At the sound of the heavy wooden door above opening, Magda scurried into the darkest corner. Footsteps made their way down the stone steps, then the scuff-clack, scuff-clack. Magda stepped to the iron gate and waited for Renata.
“What time is it?” Magda asked her.
Renata opened the gate. She handed Magda an apple, a piece of bread, and a wedge of cheese. Magda ate hungrily.
“It’s night.”
At the brusque answer, Magda stopped chewing. In the shadow of the crypt, Renata’s breath hitched, and when Magda neared her, she saw that she was crying.
Magda could not ask. She pictured Eva hanging from a tree. She pictured Samuel dead on the side of a road. They had captured them. Killed them. Slaughtered them.
“Lidice,” Renata said.
“Lidice?” A blip on the Nazi’s radar. That was what her great-aunt’s neighbors had said. Magda’s hunger vanished.
“They’ve burned it to the ground.” Renata choked. She covered her mouth. “Magda, I’m so sorry.”
“They” had replaced the “we.”
Magda remembered the neighbors and their concerns for the Nováks, their empathy, and their sympathy. Lidice, they had said, would be of no interest to “them.” The Nováks would be safe, they had assured. But because the Nováks were so many extra bodies, so many extra mouths, Magda had felt awful taking up space and resources. Her mother had always made sure that everyone—especially her two daughters-in-law with their two infants—had had enough to eat. And Magda had seen her mother growing thinner, more anxious, more drawn, her beautiful face reflecting the burden of her concerns. So Magda had left them. She had left them in that unknown—that anonymous—village somewhere between Prague and Litoměřice.
Why? What was “their” interest in that village of less than four hundred people?
Renata was talking, but Magda’s ears were ringing. Someone in Prague had mentioned a letter, Renata said. A member of the resistance connected to Heydrich’s assassination attempt. The letter sent to a Lidice address. The SS rounding the entire village up. They had imprisoned the men in a schoolhouse. They had taken the women and children to a separate location. They massacred the men, ten at a time. If they had adequate Aryan features, if they were candidates for Germanification, some of the children were sifted through and taken away from their mothers. The women they sent east.
“And the other children?” Magda’s vision was blurred from grief. She could not recall how her sisters-in-law looked. Could not recall how her baby niece had looked. Did she have blond hair? What about her nephew?
Renata wept next to her. Both had slid down to the floor, the stone walls absorbing their sobs.
“I hope to God that I am wrong,” Renata said between breaths. “I hope to God it’s only propaganda.”
It was too late. Magda’s grief may not have been able to recall her family’s faces, but it did allow her to picture Samuel and Eliška trapped inside a cattle truck, the engine running and running.
“This war will never end,” Magda cried.
Renata pushed herself off the ground and gruffly brushed at her face, as if to scour the tears away. “Get up.”
“What?” Magda could barely focus on her.
“I said, get up.” She tugged at Magda’s shoulders, and Magda nearly fell forward as she came to her feet. “Listen to me. This war will end when each one of us fights in it. And not before.”
Magda shook her head. “I can’t. I have nothing—”
Renata’s hand landed on her right cheek so fast, the sting did not immediately follow. Magda stared at her.
“You will have to learn,” Renata said. “This is no time for cowards.”
Magda rose from the floor and followed Renata out. She had nobody left. Renata and Aleš would be her family now. She was now displaced, with nowhere else to go but to those that had sworn to resist and defy, and perhaps die in doing so.
III
October 1942–December 1942
10
October 1942
Danger left a funny meaty taste in Magda’s mouth. It stuck to the roof, thick and syrupy, and sometimes it made her want to vomit. Miles east of Litoměřice, she was supposedly safe in the dilapidated house in the woods. Yet the journey to the next town to scrounge for food was enough to age Magda another year ahead of her twenty-one. And still she pushed against her limits, a constant tug-of-war between her caution and her contempt.
The bicycle was leaning up against the wall of the local cigarette and news shop. The boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, had ridden past her in the brown garb of a Hitler youth. He had parked the bicycle across the street, taken a stack of newspapers strapped to it, and gone inside. The early-morning fog settled over the muddy road once more. She waited in the falling mist. Two policemen, both anonymous beneath their caps and protected behind the shields that were their uniforms, walked by the building shortly after. Magda bent her head and tugged the headscarf long past the point where she felt certain the mark was hidden. When the patrols had disappeared, she crossed over the muddy road to the bicycle, as skittish and jumpy as a newborn colt.
Anything Magda could do, Renata had said, anything at all, was a contribution to the effort. So, she would steal the boy’s bicycle instead of hunting for edible garbage.
Blood pounding in her ears, Magda yanked the handlebars up and pushed the bicycle onto the road. She mounted it and pedaled away, the taste of dates coating her tongue, her back prickling at the image of one of those patrols aiming his pistol at her.
Just west of the train tracks, Magda rolled the contraption down the bank of the Elbe and pushed it over and into the river. It was a waste, but if she were caught
