Ula and Natalia looked bewildered.
“The Fifth’s commanders are in there.” The soldier who had driven them pointed to the Reichskanzlei. “I’d go there and find out where they want you to be.”
Natalia bent toward Magda. “Hey, are you okay?”
Magda was not. She wanted to vomit. “The Taubers are not in Theresienstadt. They can’t be.”
“Stay here.” Natalia patted her hand. “We don’t know that yet. We’ll find out where we need to go. All right? Just stay here.”
Magda nodded, still wobbly.
An old farmer’s truck, loaded with civilians, entered the far end of the square. It backfired, and Magda ducked her head. It drove crazily toward them, the people in the back whooping and cheering. Up the alleyway, Magda recognized the sound of a tank. How was it to get through the narrow streets? There was a thundering boom, and smoke rose behind the buildings in the square. It was going to blow its way through. They were too late. They were too late. The Germans were… Koenig was headed for the Americans.
Magda ran the opposite way, past the Black Eagle. She came to the arched gate and ran down the steps to the old-town wall and stopped. She was just above the Elbe, just above the bridge. Smoke curled upward on the eastern and to the western horizons. A train was stopped in the middle of the rails facing Litoměřice.
The Germans were supposed to have held on to the bridge, and the Soviet divisions should have captured them. She expected to see a barricade set up on either side of the bridge, with a group of German officers trapped in between. She indeed found a mass of people, but they were not dressed in uniforms. They were dressed in blue-and-gray striped rags—men, all men—crossing toward Theresienstadt on the opposite bank. She saw bodies up against the guardrails of the bridge, knees pulled up, huddled men lying half sideways. The Elbe was too wide for them.
She thought of the tunnels that Ula and Natalia had told her about. The factories that the Germans had used the prisoners to build. They had reported that a newly established concentration camp had been set up in Litoměřice. These had to be the prisoners. How they had gotten herded over here, she could not even begin to guess.
Those who could were slowly stumbling along, leaning on each other as they headed to the old fort. To Theresienstadt. This could only end in disaster. Beyond, vehicles were driving in and out of the old brick fortress. Red Cross flags were hung across trucks and were raised on the flagpoles outside. Magda recognized the warning flags: TB, typhus. The red-black-white swastika flags were gone. Theresienstadt had been liberated, but Magda was certain the Taubers would not be there. They would not be there.
Magda stumbled to the edge of the wall. She vomited what she had. It was not much. She took a sip of water from her canteen, then turned around and made her way back up the alley. Natalia and Ula were searching for her, their faces pulled tight in panic. The crowds had grown. That truck that had earlier pulled into the square and backfired was pulling away from one of the buildings that had housed the armory. The doors were flung wide open, and soldiers were trying to prevent the civilians from going in.
“Christ.” Ula waved at Magda. “Natalia, there she is!”
The two women hurried to Magda.
That truck with the civilians in the back took another turn around the square, shouting down at the people on the streets, sometimes stopping and picking up more civilians. Magda stared as it slowly passed by. One woman shoved her way past Magda, waving at the driver. When Magda grabbed her arm, the woman yanked away from her hold and scowled at her.
“Where are you all going?” Magda asked.
The woman’s face turned animal-like. “Koenig and the others might have fled, but he’s left that wife and child at the villa.”
Magda glanced at the men in the back handing out rifles. “I’m going with you.”
“Come on!” The woman bared her teeth. To the passengers in the back of the truck, she shouted, “She’s coming with us. Give us a hand!”
Magda was lifted inside. She vaguely heard Natalia and Ula shouting her name. She was smashed together with a dozen or so people, and as the truck shifted gears, bumped, and jarred, it sent Magda flying into the arms of some man. He stank of sweat and alcohol. She righted herself.
“I’ll find you,” Magda cried to Natalia and Ula. “I’ll come back to you later!”
The truck soon turned out of the square and onto Michalska, on the way to Radobýl Mountain and Villa Liška. The faces around her were gleeful, jeering. The hunted were now the hunters. For a moment, she tried to find a face she recognized, someone who would anchor her, help her find her footing in this swaying, bumping truck. But there was nobody. Nobody. And she wondered whether anyone recognized her. How could they not? If they knew her, they would know the birthmark, the broken nose, the scar beneath her eye—the latter two marks that identified her as one of them. But she did not recognize a single person.
Magda faced the side of the road, trying to place herself back into the environment that had been—for at least a little while—familiar to her, almost home. How many times had she walked this road? How many times had she watched that clock tower grow nearer, heard the bells of St. Stephen toll its sad news? How many times had she spotted the deer in the fields, looked forward to that stand of cedar trees? She envisioned that Koenig had not abandoned his wife. No. He was hiding in the villa. He had discovered that second wall that Renata had hidden in and was in there now. She was almost certain that was the case. How fast could the Germans run, with the Soviets and
