“What happened in Lidice?” she asked softly.

His eyes blazed with hatred as he answered. “All the men and boys are dead. The women were deported. The town is gone.”

“I'm sorry,” she said softly, and he looked away. He didn't tell her that his brother and his family had lived there. The reprisal had been total.

“We can't move you for weeks, maybe months. And it takes time to get the papers.”

“Thank you.” She didn't care how long they kept her. It was better than where she had been. Ordinarily, they would have moved her to a safe house in Prague, but they couldn't now.

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.

“We did it,” she whispered, and he nodded and put a finger to his lips. You never knew who might be listening. The essence of the masquerade was to consistently play the part. They spoke to each other comfortably in German. He discussed vacation plans with her and what she wanted to see in Paris. He told her about the hotel where they would stay, and chatted with her about her mother in Munich. As the train pulled out of the station, Amadea watched with haunted eyes as Prague slowly drifted away. All she could think of was the day she had come here in the cattle car. The agonies and the miseries they had endured, the slop buckets and the people crying and eventually dying all around them. She had stood up for days. And now she was sitting in a first-class compartment wearing a hat and white gloves, traveling with a freedom fighter in an SS uniform. All she could conclude was that, for whatever reason, thus far at least, the God she loved so profoundly had wanted her to survive.

The trip to Munich was uneventful and took just over five hours. She slept part of the way, and woke with a start when she saw a German soldier walk by. Wolff, the man she was traveling with, or the name he was using anyway, laughed at her and smiled at the soldier, and through clenched teeth told her to smile as well. She went back to sleep after that, and eventually dozed with her head on his shoulder. He woke her when they pulled into Hauptbahnhof station in Munich.

They had two hours to spare between trains. He suggested dinner at a restaurant at the station, and said it was a shame they didn't have time to go into town. But they agreed that they were anxious to get to France. Paris was a major holiday destination for Germans these days. With the Germans occupying it, everyone wanted to go to Paris. In the restaurant, Wolff talked to her about the fun they would have. But even as they chatted, she noticed that he was ever vigilant. He seemed to keep an eye on everyone and everything, all the while seeming to chat effortlessly with her.

Amadea didn't relax till she got on the train to Paris. They had a first-class compartment again, and she had scarcely been able to eat dinner, she was so worried that something terrible would happen and they'd get arrested on the spot.

“You'll get used to this eventually,” he said in a low voice as they boarded the train. But with luck she wouldn't have to. She had no idea what they were going to do to hide her outside Paris, but the idea of circulating among German officers, pretending to be the wife of an SS officer on vacation, nearly made her faint with terror. It was almost as frightening as the night she had fled Theresienstadt. That had taken courage, but this took rigorous composure. She sat rigidly in her seat once again until the train pulled out. And this time they would be traveling overnight.

The attendant opened the beds for them, and after he left, Wolff told her to put on her nightgown, as Amadea looked shocked.

“I'm your husband.” He laughed. “You could at least take off your gloves and hat.” Even she laughed at that.

She turned her back to him and put her nightgown on, pulling her dress off underneath it, and when she turned, he was wearing pajamas. He was a strikingly good-looking man.

“I've never done this before,” she said, looking embarrassed as he smiled at her, and she hoped he wouldn't take the charade too far. He didn't look like that sort of man.

“I take it you're not married?” he asked softly. The noise of the train covered their conversation, and he was no longer worried. No one was listening to them now.

Amadea smiled in answer. “No, I'm not. I'm a Carmelite.” He looked shocked for a minute and rolled his eyes.

“Well, I've never spent the night with a nun before. I suppose there's always a first time.” He helped her onto her bed, and sat looking up at her from the narrow bench across from it. She was a lovely looking girl, nun or not. “How did you get to Prague?”

She hesitated for a moment before she answered. There were no simple explanations anymore, for anything. Only hard ones. “Theresienstadt.” It explained everything with a single word. “Are you married?” she asked, curious about him too now. He nodded, and then she saw something painful in his eyes.

“I was. My wife and two sons were killed in Holland during the reprisals. She was Jewish. They didn't even bother to deport them, just killed them on the spot. I came back to Prague after that.” He had been back in Czechoslovakia for two years, doing what he could to put a stick in the Germans' wheels. “What are you going to do after you get to Paris?” he asked, as they rode through Germany. They would be in Paris by morning.