone away from the campfires and told him of her discovery. Together they walked to the edge of the clearing near where Julia had been and waited in the dark. In a few minutes Julia emerged from the shadows, followed by Eva and Josh. As they exited from the woods, the shimmering light from the campfires danced on their faces, creating a frightening ghostlike appearance to their sudden presence. Julia looked past the man and woman, carefully searching the scene before her for any threatening moves from the other gypsies, all standing now in a half circle facing her. Only the children, who had quickly stopped their hopping game, seemed to be smiling at her. When Eva and Josh stepped into the clearing from the woods and came to Julia’s side, two women, one of whom was pregnant, approached Josh, eyeing the yellow star on his jacket.
“You are a Jew?” the pregnant woman asked.
Too terrified to answer, Josh inched closer to Julia.
“We are all Jews,” Julia said, taking Josh’s hand. “We have no quarrel with you. All we ask is to stay the night where it is warm and beg a little food. Then we will leave when the sun is up.”
The man who was standing with the old woman by the edge of the woods walked over to Julia, studying her face and eyes. Taller and older than the rest of the men, he carried himself with the authority expected of him as an elder. An imposing man by any means, heavy muscled and square jawed, with skin darker than those around him and deep-set eyes that told you nothing. But his voice was gentle and musical, like someone singing softly to himself.
“You are running from the Germans, yes?” he asked.
“At one time we were, but they are no longer following us now,” Julia answered.
“Only the morning will tell us whether that is true, yes.”
“No, I am certain,” Julia said, steeling her eyes on the man’s, whose were fixed on her every move and expression.
“Come sit down with me by the smaller fire and tell me everything that I will know to be true or a lie,” the man said, taking Julia by the arm and waving for Eva and Josh to follow.
As Julia told her story with approving nods from Eva, and answered the questions that came from him, she became fascinated with the heavy strangeness of this man. Like many Jews in Prague, throughout her entire life she had spent no more than fifteen minutes talking to a gypsy man or woman. Where she was and what was happening seemed as unreal to her now as Rabbi’s Loew’s golem had been in her youth. The only story kept hidden from him was that of the British and Czech intelligence, and the role she and Eva were playing, though Julia believed he knew.
When they were through talking, the only thing Julia had learned from the man was his name, Django, nothing more. He then asked that his people gather in a circle once more around the big campfire, and he would tell them about what he had learned and what they must do. Django walked slowly to the center of the circle with Julia and Eva and Josh by his side. Speaking Romany, a language neither Julia nor Eva understood, he told what he knew about them and that they should be welcomed to rest for awhile before moving on. When he came to the episode of the two dead soldiers and where they were hidden, approving smiles and laughter broke out among the group. The tale of Josh’s loss of family brought a chorus of wistful sighs and looks of sorrow around the circle. Ending, he turned to Julia first and then to Eva, extending his hand in friendship as he told them all he had said to the gypsy families. Then he lifted little Josh in his massive arms and kissed him on the forehead, mumbling something to him that no one heard. Later in the night around the fire, songs were sung and stories told and new dreams made, none that Julia and Eva had heard before.
***
A Perfect Madness Page 23