Renata huffed. “You’ve saved his hide more than a few times.”
“He’s in danger,” Dr. Tauber said.
Magda gripped the edge of her seat.
“Listen,” he added. “We’re going to go about our business until we know more. There is an important patient.”
Renata sat up. “The SS officer from the Napola?”
He nodded, reached into his breast pocket, and shook something carefully out of an envelope. They lay in the palm of his hand.
The yellow stars. Magda counted them.
He extended them toward Renata. “In the meantime, we’ll need to apply these.”
Renata stared at him. Sweat broke out across Magda’s brow.
“We must comply,” Dr. Tauber said. “The authorities should have no reason to find fault with us. When this is all over—”
“No!” Renata leapt up and slapped his hand away. Four stars scattered across the floor, one landing before Magda’s foot. Renata and Dr. Tauber glared at one another, neither moving to pick them up.
Magda stood. She could not draw air. She stared at the star before her foot. Jude. Renata was one of them. Magda bolted to the French doors, threw them open, and fled to the deer park and into the woods beyond.
The motorbikes, the motorcades, the tanks, and the foot soldiers marched through Voštiny on the foggy dawn of October 2. Two days later, Magda’s father received notice to report to the town hall. A new protectorate was established, and the mayor was arrested for being a suspected Communist sympathizer, and his wife for being a registered one.
Her father left the farm one morning on a horse and returned in the back of a truck and no sign of the horse. His head hung low over his folded hands as six Wehrmacht soldiers jumped down from the back and positioned themselves in the yard. A lieutenant stepped out of a second vehicle.
Magda felt her brothers bristling next to her. One of the Germans eyed her face, then turned away.
Her mother called to her father, but he did not lift his head. Magda knew why. Whatever they had done to him, he did not want his wife to see.
The lieutenant addressed the rest of the family and told them that they were there to confiscate weapons and that their house had been requisitioned. The documents were in German, stamped and signed with the names of officials none of the Nováks knew.
“Requisitioned for whom?” one of Magda’s brothers snapped. “For your men?”
The lieutenant scowled at her brother as if he were an idiot. “For a German family. You have two hours to pack your things and find new accommodations, but the farm will be vacated.”
“Where should we go?” Magda’s mother protested.
The lieutenant looked confused or annoyed and shook his head. “How should I know? You Slavs are the ones who have a thousand relatives for every family. Go to one of them.”
As for her brothers, the lieutenant said, they had orders to report to Wehrmacht headquarters. “We need workers in Germany, and we need soldiers.”
When they brought Magda’s father down from the truck, they refilled it with her brothers and the two rifles that were registered. But not the ones that had been hidden. Magda’s oldest brother had come home with two revolvers and had argued with their father about how he was certain that the problems between the Sudetenland and Germany would not be settled peacefully, as it had seemed earlier that year. They had to protect themselves, he’d said.
Magda’s father and mother stood behind her as the trucks drove off with her two brothers. And then her father said to her, “Magdalena, when it’s time, the guns are buried beneath the apple tree. Southeast root.”
The horse, like their house, had also been requisitioned. Their father had been allowed to stay to work the land for the grain the army would need. They never had the courage to dig up the revolvers.
That time never came.
It was shortly afterward, when Magda’s family was piled on top of one another in her great-aunt’s home, that the family decided Magda would go to Litoměřice and look for work. Just through the winter, to relieve the family of the depleted resources.
Magda passed their farm on the way to Litoměřice and saw two things: In the yard were three young children playing a game, and a man was leading a horse—their horse—into the stable. A dark-haired woman stood, hands on her hips, surveying the yard with an air of authority. Two boys and a man were unloading a wagon filled with furniture. The second thing Magda saw was that the road leading east was flooded by people in carts, on foot, on bicycles. Dogs, cows, donkeys, and goats followed them. The people’s belongings were piled and tied precariously atop anything—the roof of a vehicle, tied up in carts, on bicycle baskets. And the sky buzzed with the planes overhead, raining leaflets down.
Magda picked one up, swimming against the tide of those trying to make it to the rump of Czechoslovakia, to Hungary perhaps, which still remained free of the Nazis. The leaflet said, “This is now the German Reich.” Followed by a list of rules—all Jews and Communists were to report to the new protectorate, curfew was at seven o’clock, all weapons were to be turned in to the village headquarters, and so on.
She folded the piece of paper and put it in her pocket. “Survive,” her mother had said. “That’s all—just survive. Do what they want, and at some point this will be over. But live, daughter.”
Two weeks after arriving at Villa Liška, she received a letter from her mother about her brothers. Please stay if you are safe. They relied on her to recover the farm when this is all over.
All Magda wanted was to have her family back together. She would work where she could, long enough to outlive the war and return home. All she had to do was keep her
