The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII

by Marion Kummerow

  Frau Tauber headed for the stairs.

  “Paní doktorová?” Magda followed with Eliška. “Has something happened?”

  It was Tuesday. On Tuesdays Dr. Tauber still worked at the hospital all day, conducting surgeries and checking on his patients. Rarely was he home before supper, and more often than not, long after that.

  “I want to go see Papa,” Eliška said. “I want to go listen to his heart with that thing…that steta…stetatope.”

  Frau Tauber stopped her daughter short of the office. “Let Magda take you into the playroom. I have to speak to your father first.”

  Ruth Tauber went to the door and knocked softly before letting herself in. There were no voices, no sounds, nothing that revealed a hint as to what had happened. Dr. Tauber was normally a composed gentleman. Slamming doors could only mean that the cruel world had found its way to Villa Liška.

  Magda led Eliška to the playroom at the end of the corridor and set up papers and paints for her. Eliška put on a little overcoat to keep her clothes clean in case of mishaps. Once the girl was busy, Magda edged her way down the corridor. Now she heard muffled voices.

  From the dining room, Renata appeared with Aleš, who was holding the box of silver. They were heading for the stairs, but both stopped at the sight of Magda and exchanged a guilty look.

  Frowning, Magda went to them. “Where are you going with that?” She pointed to the familiar case.

  “Are they in there?” Renata asked, indicating Dr. Tauber’s office.

  “Yes.”

  Aleš went upstairs, and before Magda could protest again, Renata stood in front of her, arms crossed over her chest.

  “What’s going on?” Magda asked.

  The front doorbell rang, and Renata looked relieved, before hurrying and opening it. Magda peered after Aleš and saw that he was moving to the attic floor, still carrying the silverware.

  “Good morning, Renata,” Magda heard Mayor Brauer say. “I’ll just go in and see him.”

  Renata did not budge. He peered over her at Magda. “I know he’s here.”

  It was obvious anyway, with the car parked out front.

  “Please wait here,” Renata said. “I’ll let him know.”

  “It’s a tragedy, really.” He pushed in and took off his hat, hanging it on one of the hooks. “I suppose you’ve heard.”

  Renata shook her head and shrugged. Mayor Brauer motioned for her to lead the way, though he seemed prepared to take charge himself.

  He passed Magda as if she were invisible. “You’ll hear soon enough, I suppose.”

  The Taubers came out of the office then.

  “Max,” Dr. Tauber said stiffly.

  “Hello, Johan. Ruth.” Mayor Brauer stuck out his hand to Frau Tauber first, but her greeting was lukewarm as she wrapped the morning gown tightly around her. Dr. Tauber took the mayor’s hand brusquely in turn, then motioned him in.

  The last thing Magda heard was the mayor making apologies and something about how unprofessionally the hospital handled the situation. Frau Tauber shut the door and closed off the source of information, before gazing at Renata and Magda.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s it then.”

  She walked past them toward the stairs and turned around.

  “Magda, were you planning to go out with Eliška today?”

  Magda nodded.

  “I’d prefer you stayed indoors.”

  “Yes, Frau Tauber.”

  She nodded. “I’ll get dressed then.”

  Magda made to go back to Eliška’s playroom, but when Frau Tauber’s bedroom door closed, Magda returned to find Renata in the dining room.

  Renata’s expression was grave.

  “Please tell me what’s happened,” Magda whispered.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Renata whispered back. “The doctor called from the police station though. The police chief put the call through and then handed him the telephone.” Renata’s voice dropped a decibel. “I think he’s been banned from the hospital.”

  Magda covered her mouth. “Why?”

  Renata nudged Magda toward the drawing room. She picked up that morning’s newspaper from Prague and opened it to the front page. Magda gasped at the announcement.

  All Jews age six and older in Slovakia, Bohemia, and Moravia are ordered to wear yellow stars, effective September 19, and to suspend all business activity. Report to the Reich’s Central Office for Jewish Resettlement to purchase your stars and register your property.

  “But the Taubers have special status,” Magda said. “Don’t they? Dr. Tauber’s the best oncologist outside of Prague. The hospital needs him.”

  Renata took the newspaper from her. “Aleš has a friend named Davide at the rail station In Bohošovice. He’s responsible for the coal and grain transports, sees to it that the breweries get their loads right. He told Aleš that an unscheduled train arrived a week ago. Middle of the night. Davide was there, working on some paperwork. The SS came and muscled him, made him stay inside the office, but there’s a big window, and he caught a glimpse of people coming off the train. When the SS left, he went outside to have a look. He could have sworn there had been a lot of bodies coming off that train, especially as it took a long time before the SS left him. Anyway, Davide finally saw where they’d headed with all those people.”

  “Where?”

  “To Theresienstadt, the old fort, you know? It’s where Aleš was once based. So Aleš went over there. He knows someone who still works there, maintaining the buildings. But his friend was really scared, said it was all hush-hush. Aleš finally got it out of him. He said that, yeah, a lot of men arrived in the middle of the night. He thought they were all prisoners of war, but”—she pointed to the newspaper—“there were plenty wearing these stars too.”

  Across the corridor, voices suddenly rose, and then the door to Dr. Tauber’s office flew open. Mayor Brauer looked distraught.

  “What more am I to do, Johan?” the mayor said angrily. “It’s a house arrest, not a deportation. I have to cooperate.”

  “You have to do no such thing,” Dr. Tauber said through clenched teeth.

  Mayor Brauer jabbed a finger into Dr. Tauber’s chest. “I have to, and you do as well now.” He released his finger. “I never thought it would go this far, Johan, not like this.”

  Dr. Tauber scoffed. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been aware of the antisemitism in this town. Anna was right. You’re a wholly unbelievable actor.”

  “Why didn’t you leave when you could?” Mayor Brauer demanded. “I got you the―”

  “Max!”

  Magda’s heart leapt. If the Taubers had to leave, what would become of her?

  Dr. Tauber shook his head and pinched his nose beneath his glasses. “There is someone else I can talk to. Someone…” He looked up and tilted his head back, sighing. “Someone important.”

  He suddenly turned his head in the direction of the drawing room, where Magda stood frozen to her spot. Renata jumped and rushed to the door, excused herself softly, and shut it.

  She turned and stared at Magda. “This is more serious than we even thought.”

  “We” was certainly her and Aleš. Magda was only beginning to comprehend they were in any real danger now.

  “What’s going to happen?” she asked.

  Renata leaned an ear against the door, then moved away to the ottoman as footfalls neared the drawing room. Dr. Tauber came in.

  He looked down at his feet and took in a deep breath. “I’m sorry you had to hear all that.”

  He went to the divan and sat, indicating they should sit as well. Magda moved to the chair closest to her and perched on the end of it. Renata remained standing over the ottoman.

  “Mayor Brauer has assured me that he’ll find a way to let me practice.” He hung his head and waved a hand around in the air. “Even if it’s here at the house.“

  “Is Frau Tauber well?” Renata interjected.

  He looked up and scratched his nec
k. “She’s fine.”

  “Because she’s been behaving rather, well, not herself,” Renata insisted.

  She was right. The past few weeks, Frau Tauber had been getting up later and had been eating less. Which, if Renata was right about the developments, would signal she was distressed.

  Dr. Tauber smiled weakly. “That was something we wanted to tell the house a little later.”

  “She’s expecting, isn’t she?” Renata broke in.

  “Normally it would be happy news,” he said.

  Renata sat. “What did the mayor say?”

  They were talking as if they knew each other as intimate friends, and Magda wondered how she fit into this setting, why she was allowed to be here and take part. Then again, nothing in this house had ever been overly formal, and that included the relationships to the household staff.

  Dr. Tauber glanced at Magda. “Mayor Brauer will not remain in his position much longer. That’s what he fears. He’s done his best. I will grant him that. And as his friend, I cannot expect more of him.”

  Renata huffed. “You’ve saved his hide more than a few times.”

  “He’s in danger,” Dr. Tauber said.

  Magda gripped the edge of her seat.

  “Listen,” he added. “We’re going to go about our business until we know more. There is an important patient.”

  Renata sat up. “The SS officer from the Napola?”

  He nodded, reached into his breast pocket, and shook something carefully out of an envelope. They lay in the palm of his hand.

  The yellow stars. Magda counted them.

  He extended them toward Renata. “In the meantime, we’ll need to apply these.”

  Renata stared at him. Sweat broke out across Magda’s brow.

  “We must comply,” Dr. Tauber said. “The authorities should have no reason to find fault with us. When this is all over—”

  “No!” Renata leapt up and slapped his hand away. Four stars scattered across the floor, one landing before Magda’s foot. Renata and Dr. Tauber glared at one another, neither moving to pick them up.

  Magda stood. She could not draw air. She stared at the star before her foot. Jude. Renata was one of them. Magda bolted to the French doors, threw them open, and fled to the deer park and into the woods beyond.

  The motorbikes, the motorcades, the tanks, and the foot soldiers marched through Voštiny on the foggy dawn of October 2. Two days later, Magda’s father received notice to report to the town hall. A new protectorate was established, and the mayor was arrested for being a suspected Communist sympathizer, and his wife for being a registered one.

  Her father left the farm one morning on a horse and returned in the back of a truck and no sign of the horse. His head hung low over his folded hands as six Wehrmacht soldiers jumped down from the back and positioned themselves in the yard. A lieutenant stepped out of a second vehicle.

  Magda felt her brothers bristling next to her. One of the Germans eyed her face, then turned away.

  Her mother called to her father, but he did not lift his head. Magda knew why. Whatever they had done to him, he did not want his wife to see.

  The lieutenant addressed the rest of the family and told them that they were there to confiscate weapons and that their house had been requisitioned. The documents were in German, stamped and signed with the names of officials none of the Nováks knew.

  “Requisitioned for whom?” one of Magda’s brothers snapped. “For your men?”

  The lieutenant scowled at her brother as if he were an idiot. “For a German family. You have two hours to pack your things and find new accommodations, but the farm will be vacated.”

  “Where should we go?” Magda’s mother protested.

  The lieutenant looked confused or annoyed and shook his head. “How should I know? You Slavs are the ones who have a thousand relatives for every family. Go to one of them.”

  As for her brothers, the lieutenant said, they had orders to report to Wehrmacht headquarters. “We need workers in Germany, and we need soldiers.”

  When they brought Magda’s father down from the truck, they refilled it with her brothers and the two rifles that were registered. But not the ones that had been hidden. Magda’s oldest brother had come home with two revolvers and had argued with their father about how he was certain that the problems between the Sudetenland and Germany would not be settled peacefully, as it had seemed earlier that year. They had to protect themselves, he’d said.

  Magda’s father and mother stood behind her as the trucks drove off with her two brothers. And then her father said to her, “Magdalena, when it’s time, the guns are buried beneath the apple tree. Southeast root.”

  The horse, like their house, had also been requisitioned. Their father had been allowed to stay to work the land for the grain the army would need. They never had the courage to dig up the revolvers.

  That time never came.

  It was shortly afterward, when Magda’s family was piled on top of one another in her great-aunt’s home, that the family decided Magda would go to Litoměřice and look for work. Just through the winter, to relieve the family of the depleted resources.

  Magda passed their farm on the way to Litoměřice and saw two things: In the yard were three young children playing a game, and a man was leading a horse—their horse—into the stable. A dark-haired woman stood, hands on her hips, surveying the yard with an air of authority. Two boys and a man were unloading a wagon filled with furniture. The second thing Magda saw was that the road leading east was flooded by people in carts, on foot, on bicycles. Dogs, cows, donkeys, and goats followed them. The people’s belongings were piled and tied precariously atop anything—the roof of a vehicle, tied up in carts, on bicycle baskets. And the sky buzzed with the planes overhead, raining leaflets down.

  Magda picked one up, swimming against the tide of those trying to make it to the rump of Czechoslovakia, to Hungary perhaps, which still remained free of the Nazis. The leaflet said, “This is now the German Reich.” Followed by a list of rules—all Jews and Communists were to report to the new protectorate, curfew was at seven o’clock, all weapons were to be turned in to the village headquarters, and so on.

  She folded the piece of paper and put it in her pocket. “Survive,” her mother had said. “That’s all—just survive. Do what they want, and at some point this will be over. But live, daughter.”

  Two weeks after arriving at Villa Liška, she received a letter from her mother about her brothers. Please stay if you are safe. They relied on her to recover the farm when this is all over.

  All Magda wanted was to have her family back together. She would work where she could, long enough to outlive the war and return home. All she had to do was keep her head down in the process.

  Walter had his hand on Magda’s thigh. He leaned in and whispered something into her ear. She could not understand him. He looked over her shoulder and grinned. Magda whirled around. Dr. Tauber stepped out of the shadows, watching, disapproval etched into his brow and around his mouth. He looked very old and gaunt.

  Walter turned her face back to his, his gaze still over her shoulder. She thought he would kiss her, but he was whispering again.

  Magda jerked away. “What did you say?”

  Walter’s mouth moved, and finally the words came, but it was not Walter’s voice. It was Eliška’s. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  Magda shot up in bed. In the dark, she put a hand over her thudding heart and strained to see something. Jana stirred in the bed across from her, and Magda took a deep, shaky breath, grateful she was not alone.

  After Magda had returned from the woods, Jana had sent her upstairs to rest with a bowl of soup and had told her she’d had nothing to apologize for. She’d waited a while, hoping to see the Taubers, who were talking with Aleš behind closed doors in Dr. Tauber’s office. But nobody came out. Exhausted, Magda had gone upstairs to her room and crawled beneath the covers, but did not remember falling asleep.

  Shivering, she now pul
led the blankets up around her and stared out the window. The night sky was moonless and pitch black. It was quiet save for Jana’s soft snoring.

  What had awoken Magda? She moved the blankets off and searched for her slippers before rising and going to the window. Walter’s image in her dream still lingered. She folded her arms over her chest and peered into the garden below her, three floors down. Still, she saw nothing that would have startled her from sleep.

  She was about to turn away from the window and go back to bed, when a faint orange light flickered on the lawn below. She leaned on the windowsill. The light was coming from Eliška’s window, just below Magda’s. She watched the light move, flicker, grow stronger, illuminating the hedge now. Like candlelight.

  Magda gasped. She shook Jana’s shoulders, who spluttered awake.

  “It’s a fire!” Magda lurched out of the room and pounded on Renata’s door. “Wake up! Get up! Fire!”

  Magda nearly slipped on the stairs on her way to the second floor and used the banister to propel herself to Eliška’s bedroom door. Thin, sinister wisps of smoke curled from beneath the crack. Magda stopped herself from yelling Eliška’s name. Above her and at the opposite end of the landing, she heard voices, the slamming of doors, questions, but she was feeling the door with her open palms. The handle was cool. She stepped aside, hand turning the knob already. Frau Tauber’s stricken face appeared down the corridor. Magda could hear her trying to turn on the light switch.

  Magda took in a deep breath and pushed inside.

  There was a hissing sound and crackling. Smoke. Flames. Eliška’s body was in the bed. Asleep or unconscious? The fire was crawling up the drapes, licking at the ceiling. Broken glass lay on the bedside table. The lamp. Next to it, Eliška’s china doll’s face was blackened. Scorch marks surrounded the socket.