by Michael Dean
There was a long queue outside the Tip Top, even this early in the evening. Like many enterprises in Jewish Amsterdam, the place was owned by émigrés from Germany – Jozef Kroonenberg and his son, Barend. Barend and the Tip Top’s projectionist, Piet Wessendorp, were outside, working the crowd. They greeted Manny and Tinie by name, but could not quite remember who Hein was.
‘So what have you got for us tonight, Barend?’ Manny asked.
‘You haven’t heard? Where you been, Manny?’
‘Down a hole.’
Barend shook with laughter. ‘Down a hole, he says! You’re a hoot, Manny. A hoot! Top of the bill is Leo Fuld. See? It don’t get any better than that. Tip-top at the Tip Top, boychick – as ever.’
‘As ever!’ Manny echoed obligingly. Tinie squeezed his arm, proud of him.
While still in the queue, Manny bought peanuts and shared them with Tinie and Hein. They bought cheap seats in the top balcony. But the ornate décor and red plush seats still lifted Manny’s spirits.
Tinie dug him in the ribs, nodding with her head. There was a sprinkling of German soldiers in the audience - Wehrmacht given leave-time in Amsterdam, before catching a train back to Germany. Most of them had girls with them. Manny grimaced.
The curtain went up on a diamond worker called Jakob Goubitz, in evening dress, with a red cummerbund round his ample middle. Goubitz was semi-professional. He often did the warm-up at the Tip Top:
Manny and Tinie had heard most of his jokes before. There was the one about Saint Nicholas and Zwarte Piet – Black Peter – giving the good children presents and the bad children a smack on the saint’s day.
In Goubitz’s joke, Saint Nicholas asks each child his religion: One child says Protestant, and gets a present. The next child says Catholic, and gets a present. Then a little boy says he’s Jewish. Saint Nicholas tells him, in Yiddish, to take two presents. Black Peter tops that, telling him, also in Yiddish, to take three – nimm dray. Goubitz had Black Peter speaking Yiddish in a negro voice - the joke brought the house down. Hein Broersen was rocking in his seat, laughing open-mouthed.
After the comic, there were extracts from an operetta called De koningin van Montmartre. That took them up to the interval. Manny chatted to Tinie, when the lights went up, ignoring Hein altogether. But Hein didn’t seem to mind. Tinie tried to include him in their stories of past visits to the Tip Top, but when Manny started speaking to her in a private shorthand which amounted to code, she gave up.
The second half was opened by the Nelson Cabaret, singing in German. Before the invasion, Manny had heard them singing political songs, one in particular, by Harold Horsten, was about the tramp of boots coming ever closer. Another went ‘better to wash dishes in America than live a life of fear in Berlin.’ Now they were more circumspect, keeping to anodyne German folk standards – like Hoch auf dem gelben Wagen. Manny was amazed they were there at all.
Then top-of-the-bill Leo Fuld appeared on stage. Manny heard people behind him saying this was his last appearance before he sailed to America. To massive applause, he sang a medley of Jewish hits, kicking off with the classic My Yiddishe Mama, which brought the house down.
‘Wonder what the Wehrmacht made of that?’ Manny whispered to Tinie.
‘They seemed to like it,’ Tinie whispered back, nodding.
Ahead of them, a middle-aged Wehrmacht officer was indeed applauding hard, leaning over to talk to a girl half his age, next to him. Some of the rest of Leo Fuld’s repertoire – like Mein Shtetele Belz, Resele and Az Der Rebbe Tantst - may have left the Wehrmacht rather more puzzled, but they applauded loudly enough.
As the three of them left the theatre, Manny and Tinie still arm in arm, Hein getting lost in the crowd behind them, Manny bumped into the middle-aged Wehrmacht officer, who smiled apologetically. Hanging on his arm, her face thick with make-up, lips bright red, they recognised Truus Bosse – the girl who had held the twenty-first birthday party, just before the invasion. .
Manny glared at her. ‘Moffenmeid! ‘ he shouted.
The Wehrmacht officer looked bemused. Truus flushed scarlet, pushed her long thick brunette hair back and muttered ‘Let’s get out of here’ to her escort.
‘Moffenmeid!’ Manny yelled again. ‘How could you, Truus? You whore!’
Tinie looked horrified. ‘Manny!’
The crowd carried Truus and her enemy soldier away from them. Hein did not seem to have noticed anything. ‘Let’s stop for a beer somewhere,’ he said.
‘No!’ Tinie said. ‘Manny’s wanted by the Moffen.’
When they had parted from Heim, Tinie broke Manny’s grip on her arm. ‘Oh, Manny, you shouldn’t have done that.’ Manny looked sulky. ‘You put yourself at risk. And what about Hein? Suppose you’d got him arrested, just when he was due to sail for England. ’
Tinie never got angry, but this was the nearest to it Manny had seen. He hit himself on the head. ‘Tinie, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I’ve always been an idiot. Tinie, please …’
‘When we get home, you can fetch the washing water for both of us, that’s your punishment.’
He pulled a contrite, little-boy face. ‘Alright. Willingly!’
When they got back to Batavia Straat, Manny crept up the last flight of stairs in his socks, so as not to alert the woman next door. Tinie looked happy again, once the door had closed behind them. Her cheeks were tinged pink, her eyes were wide and shining, as she looked at him. When he made for his curtained niche to sleep, she called him back.
‘Will you lie next to me, in bed?’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything. Just hold me. Will you do that, Manny?’
‘Of course!’ he said, easily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which to him, it was.
PART II
8
Captain Robert Roet was the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Dutch army. He had risen through the ranks in the Royal Netherlands Grenadiers, finishing, at the age of forty-four, as His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard’s adjutant. On the night before the German invasion, Robert had been with the prince in the Huis ten Bosch, in The Hague, when a telephone call came through. As he put the receiver down, Prince Bernhard’s serious, bespectacled face turned to Robert.
‘Sas’s aunt is expected to die in the night,’ he said, quietly.
Robert nodded. Major Sas was the Dutch military attaché in Berlin The message meant that he had heard from Colonel Hans Oster, an anti-Nazi German aiding the Dutch, that the Germans were about to cross the Dutch border.
In the event of an invasion, the plan was for Robert to drive Bernhard’s wife and the two princesses, Beatrix and Irene, to safety in Paris. But when news came that the Moerdijk had fallen, the plan had to be abandoned.
Along with his family, Prince Bernhard would have to join Queen Wilhelmina, his mother-in-law, at Ijmuiden. They would then travel together to meet the British destroyer, which had been put at the Queen’s disposal.
They set off in one car, another car from the Royal Dutch Bank followed; a third, armoured car with guards, went ahead. The convoy was strafed on a bridge by a German fighter, but it was driven off by English planes. They met up with the Queen, as planned, and boarded the British destroyer at the Hook of Holland.
Wilhelmina of Orange-Nassau was sixty. She had been Queen of the Netherlands for forty-two years. She was a tiny, rotund figure. It was as if Queen Victoria, who Wilhelmina had met as a young girl, had continued her life as a Dutch queen.
She had been expecting to sail to the south-west of Holland, where Dutch troops were continuing to resist the invasion. But the commander of the destroyer said the seas there were too full of German shipping. He would have to return to England, he said, while he still could. There was no alternative.
As the coast of Holland disappeared from sight, tears rolled down Wilhelmina’s cheeks, but her fists were clenched. She swore like a stevedore at Adolf Hitler, affixing his name with every obscenity in the Dutch language. Hitler, as head of state, had promised her personal
ly that the Germans had no intention of violating Dutch neutrality.
But not only had he invaded, he had sent a parachute force to kidnap her. They had landed at the three small airfields round The Hague, sealing off the city. The Royal Guards, led by Prince Bernhard, had fought them off, or she would have been a Nazi captive.
It was midday, and she had a long view of the beloved coastline, before it dipped beneath the horizon. Bernhard stood on one side of her and Robert Roet on the other, both of them towering over her. At her feet was an attaché case of state papers. It was the sum total of her luggage. On arrival, she would have to ask cousin George - George VI of England - for a toothbrush.
*
Though far from conventionally good-looking, Robert Roet’s energy and sense of danger attracted girls, especially the shy, mousy sort - like poor, dear, Else Hirschfeld. Else with her shaky nerves and inexhaustible need to give and receive love.
They had met at a dance, run by the Jewish organisation B’nai Brith. She was chaperoned by her brother, but then and later he was powerless to stop Robert charming her. Robert’s full lips folded into a sneer whenever he thought of Hirschfeld. To him, the man was a hypocrite: a prude, yet a voluptuary; a man of soaring ambition who affected self-doubt; a narrow-minded obsessive; a coward.
Hirschfeld, not surprisingly, resented Robert’s cavalier treatment of his sister – both before and after his abandonment of her. But Else, dear Else, poor plain warm Else, loved him more and more, no matter what he did.
In middle-age, Robert increasingly reproached himself for his youthful treatment of her and her son – actually their son, though he always thought of Manny as her son. But the pattern had repeated itself with Manny - the more Robert rejected him, the less he bothered with him, the more Manny adored him. Manny wrote to him almost as often as Else, and was equally undeterred by hardly ever getting a reply.
Manny had been a runt from birth. He had not been expected to live. Robert had not cared much, either way. He didn’t know why. The interest just was not there, at the beginning, and it never developed. He had briefly lived in Else and Max’s house, with the baby, then rented a flat for his little family, mainly to get away from Max. It was alright for a while, because the army took him away from home so much.
But in the end he got bored with them. And of course there were other women, lots of them, though Else always pretended not to notice. He had abandoned his wife and child when Manny was five. Manny had written him a letter, and drawn him a picture, pleading with him to stay. It had no effect.
*
Robert was sitting with Queen Wilhelmina, at a tea-table on the lawn, in the shade of a chestnut tree. He sat with his back to the Dutch royal residence, a mews house in Chester Square, just behind Buckingham Palace. The house, number 77, had recently been hit by a bomb. The damage had been repaired, but the Queen would not let it be repainted, because repainting would not be possible for ordinary citizens back home. She also refused to eat any food not available to her suffering people.
‘Are you still dead set on going back, Robert?’ the Queen asked him.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Robert smiled. The smile was genuine enough, but he knew its effect on ladies, young and old, regal or plebeian. ‘I’d better get a move on, while I can still do the parachute drop. I’m getting on a bit in years, ma’am.’
‘You are flagrantly fishing for compliments, Robert. I shall not respond. Now, Captain, I have a name to give you. Tell me what you think of him.’
Wilhelmina trusted Robert’s judgement of people. That was one reason she did not want to lose him, even for a short mission back to Holland.
‘Hein Broersen,’ she said. ‘You know him, do you not?’
‘Hein!’ Robert looked pleased. ‘Is Hein …?’
‘He’ll be here in five minutes. So hurry up.’
‘He made it!’
‘Yes. Via Ijmuiden in a twelve-foot open-hull dinghy, apparently.’
‘In a dinghy! Oh, well done, Hein!’
‘I’m waiting, Robert.’
‘Yes, ma’m. There are certain types of people who do well in wartime,’ Robert began, carefully. ‘One type is a success because they are so ordinary, so overlookable.
Hein’s like that. If I had to choose anybody I know to work in an occupied country, I’d choose Hein. Because nobody would notice him. He’s also practical, clear-thinking, limited, self-sufficient, and loyal as a dog.’
‘Ideal for sabotage work, then?’
‘None better, ma’am.’
‘Good. He wants to go back with you.’
‘Well, he can’t. I’m going tomorrow. Hein hasn’t started training yet. And I’m not waiting for him.’
‘I’ll leave you to break that to him yourself. Here he is.’
Hein Broersen, in an ancient grey flannel suit, was being lead across the lawn by a Dutch ADC, in the uniform of an RAF lieutenant. When he was introduced to the Queen, he blushed scarlet and stammered out that he was honoured.
There is a saying that when any two Dutchmen meet, they have only to talk for a minute or so, before they discover people they both know. Hein and Robert knew each other, as acquaintances, already, and soon the air was thick with news of people they had in common.
The news from home was mixed; resistance was increasing, but so were German reprisals.
‘I have something for you,’ Hein said to Robert, when they had finally run out of gossip.
‘Oh, really!’
‘With your permission, ma’am?’
Wilhelmina gave her permission, by tilting her head. Hein handed over two pieces of paper. One of the them was a letter from his son, Manny. Robert glanced at it with no great interest. The other piece of paper was a sketch, perfectly to scale. It showed the shipyard where the cruiser Armenius was being built .
*
As the Lysander crossed the North Sea, across a nearly full moon, Robert Roet took a slug of oude jenever from a hip flask. He stretched his legs out, pressing his back against the fuselage, as best he could with a bulky parachute strapped to his back. Then he took another slug of the jenever – feeling the viscous gin tickle every vein in his body.
It surprised him how sad he was to be leaving London. The swanky meals at Browns Hotel, with ministers of the Dutch government. All those drunken revelries at Oddenino’s, in Piccadilly, with Chris Krediet and Gerard Dogger. Oddenino’s kept a few crocks of jenever under the counter, especially for the Dutch.
But, nevertheless, as they say, ‘East or West, home is best.’ He was heading back to Holland. He had missed the Dutch sky. It’s different from anywhere else in the world, though England’s East Anglia comes closest. He had begged a staff-car and driven all the way to Norfolk, one weekend, just to look up at a near-Dutch sky.
Robert thought back to his training, on attachment with the British SOE. He remembered Beaulieu mainly for Charlotte Black, a fellow trainee, about to be parachuted into France, in search of her boyfriend. Demure in her Scottish tweed skirts, woollen pullovers, and purring Edinburgh accent, she dropped her drawers for anybody who asked, and for one or two people who hadn’t. Humiliatingly, he couldn’t keep up with her - either in desired frequency or duration.
He had gone completely bananas when he discovered she was relieving France, in the form of one of the Free French, at the same time as him: After an evening getting sloshed on pints of Bass at the Royal Oak, he had staggered back across the heath to Boarmans, the country-house where the SOE trainees were being put up. He had then unwisely attempted to roger Charlotte, who was up for it, as ever. The result was mediocre – OK, make that disastrous.
Charlotte had waited for him to fall into a drunken stupor, left his bed, and tiptoed off, along the draughty corridor, to her Free Frenchman. He, Robert, had woken up, found her gone, followed her scent. When he heard her at it, he banged on the chap’s door, burst in, and pulled her off him. He then started an ineffectual fight with the French chap, both of them stark naked, while Charlotte, a
lso naked, sat on the floor and laughed her head off.
He had ended up under arrest, briefly. They searched his room and found his stash of Gordon’s gin bottles – some drunk, some full. Only his connection with Prince Bernhard saved him from being thrown off the course – though he said he would leave, rather than have the Queen told. He was hit by the Black Birds, as he called them – dark depressions lasting weeks. They were getting worse as he got older.
He must have dozed for a while. An extraordinarily young-looking RAF Flight Lieutenant made his way along the lurching Lysander, and touched his arm. It was time to go. Time to put his parachute training into practice. He knew they had crossed what the RAF called the Kammhuber Line, a ring of anti-aircraft guns, radar stations and night-fighter bases. They were approaching Holland from the north, over the Afsluitdijk and the Zuyder Zee. The drop was to be at Noordwijk, north of The Hague and Scheveningen.
Robert took a last swig of jenever, to the RAF man’s utter horror, and stepped from the Lysander into a Dutch sky, albeit a black one. He tumbled down, then heard, then felt, his parachute opening. He caught a glimpse of the parachute containing his kit, reassuringly close. He dropped down, just into the surf, and frantically gathered up his chute, before it got waterlogged. It was silent and the beach was reassuringly empty. He buried the parachute as deep as he could, in the soft sand of the dunes, beyond the tide-mark.
In the darkness, it took him twenty minutes to locate the parachute with his kit. There was no sign of his welcoming committee, who were supposed to help with this. But he knew how difficult things were for the Geuzen. They would have to break curfew to get here; that was not always easy.
He began to bury his kit, near his parachute, but not in exactly the same place. He buried the radio-transmitter first. Though not that much bigger than a car battery, it weighed a ton. With it, he buried his gun, the Belgian FN 6.35 he had asked for.