Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,74

saying it. I was in Paris, you know, in 1940. Paris is a beautiful, civilized city, and Parisians, by and large, appreciate German culture. They are adaptable people; I got along with most of them. But then I was sent to Poland and the Baltic countries. There, it was swamps and more swamps, and atrocious weather and ruthless Jew partisans.”

He got up and came around to the back of her chair and placed his hand on her neck. “A shot to the neck precisely here—where the spinal column enters the skull,” he said. “Genickschuss. That is the word. An efficient execution, all down the line. You would think, wouldn’t you, that someone would stop it. But no one does. The orders are given—I give the orders, to be precise—and the action goes ahead, like an assembly line. Bang, bang, bang. But not quite. It is not quite like that. It is chaotic, unsightly. My ears ring from the gunshots. I will go deaf, I fear. And blind, from the things I am forced to witness. They say a woman will instinctively protect her child, but I can tell you that is not always so. People will do anything to survive. Half the time, you can’t think why they bother. The problem is, one is human, after all, and it gets to you. But I tell myself, it is either them or me. They brought it on themselves, the Jews did.”

He took the book from her hands. “Why are you reading a book by a Russian, when Russia is our enemy? You should know better, even at your age.” He tossed the book on the fire. The pages flared in the heat, turned black on the edges, and then the book was consumed. When she got up to leave the room, he held her by the arm. He said she was not to tell anyone what he’d told her. Did she promise? “You don’t want anything bad to happen to you or your parents, do you?” He let go of her arm. She ran through the door and felt her way up the stairs and down the hall to her room, where she lit a candle and held it up to be certain he had not crept in after her. She sat on the bed, trying to calm herself. Genickschuss. A word she thought she would hear in her head for the rest of her life.

* * *

Late the next day electrical power was restored, and the day after that the temperature rose, and icicles dripped from the roof. A plow was clearing the road, Herr Schulte reported. If Herr and Frau Doktor Schaeffer and their daughter wished to leave, he could get them to the train station. Irmgard made sandwiches for them to take on the train, rye bread and liverwurst, which, in the end, they couldn’t eat, and her father gave them to two boys sitting near them on the train. In Prague, it was snowing. At the station, they were interrogated by the Gestapo, and then they met Uncle Emil, who drove them to his house for a supper of soup and bread and margarine. When they got home, Anna’s mother spent an hour downstairs in the surgery reading messages Elli had left for her. Franz came home, took one look at his father, and said, “What is it? What’s happened?”

“It was like this,” Anna’s father said. “We spent four days snowbound in a house with two Waffen-SS men and a doctor who was a doppelgänger for Joseph Goebbels. We could not ski, the skis having been requisitioned by the Germans. There was a storm, and no one could get out, and the train wasn’t running.”

Anna’s mother came in and said it was worse than that. They had broken bread with the enemy, and now their names were known.

“They already know your names,” Franz said. “In a police state, everything is known.”

For days Anna distrusted her own eyes. She had to touch things—tables, chairs, the piano—to assure herself of their solidity. Often she sat by herself on the staircase with her shoulders hunched and her arms around her knees. If the doors to the surgery were left open, she could see Elli at the reception desk. Light from the window near the door fell on the marble tiles. A trapezoid of light. In the hand there was a bone called the trapezium. In this world there were such things: circuses, people laughing. There were girls like her who