Someone Named Eva Read Online Free Page A

beard and hear his deep voice and gravelly laugh. I wanted him to know about my telescope. I wanted to hear him say that he was proud I had tried to keep it from the Nazis, and that somehow we would get a new one so I could continue to look at the stars.
    I wanted to see Jaro, too. To give him a hug and let him tease me about the doll I had brought with me. And to see Terezie blush in front of him again.
    Instead, all of us sat and waited. The minutes ticked away into hours, the hours turning into another day. The air was hot and sticky by then, and the hay had become itchy and thin. My stomach had grown impatient with hunger. We had been given nothing to eat but cold coffee and pieces of dry bread, and there had been hardly enough for everyone. I watched with envy as Anechka sucked her bottle, wishing Mama had brought food for me, too.
    Women had begun to move about more freely, stopping to talk with neighbors or sitting in small huddled groups to pray quietly. But all the while, we were being watched carefully by the Nazis with their guns.
    Toward the end of our second afternoon of waiting, two men with clipboards and white coats came down a small set of stairs at the back of the gym. The guards ignored the men as they walked through the rows of women and children. But we watched warily as they moved from blanket to blanket, looking at each child and muttering in German while writing notes on their clipboards. Occasionally, one of the men would call over a guard, who would use his gun to direct a child to stand and walk up the same set of stairs at the back of the gym.
    When one of the men came to Terezie, he looked at her briefly, wrote something on his clipboard, and quickly moved on. He came to my blanket next and stopped, taking a strand of my hair in his hand. Gently he rubbed it between two fingers, murmuring softly to himself.
    "Ja." He nodded with a quick smile and scribbled something on his clipboard. Then he motioned to a guard, who pulled me up from the blanket. I was to follow the other children up the stairs.
    "Mama?" I asked, looking down at her and Anechka sitting on the blanket. Even though it was very warm in the gym, I suddenly felt cold. Anechka reached up for me, her little fingers opening and closing.
    "Go with them, Milada. You must obey." Babichka was the one who spoke, pointing to the place where her pin lay under my shirt. I had forgotten about the pin, and I looked into her face, trying to gather courage.
    "Go, Milada. Do as they say. I love you," Mama said, squeezing my hand in hers.
    Taking a deep breath, I joined the line of children walking to the back of the gym. Terezie's eyes met mine briefly as I walked by her blanket.
    A Nazi led us up the stairs and into a small room at the end of a hall. Two boys younger than me and a girl closer to Jaro's age followed me, and we joined about a dozen other Lidice children already standing in what looked like a science classroom. I stopped in the doorway, amazed by what I saw.
    It wasn't who was there that surprised me. I recognized most everyone from school, although there was only one other person from my class: Ruzha. She stood on the other side of the room. Boys and girls from the lower grades through year six had been gathered and were standing at the front of the room by the blackboard.
    But all of us had one thing in common, something I would not have noticed had we not been put together in one room. Each of us had blond hair and light-colored eyes.
    My thoughts were interrupted by the snap of a Nazi command. There was a pause; then the guard repeated his command, sending the same sickening feeling into my stomach as when I hadn't been able to understand the Nazis in our living room. I looked around, seeing a puzzled expression in the eyes of others.
    None of us knew what the guard wanted us to do as we stood shaking by the blackboard, underneath a model of the solar system. Books were scattered around the shelves, and animal cages stood empty in