Echoes

In the end, she was there, living in the forest, in his camp until the beginning of August. Things had calmed down somewhat by then. She spent most of her time praying, or walking in a small area around the camp. Other men came and went, and only once a woman. They never spoke to her. And whenever she was alone, she prayed. The forest was so peaceful that it was hard to believe sometimes that there was a war raging beyond their camp. It was late one night after she'd been there for a few weeks, and they realized that she came from Cologne that they told her Cologne had been bombed from one end to the other by a thousand British bombers. They had heard nothing about it in Theresienstadt. The partisans' description of it was amazing. It had been a major hit to the Nazis. She hoped that nothing had happened to the Daubignys, but they were far enough out of the city that hopefully they had escaped major damage.

Almost two months after Amadea had come to them, the local leader of the partisans sat down with her and explained what was going to happen. They had heard nothing about her successful escape from local authorities. Presumably she was so unimportant that they felt that one Jew more or less, dead or alive, was not worth their notice. There was no way of knowing if they had connected it to Wilhelm's disappearance on the same evening, or if they cared about it. Hopefully, they didn't. She wondered if they had ever found him. The partisans had not wanted to get that close to the camp to retrieve him and bury him elsewhere.

The freedom fighters had had papers made for her in Prague, and they were astonishingly authentic looking. They said her name was Frieda Oberhoff, and that she was a twenty-five-year-old housewife from Munich. Her husband was stationed in Prague, and she had come to visit him. He was the Kommandant of a small precinct. He was going back to Munich with her on leave and from there they would go directly to Paris for a short holiday, before she went back to Munich and he returned to Prague. Their traveling papers looked impeccable. And a young woman brought clothes and a suitcase to her. She helped Amadea dress, and they took a photograph of her for her passport. Everything was in order.

She was going to be traveling with a young German who had worked with them. He had gone in and out of Germany into Czechoslovakia and Poland. This would be the second time he traveled into France on a mission like this one. She was to meet him the following day at a safe house in Prague.

She didn't know how to thank the leader of the group when she left the camp. All she could do was look at him and tell him that she would pray for him. They had saved her life, and were giving her a new one. The plan was for her to join a cell of the Resistance outside Paris, but she still had to get through Germany first, as the Kommandant's wife. In her bright blue summer dress and white hat the day she left, she certainly looked the part. She even had high heels and white gloves. She turned to look at them for a last time, and then got in the car with the men who were driving her into the city. They were both Czechoslovaks who worked for the Germans and were beyond reproach. No one stopped them or checked their papers as they drove into the city, and less than an hour after she had left the partisan camp, she was in the basement of the safe house in Prague. At midnight, the man who was going to travel with her arrived. He was wearing an SS uniform, and he was tall and handsome and blond. He was actually a Czech who had grown up in Germany. His German was flawless, and he looked every inch an SS officer as they introduced him to Amadea late that night.

They were leaving on a train at nine in the morning. They knew that the train would be full, the soldiers in the station distracted. They would be checking papers randomly, but it would never occur to them to be suspicious of the handsome SS officer traveling with his beautiful young wife. One of the men dropped them off at the station, and they strode onto the platform chatting amiably, as he told Amadea in an undertone to smile and laugh. It felt odd to be wearing fashionable women's clothes again. She hadn't done that since she was a girl of eighteen. And she felt very odd to be traveling with a man. She was terrified that someone would recognize that her papers were false, but neither the agent nor the soldier watching people board the train questioned them. They didn't even give them a cursory glance and just waved them on. Amadea and her traveling companion looked like Hitler's dream for the master race. Tall, blond beautiful people with blue eyes. They settled into a first-class compartment as Amadea stared at him with wide eyes.