Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  Frau Haffner did not disguise her preference for her oldest child, calling him “her handsome boy,” her “little man,” although he was taller than she was, a broad, muscular youth with a thatch of light brown hair. His mother never reprimanded him when he bullied his sisters or pinched the baby hard enough to make him cry. She instructed Anna to polish Baldur’s shoes, sew missing buttons on his uniform, and help him with his schoolwork. Anna saw his school reports; he received good marks, particularly in mathematics and science, and Anna suggested he’d benefit more from doing his own schoolwork. Frau Haffner slapped her face and told her not to talk back. “I can send you away like this,” she said, snapping her fingers. Anna did help Baldur with his schoolwork, after that, and to show his appreciation, he yanked her braids hard, nearly ripping hair out of her scalp, and tripped her as she walked past him. He left a dead mouse in a fruit bowl on the sideboard in the dining room. She picked it up by the tail and carried it outside, to the garbage can. Baldur put wet ashes from the stove in her bed, which was in a small narrow room in the basement, beneath the kitchen.

  At night, when she was alone, Franz sometimes appeared to her. He knew everything that had happened to her before she was sent here. The physical examination, the X-rays; having her head measured with calipers, her eye, hair, and skin color compared to crude charts. Then—and this Franz knew as well—she was given a card that stated she was suitable for “Germanization,” and he knew she’d had to leave Reina and her aunts and uncles against her will and that she was in Berlin, in a suburb just outside Berlin, living with the Haffner family, who fulfilled the requirements of having many children, six of them, like Goebbels and his wife, and of having a firm grasp of the nation’s ideology. Franz knew, also, that while she might look like Anna, walk around in Anna’s body, speak with Anna’s voice, the essential Anna-ness was gone and what remained was a stranger to her.

  * * *

  Dr. Haffner was not a medical doctor; he held a doctorate of philosophy in literature and had lectured at the Berlin University before taking work as an editor with the Reich’s domestic press division. Anna served him his breakfast in the dining room, when the children had finished eating. He spent a long time polishing his spectacles and then squinting at the lenses and polishing them again. It wouldn’t surprise him, he said, if the smudges were actually on his eyes, since his father had lost his sight to an inherited condition. And blind, of what use would he be to the Third Reich?

  Every morning he ate one slice of toast and an egg in an eggcup shaped like a hen, standing on clawed chicken’s feet. He grimaced at his first taste of chicory coffee. He swallowed a small white tablet that gave him, he said, “some pep.” In the past year he had lost five kilograms, he said, tugging at his shirt collar to show her how loose it was. He used to do calisthenics and run in the park near his house, but his long hours at the office made such activities impossible.

  “Do you know what it’s like in that cauldron?” he said. “No, of course you don’t. How could you?” Every hour, he said, fresh directives came from the press chief, Otto Dietrich, and each one had to be studied, made sense of, and obeyed, which meant a volley of telegraphed memos, often contradicting previous memos, had to be sent posthaste to newspaper editors all over Germany and the occupied territories in the east and in Belgium, Holland, and France. As a young man, he’d imagined writing something Proustian, on a vast and sublime scale, but the lightness of spirit essential to creation had been truly knocked out of him. Self-pity, however, was inexcusable, he said.

  He could not pretend he knew nothing. He moved the saltcellar a millimeter on the tablecloth. “Sit down, Fräulein,” he said. “You make me nervous.” He said, one morning, that he didn’t feel good about some of the things that were going on. He tried to convey a sense of what it was he didn’t “feel good” about, without being specific. He put his hands flat on the table. Frau Haffner had joined the Nazi Party ten years earlier, he said, and her brother, Ernst, was in the SS, so he had to keep quiet. He had a brother-in-law who’d been in prison for months after voicing his criticism.

  On the last day of January 1943, General Paulus and the Sixth Army of the Wehrmacht surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad. Out of a force of three hundred thousand men, only ninety thousand had survived, Dr. Haffner told Anna, and they were prisoners of the Red Army. He called it a devastating defeat, but Dr. Goebbels termed it a “misfortune.” After General Paulus had surrendered, Goebbels gave a speech to an invited audience at the Sportpalast and said, “Let the storm break loose.” He urged “total war,” which would of necessity be a long war but at the same time the shortest war, the shortest path to victory over Bolshevism. These were his words, which Anna heard in a radio broadcast she listened to with the Haffner children while their parents were at the Sportpalast. Baldur stood at attention in front of the radio. His brother Josef and his sisters marched around the room. They knocked over a table. Josef jumped on the sofa beside Anna, and the baby, on her knee, began to scream. The parents returned home. Dr. Haffner slapped Josef and told him to settle down and took the baby from Anna. Frau Haffner, her eyes glassy and her cheeks flushed with excitement, kept saying what an honor it was, what a privilege, to hear Dr. Goebbels. Where there was no hope, he had given hope. “Didn’t he, Andreas?” she said, turning to her husband for confirmation.

  Baldur should have been there, she said, to see the young men who had been wounded in the war. Some were in wheelchairs, attended by nurses, but as soon as they’d convalesced, they would return to the fighting. “Their courage moved me to tears,” she said. “From now on, we must all be as courageous. Total war means total victory. Isn’t that so?”

  Dr. Haffner was of the opinion that Anna should be going to school. Frau Haffner disagreed, but Dr. Haffner enrolled Anna at his daughters’ school. Anna thanked Dr. Haffner, and his wife said it was Germany she should thank.

  Frau Haffner volunteered at a hospital for convalescent soldiers. She sacrificed some of her cast-iron cooking pots to be melted down for weapons. When the Reich government recommended foraging in the woods for wild plants to augment the reduced food rations, Frau Haffner took Anna with her to a park, where they gathered figwort and dandelion greens and dug wild garlic out of the ground. None of the Haffner children liked eating these plants, and Heinrich gagged and threw up at the table, and Frau Haffner went into hysterics, thinking she had poisoned him.

  A foreign laborer, a young man from France, was sent to the Haffner house to dig and plant a victory garden. The young man’s name was Jean-Marc; he was eighteen. He had been studying at the Sorbonne, but then came the invasion and occupation of Paris in June 1940. His brother had been killed in the fighting. And now Jean-Marc was a prisoner, a laborer for the Germans.

  Frau Haffner let Anna take Jean-Marc sandwiches and a flask of water at midday. When his hands blistered, she brought him into the house and washed off the dirt and applied ointment and bandages. He told her he had never in his life gardened or, for that matter, done any form of physical labor, nor did he particularly want to. His smile was gentle, rueful. Like her, Jean-Marc hoped to become a scientist, a chemist. She told him she had an uncle who was a chemist. She too wanted to be a scientist, she said, and Jean-Marc said, yes, that’s good, that’s wonderful, and they smiled at one another.

  In the Haffners’ pretty garden they saw a family of quail crossing the grass in single file, and a scarlet tanager in a tree. The trees and shrubberies in the garden were lush and refulgent, and then in contrast there was this patch of dark, newly dug-over ground. Anna scooped up some dirt and showed Jean-Marc its denizens: earthworms, millipedes, snails. She picked out a beetle dazed by the light; it crawled around in her palm, its wings trembling. Being so close to the lake, she said to Jean Marc, the ground was fertile, rich.

  It was true: the garden Jean-Marc planted produced an exuberant crop of beans, beets, carrots, garlic, onions, turnips. These vegetables had a subtle, indefinable flavor, because, Anna beli
eved, they had taken in something of Jean-Marc’s goodness. She had committed to memory his parents’ address in Paris, and he had memorized her uncle Emil’s address in Prague, so that one day, when they got through this, they would meet under better circumstances. He had at first assumed she was a daughter of the Haffner family; she had quickly set him straight. She was Czech, she said. He asked about her family, and she wanted to tell him, but the words would not come, the words were forbidden to her. Anna, he said, gently. He bent and kissed her, lightly, on the parting in her hair.

  * * *

  In November 1944, the Royal Air Force intensified bombing raids on Berlin. Liquid incendiary bombs containing asphalt, magnesium, and rubber fell on Berlin, and the city burned. Phosphorus bombs ignited fires that could be extinguished only with sand, and there was never enough sand. People running from burning buildings fell victim to a second wave of bombers dropping incendiary bombs. In air-raid shelters that escaped a direct hit, there existed the very real danger of suffocation or fire, and Anna heard of people’s lungs bursting from shock waves when a bomb exploded. There were days when the trains stopped running, and Dr. Haffner had to stay in the city. Then, when the air raids began, Frau Haffner refused to go to their shelter. She grabbed a knife from a kitchen drawer and waved it at Anna. She dropped the knife, and Anna picked it up and put it back in the drawer. Without her husband there to reassure her, Frau Haffner became terrified of not being able to breathe in the confined space, and wanted the shelter’s steel doors left open. Anna closed the doors. They had a flashlight and some candles. Paul sat on Anna’s lap, an arm tight around her neck, and Vera and Bettina huddled against her. They begged to hear once again, from the beginning, the story of the princess who loved her father more than salt.

  The ground shook, the sounds of sirens and ack-ack fire penetrated the shelter. Every bomb made a different sound as it fell through the air, and then there were shock waves, and the air trembled, and in the shelter it seemed that the candlelight wavered and the torch Anna held grew dim. But in the morning, Anna opened the shelter doors and saw that nothing in the immediate vicinity had been damaged in the air raid, and they went back to the house.

  In the summer of 1944, a Polish prisoner was sent in Jean-Marc’s place to do the gardening. Anna heard from Baldur that the trees in the Tiergarten were being cut down to make space for food crops—corn and potatoes and beans—and she wondered whether Jean-Marc was working there.

  Baldur was away for two weeks in Bavaria, training as a Luftwaffenhelfer, an assistant to the soldiers in the air forces. Then he came back to Berlin and was stationed at the flak tower in the Tiergarten. His mother was terrified that he would be killed, and out of fear and maybe penitence she tried to ensure his survival by fasting for entire days. She walked around with her elbows tucked in, a flightless bird, her lips moving without sound. She ignored her other children. Anna did everything for them. She combed the twins’ hair and chose the clothes they put on in the morning. She had been with the Haffner family for two years and the baby, Paul, was walking. He followed her around; he wanted her to stay with him at bedtime. Josef had nightmares and wet the bed. She had to change his pajamas when she woke him up to go to the shelter. The British air force bombed at night, and the Americans bombed day and night. When the weather got cold there was no coal—not that coal did not exist, but the railroads between the coal mines in the Ruhr Valley and Berlin had been bombed. By the late winter of 1944, food in the Reich was scarce. Frau Haffner stood for hours in a queue to receive what was always an insufficient amount to feed a large family. At the table, she made sure her children got larger portions than Anna. Some days, Anna got nothing to eat. Did she think Anna cared? She said she wasn’t hungry. Frau Haffner stared coldly at her.

  Baldur, stationed at the flak tower in the Tier Garten, was at least fed. The flak tower was not what Anna pictured: a thin needle piercing the night sky, emitting flashes of citron light as its bullets raced toward the enemy aircraft. It was a substantial building with suites of offices and sleeping quarters and a medical facility. The antiaircraft gun was, Baldur said, the biggest in Europe. He was immensely proud of it. He didn’t want to come home; he wanted to remain on duty. Civilians were dragooned into service to defend Berlin. No one had seen Hitler for weeks.

  Frau Haffner kept saying the bombs were unnecessary because they were going to starve to death. She measured, weighed, counted cans of meat, ordered her daughters not to share even a taste of food with Anna. Her family, she said, was her only concern. She had spoken to the authorities, she told Anna, and it was arranged that she would be moved. Someone else would have to take on the responsibility of feeding and housing her.

  “Find her a warm coat,” Dr. Haffner said. “Give her at least a sweater and some wool stockings and boots.”

  “She has a coat. She’ll wear what they give her,” Frau Haffner said. “When she gets there.”

  A car came for Anna. She was driven to a building in Berlin, an office, where documents were produced, and a woman sitting at a desk entered her name on the documents and stamped each page with the date and added her signature and Anna was taken outside, and she waited on the pavement with a woman in uniform until a car pulled up, and then she was driven to a camp near Hanover. Not far from the camp there were homes with nice gardens and fenced fields, and it all looked tranquil and untouched by the war, and she thought—this odd idea came to her—that she was being taken out of the war and sent to a distant country she had not known existed. Then she saw the concentration camp. Barbed wire, dark earth. Low, mean-looking buildings. Huts with small windows. And the people she saw moving between the huts were SS or Gestapo guards. Or they were prisoners.

  She saw corpses heaped up outside the huts. They were just bones with some skin on them. Anna looked away, but everywhere it was the same, and inside the hut it was almost the same, except that some of the corpses were still living. The hut was overcrowded, and yet every day more prisoners were forced in the door. These people, the newcomers, were being moved from camps in the east, just ahead of the advancing Russian army. Anna saw sickness in the feverish, sunken faces around her. The floor was covered in mud and excrement. Some women sat in it or even lay down in it, having no strength to do anything else. Anna stood, her back to the wall, arms behind her, fingernails digging into the damp wood. In this hut a baby was born. It made no sound; someone took it away. Later, Anna climbed into an empty bunk. When she woke, a woman took her to a place where they were handing out food, partly cooked potatoes, one half to each prisoner, and she took her half and ate it, shoving it into her mouth, trying not to gag.

  * * *

  In April 1945 the British army came and liberated the camp. Anna heard the soldiers shouting: Sie sind frei. Sie sind frei. You are free.

  When the soldiers entered the camp, they said no one should be afraid, everyone was going to be helped. Anna heard the soldiers also saying to each other, Fuck it. Fucking hell.

  The worst jobs, cleaning out the huts, for example, the British ordered the SS guards to do, without gloves, without overalls. The British stood over the SS guards with guns and said, Work harder, put your back into it. They made the SS guards carry the dead to a huge grave dug with tractors.

  The British gave the prisoners army rations. Some of the prisoners ate ravenously and got sicker, and some died because their bodies were too frail and desiccated to take that kind of nourishment. Many were ill with dysentery and typhus. Medical personnel arrived, British doctors and nurses. They prescribed special diets, invalid food. Anna understood English, and some of the doctors spoke a little German. To her, they looked like angels. She didn’t want to know what she looked like to them. Her head was shaved because of the lice. She had sores on her mouth, and she hadn’t eaten for days, but she wasn’t sick; she had been vaccinated against typhus, she told the soldiers. One of the soldiers spoke Czech. She repeated to him that she had been vaccinated against typhus. My mother was a doctor, she said. She
liked the British nurses and watched with interest as they tended to people. They asked if she would like to help them. They sent her from one ward to another in search of a roll of bandages or a tube of ointment. The camp’s hospital had been built by the Nazis specifically for men in the Panzer brigades who’d been wounded in battle. It provided the British medical staff with modern equipment, surgical instruments, beds, everything needed to care for the liberated prisoners.

  Sometimes she looked at these people, these survivors of atrocities, almost with antipathy. They were so sick, so pathetic, so noisy in their suffering, some of them. She felt impatient and tried to atone by saying, Let me find you another pillow. Let me help you to sit up.

  There was one patient in the hospital who never complained but just lay there in her bed. The quiet ones were the sickest, the nurses said. Anna helped her to raise her head, to sip from the glass. Take just a sip or it will make you gag, she warned.

  This patient pushed her hand away. “Anna,” the patient said.

  Anna looked at her. “Frau Faber?” she said.

  Frau Faber had no hair, and her blue eyes were bloodshot, the lids inflamed. There was nothing to her. Perhaps enough of her remained to reconstitute a viable person, perhaps not.

  “Natalia,” Anna said, and they smiled at each other.

  In the weeks that followed the camp’s liberation, the British army went house to house in the neighboring towns and demanded donations of clothes and shoes for the internees. Everything they brought back got heaped on the floor in one of the huts at Camp Two. Anna picked out a print dress and a sweater. A woman tried to pull the sweater out of her hands, but Anna refused to let go, and the woman gave up. You had to be like that in the melee, to get anything. She searched in a pile of shoes and couldn’t find a single matched pair. People clomped around in mismatched shoes. They spoke in Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, German. A woman found Anna mismatched shoes, and she put them on at once. One fit, the other was a little too big. There was room for at least two Annas inside her new dress. Her hair was shorn, and her face had erupted in a rash from the DDT delousing powder. She imagined her mother could see her and was consoling her, saying it was all right, her hair would grow, and she must let the nurses put ointment on the rash, which would soon heal.