by Susan Finlay
But a promotion and a chance to give Tawny what she wanted? How could he say no to that?
“That sounds great,” he said. “Uh, may I enquire about the salary?”
“Of course. With the added responsibility of being a supervisor, you would get a bump of ten thousand dollars a year.”
That clinched it. He would live with the house. “Okay. Can I give my wife a call and discuss it with her?” As if he didn’t know what she would say. Still, she would want him to include her in the decision. He would want to be included, if the shoe was on the other foot. That’s what being partners meant.
“Certainly. Can you get back to me with your answer by the end of the day?”
“Will do, and thank you.”
He hurried out of the office, back down the hall, and into his own tiny office. As he closed the door, he did a little dance, unable to contain himself any longer. Calming down, he sank down into his chair, and picked up the phone.
“Of course you should take the promotion,” Tawny said, after he told her about the conversation in Lucy Bryant’s office. “Do you know what this means? We can move into your father’s house and you can go on your trip to Germany.”
“I, uh,” he said, scratching his head. “Yeah, I know. That’s what you really want, right?”
“It’s serendipitous,” she said, her voice almost cooing. “Don’t you see? We’re meant to live there. I’ll have time off after the baby is born. I can look around for a job closer to home while I’m on maternity leave. And you, mister, can go on that trip to Germany. Hang up the phone. Call Lucy Bryant and tell her you accept the job in Sacramento. Then call a travel agent and buy your plane ticket.”
Lucas chuckled. “I guess you’ve made up my mind.”
“Am I being too bossy? You can tell me if I am.”
“No. Not too bossy. Just the right amount of bossy.”
Tawny Landry, Sacramento, California, August 2017—
TAWNY SMILED SO wide she thought her face might crack. Yay! We’re going to move into the Victorian house and my amazing husband is getting a good promotion that he deserves! What more could I ask for? Bianca will be excited, too. She chuckled to herself and went to pick up the phone again and dial her mother’s number to give her the good news. But as she started to dial, she thought about the nursery they’d just finished painting in their house. Now they would have to paint it again in the new house. The thought of moving all their furniture and belongings pained her, too. They would definitely have to hire someone to do the moving. While Lucas was strong and capable, she couldn’t lift anything heavy right now, not in her condition. Lucas was always stubborn when it came to hiring help for work around the house, but surely he would see the need in this situation.
She smiled again, picturing them in the new house. They could use Lucas’s old bedroom for the baby, and paint it the same pale blue they’d painted the nursery in their house. Bianca would be thrilled to get to re-do her bedroom. And she would be getting a bigger bedroom.
Best of all, Tawny had a great excuse to look for another job. She could get away from Ed Ballantine. The jerk. She would have filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, if she didn’t have to tell Lucas. Knowing Lucas, he’d probably punch her supervisor out if he knew he’d propositioned her. This had happened twice, first a few months ago, and then again shortly before telling her she wasn’t getting the promotion. Both times, he used the line that she could play around all she wanted, because being pregnant already, she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant with some other guy’s baby. Just thinking about it made her want to punch him herself. Jerk, jerk, jerk.
And that supposed complaint from one of her patients about her being black, she suspected, had been a ruse. Something to lower her self-confidence, make her afraid of losing her job, make her more pliable. Sure the patient could have said something about her race. Plenty of people were biased. But she had no control over being black and had only seen him the one visit. But that didn’t mean her boss hadn’t used it. Either way, the jerk had tried to play her.
Her phone buzzed. She picked it up. Her next client was here. She stood up, and went out to the waiting room to greet her patient.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Christa Nagel, April-May 1945, Altstadt, Sudetenland—
CHRISTA FOLLOWED HER mother and siblings to the gathering place in front of Altstadt’s town hall. Most people present were wearing their winter coats, as well as either winter hats or heavy scarves wrapped around their heads and necks, like Mutti. The women and girls wore dresses or skirts with blouses, and long socks or stockings. The boys and the elderly men wore long pants. Although it was springtime, snow could still fall, and no one knew where they were going or what the conditions might be, and they wanted to be prepared.
Christa held her three year old brother, Andreas, and carried a suitcase with his clothes and her own. Mutti held baby Dirk and carried a larger suitcase. The other kids each carried a small suitcase with their own clothes. Christa remembered that Mutti had sewn money and jewelry into the lining of their coats and some of their clothes over the past few weeks, expecting that if they were forced to leave, they could take a few valuables with them. She was right. The Czech soldiers were opening suitcases, tossing belongings on the ground, and confiscating anything valuable. People were crying and desperately re-stuffing their remaining things back inside their suitcases. One soldier hit an elderly woman in the stomach with the end of his rifle when she tried to keep him from taking her suitcase.
Some of their Czech neighbors were standing on the sidewalks, watching, some with their arms folded and one hand resting at their throat. Expressions blank. What were they thinking? That they might be next? Did any of them feel bad about what was happening to their neighbors?
Christa doubted the soldiers would be rounding up the Czechs. On the walk to the gathering place, people had talked, saying they heard on the radio that Germans were not welcome in the CSR any more. They didn’t belong here. Months ago she’d heard on the radio that their country, and other countries in the region, like Poland and Hungary were going to expel the Germans when the war ended. But the war hadn’t ended yet. Either way, the Czechs and Poles and Hungarians would be safe. She felt sure of that.
“Line up over there,” a Czech soldier said, pointing straight ahead. “We leave in five minutes. Take only what you can carry.”
Christa helped Mutti herd the other children along. “What do you think they are going to do with us?” Christa whispered to Mutti.
Mutti opened her mouth to answer, but a soldier walked over and told them to be quiet.
Christa surveyed the line of Germans she’d known her whole life. Children from school, their mothers, their grandparents, elderly people without family in town, shopkeepers, and—wait, where was their priest? She looked up and down the line. He wasn’t there. What did that mean? She wanted to ask someone, but who would know?
Numerous bystanders—all of them Czechs—rushed over and started yelling obscenities at the Germans. Some spat at their feet. One of them was a man Christa recognized from the bank where her parents had an account.
Guards at the front of the line began leading them away from town; not toward the train station as Christa had expected. Guards on either side of the line and at the rear shouted at everyone to move, to follow their leaders.
A memory of Jews being taken from their homes, suitcases in hand, and put into trucks, sprang to Christa’s mind. She remembered, too, that she’d later heard they’d been taken to concentration camps. Many were supposedly killed in gas chambers. Was this revenge? Would the same thing happen to them?
She shivered, even though the sun was out and it was a warm spring day. We had nothing to do with what happened to the Jews. Don’t they understand that?
As they walked on and on and on, Christa’s belly ached from hunger and her legs hurt from exertion. She’d been mostly hidden away in their farmhouse for months and unused to physical activity beyon
d short trips into town to obtain their rations.
Children of all ages sobbed or cried out, complaining they couldn’t walk anymore. Elderly people moaned. Mutti, still recovering from her attack and suffering from massive bruises, stumbled and moaned in pain. The sounds of suffering became an eternal nightmare and Christa wanted to place her hands over her ears to block it, but how could she when her hands were full? And then people began to crumple and fall to the ground. Tears welled up in Christa’s eyes. It was all too much.
“Please stop,” Christa yelled out to the guards. “We need rest.”
A young guard, maybe eighteen or nineteen, she guessed came over and said something in Czech.
Christa was too tired to work out the translation.
He spoke again, this time in German. “You must keep quiet. They will not stop until it is time to make camp. Do not draw attention to yourself. You will only get yourself killed.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but Mutti put her hand on her arm to stop her. Huh? Mutti was carrying the baby and a suitcase. How could she touch my arm? Christa really looked at her mother, and then looked at the line of people. Mutti had set down her suitcase and people were walking around it. “Take my smaller suitcase, Mutti, and I will carry your bigger one,” Christa said, knowing she was stronger and could carry it easier than Mutti could.
Mutti nodded and took the small suitcase from Christa.
Christa hurried back to retrieve the larger and heavier suitcase. Then she struggled to get back to her family, weaving in and out of the line, and finally reached them. Poor Giselle was at the back of their family group, looking as if she might collapse at any moment. Christa wanted to pick her up, but she already had her hands full.
Ernst glanced over his shoulder. Then, without speaking, he slowed down, and when he was even with Giselle, he reached down with one arm and scooped her up. She wrapped her arm around his neck and buried her face against his body, whimpering.
Christa smiled slightly at Ernst, thanking him the only way she could since they weren’t supposed to speak.
As the sky grew dark, the soldiers finally stopped.
Christa looked ahead to see what was happening. They’d stopped alongside a large barn. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or worried. Was this their final destination? Would they be herded inside and slaughtered like pigs going to a butcher?
“We camp here tonight,” one of the soldiers proclaimed. He was gray-haired and fat. How could anyone be fat during the war? Most people were starving. “Everyone can relieve themselves and then settle into the barn for dinner and sleep.”
Christa quickly rushed behind a bush, set Andreas and the suitcase down, and took care of business. Then she helped Andreas do the same. When they were ready, they found the rest of the family, and together they entered the barn.
The familiar aroma of cows and manure hit Christa, making her suddenly homesick for their farm—not as it had become but as it had been before the war, back when the family had cows and pigs and goats. Gazing around the barn, she realized it was empty except for dirty straw strewn all over the floors and bales of hay stacked up in messy piles. Had prisoners or soldiers or resistance fighters camped here before them?
That brought up a different question. She wasn’t sure what to call their group of German civilians. Were they prisoners or refugees or something else?
Someone, an elderly man she didn’t recognize, pulled bales down and started breaking them apart for people to use as bedding. Soon, others followed suit.
In a while, guards came in and handed them each a bowl of soup and a small chunk of bread.
Christa’s mouth watered, until she stirred her soup and found that it was mostly dirty looking water with a few pieces of potatoes. Mein Gott! Still, she ate it. The bread was better, but awfully dry.
After eating, her family huddled together, as they’d been doing for the last few weeks, and settled in to sleep. Cold night wind, seeping through the gaps in the barn’s boards, made Christa and her siblings and mother shiver. She was sure glad they’d worn their winter coats and hats. The snoring, crying, and moaning from all around her kept Christa awake for what seemed like hours, until she finally drifted off.
The next morning, before they headed out again, many people, including Christa and her family, took clothing out of their suitcases and put on as many of their extra clothes as they could—layer upon layer—so that they could leave the suitcases behind. Anything they couldn’t wear stayed in the barn.
The days and nights of walking blended. Walk, break for a meager lunch, walk again, terrible dinner, sleep, walk again. Day in and day out.
Whenever someone fell down or refused to walk, the guards would beat them. As if they thought that would somehow make them walk better, faster. How stupid. Didn’t the guards have feelings? Couldn’t they see that the women, children, and elderly weren’t able to keep up the pace that the physically fit soldiers could?
Christa wanted to scream at them, to tell them they couldn’t treat people that way, but then she would remember what the young guard had told her on their first day: Don’t draw attention to yourself.
Ernst did say something one day and got hit in the stomach for it. The meanest guard had rushed over and pointed his gun at Ernst’s head. Mutti, carrying baby Dirk, had pleaded with him not to kill her boy.
The guard lowered his gun and gave Ernst a warning. He would not let Ernst get away with it again.
Sometimes, someone tried to escape from the ‘column’ as the guards called it. Christa had no idea why they called it that. The escapees were always caught, then shot by one of the guards. No escape attempt went unpunished. No escapee lived. Ever. Not from their column, anyway. Christa now knew what to call them: prisoners.
Once in a while guards allowed them to forage for potatoes or carrots or beets growing in a farmer’s field. The farmers, it seemed, had left—maybe on a forced march like theirs, or maybe on their own. No one knew. But they took advantage and everyone picked whatever they could dig up to be confiscated and cooked for dinner. For that, the guards didn’t complain. Some days they came across bushes with wild berries, and everyone went into a picking frenzy, including the guards. Those episodes told Christa the guards were hungry, too.
Even with the extra food, everyone grew thinner and thinner as the days went by. It helped slightly when other groups from other towns, along with their guards, joined them, doubling and tripling the size of their column, but also bringing more supplies and food.
Some people simply dropped dead during the walk. Instead of helping to bury the dead or even letting the prisoners bury their own family members, the guards just dragged the bodies over to the side of the road or trail and yelled at everyone to keep walking. No time for goodbyes or for grieving.
Occasionally, someone went to sleep at night and never awakened. Christa decided if she had to die on this trip that was how she wanted to go.
Unfortunately, she woke up every morning, day after day, week after week, wondering if the walking would ever end.
Petr Jaroslav, April-May 1945, Sudetenland—
PETR JAROSLAV WATCHED his group leader, Ivan Stransky, beat an elderly woman who had stopped walking simply because she needed to urinate, unable to hold it in any longer. Ivan had screamed at her to get moving. She’d cried and attempted to explain that she didn’t have a choice, but Ivan hit her in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. Now she was bent over in pain, but Ivan screamed at her again. Watching as urine ran down the wretched woman’s legs, Ivan then pummeled her in her face with his fists until she fell, bleeding, on the ground. An elderly man intervened, lifting her up, and began walking her back to the group.
Petr thought of his own grandmother, realizing she probably would have done the same thing if she’d been here. Petr decided Ivan was an ass. Old people’s bladders don’t work as well as a younger person’s does. What was wrong with him? Petr hated the Germans, as much as Ivan and all the other guards did. But
he conceded that these particular Germans—women, children, and old people—didn’t look much like Nazi sympathizers. If anything, they looked much like his own family.
Family. The thought threatened to overcome him. Dear God, why did I have to think of my family? They were all dead. Antonin had been killed attempting to rescue his girlfriend from a concentration camp. Josef was killed fighting in the Resistance. Vera died from Tuberculosis. Kamila, Milena, Gabriel, as well as their mother, Jolanta, were all killed in their home by a bomb. Petr remembered rushing home from a Resistance meeting immediately after the bombing, finding Kamila and Jolanta dead under rubble, but Milena and Gabriel were still alive. Both died in his arms minutes later. Only his father might still be alive, somewhere. Petr didn’t know. As far as Petr knew, his father had dropped off the face of the earth.
It was an effort every day for him to keep memories of his family locked away in the back of his mind. He needed those memories pushed far back, away from his conscious mind, because when they surfaced, he couldn’t function, couldn’t focus on his job. Right now, he needed to stay clear and focused. As decreed by the President, his job was to eliminate the Germans, expel them all, get them out of the CSR (Czech-Slovak Republic) and return it to the way it should have been—pure and untainted by foreign blood.
Of course, there’d been more, too. The Germans—all of them—needed to be punished for what they’d done, whether or not they’d been involved.
Most of Petr’s comrades had no problem punishing them. Petr hadn’t expected to have a problem, either. He’d killed his share of Germans, just not usually civilians.
Late at nights, the guards would take turns staying awake, watching for signs of the Red Army. The Russians had continued moving westward and were still fighting the German army, who wouldn’t give up and admit they were losing the war. The war should have ended months ago, but the damned Germans couldn’t admit defeat.
Constant gun battles and bombings made it difficult on everyone—Russians soldiers, German soldiers, German expellees, Czech soldiers, and Czech civilians. No one was safe, and the odd thing was that they weren’t safe from either side. Russians were attacking and raping the German expellees, even those under Czech guards. If the Czech guards and their prisoners were in the wrong place at the wrong time, they could all be killed by bombs from either the German enemy or from Russian friendly bombings. Most times it just seemed like insane chaos.