Lying on her mattress that night, all Amadea could think about was escaping, but once beyond the gates, then what? There was no way for it to work. He had spoken of Czech partisans in the hills, and how were they supposed to find them? Just walk into the hills and start waving a white flag? It made no sense. But the thought of it kept her going for days. And each day Wilhelm was kinder and spent more time with her. What he was trying to start was an innocent romance, and this wasn't the time or place, nor was she the right woman. But she no longer said that to him. Perhaps they could leave together, as friends. It was an extraordinary idea. Yet she also knew that there was nowhere in the world where they could be safe. He would be a deserter and she a Jew. And together, they would be doubly at risk.
There were rumors in the camp about something happening at the end of May. At first, the inmates didn't know what it was, but there were whispers among the guards. Two Czech patriots, serving with the British forces, had been parachuted into the countryside near Prague. On May 27 they had attempted to assassinate Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector. All hell had broken loose in Prague as a result. Fatally wounded, he died on the fourth of June. Within the next few days 3,188 Czech citizens were arrested, of whom 1,357 were shot. Another 657 died during interrogation. The repercussions were massive, and the reprisals by the Nazis severe. Everyone in the camps waited to hear what was happening day by day.
On the afternoon of June 9 Wilhelm came to her in the garden, walked by her slowly without looking at her, and said a single word. “Tonight.” She turned and stared. He couldn't mean what he had just said. Maybe he was propositioning her. But as she was finishing work, he stopped as though inspecting what she'd done and explained in a rapid whisper. “They are taking over the town of Lidice tonight. It's twenty miles from here, and they need our men. They're going to deport all the women and kill all the men, and burn the town to the ground, as an example to others. Two-thirds of our men are going there. They leave at eight o'clock. Nine at the latest, with most of the trucks and cars. Meet me at the back gate at midnight. I'll find the key.”
“If anyone sees me leaving, I'll be shot.”
“There'll be no one left to shoot you. Stay close to the barracks, no one will see you, and if they stop you, tell them you are going to the sick.” He looked at her meaningfully then, and nodded, as though approving her work, and then he left. She knew what he had said was insane. It was a crazy plan, but there was no question that if there was ever going to be an opportunity, this was the night. And then what would they do? What would she do? But she knew that whatever happened, she had to try it.
She was thinking of the people in the town of Lidice as she walked home. They were going to kill the men and deport the women and children, burn the town down. It was a horrifying thought. But so was staying at Theresienstadt until the end of the war, or getting deported to another camp. She had been there for five months, and she was lucky. She wasn't as sick as most. They had never tattooed her. There were too many new arrivals, too much construction to organize, too much to do. She had slipped through the cracks. And now they were going to slip right out the gate. If they were caught, she would be killed or sent to Auschwitz, and he might be killed as well. She had much to lose. But perhaps more to lose by staying here. She might be sent to Auschwitz anyway. She knew she had to try, even if they killed her. She could not stay here, and they would never get another chance like this. This was the perfect opportunity.
She heard the trucks and cars roar out that night. Others noticed it, too. And even the guards roaming around the barracks were sparse. There was hardly anyone there. But Theresienstadt was a peaceful place. They were “good” Jews. They did as they were told. They worked. They built what they were meant to. They worked in their jobs. They played music. They did as the guards said. It was a peaceful night. And at midnight, Amadea got off her mattress, still wearing her clothes. Almost everyone slept in their clothes. If you didn't, they disappeared. Or got lost. She told the guard she was going to the bathroom, and wanted to check on a friend on the upper floor, in the attic, where the sickest ones were kept. He smiled and moved on. She had never given him any trouble, and he knew she wouldn't now. He knew she was a nun, and was always ministering to someone, either old people or children, or the sick, of which there were thousands. They were all sick to some degree.
“Goodnight,” the guard said politely, as he moved on to the next barracks. It was going to be a quiet night with the others gone. There was no sign of unrest here. Just peaceful Jews. The better weather put everyone in a good mood, inmates and guards alike. The winter had been brutal, but the summer was gentle and warm. Someone was playing a harmonica as Amadea left. She stopped at the bathroom, and then just walked out of the barracks. There was no one there, and it was a short distance from where she was staying to the back gate. It was remarkable. There was absolutely no one around. The main square was a ghost town tonight. And he was there. Waiting for her. He had the key in his hand and showed it to her with a smile. With a single brief gesture, he put the enormous metal key in the lock, the same one that had been used for nearly two hundred years. The gate squeaked open, just enough to let them both through, and he closed it again, reached back inside to lock it, and then tossed the key away. If they found it, they would think a sentry had dropped it inadvertently and be relieved that no one had found it and unlocked the gate. And then they ran. They ran like the wind, both of them. Amadea never knew she could run so fast. Every moment, every second, she waited to hear shots, to feel a knifelike pain in her back or heart or her arm or her leg. She felt nothing. She heard nothing except Wilhelm's breath and hers. Until they reached the trees. There was a forest near Theresienstadt, and they plunged into it like two lost children, gasping for breath. They had done it! They were safe! She was free!
“Oh my God!” she whispered in the moonlight. “Oh my God! Wilhelm, we did it!” It was impossible to believe. She was beaming at him, as he smiled at her. And she had never seen so much love in a man's eyes.
“My darling, I love you,” he whispered, and pulled her into his arms, as she suddenly wondered if this was just a plot to rape her. But it couldn't be. He had taken as much risk as she. Although he could always say that she had escaped and he had followed her, and then he would bring her back, after he raped her. She trusted no one now and looked at him suspiciously. He kissed her hard on the mouth, and she pushed him away. “Wilhelm, don't… please …” She was still out of breath and so was he.
“Don't be stupid,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I didn't risk my life for you, so you could play nun. I'm going to marry you when we get back to Germany. Or before that.” This was no time to be arguing about his illusions or her vows. “I love you.”
“I love you for helping me, but not the way you mean,” she said honestly, as he fondled her breast and then grabbed her. He wanted to make love to her right there. “Wilhelm, don't.” She stood up, to get away from him, and he stood up with her, and grabbed her with powerful hands. He was trying to force her to the ground, as she pushed him away from her as hard as she could, and he lost his footing on a tree root, and pitched backward with a sharp sound and a stunned look on his face. His head hit the ground with a thud and instantly cracked.
There was blood everywhere as Amadea knelt next to him in shock and horror. She hadn't meant to hurt him, only to push him off. She had been afraid he was going to rape her in his enthusiasm and fervor, and now his eyes were open in a dead stare. He had no pulse. Wilhelm was dead, as she bowed her head in grief over what she'd done. She had killed a man. The man who had helped her escape. His death was on her soul. She looked at him, closed his eyes, and made the sign of the cross. And then, gingerly, she took his gun, and held it in her hand. He had a small canteen of water, and she took that, too. She found money, although very little, some candies, and bullets that she had no idea what to do with. She assumed the gun was loaded, but she had no notion of how to use it, and then she stood up.
“Thank you,” she said softly, and then she walked deeper into the forest, with no idea where she was going, or what she would find. All she could do was keep walking, stay in the forest, and pray the partisans would find her. But she knew they would be busy that night. Lidice was already burning as Amadea walked away, and left the dead soldier beneath the trees. She would never know what he had really planned to do, if he would have hurt her or not, if he loved her or not, if he was a good man or bad. All she knew was that she had killed a man, and for now at least, she was free.
18
AMADEA WAS ALONE IN THE FOREST FOR TWO DAYS. SHE walked by day, and slept for a few hours at night. The air was cool and fresh, although at one point she thought she smelled fire in the air. Lidice. But the forest was dark. Even in the daytime it was deeply shaded. She had no idea where she was going, or if she would find anyone before she died of hunger, exhaustion, and thirst. The water in Wilhelm's canteen ran out. And on the second day she found a stream. She didn't know if the water was good or not, but she drank it anyway. It couldn't be any worse than the water they had drunk in Theresienstadt, standing stagnant in barrels, full of diseases. This water at least tasted clean. The forest was cool. There were no sounds except birds in the trees high above her and the ones she made. She saw a rabbit once, and a squirrel. It felt like an enchanted forest, and the enchantment was that she was free. She had killed a man to get here. She knew she would never forgive herself for that. It had been an accident, but still she would have to answer for it. She wished she could tell the Mother Superior. Wished she were back in the convent with her sisters. She had buried her papers under a clump of dirt. She had no identification now. None. She was a random soul, a lost person wandering through the forest. And there was no number on her arm. She could tell them whatever she wanted if they found her, but they would know. She looked like all the others in the camps. Thin, malnourished, filthy. The shoes she wore had almost no soles. She lay down finally at the end of the second day, and thought about eating leaves. She wondered if they were poisonous. She had found some berries and eaten those, and they had given her terrible cramps, and more dysentery. She felt weak and exhausted and sick. And as the light faded in the forest, she lay down to sleep on the soft earth. If the Nazis found her, maybe they would just shoot her there. It was a good place to die. She had seen no one in two days. She didn't know if they were looking for her, or if they cared. She was just one more Jew. And wherever the partisans were, they were surely not here.
She was alone in the forest, and remembered to say her prayers as she fell asleep. She prayed for Wilhelm's soul, and thought of his mother and sister and how sad they would be. She thought of her mother and Daphne and wondered where they were and if they were still alive. Maybe they had escaped, too. She smiled thinking of it, and then she fell asleep.
They found her there the next morning, as the light filtered dimly through the trees. They came on silent feet and signaled to each other. One of them held her down, and the other covered her mouth so she wouldn't scream. She woke with a huge start and a terrified look. There were men with guns, six of them, surrounding her. Wilhelm's gun lay on the ground beside her. She couldn't reach it and didn't know how to use it anyway. One of the men signaled to her not to scream, and she nodded slightly. There was no way of knowing who they were. They watched her for a moment, and then let her go, as five of them pointed guns at her and one of them searched her pockets. There was nothing. They found nothing, except for the last candy she had left. It was a German bonbon, and they eyed her with suspicion. The men spoke to each other in hushed voices in Czech. She had picked up a little in the camp, from Czechoslovak prisoners. She wasn't sure if they were good men or bad, if they were the partisans she had hoped to find. And even if they were, she didn't know if they would rape her, or what to expect from them. They pulled her roughly to her feet and signaled to her to follow. They had her surrounded, and one of the men took the gun. She stumbled often, and they walked fast. She was tired and weak, and when she fell, they let her pick herself up in case it was a trick.
Not one of them spoke to each other, except rarely, as they walked for several hours, and then she saw a camp in the forest. There were about twenty men there, and they left her with two of the men under guard, and then pulled her roughly into a clump of trees where a group of armed men sat talking. They looked up at her as she walked in. And the men who had walked with her to get there left. There was a long silence as they looked at her, and then finally one of them spoke. He addressed her in Czech first, and she shook her head. And then he spoke to her in German.
“Where did you come from?” he asked in proficient although heavily accented German, as he looked her over. She was filthy and thin, she had cuts and scratches everywhere, and her shoes were in shreds on her feet. The soles of her feet were bleeding. She looked him straight in the eyes.
“Theresienstadt,” she said softly. If they were partisans, she had to tell them the truth. They couldn't help her otherwise, and maybe wouldn't anyway.
“You were a prisoner there?” She nodded. “You escaped?”
“Yes.”
“You have no number,” he said suspiciously. She looked more like a German agent with her tall blond good looks. Even dirty and exhausted she was beautiful, and obviously frightened. But she was brave, too, he could see, and he admired that.
“They never tattooed me. They forgot,” she said with a small smile. He didn't smile back. This was serious business. There was a lot at stake. For all of them. Not only her.
“You're a Jew?”
“Half. My mother was German Jewish. My father was a French Catholic. She was a convert.”
“Where is she? At Theresienstadt, too?”
Amadea's eyes wavered, but only for a moment. “They sent her to Ravensbrück a year ago.”
“How long were you in Terezin?” He used the Czech name for it, not the one she used.
“Since January.” He nodded.
“Do you speak French?” This time she nodded. “How well?”
“Fluently.”
“Do you have an accent? Can you pass for German or French equally?” She felt weak as she realized they were going to help her, or try to. The questions he asked were brisk and efficient. He looked like a farmer, but he was more than that. He was the leader of the partisans in the area. He would be the one to decide if they would help her or not.
“I can pass equally,” she said. But he realized as she did that she looked German. In this case, it was an asset. She looked entirely Aryan. And then she looked at him and dared to ask a question. “What will you do with me? Where will I go?”
“I don't know.” He shook his head. “You can't go back to Germany if you're a Jew, not to stay at least. We can get you through with false papers, but they'll find you eventually. And you can't stay here. All the German women went back. The officers' wives come to visit sometimes. We'll see.” He said something to one of his men then, and a few minutes later, they brought her food. She was so hungry she felt sick, and could hardly eat. She hadn't seen real food in six months. “You'll have to stay here for a while. There's trouble all around.”
“What happened in Lidice?” she asked softly.
His eyes blazed with hatred as he answered. “All the men and boys are dead. The women were deported. The town is gone.”
“I'm sorry,” she said softly, and he looked away. He didn't tell her that his brother and his family had lived there. The reprisal had been total.
“We can't move you for weeks, maybe months. And it takes time to get the papers.”
“Thank you.” She didn't care how long they kept her. It was better than where she had been. Ordinarily, they would have moved her to a safe house in Prague, but they couldn't now.
In the end, she was there, living in the forest, in his camp until the beginning of August. Things had calmed down somewhat by then. She spent most of her time praying, or walking in a small area around the camp. Other men cam
e and went, and only once a woman. They never spoke to her. And whenever she was alone, she prayed. The forest was so peaceful that it was hard to believe sometimes that there was a war raging beyond their camp. It was late one night after she'd been there for a few weeks, and they realized that she came from Cologne that they told her Cologne had been bombed from one end to the other by a thousand British bombers. They had heard nothing about it in Theresienstadt. The partisans' description of it was amazing. It had been a major hit to the Nazis. She hoped that nothing had happened to the Daubignys, but they were far enough out of the city that hopefully they had escaped major damage.
Almost two months after Amadea had come to them, the local leader of the partisans sat down with her and explained what was going to happen. They had heard nothing about her successful escape from local authorities. Presumably she was so unimportant that they felt that one Jew more or less, dead or alive, was not worth their notice. There was no way of knowing if they had connected it to Wilhelm's disappearance on the same evening, or if they cared about it. Hopefully, they didn't. She wondered if they had ever found him. The partisans had not wanted to get that close to the camp to retrieve him and bury him elsewhere.
The freedom fighters had had papers made for her in Prague, and they were astonishingly authentic looking. They said her name was Frieda Oberhoff, and that she was a twenty-five-year-old housewife from Munich. Her husband was stationed in Prague, and she had come to visit him. He was the Kommandant of a small precinct. He was going back to Munich with her on leave and from there they would go directly to Paris for a short holiday, before she went back to Munich and he returned to Prague. Their traveling papers looked impeccable. And a young woman brought clothes and a suitcase to her. She helped Amadea dress, and they took a photograph of her for her passport. Everything was in order.
She was going to be traveling with a young German who had worked with them. He had gone in and out of Germany into Czechoslovakia and Poland. This would be the second time he traveled into France on a mission like this one. She was to meet him the following day at a safe house in Prague.
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