“You see that, Lieutenant?” Karol whooped.
“You sure she doesn’t have bullets for that?” Taras asked.
“I taught her that.” Karol clapped the lieutenant on the shoulder.
“So you’re going on a mission.” Taras winked at Magda. “Sure is a shame we lost you as a nurse.”
Magda turned away.
“Shame she decided I’m not good for her,” Karol said plaintively.
Taras nudged Karol and laughed. “What she want with a Jew anyway? We should all stick to our own kind.”
Magda glanced at him sideways. Karol’s smile was quick and ungenuine. Always with the spurns, the digs disguised as jokes. Jokes covered up the fear or the pain, and it could also disguise hate. She had never been more aware of the rampant antisemitism than when she began fighting in the Underground. She had had the naïve idea that they were all united in a single cause. It had become quite clear early on that each group that had gelled into this one division had its own agenda for when the war was over. She sensed that if they were victorious against the Axis powers, these very same people would find reason to turn on one another.
It hurt her that Karol was merely tolerated within the unit. They were a mixed group of Czechoslovaks, Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews. In fact one group of Jews had abandoned them on principle. They had gone off on their own but had begged Karol to join them. But Karol had chosen her. And shortly after, she had rebuffed him.
“I’m going back,” Magda said to the men. She packed the gun into her holster. “I’ll see you two later.”
Taras jerked his chin at her. “I hear you’re going into the hornet’s nest? Pretty yourself up and get us some information. Karol, you’ve got a briefing at 0100 hours. I’d get some rest if I were you. We’re moving out tonight.”
“Where to?” Karol asked. He was trying to be casual, Magda could tell. She knew he wanted to talk to her about her mission again, to talk her out of it before the morning came.
Taras shrugged. “Trouble with some partisans. Apparently the Ukrainians want us to police some village, get rid of the pests. They’ve been doing things that—well, let’s put it this way—you as a Jew, you’re probably familiar with.”
Karol was also walking into danger then. Magda threw him a look. Courage. And ignore the bastard.
She walked away, heart hardened to the need to say goodbye. It was nothing new, this danger. She and Karol had a history together now, a long list of adventures. Some had ended in tragedy, a few in victory.
After they had rested in the safe house, Karol led Magda to the partisan group he’d met the day before. The men in the group were former soldiers in the Czechoslovakian army. All knew Aleš, but none had heard from either him or Renata. Davide was also still missing. Magda and Karol were left to wonder whether they had been captured or killed in the raids.
Because Magda and Karol only had one weapon between the two of them, Karol had to convince the leaders to take Magda along. She was assigned to “kitchen detail”—with no kitchen—after she described how she had hidden out for months, had learned to fend for herself by pilfering and sneaking about. Her quick ability to assess a situation and act was soon proven, and the group eventually admitted she had good instincts. Not an unuseful thing to have.
They headed east and grazed the Carpathians. Magda kept a lookout for a boy. She always looked out for a boy regardless where they were. At first for a two-year-old, then two-and-a-half, and now Samuel would be three. In between raids and hiding, she and Karol had engaged in skirmishes, eventually picking up other resistance fighters along the way that replaced the ones lost to wounds, captures, disease, or simply because they had deserted. Magda stopped counting all the people she met.
The partisans’ focus was sabotage. They blew up train tracks, intercepted codes and messages, informed Allied troops—mostly the Soviets—of positions. They managed to finally get around the front lines. By that time, Magda had a rifle, one that had been picked off a dead comrade. But there was no way to teach her how to shoot properly. She also had a dagger. And she had learned to extract bullets and clean and bandage wounds, and she’d even helped one poor soul put his guts back in before he died. She had slept in burrows, in dugouts, in dead people’s houses, with families that were barely hanging on, in barns, in hollows, in the rain, in the snow—and nearly died. In desperate times, she had eaten grass, clover, insects, rose hips, and rose leaves—and gotten very ill. Magda stopped counting the people she knew, and she stopped counting the hours she did not sleep, and she stopped counting the days she did not eat.
The winters left them with holes in their roll calls. Magda had lost not just one or two comrades to the freezing temperatures. She had woken up several times in her dugout next to a stiff corpse, herself fighting through the numbing fog in her brain, the voice that called Sleep, sleep. But it was Karol who came by, woke her up on a regular basis, tried to warm her, and she often marveled how he managed to have enough strength to rescue both of them.
They made love, sometimes while others slept around them. Sometimes isolated and then wildly, like animals, weeping in each other’s arms afterwards. Sometimes so tenderly, she was left numb from the pain of knowing she could lose him.
At the very beginning, Magda made friends with the women. One had schooled Magda in some basic nursing. When their group began suffering numerous casualties, Magda began distancing herself from anyone new. She learned to remain cool and collected, and several times she briefly
