by Lynn Austin
A tractor coughed as it rumbled across a distant field scribing tidy rows. A colony of ants busied themselves in their hill beneath her feet. Lena found order and safety and purpose in the rhythms of nature. She could see no purpose in Ans’s flight from home.
“If you love her . . .” Oh, how she loved her daughter! Ans, her firstborn, special to her in so many ways. She possessed an outward beauty that frightened Lena because Ans didn’t know the power of it yet. Lena clasped her hands into fists as if longing to hold tightly to her.
“If you love her, let her go.” She had to entrust her daughter to God. Lena knew her faith wasn’t strong enough to do that. She lowered her head as her tears fell and asked God to teach her how to let go.
CHAPTER 2
COLOGNE, GERMANY
Miriam Jacobs put her hands over her ears to block out the bickering. Her family was quarreling again. Abba argued with Uncle David. Uncle David argued with Uncle Nathan. And Uncle Nathan argued with Abba. Aunt Shoshanna and Aunt Louisa squabbled with Mother and with each other. Mother disagreed with Abba.
Miriam didn’t want to hear any more. She pushed her chair away from the table and stood, gathering up the delicate bone china plates. She carried them into the kitchen to escape the noise and yanked the door closed between the butler’s pantry and the dining room. She could still hear them quarreling.
Miriam longed for the meals around her family’s dinner table to be as they used to be, when there was laughter instead of fighting and generous platters of food spread across the white tablecloth. A time when the silver candlesticks were lit in celebration, not to save on the cost of electricity. Mother would sit down at the grand piano after dinner, and Miriam and Uncle David would take out their violins, and they would make lovely music together. Her cousin Saul would join them on his cello when he was home from the music conservatory. Sometimes Aunt Louisa would sing a Mozart aria in her beautiful soprano voice, making chills run down Miriam’s arms.
“Our lives will never be the way they used to be,” Abba shouted. “It’s foolish to expect them to.”
“This madness will pass,” Uncle Nathan replied. “We just need to be patient and wait it out. People will come to their senses, you’ll see.”
“We should apply for visas and go to Palestine,” Cousin Saul insisted.
“Don’t be absurd! Palestine is a backwards, desolate place!”
“We should go to America,” another cousin said. “They don’t hate Jews there.”
“No? Well, if that’s true, why don’t they issue more visas so we can immigrate? They turned away all those desperate people on that ship, didn’t they?” No one could forget the SS St. Louis, sailing from Germany last month with more than nine hundred Jews on board seeking asylum in Cuba. The visas the Cuban consulate had issued its passengers were declared invalid by the time the ship reached Havana, and the passengers were forbidden to disembark. Urgent appeals to the American and Canadian governments for refuge were rejected. The desperate passengers had no choice but to return to hate-filled Europe.
“We’re staying right here,” Uncle Nathan said. He was the older of Mother’s two brothers and once the wealthiest.
“But they are boxing us in,” Abba said, removing his glasses. “Our lives have grown intolerable. We aren’t wanted. We must leave.”
“It will get better.”
“It will get worse.”
Dishes and pots teetered in the kitchen sink. Miriam would help wash them tomorrow. There was little else for her to do all day besides practice her violin, and besides, it was too dark in the kitchen to see what she was doing. She waited for a lull in the arguing, then returned to the dining room to bid everyone good night.
“I wish Saul hadn’t gone out,” she heard Aunt Louisa say. “It’s past curfew.”
“I warned him not to,” Uncle David said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“He’ll be all right,” Uncle Nathan replied. “He knows how to take care of himself.”
“Where would we go if we were to leave?” Mother asked. She was still beautiful and delicate, as lovely as the music she’d once performed. It was the first time she’d shown any hint of listening to Abba’s arguments.
“I told you, to the Netherlands. They are allowing Jewish refugees to flee across their border. Some people I knew from the university have already gone there.”
“How would we move all of our belongings to the Netherlands?” Mother asked. “It’s impossible.”
“When we go, we must leave everything behind,” Abba replied. “Our lives are more valuable than any of our possessions.”
“How would you get there?” Uncle Nathan asked.
“I’m told there are guides who will take us across the border in places that aren’t guarded,” Abba said. “I’ll walk if I have to.”
“And you think the Dutch people are going to accept Jews any better than our fellow Germans do here in Cologne?”
“There has been a synagogue in Amsterdam since the seventeenth century,” Abba replied. “The Dutch don’t hate us. They don’t have propaganda posters plastered on every wall, demonizing us, or signs in their shops saying no Jews allowed.”
“How would you make a living?” Mother asked.
“They have some very fine universities. Jews aren’t forbidden to teach there. I’ve already been making inquiries—”
“I’m getting worried! I wish Saul would come home.” Aunt Louisa had risen from the table and was pacing between the foyer and the dining room, lifting the curtain from time to time to gaze into the darkened street.
“Now that it’s after curfew,” Uncle David said, “Saul might have decided to stay where he is rather than get caught outside in the streets.”
Miriam’s concern for her cousin grew by the minute. They had all heard horror stories about Jews being assaulted and beaten for no reason. Jewish men who’d had their beards set on fire, women molested. But she also understood her cousin’s restlessness, his longing for freedom in spite of the danger. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but the prospect of living the rest of her life in this joyless house was unimaginable. Abba’s arguments had begun to sway her.
“I’m going to bed,” Miriam said. She kissed Mother’s cheek and gave Abba a hug, then lit a candle from the one in the center of the table and carried it upstairs. She could still hear them arguing, even with her bedroom door closed. A dark curtain of anxiety began to settle over Miriam, wrapping itself around her, snatching her breath, making her queasy. Her battles with this sudden, nameless dread had begun on Kristallnacht as she’d sat with her parents in their darkened apartment near the university, listening to angry shouts and shattering glass in the streets below, the sky lit by the glow of flames. Now she struggled to control this panic attack, knowing it would grow to uncontrollable proportions until she would be gasping for air as if she’d run up a steep hill. The best way to control it, she’d learned, was to lose herself in her music.
Miriam’s hands trembled as she lifted her violin from the case. Her lungs squeezed tighter, but she began to play a Tchaikovsky violin piece by memory, unable to read the music by candlelight. She offered her music as a plea for Saul’s safety and as a prayer that God would end the bickering and show her family what to do. Slowly, slowly, her nausea eased and she could breathe again.
“That’s it,” Abba said. “We are leaving.” He spoke calmly and with great certainty. Two Jewish neighbors on their way to morning prayers had found Miriam’s cousin a few blocks from home. Saul had been beaten and left for dead by a gang of Hitler Youth. The neighbors carried him home. He would live, the doctor said, but his injuries would take a long time to heal. Miriam wondered if his soul would ever heal. And if his crushed fingers would ever play the cello again.
The entire family had gathered in Saul’s bedroom, trying to comprehend what had happened and why. The room grew very still when Abba announced they were leaving. “If any of you wants to join me, you are welcome to come. But I am taking my wi
fe and daughter and we are leaving Germany for good.”
Miriam’s heart stuttered at his words, like a leaf tumbling down the street in the wind. The shroud of anxiety floated around her, threatening to settle over her. She couldn’t imagine leaving Cologne. Yet she couldn’t imagine staying. Who could live in a place where such things happened? “When, Abba?” she asked.
“By the end of the week, if not sooner. I will need a few days to finish making arrangements, then we will go. We must get out.”
He told Miriam and her mother to pack one suitcase each. They would have to carry it themselves, and they might have to walk part of the way. Miriam would take her violin, too, of course. She packed and repacked her suitcase countless times in the next hurried days, unable to decide what to bring and what to leave behind. At the very last minute, she tossed out some clothes and added her photograph album and her grandmother’s silver candlesticks. Her former life might be ending, but that didn’t mean it had never happened. Miriam wanted to remember the laughter and the holidays by Lake Constance so the hope for happier days in the future wouldn’t fade.
The night before they were to leave, Abba loaded their bags, Miriam’s violin, and an extra suitcase with some of his books and research papers into his car, gathering dust in the carriage house all these months. One of his former physics students, Rolf, came to fetch it and drove it to his apartment in a different part of town.
Saying goodbye to her family and her home the next morning was one of the hardest things Miriam had ever done. Knowing her parents would be right beside her was the only thing that made it bearable. But when the final moment came and they stood in the foyer with their coats on, Mother sank down on one of Grandmother’s antique chairs and said, “I can’t leave. I’m sorry, but I can’t.” It was as if her home and her way of life exerted a pull as strong as gravity, and she couldn’t free herself from its grip. “You go first and get settled. Miriam and I will join you later. That way you can let us know what furniture and other household goods we should bring with us.”
“My dear, don’t you understand? The Nazis won’t let us bring anything with us.” He spoke gently as if explaining it to a child. “The moment they see us moving our things, they will arrest us. Remember how they took everything in Nathan’s store? The Nazis are already moving into Jewish homes and taking whatever they wish. It won’t be long until they take this house, too.”
Mother looked away as if unable to face him or the incomprehensible truth. It was the same way Miriam had looked away when she first saw her cousin’s beaten body. “I can’t leave my home,” she said softly. “I can’t.”
“And what about you, dear one?” Abba reached for Miriam’s hand. “Will you come with me?”
“I . . . I . . .” She looked from one parent to the other, her stomach as tight as a fist.
She heard a soft sound, like a groan. Her cousin Saul was trying to speak. He looked at Miriam through swollen eyes. “Go . . . ,” he rasped. “Miriam, go!”
She looked at her mother.
“Yes,” Mother said, closing her eyes. “Yes, you should go.” Miriam knelt beside Mother’s chair and hugged her fiercely. She embraced her in return, then gently pushed her away. Miriam stood and went to join Abba.
“Dry your eyes, Miriam,” Abba said, “so the neighbors won’t know that we’re leaving.” Miriam wiped her eyes on her coat sleeve and walked through the front door with him. She heard weeping behind her and couldn’t look back as the door closed. “You remember what we must do?” he asked when they reached the sidewalk.
“Yes, Abba.” They walked through the streets together to the crowded market district, carrying empty shopping bags. With the crush and press of shoppers all around them, Miriam and Abba quickly tore off the loosened yellow stars that identified them as Jews and stuffed them into their pockets. They faced imprisonment if caught without them. No one seemed to notice. They continued walking, stopping at a produce vendor to buy fruit, adding it to their bags as if they were ordinary people on an ordinary shopping day. Surely the fruit vendor saw Miriam’s shaking hands as she paid for her purchases, or noticed her ragged breaths. And the soldiers idling on the street corner—could they tell that she and Abba were Jewish? What if they stopped them and asked to see their identity cards? Miriam’s insides churned as she struggled to breathe, battling her rising fear. And sorrow. She mustn’t cry.
Abba filled their bags. He and Miriam continued walking through the marketplace, then out of the Jewish district for the first time in months. Grotesque posters in shopwindows and on billboards depicted Jews with exaggerated facial features and denounced them as an inferior race. What if Rolf had tricked Abba, and the Nazis were waiting inside his apartment to arrest them? “Everything will be fine, Miriam,” Abba said as her breathing became labored. “We’re almost there.”
Abba rang the bell to Rolf’s apartment. He answered a moment later and invited them inside. Miriam needed to sit down as fear threatened to overwhelm her. Rolf brought her a glass of water. “Where’s your wife, Professor Jacobs?” he asked.
“She isn’t coming.” Miriam saw pain in Abba’s eyes as he removed his glasses and rubbed them. He’d been forced to choose between staying with his wife of twenty-five years and leaving with his daughter. Miriam wondered if Abba would have stayed behind if she had.
“Shall we go, Professor?” Rolf asked after they’d rested and regained their composure. Abba nodded. They left through the back door and went down a rear staircase to where the car was parked behind the building. Miriam gripped the railing on the way down, her knees trembling. They were three ordinary people, traveling west out of Cologne, going on a holiday in the countryside the way they had when Miriam was a child.
Rolf drove for a very long time. It was growing dark when they stopped at a house in a small German village near the Dutch border. It belonged to the guide who would help them cross the border. The guide’s wife offered coffee and sandwiches at her kitchen table. They barely spoke as they waited until midnight. It all seemed like a dream to Miriam, and she longed to wake up in her bed in their apartment near the university. But it wasn’t a dream. She thought of Saul and wished they had all left together weeks ago as Abba had begged them to do.
“It’s time to go,” the guide finally said. They went out into a cold wind and walked across a meadow and into the woods behind the village, carrying their suitcases and the violin. The ground was wet, soaking Miriam’s shoes, the night dark and frigid. After living inside for months, it seemed strange to feel the wind blowing her hair across her face.
They emerged from the woods several minutes later, and after crossing another pasture, they came to a river where a man waited with a rowboat. The boat rocked as the man helped her and Abba board and then tossed in their suitcases. Miriam shivered as if she might never be warm again as they crossed the river, the wind blowing straight from the Noordzee. When the boat reached the other side, the man helped Abba lift out their suitcases and haul them up the embankment.
“Head straight west across that field and you’ll come to a road,” the man told them. “Turn right and follow the road north until you come to a small village. The Dutch people will help you from there. They’re good people.”
The trip across the damp field and up the dirt road into the village took more than three hours. Abba had to stop several times to set down his heavy suitcase and rest. Miriam was grateful each time. Her feet felt frozen, her hands blistered from gripping her bag and her violin. Her lungs ached. All around them, the countryside rustled with strange sounds.
Dawn shimmered along the horizon beneath the clouds, like a window shade slowly rolling open by the time they reached a farm on the edge of town. The farmer had just stepped from the barn with his dog, and the animal hurtled toward them, barking a warning. The farmer silenced it with a shout and walked out to the road to meet Miriam and Abba. “From Germany?” he asked. Abba nodded. “Many, many are coming,” he said in clumsy German. “I will show y
ou the train. It takes you to Westerbork, the camp for refugees.”
CHAPTER 3
LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS
Ans de Vries arrived at the Leiden train station toting all of her belongings in two canvas bags and a pasteboard suitcase. She couldn’t help grinning as she walked down busy Rapenburg Street, thrilled to be moving to such a bustling place. The air smelled of coffee and of the fishy canals and rivers, not of manure. The streets hummed with traffic. Bicycles whooshed past and leaned in tangled piles outside shops and houses. Church steeples and the domes of an observatory poked above the trees in the distance.
Ans followed the directions Opa had given her to meet with her potential employer, Professor Herman Huizenga. She would have skipped like a schoolgirl all the way there in her eagerness to begin her new life, but the cumbersome baggage slowed her steps. A fifteen-minute walk brought her to his office at the university, a venerable old building of aged brick and polished wood, rich with centuries of history. She climbed the stairs to the second floor. His door stood open. Ans set down her luggage, straightened her blouse, and smoothed back her fair hair before knocking on the doorframe. She hoped she didn’t smell of cows.
“Come in, please.”
She stepped through the doorway with what she hoped was a confident smile and extended her hand to the gentleman seated behind a desk. “Hello, Professor Huizenga. I’m Ans de Vries. I’m here about the job as a lady’s companion?”
He stood, unfolding his lanky body, grasshopper-like, and shook her hand. “Very nice to meet you. Please, have a seat.” She had never seen an office like his, lined with shelves of leather-bound books that spilled over onto the floor and every available surface. Scientific gadgets and contraptions she couldn’t begin to recognize adorned every pile and table and shelf and chair. What an interesting person he must be to have such an office.
“Thank you for coming, Miss De Vries,” he said when they both were seated. “You have been told what this job entails?”