The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII

by Marion Kummerow

  “I will perform a mitzvah. I need you to hold the boy still on the table.”

  The midwife shook her head and stepped back. “What do you mean?”

  “And I need permission from the community.” Magda studied the midwife. “Yours will do, but Jana has already given hers.”

  “But—”

  Magda stepped toward her. “This child will be blessed in the tradition of this household.” She leaned in toward Eva, lifted the baby from her arms, and whispered, “Samuel is alive!”

  Eva released the child and stared at Magda in disbelief.

  “It’s true. I am his sandek. The closest I shall be to a godmother. But Koenig is going after him. He doesn’t know it but Samuel is at the convent across the river.” She held the knife up and showed it to Eva. “There will be no blood. The only horror here will be Koenig’s when he discovers that his son will never be able to serve the Führer.”

  Eva’s eyes grew wider, but when she slowly dropped her hand, her fear transformed into intent before Magda’s very eyes.

  “You may stay or you may go,” Magda offered. “If you stay, you will have to leave with me tonight. As you are.”

  Eva’s gaze never left Magda’s face as she bent over the child.

  Magda stroked the boy’s head, his face, his chest. She examined him. His birthmark was on the back of his right thigh.

  She soothed the boy one last time and looked at Eva. “Do I have your permission?”

  The midwife nodded.

  Magda raised the knife. “Then l’chaim. To life.”

  9

  June 1942

  The sound of a baby’s cry brought tears of relief. Magda left Aleš and Eva behind as she ran the last few feet to the mountain hut. Renata waited outside with an infant in her arms. Magda scooped the bundle from her, tears streaming as she kissed Samuel’s sweet face. She remembered how he had weighed in her arms the last time she’d held him, the day Koenig and Walter had come. Now he was bigger, with chubby cheeks and Frau Tauber’s blue eyes.

  Renata crossed her arms. “And? Are you happy with yourself?”

  Magda took his right hand in hers and shoved the cuff of his sleeve up with her thumb. There it was, the brown birthmark on his wrist. She looked up from the baby, and Samuel began to fuss. She shushed him and cooed at him. It had been too long. He could no longer know who she was.

  “It was a terrible risk,” Renata continued. “Terrible, Magda.”

  Magda could say nothing to this; she still did not quite understand herself. She pictured Richard Koenig coming home and lifting his son into his arms for the first time. She did not know how long it would be before he would take enough interest to examine his child, before he—and his wife—realized what had been done. But when he found out, she could see his square, boxer physique striding across the room in that uniform, the doors slamming, and the fury. That fury would precede the final act: his total humiliation. He might order a hunt for Eva and her, but he would never tell anyone the real reason for it, never tell anyone about what had been done to his son. And Jana would be questioned, quite possibly beaten, but she would continue to feign ignorance and outrage. She was a German full blood, and she had the talent of being exceptionally convincing. Those two things, she’d told Magda at the kitchen table, would keep her alive.

  When Aleš and Eva arrived, Magda followed everyone inside. It was a simple woodsman’s hut, a single room with few furnishings: one bed, a table with two long benches on either side, a small stove to cook and heat with. They sat. Renata pushed a plate of bread and a glass of water to Magda.

  “How did you pick up Samuel?” Magda dipped a piece of bread and held it to the child’s mouth. He tasted it and sucked it in, his beautiful eyes straining to focus on her so up close.

  Renata crossed her arms. “Davide drove. Gabriel did the talking. The Nazis were right behind us. I don’t think it was more than a minute before we saw the first headlights pulling into the convent. We left through the service road, lights out.”

  She made it sound so easy, but Magda knew better. Their nerves were beyond frayed, all of them. She kissed the top of Samuel’s head, fed him another piece of bread. “Then I met you just in time.”

  “You said the opium, Magda. You wanted the opium, and I thought it was for getting yourself and Jana out. If you had told me what you were planning—” Renata shook her head.

  Magda shriveled beneath her glare.

  “You’re incredible, you know that?”

  “Yes,” Aleš interjected. “And now we need to decide what we’re going to do with Magda’s newfound courage.”

  Renata and he took turns reprimanding her and Eva. The three of them—Magda, Eva, and Samuel—were in grave danger. Samuel because of Koenig’s orders to eradicate every evidence of hiding Jews or collaborators, and Eva and Magda for their rash crime. But getting them out of the district altogether—especially Magda with her recognizable features—was not without great risks. They needed travel permits, and with the crackdown, it would be extra challenging.

  Magda listened with half an ear, distancing herself by keeping Samuel busy. Outside, birds sang in the surrounding woods, and the trickle of a nearby creek came through the door. Everything seemed lighter. The danger felt far away, and with Samuel in her arms, even more so.

  “Can’t we simply stay here?” Magda interrupted.

  “From now on,” Aleš said measuredly, “you will always be on the run, always terrified.”

  Magda pulled Samuel back into her lap. “I understand.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” Renata challenged. She glared at Eva next. “And you! You were our best connection aboveground. Your family’s bakery will be destroyed.”

  “Enough, Renata.” Aleš nodded at her. “Eva knew what she was doing.”

  Eva smiled wanly. “I never liked the bakery anyway. I can still help. I can still do something underground.”

  Magda laughed abruptly. I never liked the bakery anyway. Even when everyone looked at her with dismay, she could not stop laughing. Samuel’s face screwed up uncertainly at the sound of it.

  Renata pointed to Eva and Magda in turn. “The SS will put out an alert to all divisions of security—from the Wehrmacht to the SS. They will—”

  Magda giggled. “It’s a good thing Walter is on the Eastern Front then.” She laughed at her own joke.

  Staring at her, Renata growled, “They will hunt for you until they have killed you both. Is that what you want, Magda? Do you have a death wish?”

  On the contrary, Magda wanted to say, she had never felt more alive, but she was trying to control the bubble of laughter.

  Aleš slowly shook his head. “She’s in shock, Renata.” He tapped the table with his palms. “My brother will have to find a new place for Samuel—”

  Now Magda stopped laughing. “No! He goes where I go.” She pressed Samuel to her. The baby began screaming. He turned his head, crying as he searched for one familiar person in the room, his little fists pushing against her chest.

  Aleš pointed at the baby. “That is not something I can control. We have nowhere to take him now, not with Koenig leading raids. Samuel has to be moved out of the country.”

  “Where?” Magda demanded. “We’re surrounded on every side.”

  “I know where,” Eva said softly.

  Magda leapt off the bench. She held Samuel high above her, smiled at him, tried to soothe him. He wailed louder, real tears now rolling down his cheeks. “He’s staying with me,” she said, and leaned him against her shoulder, patted his back. “I’m not letting go of him again.”

  “I’ll take him,” Eva said, twisting in her seat to look at Magda. “I’ll bring him to safety. I promise.”

  “Where?” Magda demanded. “You tell me where, and I’ll think about it.”

  Renata slapped the top of the table, stood, and strode to Magda. “Sit down. Just sit down. You will be given information only when it is absolutely necessary. But you have no idea what you are
talking about, no idea what it’s going to be like for you, to be one of us. You’ve gone from delivering coupons and bread rolls to becoming a high-profile fugitive. You get no information. None. Or”—she waved a hand around the whole group—“we’re all dead.”

  If Magda was ever caught. If they tortured her. That was what Renata was saying. They did not trust her to keep her mouth shut, to withstand the pain, the terror, the threat of death. And they were right about that.

  Renata reached for the child. Magda whimpered, felt Aleš’s hands on her shoulders. He pulled her into him and wrapped his arms around her as Renata took Samuel.

  “There are quite a few of us now, Magda,” Aleš said. “We’re well organized. You know about the food, the stashes we have left. It’s not much—we can’t risk much. Once, a fight broke out between two of the prisoners in a field. They had both found the sack and had wrestled one another for those extra rations. Both were shot. We were compromised. The Nazis stepped up their security, and we had to lay low for a few days.” He let that sink in. “There are more of us each day, and that too makes it dangerous. The Germans are finished with accepting foreign leagues. They’ve been sabotaged, attacked, and tricked one too many times. They suspect everyone. Everyone.”

  “And the good news?” Magda asked the room in despair. “Will this ever end?”

  Aleš sighed. “Sometimes we cannot see the trees for all the wood.”

  Magda had lost Eliška. She had lost Frau Tauber and Dr. Tauber. She had nobody left of the family except Samuel, and if she lost sight of him again, if she was not able to make sure of his safety, she was certain she would die as well. She hated herself. She hated them. She hated everything. And that hate dried up her tears. That hate dripped like tar within her, cementing a new resolve she could not put words to.

  Renata handed Eva the baby and then gazed at Magda, and for the first time, her face smoothed. Slowly, she nodded. “Are you ready for this now?”

  What could Magda do with her newfound courage, Aleš had wanted to know.

  Samuel gurgled in Eva’s lap, one fist jammed into his mouth. Magda nodded.

  Magda had three days. She tried to rest, but sleep evaded her. She overheard Aleš and Renata discussing the Taubers, Samuel being taken far away. The Taubers might—he stressed the word might—still be in the ghetto. But, Renata and Davide argued, more and more trains were being sent east filled with the inmates from the ghetto. Davide and his scouts had caught glimpses of the late-night or early-morning transports leaving the nearest train station, and now the Germans were making the prisoners build tracks that would lead directly to and from the old fort.

  Responsible for radioing in the coded messages, Davide received information in return from both the Soviets and the British that news was seeping out of these labor camps, that they were the sites of horrible conditions and illness. What Davide relayed back to the group, Magda knew had been censored. It did not help. She imagined the worst of the worse, but if what she had overheard from Aleš and Renata outside the hut one evening was true, she had not even begun to fathom the length the Nazis were going to in order to exterminate their enemies.

  During the day, Magda played with Samuel, barely letting him out of her sight. Davide appeared one evening. And then it was time. Not once had Eva given a hint of where she was taking Samuel, what risks were involved. But someone, Eva assured, would know that, at war’s end, if they did not find the Taubers right away, they must search for Magda in Voštiny. Aleš, filled with sympathy for her, assured Magda that Eva was heading east, and that was all he would say.

  Once Renata finished transforming Eva, it was obvious that Eva was the right person to take Samuel to safety. With a haircut and her straw-yellow hair dyed a dark brown, her reedy frame padded by extra clothing, and a pair of glasses, Eva was a new woman paired together with well-forged identification papers and a travel permit for herself and her “son.”

  Magda, unless they painted a carnival mask onto her face, was trapped the moment anyone spotted any of her outer features. She had never wished to be more invisible than now.

  Renata remained sore with Magda for most of the time while they hid out in the hut, but Aleš attempted to explain her behavior away. The terror Renata had experienced while she’d hidden from the SS had changed her, had left her edgy. A double panel in the Taubers’ bedroom wall was all that had lain between her and certain death. But the dogs had been called back outside, and the Wehrmacht had ransacked the bedroom but had not found her. The hiding place, Magda discovered after that day, had been meant for them all—the Taubers, their children, and Renata.

  “She is still wondering,” Aleš concluded, “whether we could have gotten everyone into the house on time. And the last thing she wants is for you to have to go through any of that.”

  “None of us,” Eva said to Magda later, “will be left unchanged by these years. This war will end, and our job—the one thing any of us can do to beat this—is to survive it.”

  A day later, Magda was saying goodbye to baby Samuel. She kissed his cheeks, hugged him to her, and finally handed him back to Eva. “Please take care of him.”

  Eva hugged her. “You know I will. You did well, Magda. I will come back and find you.”

  Magda grasped at that wisp of an idea.

  Patrols were seen making checks around the mountains, and Magda was shuffled to a different hiding place each day. A week after she had fled Villa Liška with Eva, she was back in St. Stephen’s, in the crypt. Aleš and Renata were looking for a safe house farther north for her, but for the time being she had to stay put with the coffins. Each day she suffered the pangs of fear, and one day an anxiety attack left her unconscious when she could not breathe. The weight of what she had done, the situation she was now in, was now very real. Renata had been right. She would not withstand this kind of life.

  It was not the first time Magda thought of her family. She had heard from them just before Samuel’s Bris Milah, but nothing since. She thought of the small village where her family had been forced to migrate, a village so insignificant that it ought to remain anonymous. She could go there. She spoke to Renata and Aleš about it, pleaded with them. Yes, it was still within the district, but it was Lidice. Nobody had ever heard of Lidice. And the two others agreed. They would arrange a way to get her there. And Magda looked forward to her family.

  At the sound of the heavy wooden door above opening, Magda scurried into the darkest corner. Footsteps made their way down the stone steps, then the scuff-clack, scuff-clack. Magda stepped to the iron gate and waited for Renata.

  “What time is it?” Magda asked her.

  Renata opened the gate. She handed Magda an apple, a piece of bread, and a wedge of cheese. Magda ate hungrily.

  “It’s night.”

  At the brusque answer, Magda stopped chewing. In the shadow of the crypt, Renata’s breath hitched, and when Magda neared her, she saw that she was crying.

  Magda could not ask. She pictured Eva hanging from a tree. She pictured Samuel dead on the side of a road. They had captured them. Killed them. Slaughtered them.

  “Lidice,” Renata said.

  “Lidice?” A blip on the Nazi’s radar. That was what her great-aunt’s neighbors had said. Magda’s hunger vanished.

  “They’ve burned it to the ground.” Renata choked. She covered her mouth. “Magda, I’m so sorry.”

  “They” had replaced the “we.”

  Magda remembered the neighbors and their concerns for the Nováks, their empathy, and their sympathy. Lidice, they had said, would be of no interest to “them.” The Nováks would be safe, they had assured. But because the Nováks were so many extra bodies, so many extra mouths, Magda had felt awful taking up space and resources. Her mother had always made sure that everyone—especially her two daughters-in-law with their two infants—had had enough to eat. And Magda had seen her mother growing thinner, more anxious, more drawn, her beautiful face reflecting the burden of her concerns. So Magda had left
them. She had left them in that unknown—that anonymous—village somewhere between Prague and Litoměřice.

  Why? What was “their” interest in that village of less than four hundred people?

  Renata was talking, but Magda’s ears were ringing. Someone in Prague had mentioned a letter, Renata said. A member of the resistance connected to Heydrich’s assassination attempt. The letter sent to a Lidice address. The SS rounding the entire village up. They had imprisoned the men in a schoolhouse. They had taken the women and children to a separate location. They massacred the men, ten at a time. If they had adequate Aryan features, if they were candidates for Germanification, some of the children were sifted through and taken away from their mothers. The women they sent east.

  “And the other children?” Magda’s vision was blurred from grief. She could not recall how her sisters-in-law looked. Could not recall how her baby niece had looked. Did she have blond hair? What about her nephew?

  Renata wept next to her. Both had slid down to the floor, the stone walls absorbing their sobs.

  “I hope to God that I am wrong,” Renata said between breaths. “I hope to God it’s only propaganda.”

  It was too late. Magda’s grief may not have been able to recall her family’s faces, but it did allow her to picture Samuel and Eliška trapped inside a cattle truck, the engine running and running.

  “This war will never end,” Magda cried.

  Renata pushed herself off the ground and gruffly brushed at her face, as if to scour the tears away. “Get up.”

  “What?” Magda could barely focus on her.

  “I said, get up.” She tugged at Magda’s shoulders, and Magda nearly fell forward as she came to her feet. “Listen to me. This war will end when each one of us fights in it. And not before.”

  Magda shook her head. “I can’t. I have nothing—”

  Renata’s hand landed on her right cheek so fast, the sting did not immediately follow. Magda stared at her.