Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,62

know. In June, two Schutzstaffel officers came into her classroom at school and removed her teacher, Miss Kleinová, who was Jewish. Anna’s beloved Miss Kleinová’s replacement was Fräulein Sauer, from Germany, who began by telling the class they were imbeciles. She punished Anna for speaking Czech instead of German and struck her across the shoulders with a stick. It hurt and left a bruise; she did not dare tell her mother.

Then all Jewish children, including Anna’s friends Rosa Erhmann and Jacob Stein, were forbidden to attend school. The Reich Protectorate Office ordered Jews to leave the protectorate. Thirty thousand had to get out by the end of 1939, another seventy thousand in 1940. Rosa told Anna her parents did not know where they could go. France wouldn’t accept Jews, and neither would Switzerland or Canada or the United States. South America was a possibility, but Rosa’s parents knew no one in Argentina or Brazil or Paraguay. Her parents’ bank accounts were frozen, and their house had been given to a Reich German family; there were now two classes of citizens in the protectorate. Reich Germans lived and worked in Czechoslovakia but as Germans received privileges denied to Czechs, who as Slavs were termed Untermenschen by the Nazis, which meant subhuman, a word no moral person would use.

Rosa’s family moved into her grandmother’s small apartment. Rosa’s father was ordered to place a sign in the window of his pharmacy that said he could serve only Jewish customers. Jewish families were not allowed to keep pets, Rosa told Anna, and no one would love their cat as much as she did. They had never been religious, but now her family observed Shabbat and went to synagogue. Anna and Rosa had been sitting on the stairs in the entrance hall of Anna’s house. Anna went upstairs and got her cat, Milo, and came down and put him on Rosa’s lap. When they were younger, she and Rosa, and sometimes Jacob, had played a game in the hall that Anna had invented, in which they could step only on black floor tiles or only on white tiles. A misstep meant you had to walk backward up six stairs with your eyes closed. Another game involved the skeleton in her mother’s office. They pretended he was chasing them down the hall, past the storage-room door and the door to Anna’s father’s workroom at the back of the house. The skeleton’s bones clacked, his toes clicked; Anna and Rosa giggled and said if he touched them, they would die.

They should have more sense, Sora told them. In Germany, a long time ago, she said, people in a village saw skeletons tumbling out of a dark, threatening sky. It was a warning of bad things to come. “You need to think what you’re playing with,” she said. “Some things are better left undisturbed.”

It was only a game, Anna had assured Sora. The skeleton would never hurt them. He was a three-dimensional lesson in anatomy, a useful reference, her mother had told her. Henri, which was the name Anna and Rosa had given the skeleton, had no malice in him. But maybe Sora had been right and those games of pretend with Henri had brought bad luck, not just to their house but to Prague.

If she closed her eyes, Anna could picture Rosa. She had small, perfect features, silky dark hair cut in a fringe, blue eyes, smoky black eyelashes. Rosa and her family had left Prague to travel to Palestine in August 1939. Rosa’s mother had decided they would get there if they had to walk. In Palestine, they would have a house of their own again, and her father could open another pharmacy. Anna and her parents should come with them, she had said. They weren’t Jewish, Anna had pointed out. But Anna’s mother was a doctor, Rosa had said, and doctors were needed everywhere.

That same month Jacob and his family had emigrated to New York City, where Jacob’s uncle lived. Jacob’s father was a surgeon. The Nazis had revoked his hospital privileges and banned him from lecturing at the Charles University. Anna’s mother had submitted a formal complaint to the hospital’s administration. In response she had received a letter warning her that she was compromising her own professional standing and would be disciplined if she did not desist. She had ripped the letter in half and burned it in the fireplace.

* * *

They should have gone to Palestine, Anna thought later. Weeks before the occupation