Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,97

room. A uniformed Gestapo agent took her out of the room, to the prison, where she remained for several weeks. The cuts on her hands healed at different rates, leaving scars. Then she was transferred to a prison camp in Germany, a camp for women, not far from Berlin. When she got to the camp, she was classified as a political prisoner and had to stitch a red triangle to her sleeve.

Chapter Seventeen

It was night and dark and Anna thought the train was taking her to Theresienstadt, where she would be a prisoner and she would die, there or at another camp. But the journey continued to the border with Germany and then went on to Dresden and finally to Berlin. She was one of many Czech girls and young women being sent to Germany, at the end of 1942, as domestic servants or to live with German families, who would instruct Slav girls who had what the Nazis called Aryan racial characteristics to behave and think like true Germans. At the Potsdamer Bahnhof, in Berlin, a man came forward and introduced himself as Dr. Haffner. He was slight, wearing a tightly belted greatcoat, a fedora. He sneezed and apologized, saying he had a cold. By a small miracle, he said, he had managed to buy enough petrol for the drive to his home. It had started snowing again. He lived on the banks of the Kleiner Wannsee. He told her the villa had belonged to his wife’s parents. Anna watched the wipers clearing snow off the windows. She had nothing to say. When Dr. Haffner reached his house, he got out to open the gates to the drive. The snow made it bright enough to see the villa’s asymmetrical façade, a sort of curlicue roofline. Dr. Haffner closed the gates and drove to the front of the villa, and they got out.

Frau Haffner scolded her husband for being late. “You’re letting in cold air,” she said, at the door, and then, accusingly, “You’re sick.”

Dr. Haffner rubbed his hands together to warm them. “This is Fräulein Schaeffer,” he said.

The Haffner family ate in the dining room; Anna had a bowl of soup in the kitchen. Dr. and Frau Haffner were the parents of six children, she learned. Like Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Frau Haffner proudly pointed out. The eldest Haffner son, Baldur, was fifteen and wore a Hitlerjugend uniform and bragged that he had been trained as a sharpshooter and owned a pistol. He did not see how Anna could be “Germanized,” since she was a Slav, and it was not possible even to domesticate a Slav. Weren’t they basically Picts? he said. The Picts were ancient Scots, not Slavs, Anna said, and he said, Well wasn’t she the genius, and it amounted to the same thing.

The daughters were twins, thirteen years old, and played with dolls and laughed at Anna behind their hands. Their names were Bettina and Vera; they had small, sharp features, like ferrets. Heinrich was eight, Josef was four, and the baby, Paul, was ten months old. The children caught their father’s cold, and Frau Haffner asked Anna to take their meals to them in their bedrooms and to rub liniment on the younger children’s chests. Where are your own mother and father? the twins asked. Why don’t you live with them?

Frau Haffner did not disguise her preference for her oldest child, calling him “her handsome boy,” her “little man,” although he was taller than she was, a broad, muscular youth with a thatch of light brown hair. His mother never reprimanded him when he bullied his sisters or pinched the baby hard enough to make him cry. She instructed Anna to polish Baldur’s shoes, sew missing buttons on his uniform, and help him with his schoolwork. Anna saw his school reports; he received good marks, particularly in mathematics and science, and Anna suggested he’d benefit more from doing his own schoolwork. Frau Haffner slapped her face and told her not to talk back. “I can send you away like this,” she said, snapping her fingers. Anna did help Baldur with his schoolwork, after that, and to show his appreciation, he yanked her braids hard, nearly ripping hair out of her scalp, and tripped her as she walked past him. He left a dead mouse in a fruit bowl on the sideboard in the dining room. She picked it up by the tail and carried it outside, to the garbage can. Baldur put wet ashes from