A Sparrow in Terezin

by Kristy Cambron

Kája exhaled. “We could patch the window. I have some cardboard at the school. Maybe we could find something to attach it to the windowsill?”

  “That might work for now, but what about when it rains? Or snows?”

  “I don’t know what the answer is, but we’ll decide what to do later. Right now she needs care. That’s all I can think. Even if it’s in an attic with no water or heat. We’ll have to fight for enough rations to keep everyone fed, but we can do that. She doesn’t look like she’d eat much of what we’d offer anyway.”

  Agnes sighed.

  “One more thing. I hesitate to bring this up now, but I don’t know if this is a good idea because of your mother. Kája, she has me very concerned.”

  Kája’s heart sank like a stone. “What? Why?”

  “She’s . . . confused.”

  “What do you mean, confused?”

  It was the kind of comment Kája had prepared herself for. With her mother’s bewilderment in Prague and her steady decline in the months since they’d entered Terezin, she knew it was inevitable.

  “Izabel doesn’t seem to know where she is much of the time. I try to remind her when I can, but she doesn’t believe me. She’s gotten up and tried to leave the factory more than once. And she can’t keep up with the work, so much so that the guards are beginning to notice. I still make sure to sit by her each day, but I’m having trouble getting my work and hers done too. I’ve handed some of it off to the other girls near us, but I think they are resentful of it. I’m not sure how long she can keep up the sewing, and I don’t know who we can trust if she doesn’t. ”

  The only thing left to do was nod. Kája did so, blankly.

  Her mother was slipping further and further away. She appeared a frail old shell, sleeping her hours away as if lost in a dream world. In the hours she was awake, Kája could only see glimpses of the woman who had borne her.

  “She called me Hannah today.”

  Kája’s tears boiled over at the mention of her sister. Her hand flew to her mouth seemingly on its own and she cried, biting at the side of her finger to keep the emotion hemmed in. She said a quick prayer thanking God that her sister and brother-in-law were still safe in Palestine, as far as she knew, and that it was very far away from the hellish attic in which they fought to live now.

  Arms came around her then, the thin, bony arms of a young German woman who’d been in Terezin longer than she. They cried together, shedding the anguish that had been walled up inside their hearts for so long.

  “I tried.” Kája’s voice came out in a muddle of tears. “I tried to get the Jewish Council to move me to the factory so I could be by her side. But they wouldn’t relent. They’re keeping me where I am.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you, but I knew you’d want to know. And don’t worry,” Agnes whispered in her ear. “I’ll be Hannah every day if I have to.”

  She welcomed Agnes’s embrace, nodding, feeling the weight of the world bearing down on them both. They stayed in the hall for long moments, Kája wondering where hope had gone. Murmuring words of prayer up at the ceiling.

  She thought of Liam and how he had worried over the safety of his father. Liam would understand how she felt right now. But for the first time, she was glad he wasn’t with her. Glad he would never see her like this. All she could do was pray that like Hannah, he, too, was alive and safe.

  Kája could hear people on the floor below them, women returning to their makeshift rooms and guards marching up the stairs for the nightly counts. Agnes pulled back and they both wiped at the tears under their eyes.

  It wasn’t until they’d stepped back into the room that Kája saw the sweet glimmer of hope. There on the bed next to her mother was a little girl in a navy polka-dot dress and gray knee socks, curled up and precious in sleep, hugging a picture book to her chest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  7 Wadham Gardens

  Primrose Hill, London

  Sera stepped out from the cab and into the quiet neighborhood of Primrose Hill.

  The street boasted impressive, multistoried brick homes with manicured yards and gated iron and wood fences. They each had their own front garden and cottage feel, with trees lining the expanse of the sidewalk along the street and the sweet smell of honeysuckle perfuming the afternoon air.

  Number 7 was on the far end of a high brick fence and a bower of tall trees.

  Sera approached it, passing through the gate. And though her feet were heavier with each step, she walked up the cobblestone path to the front door and rang the bell.

  She tried not to shift her feet while she waited. And as she heard a bustling noise from inside, the door was cracked wide and a young woman of perhaps twenty appeared before her, standing tall with dark hair and light-blue eyes.

  “Hello?” She stood before Sera and with a curious bent, asked, “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Katie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Katie Elizabeth Hanover?”

  She shifted her stance, giving a more reluctant, “Yes.”

  Sera nodded. “Then, umm, may I speak with you for a moment?”

  Katie folded her arms across her chest and squinted into the sunlight. She looked back into the shadow of the house for a moment, then seemed to decide. She came out on the porch and closed the door with a soft click behind her.

  “Look. If you’re a lawyer, I’ll tell you what I told the rest of them. We don’t want any money. We don’t want the Hanover name. We just want to be left alone.”

  “I’m not a lawyer.” Sera shook her head. “And I’m not here to offer you any money. I just need some information, if you have it.”

  “Information about what?”

  The girl was beautiful. She flipped dark waves over her shoulder, and Sera could tell she was making every attempt at appearing indifferent. But the expressive blue of her eyes gave her away. Sera could see—she was more interested than she was willing to admit.

  “I’m wondering if you know a William Hanover?”

  Katie answered immediately. “What does he want now?”

  “Nothing. I—” Sera had thought to introduce herself as William’s wife but based on the cool reception of the name, she was quick to think better of it. She took the folded paper photograph from her pocket and held it out in front of her. “I just need to know if you can help me identify something. It’s a piece of jewelry in the family estate, and I have reason to believe it might be in your possession. I’m not asking for the jewelry back or anything. I just need to know if you’ve seen it.”

  Katie eyed it with a skeptical glare.

  “Who are you?” she asked, and slid her hand back onto the doorknob.

  “I’m Sera. And I’m not here to cause trouble,” she replied. “Please. I’m just hoping you can tell me if you’ve ever seen it before. That’s all I ask.”

  Katie looked back at her, decision evident on her face. She sighed lightly, then nodded and took the paper in hand. It wasn’t a second after she’d unfolded it that she handed the paper right back.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s an old cross necklace that I received as a gift a few years back. But it’s broken. The clasp doesn’t work.”

  “It’s broken,” Sera said, looking up at her. “Wait, you mean you have it? Here?”

  Katie nodded. “All I know is that it was sent to me from some grandfather in America whom I’ve never met. I received that necklace in the mail and then I heard that he died sometime after.”

  Sera’s world felt like it was tumbling down on that quaint Primrose porch. She swallowed hard and with every ounce of restraint, asked, “I’m sorry. Did you say grandfather?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Would you mind if I come inside for a minute?” she breathed out, shock not yet settling in. “My name is Sera Hanover and I think I might be your sister-in-law.”

  The news that Thomas Hanover had another daughter was about the last thing Sera had expected to learn that day.

  Even so, she’d
managed to hold her composure enough to accept an invitation into the front room of Katie Hanover’s home and proceeded to spend the next half hour with the half-sister William had never told her about.

  Back at the Hanover townhome, she went straight up to the guest suite, praying to avoid both Thomas and Mrs. Clark in her desperation to talk to Penny. She ducked into the sitting room and finding it as empty, she slid into the chair by the fireplace and dropped her head in her hands.

  “Sera.”

  William stood in the doorway to her bedroom, with a rather shifty-footed Penny nearby. She was wringing her hands like a good friend should, darting her eyes back and forth from husband to wife while doing her best to give Sera a supportive look.

  “I think I’ll just step out to the garden for a few minutes so you two can talk,” she tossed out lightly, though the tension in the room could have set the entire house ablaze despite her attempt to cool it. She sent Sera a broken but encouraging half smile and headed for the door.

  Sera waited until she heard the door close before moving. And though quite sure he knew exactly what she was going to say, Sera stood, looked him point-blank in the face, and said, “I’m leaving.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  February 26, 1943

  Terezin

  There had been no transports to leave so far that February. And then the trains began again.

  It was early still, the sky barely cracked with the light of dawn, and a transport train had already come through the fog with scores of prisoners in tow. There walked the elderly, their hands barely able to hold their suitcase handles in the bitter cold. Several coughing children followed along. Kája wondered how many would show up at their schoolhouse door, and how many would be missing the day after that. The little ones walked along, heads down, holding the hands of adults with the same hunched shoulders. Parents, teachers, merchants, musicians . . . who had they been before Terezin? The guards had come out to keep watch, their unconcern evident in the way they enjoyed a casual smoke on the street corners.

  The transport ambled by, a ghost army bound to haunt Terezin’s city streets.

  The lost were there too. The forgotten souls whose train had come in any day before this one. Mostly elderly, all starving; they wandered through the streets, looking for food when there was none, peeking into shop windows when there was nothing to buy. Kája had seen them on her walk from the train on her first day, too, the lost birds out in the cold. Though they had new faces now, their haunting presence remained. They took up benches, doorways, the corners of buildings even, dotting the streets like mournful markers on the route to the school building.

  “She was here yesterday,” Sophie remarked, the quiet shudder of her voice drawing Kája’s attention.

  A woman, clad in tatters with a curious purple silk scarf round her head, sat motionless on a bench ahead of them. Her feet were stretched out, warning that she’d trip anyone who walked by too closely.

  Kája drew in a steadying breath when she saw the woman’s face. It was not gray like the rest of the slowly starving. Her skin was pale as flour, frozen against the icy morning air. She’d slumped to the side sometime the day before and no one had noticed. Kája would probably not have noticed had Sophie not spoken. And how long would she sit here today? Tomorrow?

  “Come along, Sophie.” Kája tried to sound unconcerned and quickly turned them away from the bench to cross the street. “We’ll walk along the other side of the street today.”

  She kept them going, heads down and hoping to go unnoticed.

  The school was in an old dressmaker’s shop past Neuegasse Street.

  Shops had opened along it, curious oddities with street-facing windows and large signs, but no patrons who went inside. These were shops where no one made purchases. There was money in Terezin, official notes printed and handed out to prisoners for their purchasing needs. But what good did it do? There was no food. No medicine or clean water one could buy. Even the secondhand clothing shop boasted goods one would never need in such a place. Opera gloves and furs, silk dresses and jewels, all confiscated from the very suitcases that were being carried along the streets now. And who’d have need of them?

  Kája glanced in the shop windows on that morning, never expecting to stop. Never wishing to give the pain of seeing Jewish wares for sale any stronghold in her heart. But she paused now, still in mid stride with hand tightly fused to Sophie’s, drawn by a wink of blue in one of the windows.

  Her feet seemed to stop on their own, her breath freezing against the weathered glass before them. Sophie stood with her, squeezing her hand in confusion, trying to pull her along. Kája felt for a moment as dead as the woman they’d passed by on the bench. What did it all matter now? A purple scarf? Suitcases being carried and schoolhouses being readied for the day? She couldn’t know, not when there in the front window, as if to torture her, was a string of pearls and their mates, unique little studs with tiny settings of emerald blue, for sale to no one.

  They hadn’t any desks, but instead used the large rectangular work table in the center of the shop as their work space. Stacked crates and large wooden spools served as chairs. An easel had been positioned at one end, which Kája used as her instruction space, and at the other, a small box stove that was fed with used paper and wood chips that the children collected on their way to the school each day.

  Collages dotted the room, hung on the wall with old tacks or pinned to lengths of twine draped along the back wall. Theirs was art fashioned from life in Terezin, the children’s expressions made from old newsprint and label paper from old cans. They used what they had. Stretched where they could. And all the while, Kája tried to believe that she wasn’t feeding them false hope.

  The pearls forced from her thoughts, Kája went about her duties for the morning, setting out what paper they had left and filling small jars with rain water they’d collected from one of the run-off gutter spouts behind the building.

  “Your jars are ready,” she said, and set them on the end of the work table for Sophie to distribute.

  Sophie had become her silent partner of sorts, not saying much but bringing wares to the work table: old cans of pencils and boxes with broken crayons rolling around in the bottom. She worked quietly in her polka-dot dress, settling into the corner like a silent worker bee.

  “Sophie, what we saw this morning . . . ,” Kája began to explain, wanting to find some way to connect with the little girl, but was interrupted by a tiny knock at the door. She sighed and stood.

  Kája dried her hands on a towel and walked over to open the back door, knowing the conversation would have to wait now that the children were arriving.

  Little Adina, the younger of two sisters from Poland, stood in the cold. She blew air into her hands and whispered, “Dobré ráno, Miss Makovský.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Adina.” She opened the door wide, having been unable to return the greeting with anything but a hard-fought half smile. “It is cold out, yes? Do come in and warm yourself by the stove.”

  Adina agreed with an enthusiastic nod and stepped inside. “The walk was cold.”

  Adina closed the door and proceeded to take off her winter wrappings. Kája looked around, alarm bells going off in her head.

  Where is Ingrid?

  When camp inhabitants did not show up when expected, that was never a good thing. She stood with hands on her hips and asked, “Your sister, Adina. Where is she today?”

  Sophie looked up from the work table.

  The little girl stopped in motion before hanging her coat on the hook by the wall. She kept her back to Kája, shoulders squared, and slowly shook her head. She hung her coat and without turning whispered, “Ingrid has a cough.”

  “A cough? But she was here yesterday and didn’t seem ill.” Kája knelt down before the little girl, taking her tiny hand in her own. “Tell me—how bad is it?”

  “I don’t know. She coughed through the night and woke with a fever. Mother thought it best s
he stay hidden in the barracks today.”

  “And has she seen a doctor?”

  Adina shook her head, her lopsided braids tossing about her shoulders with the movement. “No. Mother was afraid they would think our barracks have illness and come to take us away. She refused to call a doctor. She made Ingrid promise to sleep under her bunk today and stay out of sight.”

  Kája exhaled, wishing there was something else she could do. If Ingrid was sick, the risk of accepting her at school with the rest of the children was great. Disease spread like wildfire once it found a victim. But leaving her to sleep on the freezing barrack floor was a greater risk. There would be no hope for the little girl if something wasn’t done.

  “Adina, I can go for a doctor. Do you think your sister has enough strength to walk here today if I went to go get her?”

  “Yes. I think so.” Her reluctant nodding left certainty far out of the equation.

  “You must be sure.”

  It would do no good to bring Ingrid out in the cold if she couldn’t walk. Carrying her in front of the guards was out of the question. But the thought of Ingrid alone in the barracks, with transport trains running again . . . they couldn’t risk leaving her behind.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  Kája turned at the sound of Sophie’s voice, so clear and strong in offering to help. She hadn’t said much beyond small utterances since arriving in Terezin. But this? Sophie’s declaration was so loud that it fairly echoed off the walls. She crossed the room and immediately began pulling on her coat.

  “Sophie . . . I don’t know. It will be faster if I go alone.”

  Sophie shook her head, wide-eyed and beautiful, with strength that astonished Kája. Where it came from, she hadn’t a clue.

  “I know where to hide from the guards,” she vowed, voice firm. “I could sneak into the barracks and hold her up while we walk.”

  “Where?”

  “There is a brick wall by the gardens. I saw it that first day I came here. We can pass by there without being seen.”