Eva Mandl escapes her husband

Hana Hanáková’s rescue of Eva Mandl is at once a covert escape from a controlling husband and an intimate story Hana tells Liesel Landauer with theatrical relish. Its route runs from a confrontation at the Sacher through a waiting taxi and a concealed train compartment to the Nordbahnhof; its aftermath complicates any clean idea of rescue, as Eva’s precarious refugee circumstances return to view and Hana admits that desire was part of her involvement.

The plan and the confrontation

Hana recounts that Eva was accompanied by a woman assigned by her husband, whom Hana describes contemptuously as having a walrus moustache and nutcracker jaws. The planned rendezvous was at the Sacher: Hana waited in the café while Eva and her companion arrived, then slipped away to the bathroom, expecting Eva to meet her there. When Eva did not appear, Hana spent about half an hour in the corridor, weighing a far more conspicuous alternative: rushing in, pushing a Sachertorte into the companion’s face, and grabbing Eva.

The escape turns not on that comic fantasy but on Eva’s own defiance. Just as Hana is preparing to act, Eva emerges after a public argument with the companion. She has insisted on going to the bathroom alone, regardless of her husband’s orders. Hana describes her as pale with fright but brave, and takes her by the hand. They hurry down the corridor and out through the back entrance, imagining that the companion may be pursuing them. The scene makes Eva more than the object of Hana’s rescue: her refusal to submit creates the opening through which the escape becomes possible.

Disguise and departure

Hana has arranged a taxi with its engine running and the meter ticking, a getaway car that makes her account sound like a film caper. In the taxi she has placed a black suit from Grünbaum and a pillbox hat with a veil from P&C Habig. With the blinds drawn, Eva changes there. The clothes are not merely a disguise: they turn a woman being watched and escorted into someone less recognizable, allowing her to pass through the city without her former appearance announcing her identity.

Hana says she gets Eva to the Nordbahnhof transformed into the Merry Widow, concealed behind her veil. A private compartment has been booked. Hana’s stated logic is that pursuers will first search the Westbahnhof, where the trains to Paris leave, rather than the station from which Eva’s train departs. The women still have ten minutes to wait, sitting with the blinds drawn in a compartment Hana compares to an execution chamber. When the whistles sound and the train begins to move, Eva bursts into tears and throws herself into Hana’s arms. The departure brings relief, but the tense wait leaves its danger palpable even at the moment of escape.

Rescue, desire, and Hana’s telling

Hana later tells Liesel that Eva spent the night in her bed, calling it her reward. When Liesel asks why she is being told this, Hana says plainly that she is trying to make her jealous. The rescue is therefore bound up with an erotic attachment, not simply an act of solidarity. Hana’s excited retelling lingers on Eva’s appearance and on their physical intimacy; at the café, the explicitness of her language is enough to make people at a nearby table turn and look. The narrative places Hana’s bold public performance beside the vulnerability she describes in Eva, making the story both a disclosure of intimacy and a deliberate test of Liesel’s response.

The next morning, Hana puts Eva on a train to Prague. Eva wants to go to Paris, and Hana offers to accompany her, but Eva refuses. She says she will write and wants to become a movie star. These details distinguish getting Eva out of one immediate danger from securing her future: Hana can arrange a disguise, a taxi, and a train, but cannot decide where Eva goes next or guarantee that her ambitions will be realized.

The wider refugee predicament

Eva’s departure does not remove her from the larger crisis of displacement. At a gathering in the Glass Room, refugees are ushered in from the dining area and positioned before an audience as though they were performers in a small theatre. Among them are a middle-aged couple with two children, and a woman with an eight-year-old daughter. The girl’s floral dress is shabby; the mother’s neat appearance and disdainful look contrast with the crowd’s close inspection of her. The woman is identified as Kata, and this scene makes visible the social gaze that turns displaced people into objects to be examined before those who may decide whether to help.

The episode also exposes how unevenly women can secure the means to leave. When Liesel confronts Katalin about her past with Viktor, Katalin acknowledges that he helped her financially. She refuses to express shame: without work, rent, a place to sleep, food, or clothes for her baby, taking money has different consequences for someone living in insecurity than for a woman who has never faced those needs. Her account gives material context to the vulnerability shared by women whose movements are constrained by dependence, poverty, and the authority of men.

That vulnerability becomes unmistakable at the border. Katalin has a passport and visas, but an official examines the documents, consults another official, and then takes her by the elbow toward a nearby hut. Liesel pulls Marika close as the child cries out for her mother and promises that she will be looked after. The suddenness of Katalin’s detention reveals the limits of documents and of a rescue plan: a woman can be shepherded away in moments, while her child is left behind with strangers. Against this later scene, Hana’s carefully staged extraction of Eva remains a consequential act of aid, but not a guarantee of lasting freedom. The escape joins private desire to practical courage and places both within a world where a woman’s safety can depend on money, concealment, a train, and the decisions of officials.