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 Ravensbruck 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 came 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
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.
She didn't know how to thank the leader of the group when she left the camp. All she could do was look at him and tell him that she would pray for him. They had saved her life, and were giving her a new one. The plan was for her to join a cell of the Resistance outside Paris, but she still had to get through Germany first, as the
