Natalia and Ula appeared before her one morning. Magda’s temples still throbbed, and her clothing was crusted from sweat. A bowl of soup steamed on the floor next to her. Natalia’s concerned look made Magda turn her head away. Her neck felt wooden. She looked beyond the arcade at the sky above the open alcove. It rumbled, although it was bright blue. Planes crawled across the expanse like flies on a windowpane. She shut her eyes.
The two women moved to either side of her cot and squatted down, and one took in a deep breath.
“Magda.” It was Ula. “We spoke with the commanders. The division is heading straight to Prague, but we’ve asked for special permission to be dropped off in Litoměřice.” She paused. Magda pictured Ula checking with Natalia, Natalia giving an encouraging nod. “We could go to Theresienstadt and be on hand when it’s liberated. We could be there first, to look for the Taubers.”
Magda squeezed her eyes harder. Not his nose. Not his chin. Not his eyes.
Natalia tried next. “A squad will drive us down. There’s a team of doctors coming up from Prague, and the Red Cross is already on its way. Apparently it’s mayhem there. That concentration camp? The one they established for the factories in the tunnels? There’s been an outbreak of TB. The Thirty-Third Guards Rifles and the Fifth Guards Army are heading there already. There are concerns that the officers and commanders have already fled the city.”
Magda sat up. “No.”
The Koenigs, in civilian clothing probably stolen off the back of some poor souls on the road, walking into the hands of the Americans. I am not the man you are searching for. I am just a poor Jew. Look, my son, he is…
“No,” she repeated, and rose on unsteady legs.
She lifted her rucksack off the floor, rifled through it, and touched the revolver. She stuffed what few things she had inside and eased it onto her shoulders. “When?”
Ula and Natalia glanced at one another.
“Now,” Ula said.
A monk hurried over to them, his wrinkled face creased with more concern, his blue eyes flashing with urgency. “Magdalena, you must lay back down.”
Brother Bohdan.
He placed a hand on her forehead, almost like a blessing. Magda let him. Behind him, Natalia poured a glass of water, and Ula mixed in a powder. Natalia handed Magda the glass around the fretting monk, and Magda drank it down. It coated her insides and steadied her.
The monk took Magda’s hand. “Where you are now going,” he said, “I want you to remember—God is angry, and to make it right, we must remember love.”
“Where we’re going now,” Ula said matter of factly, “we’re winning. And we’re off to save the wretched souls from themselves.”
The monk squeezed Magda’s hand. “Be an instrument of peace now. In your condition—”
“Eat the soup,” Natalia interrupted. “Sorry, Brother, but we have to go. Or we’ll miss the transport.”
Within minutes, Magda was sitting between the two women in the back of a truck. Brother Bohdan raised a hand in goodbye. Magda lifted her hand in return just as another ambulance arrived. More injured and wounded. Something tugged at her heart, and she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, they were crossing the Elbe, and then all she saw was the landscape of rolling green hills and empty, neglected fields. Karol, she told herself, had not been in that ambulance truck either.
The drive lasted less than an hour, but Magda had fallen asleep, still woozy from the aftermath of the fever. When the truck shifted gears and slowed down, she recognized that they were already on the north end of town, on Lidická Road. Magda’s limbs felt heavy, but she gathered her things. They would soon disembark in the square of the old town. Natalia and Ula watched her. They remained silent as the truck broke to a halt near the building, the Reichskanzlei.
Ula jumped down first, her hair tied up beneath a headband to keep the mop out of her face. She reached a hand toward Magda and helped her down. For the first time in almost three years, Magda stood in the old square, about where the gallows had once been, but there was no time to think about more than just that.
A hodgepodge of vehicles filled the square, red stars on most of them. The front doors of the Reichskanzlei had been thrown open, and soldiers were going in and out like ants, carrying boxes. One of the flags suddenly floated away from the building and buckled to the ground. A man whooped from the upper story window. Glass broke somewhere to her left in the arcade, and Magda witnessed a scuffle between men dressed in civilian clothing and a group of soldiers in Czechoslovak Army uniforms. One man clutched something to him and made a run for the other side of the square and darted up the alley. Looting. The people were looting. Cries of glee, cries of outrage echoed off the buildings. A woman with a child was harassed by a group of men, and she shouted something. Magda recognized the German cadence from the woman and the Czech language
