“What is wrong with people?” Magda said angrily. “He’s only a child! Samuel is only a child! How can they—”
“We don’t know whether Samuel has been captured as well, but Magda…” Karol was eye level with her, his face so close in the small pool of light. “You have to believe that he’s still alive. Until otherwise proven. Promise me?”
A crack of a rifle. Magda jumped before she registered that it was in the far distance. “Good Christ,” she breathed. “They’re still looking for us?”
A flare lit up the forest’s edge. Then an explosion, also far away.
“Are those the mines?” Magda asked. She had not gone far then. Not far enough.
“Or they’ve found the bunker.” Karol spun her in the opposite direction. “Come on. We can’t stop.”
“Where should we go?” Magda did not know where they were; she did not know the terrain at all. What purpose had she ever had to wander this far away from Villa Liška or the bunkers? The world was as enormous as her uncertainty and still not big enough to hide either of them.
Karol pushed Magda forward. “Aleš and Renata showed me a safe house on the way to the meeting today. I know how to get there, but we have to move fast. And it’s on the mountain. But we can rest there.”
Magda stumbled and had to right herself. She was so tired. So tired. “I’m never going to make it.”
“You are. Move!” Karol snatched her hand and moved ahead of her, dragging her so that she had to run to keep up. Eventually they burst out of the woods. Before them, another field and then a steep wall of mountain.
She was breathless and soaked in sweat, but the exertion was freeing her mind. She thought about all that had happened to lead her to this very place, to this very moment.
The Germans rolling past her family’s farm. Her brothers conscripted to fight in Hitler’s war. Her grandparents forced to move from the one home they had ever had. The farmhouse occupied by a German family. Her great-aunt’s small home in Lidice, where they’d had to sleep on the floor or on top of the tiled oven. The squalor. The Germans marching through Litoměřice. Walter’s betrayal. The Taubers. Eliška. Samuel. Koenig. Karol’s descriptions of Theresienstadt. The cattle cars and the people in them—so desperate they would kill their own to survive.
And Koenig. The cigar. The creak of the black leather coat. The smoke in the air and his Heil Hitler!
By the time Karol pulled up to yet another wooden hut hardly fit to shelter a cat much less two people on the run, Magda had made her choice. If they survived the night, if they really managed to join a larger group of partisans, then she was going to be useful in some way, even if it cost her her life.
She stepped through the slanted door of the next safe house.
“Tomorrow we head northeast and see if we can regroup with the resistance.” Karol was rummaging through the dark with his flashlight and came back with an old lump of cloth. At the hearth, he brushed together a pile of splinters and shavings and built a nest, placing the piece of burlap on top. Then he slid open the magazine of the revolver and tapped out a bullet. It took some time before he managed to pull it apart and empty some of the gunpowder onto the tinder nest.
He looked up. “This will get things going.”
Next, he took the flashlight, undid the bottom, and tapped one of the batteries into his hand. Then he reached into his back pocket and withdrew something small. He held it between his forefinger and thumb toward her in the dark. “Dinner.”
She peered at it and could smell cocoa. “How did you get your hands on chocolate?”
“The commanders at the meeting today had them. Let’s just say they used them to sweeten the deal…except they didn’t. I stole them out of a candy dish.” He made a noise that Magda recognized was a part of his smile. If she were blind, she would know when he was smiling.
“You were at a house today?” It was as if he were telling her a fairy tale.
He chuckled. “Yeah, I was at a house today. Felt rather out of place after all this wilderness-survival stuff. Look, you get a bite and I get a bite.” She heard the rustle of foil as he unwrapped the praline and held it out to her. “Go on.”
She bit into it. It had a liquid center—rum—and she tried to not take it all, but it dripped on her chin, and it was so surprising that it made her laugh with embarrassment.
Karol popped the rest into his mouth and licked his fingers. He folded the tinfoil lengthwise and held the ends over the negative and positive charges of the battery. He hovered over the tinder nest. Nothing happened. At least Magda didn’t think it did, until Karol whistled between his teeth, said “Ouch,” and blew on the fingers holding the battery. “It’s hot.”
Then whoosh! And a pop! The gunpowder was alight. Magda sat back on her haunches with a little whoop. They had a fire!
Karol had gathered enough to feed the flames in the hearth. He sent Magda out to look for more wood. She found a stack of logs off to the side of the house, and she tapped them against the walls of the hut to get rid of the snow on the very ends before carrying an armload in to him.
As the flames danced on the walls, she took a look around. Like all the other huts she had stayed in, this one also had one bed, some old, dusty, and musty covers, a couple of chairs, the fireplace, and a few odds and ends. She
