Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  In January 1933, von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. The Press Law of October 1933 stated that journalists had to be Aryan and could not be married to a non-Aryan and were required to belong to the Reich Press Association. Although these anti-Semitic laws did not directly affect Miklós, he was angered by them, as well as depressed, and resigned from Ullstein Verlag, which had been taken over by Eher Verlag, the Nazi-controlled publishing house. He did some work for newspapers in Budapest. He wrote a novel that was based on his brother’s life and dealt with the war. Natalia thought it his best work.

  In 1934, Zita was arrested and held at the Reich Main Security Office at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, near Potsdamer Platz. She was released, but had been beaten, her arm broken. Beatriz would have taken Zita to safety in Buenos Aires, but if she lived that far away, she’d never see her grandson. Krisztián was two years old in 1934. Zita adored him. Four years later, in 1938, she and Zita did leave Germany and a year later Germany invaded Poland. Great Britain and then France declared war on Germany. At the castle, Rozalia turned the radio off when a newscast began and burned the newspapers in the library fireplace, sometimes before Natalia had a chance to read them.

  Part

  Two

  O century! O sciences! It is a delight to be alive, even if not yet in tranquility.

  Barbarity, take a rope and prepare yourself for banishment.

  —ULRICH VON HUTTEN, 1518

  Chapter Eleven

  PRAGUE, 1941

  Anna was gathering chestnuts from the grass beneath the tree in the garden of her family’s house in Malá Strana, the Lesser Quarter, in Prague. It was November; a light frost silvered the grass, and fog drifted up from the river, muting the sound of people walking past on the other side of the garden wall. Her father, Julius, had told her once that trees transmogrified, over time, into animals, rooted and sightless, yet sentient, in their way. If he believed this, then she did too. She sensed the chestnut tree gazing at her with its inner eyes. The chestnuts, with their burred outer skins, nipped at her fingers, like small forest animals. She filled the basket and took it upstairs to the kitchen. Sora, who before she came to them had worked in Italy and knew exactly what to do with sweet chestnuts, spread them out on newspaper and left them for a week to ripen, so that the starch in the fruit could develop into sugar. Then they painstakingly peeled away the outer casings, and the chestnuts were roasted in the oven and then ground into a coarse flour, which Sora used to bake a dense, moist Italian cake called castagnaccio. The arrival of this cake at the table was an event in Anna’s family. It marked the drawing in of the days, the approach of winter.

  The last winter; the last taste of castagnaccio. That evening her father, who was an artist, pushed back his chair, picked up his sketch pad, and drew the scene, including the partly demolished Italian cake on a Bohemian-crystal plate. He drew Anna’s mother, Magdalena, as she turned to say something to Franz, who had a fork in his hand. Anna’s cousin Reina was about to pour coffee—or ersatz coffee, wartime coffee, occupation coffee, whatever it was—from a carafe into Franz’s cup. Anna had rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and was listening to her mother and Franz. Her father drew himself, sketch pad balanced on his knee. Candles burning, small pools of light, cake crumbs on the tablecloth.

  Her father’s paintings were in private collections in Prague, Vienna, London, Paris, and New York, and in art galleries in those cities and others. His portrait of President Tomáš Masaryk, while not as well known as the portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, had been a favorite of the president, who had hung it on his office wall.

  Her mother was a specialist in diseases of the blood. Many of her patients were referred to her by doctors in other towns, in the countryside. Anna imagined these patients rising before daylight, traveling by train sometimes hundreds of kilometers. Often, they hung around on the pavement outside the house, delaying the moment when they would have to admit to the doctor that they were unwell, probably with nothing, a passing fatigue, trouble sleeping, no appetite. Anna had seen them lighting cigarettes, checking their watches. They came inside, meticulously wiped their feet on the doormat, hung coats and hats on the coatrack, glanced at the pendulum clock in the corner. They gazed for a moment at a painting on the wall by Anna’s father, of three men fishing for carp on the banks of the Vltava. It was in a highly realistic style her father had since repudiated, but Anna liked it, and she’d heard her mother’s patients remark that they could almost smell the river and feel the mist on their faces. Anna fancied herself invisible, watching the patients from the fourth step up on the staircase, where she believed she was hidden from sight. If her brother, Franz, saw her there, he asked what she was doing, sitting in a cold draft. She wanted to explain how happy she felt, part of the house’s activities and close to her mother, yet separate, almost incorporeal. She wasn’t always alone, either. Sometimes her friend Rosa sat with her, and they watched everything together.

  * * *

  Anna’s father’s father owned gypsum mines near the Neckar River. His parents had expected Julius to study chemistry and work in the family business, as his older brother, Anna’s uncle Rupert, had done, but instead he came to Prague to study art with Alphonse Mucha and to see Prague’s distinctive art nouveau and cubist architecture. In all of Europe, there were no other examples of cubist architecture. How, he had wondered, could he live anywhere else? Alphonse Mucha wasn’t in Prague when he arrived; he was in the United States, and so Anna’s father had studied at an art academy. He lodged at the home of Vivian and Tomáš Svetla and one day met their niece, Magdalena, a medical student at Charles University. Anna’s father told her that as soon as he saw Magdalena, he fell in love with her. In 1921 they were married in the church of Saint Nicholas in Republic Square, and then they lived with Magdalena’s father, in the house where Franz was born in 1923 and Anna in 1929. Anna’s mother opened her surgery, and her father affixed a polished brass plaque, inscribed MAGDALENA SCHAEFFEROVÁ, DOCTOR OF MEDICINE, on the wall beside the entrance to the house. Anna had lived in this house since her birth, and she had decided, when she was quite young, that it was where she wanted to spend her life, every year watching as the chestnut tree flowered, produced succulent sweet chestnuts, and in autumn shed its beautiful leaves on the grass.

  * * *

  Anna was doing homework at the table in the dining room. Her cousin Reina, who was staying with them, had promised to help her, but she kept getting up and wandering around, opening drawers in the credenza, taking out a spoon, examining it for tarnish—not that she would bother to clean it—and putting it back. At the same time, she was telling Anna about a quarrel she’d had with the owner of the bookshop where she worked. Someone’s order had been misplaced. She knew it wasn’t her fault. The bookshop was busy; mistakes got made. Everyone was reading forbidden Czech literature, every book they could get their hands on, in defiance of the Nazis. The printing presses were running day and night to keep up with the demand. Anna had seen it herself: people read as they walked; they read in cafés, on trams, in queues at the shops. Here I am, they were saying, defiantly. Here I am, reading a book by a Czech author working in the Czech language. What are you going to do about it? Reina sat down and bit her fingernails and then got up again and went out of the room and came back with one of Franz’s philosophy textbooks.

  She flipped through the pages and said Franz was brilliant at philosophy, but it was her least favorite subject. “Nietzsche called other philosophers cabbage heads. He said the cabbage heads settled for a frog’s-eye view of life. Cabbages don’t have eyes, but it’s a nice simile, isn’t it? Or is it a metaphor? Or just an insult? A frog’s-eye view is a term in art. Your father would know it. It means from a limited perspective, from near the ground, as if you were a frog sitting on a lily pad. I have no intention of settling for a frog’s-eye view. As soon as this stupid war ends, I am going to America. Aunt Vivian says she’ll give me the addresses of her relatives in Chicago, who’ll be
happy to put me up while I look for work. A lot of Czechs have emigrated to America. Half of Europe is there; the smart half, if you ask me.”

  She picked at the sleeve of her sweater, which was black and lacy, intricate as a spider’s web, and then said she was going to take a bath, shampoo her hair, and do some sewing. “Listen,” she said. “I think Franz is home.” She went out, closing the door behind her.

  Anna finished solving an algebraic equation and opened another book and began to take notes: The boiling point of water is one hundred degrees Celsius, and the melting point of ice is zero degrees Celsius. As water heats, it expands. Solids and liquids expand when heated and contract as they cool. Even a mountain responds to heat and cold in this way, the rocks contracting and expanding along fault lines. A calorie measures the energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of liquid by one degree Celsius. One fact led to another; one discovery opened the way to another. Anna’s ambition was to become a scientist like her mother and her uncle Rupert in Heidelberg, who formulated new medicines from dyes at one company while also carrying out tests for the family’s gypsum-mining business. There was another scientist in her family: her mother’s stepmother, Eva Svetlová, had been a botanist, and Eva’s brother, Maximilian Nagy, for whom Anna’s uncle Max was named, had been an agronomist.

  Once Anna had pricked her finger with a lancet, and her mother had squeezed a drop of blood onto a microscope slide so that Anna could see her blood magnified a hundred times. Microscopy was her favorite word, and she loved the microscope, with its polished lenses and fine calibrations. In a drop of rainwater legions of bugs thrived. Bits of earthworm appeared cratered and dimpled, like the face of the moon. Some microbes were benign, others capable of causing illness; and there existed microbes too small to be detected even under a microscope.

  She could hear Reina and Franz in the hall. Something in their voices made her get up and open the door. They were standing on either side of Ivan Lazar. Anna almost didn’t know him at first. He was bleeding from a deep gash beneath his left eye. Blood was running down his face and dripping on the floor. If Ivan didn’t sit down, he would collapse, and since Franz and Reina seemed unable to move, she told them to take Ivan to the kitchen. She folded a clean kitchen towel to make a compress and asked Reina to press it to Ivan’s face.

  “You need stitches,” Anna said.

  “No, it will be all right,” Ivan said.

  “Without stitches it won’t heal,” Anna said. She was going to phone her mother, who had gone to the hospital to check on a patient, but as she went downstairs, her mother came in the front door. She ran upstairs with Anna and knelt beside Ivan and touched the area around his injury. He should be seen by a facial surgeon, she said. She would like an X-ray, to rule out a fracture to the cheekbone or orbital bone, and an ophthalmologist should examine him, to be on the safe side. Franz could drive him to the hospital in her car, she said; she would phone ahead and alert the staff.

  No, out of the question, Franz said. They would be questioned; arrested. Anna’s mother considered this. Gently, she again palpated Ivan’s face around the wound and asked how it had happened. Franz said he would tell her later.

  “Do what you can, please, Dr. Schaefferová,” Ivan said. Marta Hempel, his fiancée, was on duty that afternoon at the hospital. He didn’t want her to see him like this.

  “Marta would want to know,” Magdalena said, but then she relented. “All right. I will do my best for you, Ivan.” But the light in the kitchen was insufficient, she said; she needed a lamp, a sterile surface, instruments, anesthetic. They went down to the ground floor, where she had her surgery. She set out instruments on a stainless-steel tray and swabbed Ivan’s face with gauze soaked in an antiseptic. She prepared a syringe and injected anesthetic into Ivan’s face, near the wound. Elli wasn’t in the surgery that day, and Anna acted as her mother’s assistant, holding a stainless-steel bowl to catch the blood and water as her mother irrigated the wound with a saline solution. Her mother talked as she worked. “The finest surgical thread in the world used to come from silkworms in the Cevannes, in France, but it became too costly, and now we use silk thread from China,” she told Ivan. “The benefit of silk is that it leaves less of a scar than catgut.” She pulled the needle through the skin with toothed forceps. “This is not so different from doing embroidery,” she said.

  Ivan said he would look a picture, then.

  “For the next few hours, try not to move the muscles in your face,” Anna’s mother said. “When the anesthetic wears off, you’ll feel pain. I can give you something for it. We’ll leave the wound uncovered for now, and in the morning, I’ll examine it and put on a dressing.” Magdalena gave Ivan an anti-tetanus injection, and then Ivan got off the table. Anna and Reina made him a light lunch of buttered bread and a soft-boiled egg and carried a tray to the guest room, where Franz had taken Ivan to rest.

  That evening, Franz described the assault to his parents. They were in the living room, Anna’s mother and father, Franz, Anna, Reina, and Ivan Lazar. Franz said Ivan had been getting off the tram after finishing a shift at the armament factory where he worked. This wasn’t by choice, Anna knew, but because everyone from the age of fifteen to sixty was compelled to contribute his or her labor to the German war effort. Franz went on to say he’d seen Ivan and had started to walk toward him, when a Gestapo officer pushed a woman hard enough to knock her down. She had got in his way or something. Franz had thought she was dead, but she began to move, and he got there in time to help her to her feet. Ivan was picking up the woman’s groceries and putting them in her shopping bag. He said to the Gestapo guy, Why did you have to push her, why did you have to do that? In reply, the Gestapo officer took his rifle off his shoulder and smashed it against Ivan’s face.

  “So now,” Franz said, “blood is pouring down Ivan’s face, and the Gestapo officer is shouting at him to produce his identity card, and the woman is crying. And along comes another Gestapo, who wants to know what’s going on. The first one gave Ivan’s card back, and at the same time a car pulled up and they got in and drove away. I brought Ivan here, and Mother patched him up.”

  “The Gestapo took down Ivan’s name and address?” Anna’s father said.

  They looked at Ivan’s identity card, yes, Franz said. But they hadn’t asked Franz for his identity card. They didn’t know who he was or where he lived.

  Ivan said he’d caused enough trouble; he would go home.

  “Ivan, you should stay with us tonight,” Anna’s mother said. “In the morning I would like to examine your wound.”

  Ivan had started to get up. He sank back into the chair. He was pale, and a violently purple bruise had spread across his cheek and nose. His eye was swollen shut. Ivan was a teacher at the Royal Gymnasium. He wrote poetry that was published in important literary journals. And there he sat, with that terrible wound to his face. Anna looked away. The evening sun, level in the sky, illuminated the room, with its comfortable blue velvet sofas and chairs and Bechstein piano and the credenza that had belonged to Anna’s grandmother, Katharina Svetlová. But outside the house, out there in the streets of Prague, someone like Ivan could be grievously injured for no reason, for doing something any decent human would do. Understanding how this could be was beyond her.

  The next day, Franz went to the school where Ivan taught and told the headmaster Ivan had been called home to Český Krumlov to be with his father, who was ill. Franz had no qualms about lying to protect his friend. He repeated the same story to Ivan’s landlady when he stopped to feed Ivan’s cat and water the plants. As far as he could make out, no one had been to the house in the past twenty-four hours asking questions. They were safe, he thought. But Ivan learned later that the Gestapo had questioned the headmaster at his school and had sent two men to interrogate Ivan’s father, who unwittingly corroborated Franz’s story. The elder Mr. Lazar had, in fact, been ill and was just beginning to recover when the Gestapo came to his door. Mr. Lazar, an engineer at the
hydroelectric dam on the Elbe River near Český Krumlov, told Ivan he wasn’t going to take any shit from the Gestapo. He had looked them in the eye and had said, yes, his son had been there to help him out when he was at death’s door with ’flu. By now, his son would be back in Prague. Then he had a fit of coughing and didn’t cover his mouth, and they had backed away, big men, big heroes, afraid of a few germs.

  The Gestapo seemed to give up at that point, Franz said. But it illustrated the lengths they’d go to, to punish even a minor offense.

  * * *

  The occupation of Czechoslovakia by the German Reich had begun March 15, 1939, when the German army marched into Prague, and Hitler appeared at a window in Prague Castle. It was snowing that day, and it was Anna’s tenth birthday. She hated that her birthday, for the rest of her life, would be linked to the day when Czechoslovakia ceased to be a sovereign nation and became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. She tried not to know what was happening, and for a time everything was unchanged, at least in her family. She knew, vaguely, that Hitler had appointed a German from Württemberg, Baron von Neurath, as Reich protector. Neurath immediately censored the free press and imposed the Nuremberg Laws, and that Anna could not pretend she didn’t know. In June, two Schutzstaffel officers came into her classroom at school and removed her teacher, Miss Kleinová, who was Jewish. Anna’s beloved Miss Kleinová’s replacement was Fräulein Sauer, from Germany, who began by telling the class they were imbeciles. She punished Anna for speaking Czech instead of German and struck her across the shoulders with a stick. It hurt and left a bruise; she did not dare tell her mother.