A Sparrow in Terezin

by Kristy Cambron

  “You looked for me.”

  “I went into every office I could and yelled back at the men who told me you weren’t a British citizen and there was nothing they could do. I’m surprised I didn’t land in the brig for every superior I insulted.” He sighed and hooked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “But what do you think? That I would let you go without a fight? Edmunton helped me. We watched transmissions at Bletchley, read transcripts looking for your name. We found out that the Red Cross had gone into Prague, we just had no idea when you’d gone out. I got Edmunton to print an article on you, hoping it would bring any leads. It just took a little longer to find you than we expected, that’s all.”

  She nodded. The months had muddled together, bleeding into years—and he’d looked for her, all that time?

  “How did you find me?”

  “Dane. We couldn’t let you reach Auschwitz, knowing what would happen.”

  She stepped back, startled. “You mean it was you—all along? On the tracks. You were the one who helped him stop the train?”

  Liam shook his head. “There was no other option. We made an explosive device out of an old Ford Rheinland and put it on the tracks. Between that and Dane’s army-issue pistol, it bought us enough time to get all the boxcar doors open.”

  “But how did you know? I mean—how did you find him?”

  “It was he who found us some months back. He sent letters out to the Danish Red Cross seeking a volunteer who may have once known a Kája Makovský from Prague. It took some doing, but he found Margot Sørensen. From there, after almost two years of searching for a woman who had vanished into thin air, we finally knew where you were. And when we had enough credible evidence that you were inside a Nazi ghetto and that you were alive, I was able to convince the higher-ups at Bletchley to let me try and get you out. We were in the midst of planning but before we could do anything, your name showed up on a transport list. And the plans went out the window.”

  Liam looked down at her. She hated to think of what he saw. She was wounded; so frail and battered by Terezin, so altered by the things she’d seen, never again to be the refined woman he’d once known. Who would they be now?

  “Liam, we’re still in Nazi-occupied territory. We have nowhere to go.”

  “We had no choice, Kája. Dane found this abandoned cellar near an old winery and we planned where to do it, SS trailing us or not.” His voice was whisper soft. And kind. And endearing in a way she’d long since forgotten. “As for the children—we’ll do everything we can to find them all. I promise you that.”

  “We’ll all be hunted.”

  Liam nodded. “Only until the war ends.”

  “And you think it will soon?”

  “We have every reason to hope so, and that it will end in Germany’s defeat. There’s no way to know yet.” He ran a finger over the scar at her temple. “Even still, I would have done anything to find my fiancé and bring her back home.”

  “Is that really what I am, Liam? We said some things, so long ago—before all of this. We’re different people. I’d never hold you to it now.”

  “Do you remember that night in the archive library, when you told me about the clock, about the time God’s given us?”

  “I didn’t know you were really listening. I thought you were angry because I’d labeled you a spy.”

  “I kept thinking after that night, about what you said. And I told myself that if I found you, I’d never let you go again. I’d ask God to forgive me, to change me, to make me a man half worthy of you.”

  “I never wanted to change you, Liam. I only wanted you—as I’d come to love you—as the man I was privileged to know. The one who really knew me.”

  “I pictured you like this for so long,” he said, touching his hand to the side of her hair. “Your hair was down about your shoulders when you got on that train in Norwich. Remember?”

  “Yes. I’d been crying. I knew you could tell and still, you didn’t comment on it.”

  “I don’t think I could have spoken had I wanted to. I was trying to think of the words to say to ask you to marry me.” He laughed, so softly she might have believed it was the caress of wind outside. “And every thought I ever had before that was gone. I’d never seen anything like you.” He paused, blue eyes entreating hers. “And I swear I’ll get you out of here if you still want to go with me.”

  “It’s all I’ve wanted,” she cried against him, feeling a rush of hope as long as his arms were securely around her.

  “We can stay here as long as it’s safe. Let you heal up a day or so. Get your strength back. Then we’ll get you out. I wish I could say the plan was more definitive than that but well, we’re making this thing up as we go along.”

  “What about my father? Did you see him?”

  Liam shook his head. “Not yet. But I promise—we’ll do whatever we must to find him.”

  “And Sophie?” She paused, so unsure of what his response would be. “She hasn’t anyone.”

  He pressed his lips to her forehead. His breath warmed her skin.

  “She goes with us. She’s part of you now, isn’t she? That makes her part of me too.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her palm and feeling safe now, turned in his arms and looked back into the room.

  “And where’s Dane?” she asked. “I have to thank him. We wouldn’t have made it from the train if he hadn’t come back for us.”

  When Liam didn’t respond as Kája expected, she leaned back to look him in the face.

  “Dane?” she asked, a scared feeling growing in her midsection. “Where is he?”

  “Kája . . . we don’t have to talk about this now.”

  “We don’t have to talk about what?” She paused, searching his face, her eyes pleading for an answer that was different from the one that was etched on his face now. “Tell me where he is.”

  With a soft tone and the unmistakable note of regret painting his features, he said, “We went out after the children, and Dane didn’t come back.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Spring San Francisco

  There’s another one down here!”

  William called up the stairs to her, indicating that they had yet another crate to unpack before the gallery opening.

  “Can you unpack it for me? I don’t think I can walk down those stairs again without falling the rest of the way down,” Sera shouted back, and plopped down in the rocking chair in the nursery. “And maybe remind me next time I’m opening a gallery to time it more effectively around childbirth?”

  They were mere weeks away from meeting their new little girl. Despite swollen ankles and feeling like she was the size of the entire loft space, Sera couldn’t have been happier.

  William was free. His father had been true to his word and eventually all charges against him were dropped. There were still wounds in the family as Thomas embarked on his own legal battles and the rest of the Hanovers tried to move on. But surprisingly, Sera found that she and William had a measure of peace in the midst of it.

  Sera ran her hand over her belly, feeling the little bumps of errant kicking from her daughter, and smiled.

  “You have the disposition of your father,” she whispered, talking aloud to her little girl as if she were already in the room. “And you are lucky for it, little one.”

  William’s knuckles rapped on the doorframe.

  “Sera?”

  His tender gaze was the first thing she saw when she looked up. He held a small shipping crate in his arms and walked over with a smile that spread wide across his face. He knelt at her side and nudged the package up to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “I think you’re going to want to unpack this one yourself.”

  He handed her a screwdriver and quietly leaned back on his heels.

  She gazed back, smiling.

  “Will—what’s going on? Is it some sort of baby gift? You shouldn’t have. Look around you. There is enough stuff here to start a day-care center
if we had a mind to.”

  “Just open it,” he whispered, and nudged her on with a tilt of his chin.

  Sera couldn’t begin to think of what he was doing with the mysterious crate. But she took the look on his face as one of joy. It looked important to him, so she went to work. She pushed the screwdriver up under the top of the crate and tilted up the lid. It clanged down on the wood floor.

  “Keep going,” he whispered.

  Sera felt a rush of adrenaline as she pulled out several handfuls of packing paper and tossed it on the floor. She found the edge of a black frame and with careful hands, pulled it free.

  Her heart thumped, uncaged in her chest, and tears sprang to her eyes.

  The beautifully rendered painting of a clock and a handful of soaring birds stared back at her from the confines of the large frame. With it, a note from Sophie.

  A gift, from one of God’s precious sparrows to another.

  With love,

  Sophie

  “Will, look. It’s the painting. The one I told you about? The one Sophie made in Terezin as a child.”

  He nodded, knowingly. “I had a feeling. Somehow I knew you’d want to open it yourself.”

  “It’s beautiful. And it’s exactly what I would have wished for our little Adele,” she cried. “It’ll be perfect in here. It feels like this is the way things should be, doesn’t it? It’s more than I ever hoped.”

  “And . . .” With a coy smile, he produced a hammer from behind his back and took a nail from the pocket of his plaid button-down shirt. “I think there’s the perfect place for it, right over there.”

  William crossed the room and pounded the nail into the wall in the center of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He took Sophie’s painting in hand and hung it, then stepped back over to her side.

  “Dance with me.”

  “William . . .”

  He laughed, showering her with the praise of a light-hearted grin. “You are forever turning down my offers to dance. We’ll have to do something about that one day, I think.”

  “Are you sure?” Sera pushed up against the back of the chair and with his help, stood up straight. “I’m not even sure you’ll be able to get your arms around me.”

  He held them out wide.

  “Lucky for you, I have an impressive wingspan.”

  Sera exhaled long and low, and with the giddiness of first love, nodded acceptance.

  William wrapped her in the shelter of his arms and they danced, swaying to their own song, lilting in the shadow of the clock. Without the past to weigh them down, and despite the uncertainty of the future, Sera leaned in to him, thankful for the measure of peace she’d found in his arms.

  “I never thought it could be like this.”

  “What?” William arched a brow at her. “Was my dancing that bad to begin with?”

  “No.” She laughed aloud. “I meant peace. That’s what it feels like. God’s peace showering down on us. And it’s not because we haven’t seen storms. I think it’s because he gave us the strength to weather them—no matter what.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The room had turned cold, like a blast of icy air had bled down the walls and frozen over every inch of the abandoned cellar. It caused Kája to shake uncontrollably, until she feared standing was no longer an option.

  Liam wrapped a woolen coat around her shoulders, urging her out of the room and into a chair at the far end of the cellar. “Come. Sit.”

  He settled her down in a wooden spindle chair. Kája sat, numb and in a state of bemused shock, trying to process what she’d just heard.

  “What do you mean, he didn’t come back? Dane’s still out there somewhere?”

  Liam pulled a stool up before her and took her trembling hands in his. She tried to focus as he sat across from her, searching the contours of his face, the lightness of his eyes, the concern etched on his mouth—anything so that she’d not have to consider the reality of what she was about to be told.

  The compassion in his eyes was what frightened her more than anything. She stared back at him, preparing her heart.

  “A group of us came here to stop the train—two other agents are hidden away in the town nearby. But after we treated you and I knew you and Sophie would be safe, we went back after as many of the children as we could. Just knowing they wouldn’t have a prayer out there alone . . .” His voice was strong and the hands that cradled hers so gentle, she could feel the emotion coursing through them into hers. His thumb brushed the underside of her palm. “I want you to know that Dane wouldn’t give up. They had spotlights and dogs. We’d get one child to safety and he’d still go back out for another. And even when the SS caught up to him, Dane refused to turn us in. I need you to know that.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Liam swallowed hard. “They executed him on sight. One shot.”

  Kája’s heart lurched in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

  “And did you see it?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut until she heard him answer with a heart-wrenching, “Yes.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you by telling you this way,” Liam said, then reached down to the dirt floor and retrieved something that had been stashed against the wall. Aged brown leather, wet from the dew outside, was held out before her. “But he wanted you to have this.”

  “Your satchel,” she said, tearing up as she drew her hands down upon it. “I’ve had it in the camp all this time. They let us take luggage on the train. Even though I knew what would happen to it when I reached Auschwitz, I wanted to take you with me. And my mother. She gave me her pearls once and they found their way back to me. I tucked them in the bottom of the bag, thinking they would give me courage on yet another train ride.”

  She ran her hands over the worn leather.

  “Everything happened so fast. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped it.”

  “You must have, running from the train. And whether it was by luck or by God, Dane found it out there. He made me promise to bring it back and put it into your hands. There’s something in there he wanted you to see.”

  Kája looked back at him for a moment, the face of the man who had remained alive in her heart for so long. And he was there now, saving her all over again.

  She opened the bag and as expected, the pearls slid out first. But on their wings, something else much lighter floated out. What fell into her lap was the one glimpse of beauty she’d found in Terezin.

  “My children!” she cried, the softness of paper feeling like spun gold in her fingertips.

  The children’s artwork—paintings, watercolors and drawings, poetry even—Dane had taken them from the school when she’d been loaded on the transport train. He’d managed to hide them somehow, keeping the memory of her beloved sparrows alive. It was mercy she held in her shaking hands; he’d gone back and found it for her, in every color of the rainbow.

  “Liam,” she whispered, heart bleeding for what they’d been through.

  Emotion caught in her throat and she swallowed hard, as tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “I wish I could tell him what this means to me—to thank him for stopping that train, for saving my sparrows. For every one of the children who will survive because of what you and he have done, I will be forever grateful. And it’s my wish that someday, when we are both very, very far away from this war-torn world, I might call him my friend openly. And we would no longer be Nazi and Jew. Or captor and prisoner. But friends. I pray the world would someday allow us to call him that.” She placed her hand atop his and added, “When the time comes, will you help me?”

  He used a finger to brush the tears away from her cheek.

  “Of course.”

  Wednesday, October 19, 1949 Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Nuremberg, Germany

  “Your father is almost finished giving his deposition,” Liam whispered, and squeezed Kája’s shoulder to get her attention. “They said they’ll be ready for us next.” />
  Kája looked up, then tried to give a light roll of the eyes to indicate she’d brushed the cobwebs of memories away.

  She’d been lost in them as she sat outside the U.S. military court at the Palace of Justice in Nuremburg, Germany. And for a few vivid moments, she’d been back on the transport train to Auschwitz instead of sitting where she was, in a tailored cream suit with her hair coiled soft at her nape and her husband seated at her side.

  “Your mother would be glad to know you’re wearing them today.”

  Her fingers had been toying with the pearls at her collar; she hadn’t even realized it until he’d smiled and whispered next to her ear. She dropped her hand to her lap and looked up, admiring the strength of his profile.

  “I hope she’d be proud of us. What we’re trying to do for Dane? Something inside me says it’s the right thing to do. I hope she understands.”

  “I believe she does, Kája. And we’re here with your father. He’s testifying for Dane too.” His hand slid over hers. “Take comfort in that.”

  “But do you suppose if she were here now, she’d want us to go in? What will they think of us if we go to defend a Nazi? I mean, I never imagined we would be called to a place like this, to speak out in this way.”

  “You told me you wanted to. Remember? We don’t want to miss our chance.” He offered her an encouraging smile. “And I know you, Kája. I know what’s in your heart. I can’t share what you and Sophie endured in that camp. God knows, I wish I could take the bad memories and burn them away somehow. I don’t want you to have to live in them. But you have a bond with Sophie, your mother, and with Dane, that other people could never understand. You have the ability to make this right for him.”

  The oak doors creaked open and a court clerk stepped out.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Marshall?”

  “Yes,” Liam answered and reached out to take her elbow as she stood.

  “Wait,” he said, pulling her back ever so slightly. “I have something for you.”