by Lily Graham
The day he let her take his hand, she knew he was ready. ‘Tomas, I’d like you to come to live with me. It’s what your mother wanted,’ she swallowed. ‘I’d like it very much – but if you want to stay here I will understand.’
If that’s what he wanted, it would be the hardest thing she’d ever have to accept, but she would do it. As much as she’d promised Sofie – as much as she’d fallen for this little boy, with his serious eyes, and his quiet smile – she couldn’t make his life harder, she could understand what Liesl had meant, now. How no matter what they all thought, what they all wanted, his needs had to come first.
To her surprise, he touched her hand. ‘Aunt Liesl asked me if that’s what I’d like, and I said yes – I would like to be with you. I’d like to meet Naděje, and live by that lake, to hear more stories about my mother.’
She clutched him to her tightly, and cried into his dark blond hair. ‘I will tell you all the stories you want to know, we will be a family, all of us,’ she promised him.
He looked up at her with his dark eyes, and smiled, her heart felt like it would burst when his little arms tightened around her in response.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Eva returned to Jívka in the autumn, and together with Tomas, Naděje, Kaja and Helga began a new life in the countryside. It was wondrous to have her baby girl back in her arms, and her heart tore at how much she’d grown in the short space she’d been away. It wasn’t much; she was still a tiny little thing, and would likely remain so for most of her life, but it hurt to know she’d missed it. It was worth it though to have Tomas in her life. As the weeks had passed he had begun slowly to open up more, and it was clear that from the moment he’d clamped eyes on Naděje he was in her thrall.
He was a beautiful child, with his mother’s eyes. More at home in the outdoors, befriending the wildlife, than he’d ever been cooped up for so long in a cloister. Liesl had allowed the boy to take the small caramel-coloured dog, whose name was Duster, with him, which Eva was grateful for – as at least he would have some normalcy when starting his new life with her. She taught him how to sketch, and the three of them would spend hours exploring the lake, Naděje asleep in her pram, while she and Tomas sought the dens of otters, and convinced a stray cat to make theirs his home of choice. It broke her heart to think of the five years Sofie had missed – but every time he looked at her, something like a wry smile on his lips, she couldn’t help but see her face.
While her days were full of a lightness she’d been hard pressed to imagine discovering, at night, her dreams took her back to the darkness, and she woke, shivering and full of fear, tears coursing down her cheeks.
When Helga heard her one night, she came to lie next to her, fitting her body next to hers the way they’d all lain in their bunks. ‘It’s all right, you’re safe now,’ she said.
Eva nodded. She looked up at the old woman, and squeezed her hand. ‘Do you remember when we first met?’
Helga sighed. ‘I wasn’t nice, I’m sorry.’
On her first night in Auschwitz, Helga had told her that they were all going to die – she accused her of being a fool because she vowed that she was going to live, that she would see Michal again someday. Eva couldn’t help marvelling at how the woman who’d been so close to giving up on living when they’d met was a different person all round.
‘You told me I was a fool to hope.’
‘I was wrong.’
Eva brushed away her tears. ‘Maybe, maybe not. I really believed that we’d get out of it together, Sofie and me. That I would find Michal.’
‘But you did – you proved me so wrong, dítě.’
Eva wasn’t so sure sometimes. With no word from her parents or her uncle, she was beginning to face the fact that maybe she was the only one left.
‘I think you should speak to someone about these nightmares,’ Helga said. ‘It’s good to get it out.’
‘I don’t know if I could sit and tell someone about this – I told Liesl and that was one of the hardest things to do – and I barely scratched the surface. The only person I want to tell is Michal, and I can’t.’
Helga nodded. ‘You could write to him. I do that in my notebook. I write to my husband, my children. I tell him how I feel, what I’m going through, it helps. Especially with the nightmares.’
Eva thought about it, and she nodded. Already she’d disturbed Tomas with hers – she didn’t want him to fear for her, didn’t want him to grow up with any more darkness than he’d already faced.
The next morning while Tomas played outside in the late autumn sunshine with the cat, and Naděje slept in her cot, Eva wrote letters. To Michal. To her mother, her father, Sofie, Mila, and her uncle Bedrich. All the things she needed to tell them, all the last words she’d wished she could have told them. She cried as the words began to pour out, needing to be said. She told Sofie how she was sorry, how she wished things had worked out differently. She told her uncle how grateful she was for the lessons he’d given her. But most of all she spoke to Michal.
My darling,
My deepest regret is that you never got to meet your daughter. She is a miracle that happened to us in that horrific place. So small, so full of spirit, so full of life. I look at her, and draw strength, and remember that I can keep going.
I look at her, and I see you. She looks so much like you, Michal, and it breaks my heart in two as much as it melts it. I swear I saw a dimple in her cheek the other day, just like yours. I had to go for a walk by myself, and try to stop the tears. Not let poor Tomas see, he doesn’t need tears now, just hugs and laughter and that’s what I’m trying to give that dear child. You’d love him so much if you knew him too.
My darling, I told Helga that hope had kept me alive. But it was love. My love for you, and it helped me so much more than anything else did, it brought our child into the world and helped me find Tomas. When they all thought I was a fool, all I could think of was seeing you again.
I thank you for that, for the beautiful love we shared, it saved my life.
As the days passed she wrote two dozen letters, and in the last one, she told him how she was going to try to live. I made a promise to my friend, and I am going to honour it. She died for our daughter so that we could live. I owe her that. I will always love you. She placed the letters in her drawer, and someday she would give them to Naděje, so that she could know their story. For now, she would give her the things she would give Tomas, love, and laughter, and a home, safe from darkness.
As autumn gave its final burst, and the leaves around the lake turned to copper and russet, Eva watched as Tomas ran towards the lake, Duster at his heels, the last of the autumn sunshine turning the lake into shimmering gold, then suddenly stopped, and frowned, pointing up ahead, and said, ‘Man?’
Eva stopped, and looked. Shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, she saw the colour gold, and then a man in the distance. He was walking painstakingly, slowly.
She blinked, and stood stock still, not able to move.
Something about him looked familiar, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t trust her brain.
‘It’s not,’ she breathed.
As he neared, he looked up, then he stopped as well.
There was a shout from the house, and Kaja’s voice called out, ‘Michal?’
Eva put both hands across her mouth, and then began to walk, slowly, then very fast, towards the figure at the end of the drive. He started to walk towards her as quickly as his legs would allow.
She didn’t pause to see his face – suddenly, his arm was around her, and she sunk into the familiar embrace. She couldn’t stop the tears, even as he kissed her face, her hair, her hands. Even as Tomas rushed forward to meet this stranger.
‘B-but how?’ stuttered Eva, not able to let him go. Not sure if her broken heart had made him appear, if she hadn’t slipped into a delusion of some kind. Part of her didn’t care even if that was the case.
His face was worn, and he looked years older than he should h
ave. There was grey streaked through his hair. Dark shadows beneath his eyes, which were heavily lined. His frame was thin, and his left hand hung limply at his side, she could see a heavy knot of scars, and two fingers missing. She held it gently.
‘I wrote you letters but I don’t think you got them,’ he said, touching her face, her short hair which had begun at last to grow around her ears. ‘I found out later why – when I saw what was left of the apartment. It took such a long time to cross the border. My birth certificate is German, even though my family lived here most of my life, they didn’t want to let me in. The Americans and the Red Cross helped me – I convinced them to let me come home.’
Eva’s lips trembled as she listened to his voice, as she stared up at his face, her eyes filled.
‘B-but they said you were dead – an accident at the factory.’
He shook his head. ‘I got these injuries,’ he said, holding up his hand, his face a little sad. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to play again,’ he said, then shrugged. ‘Someone else died, his tattoo was the same as mine, except for the nine. We were friends.’ He breathed out now as he realised. ‘All this time, I never realised they would have recorded it as me.’
Eva gasped. He’d been alive, this whole time?
He held her fiercely. ‘Oh God, Eva, I dreamt of this for so long,’ he said, kissing her, holding her close.
‘Me too,’ she said, softly, and started to cry again. She touched his face. In the background she could see Tomas staring at them, waiting to come forward, his curiosity running rampant. She smiled, and beckoned him over, as Helga came forward too, their small daughter in her arms. She led her husband towards them. ‘There’s someone I think you might like to meet.’
Chapter Forty
Present day, Prague
Naděje sat at her desk, overlooking the city of Prague, which the dawn light had bathed the colour of gold. The colour of love, of champagne and her mother’s laugh. Thinking of her life, of her parents, and the enduring love they had shared.
Her granddaughter, Kamila, had come to check in on her, and she paused her story for a moment, her pen poised over the sheet of paper, inviting her to take a seat.
‘I moved back here just after the end of Communist rule,’ she said. ‘I wanted to know where I came from. But really,’ she said, looking down at her stacks of paper, scribbled in her messy handwriting, from the tale she’d put off for all these years which had finally been set down, transcribed from her mother’s letters, her legacy to her, ‘I was born in Auschwitz.’
Kamila nodded. She knew a little of the story, but not everything.
‘My mother was a remarkable woman, and she taught me about love. She was patient, and kind. As you know, it took me years before I was able to walk. She tried her best to undo what had been done to me through their mistreatment of her, but it is a legacy I have lived with all my life. I have broken countless bones in my life, and suffered from a weak chest. At five feet, I am often the smallest person in the room.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Kamila, shaking her head, and her grandmother looked at her, a frown between her eyes.
‘You’re the most compelling, sometimes the most infuriating person because you are always right – you always know just what to say to win every argument, here and in your lectures at the university. What you lack in size is often overlooked by the force of your personality.’
‘Are you trying to say that I am stubborn? Or a hard-arse?’ asked Naděje, with a quirk to her lips.
Kamila laughed at the American term. ‘Both. It’s the other thing you got from them maybe.’
Naděje smiled. ‘Yes. Stubborn love, that’s what my mother called it.’
Stubborn love, that was the legacy of her life growing up. After the Communists took over, her father got a job offer in England, and they decided to move, and they took to their new lives with the same gutsy determination that had led them back to one another.
In their home in the countryside, her parents raised her and her brother Tomas, who remained Naděje’s best friend throughout their lives. As far as both of them knew their grandmother was a stern-looking woman named Helga – it would be years before Naděje discovered that they weren’t, in fact, related. It didn’t matter. ‘Sometimes you get to choose your family,’ was another thing her mother used to like to say.
Discovering what had happened to her parents, and her beloved uncle Bedrich, through a chance meeting with one of their old neighbours, had been devastating for her mother. Eva’s father had died in transit to Auschwitz from typhus, and her mother and uncle had been gassed in the Terezín family camp in Auschwitz: they had been there a few short weeks while Eva had been there too, and no one had ever known. This fact would haunt her for years. Like the nightmares that never really left her. They were indelible scars.
‘Despite all this, my parents had an unconquerable lust for life, and together they fought hard against the darkness,’ she wrote, continuing her story as Kamila got up to open the curtains.
‘My mother found it hard to draw at first, but in time she began to paint again, and she sold a few. My father taught music at a local school, and he always composed new pieces that reminded him of his sweetheart, and his children. Every Friday, without fail, my mother made challah bread and lit a candle for the woman who had saved them, her best friend Sofie.’
Then she wrote the final words of their story. ‘I was never meant to live, but I have, because of her. Because of them, and despite all the horror in this world, all its darkness that tried so desperately to wipe us out, my life has been one full of joy, light, and love because no matter how hard someone tries to vanquish the day, what I have learnt in my long years in this life, is that dawn breaks even the longest night.’
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An epic and heartbreaking love story set in World War Two
The last time Valerie was in Paris, she was three years old, running from the Nazis, away from the only home she had ever known.
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Books by Lily Graham
The Child of Auschwitz
The Paris Secret
The Island Villa
Summer at Seafall Cottage
The Summer Escape
Christmas at Hope Cottage
A Cornish Christmas
A Letter from Lily
Vera Bein gave birth to her daughter, Angela Orosz, in the top bunk of camp C at Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1944. She weighed just 1kg and was too weak to cry. It is what saved her.
The result of malnutrition, and the harsh conditions
of the camp, as well as an experimentation on her pregnant mother by the famous Nazi doctor, Dr Josef Mengele, ensured that the effects of the camp stayed with her for her entire life. She didn’t walk during her early years, and suffered many adverse health effects such as brittle bones and weak lungs. Her mother had arrived at the camp three months pregnant and was forced to undergo experiments from Mengele, but managed to slip through his clutches and survive. She got assigned a job in the kitchen, and when she gave birth, the Blockalteste made her climb to the top bunk and helped her give birth.
Her remarkable true story and others’ inspired this novel.
I also drew on the true stories of survivors like Eva Schloss, the step-sister of Anne Frank, who survived Auschwitz, along with her mother, by staying behind with the sick and elderly when they were ordered to join the death marches, a decision that ultimately saved their lives.
I got a sense of life in Prague and the ghetto of Terezín from Helga Weiss, who kept a diary, as well as drawing poignant sketches of her time in a concentration camp. Helga, like the others, also survived Auschwitz. I was also greatly inspired by the incredibly poignant story of Anka Bergman, who also came to Auschwitz pregnant, and had her baby on the train on the way to the Mauthausen death camp. The only reason she survived was because the day before the Nazis had blown up the crematoria.
It has been an honour and a privilege to share some of these remarkable women’s experiences in my novel. After months of getting to know these women through their written testimonies and biographies, I noticed one thing that each one of them shared – an unquenchable sense of hope that they would survive. In fact, throughout each woman’s story, they made a point of saying that they were likely being foolish. I felt that this was significant, somehow. While of course they had no real control over their fates within the camp, it is incredible that they held onto this sense of hope despite the darkness they encountered, and I feel that perhaps in some small way it did end up making a difference to their survival – perhaps in helping them see a way out. It is hard to say. So much of survival depended on luck and timing.
