“And the good news?” Magda asked the room in despair. “Will this ever end?”
Aleš sighed. “Sometimes we cannot see the trees for all the wood.”
Magda had lost Eliška. She had lost Frau Tauber and Dr. Tauber. She had nobody left of the family except Samuel, and if she lost sight of him again, if she was not able to make sure of his safety, she was certain she would die as well. She hated herself. She hated them. She hated everything. And that hate dried up her tears. That hate dripped like tar within her, cementing a new resolve she could not put words to.
Renata handed Eva the baby and then gazed at Magda, and for the first time, her face smoothed. Slowly, she nodded. “Are you ready for this now?”
What could Magda do with her newfound courage, Aleš had wanted to know.
Samuel gurgled in Eva’s lap, one fist jammed into his mouth. Magda nodded.
Magda had three days. She tried to rest, but sleep evaded her. She overheard Aleš and Renata discussing the Taubers, Samuel being taken far away. The Taubers might—he stressed the word might—still be in the ghetto. But, Renata and Davide argued, more and more trains were being sent east filled with the inmates from the ghetto. Davide and his scouts had caught glimpses of the late-night or early-morning transports leaving the nearest train station, and now the Germans were making the prisoners build tracks that would lead directly to and from the old fort.
Responsible for radioing in the coded messages, Davide received information in return from both the Soviets and the British that news was seeping out of these labor camps, that they were the sites of horrible conditions and illness. What Davide relayed back to the group, Magda knew had been censored. It did not help. She imagined the worst of the worse, but if what she had overheard from Aleš and Renata outside the hut one evening was true, she had not even begun to fathom the length the Nazis were going to in order to exterminate their enemies.
During the day, Magda played with Samuel, barely letting him out of her sight. Davide appeared one evening. And then it was time. Not once had Eva given a hint of where she was taking Samuel, what risks were involved. But someone, Eva assured, would know that, at war’s end, if they did not find the Taubers right away, they must search for Magda in Voštiny. Aleš, filled with sympathy for her, assured Magda that Eva was heading east, and that was all he would say.
Once Renata finished transforming Eva, it was obvious that Eva was the right person to take Samuel to safety. With a haircut and her straw-yellow hair dyed a dark brown, her reedy frame padded by extra clothing, and a pair of glasses, Eva was a new woman paired together with well-forged identification papers and a travel permit for herself and her “son.”
Magda, unless they painted a carnival mask onto her face, was trapped the moment anyone spotted any of her outer features. She had never wished to be more invisible than now.
Renata remained sore with Magda for most of the time while they hid out in the hut, but Aleš attempted to explain her behavior away. The terror Renata had experienced while she’d hidden from the SS had changed her, had left her edgy. A double panel in the Taubers’ bedroom wall was all that had lain between her and certain death. But the dogs had been called back outside, and the Wehrmacht had ransacked the bedroom but had not found her. The hiding place, Magda discovered after that day, had been meant for them all—the Taubers, their children, and Renata.
“She is still wondering,” Aleš concluded, “whether we could have gotten everyone into the house on time. And the last thing she wants is for you to have to go through any of that.”
“None of us,” Eva said to Magda later, “will be left unchanged by these years. This war will end, and our job—the one thing any of us can do to beat this—is to survive it.”
A day later, Magda was saying goodbye to baby Samuel. She kissed his cheeks, hugged him to her, and finally handed him back to Eva. “Please take care of him.”
Eva hugged her. “You know I will. You did well, Magda. I will come back and find you.”
Magda grasped at that wisp of an idea.
Patrols were seen making checks around the mountains, and Magda was shuffled to a different hiding place each day. A week after she had fled Villa Liška with Eva, she was back in St. Stephen’s, in the crypt. Aleš and Renata were looking for a safe house farther north for her, but for the time being she had to stay put with the coffins. Each day she suffered the pangs of fear, and one day an anxiety attack left her unconscious when she could not breathe. The weight of what she had done, the situation she was now in, was now very real. Renata had been right. She would not withstand this kind of life.
It was not the first time Magda thought of her family. She had heard from them just before Samuel’s Bris Milah, but nothing since. She thought of the small village where her family had been forced to migrate, a village so insignificant that it ought to remain anonymous. She could go there. She spoke to Renata and Aleš about
