by Lynn Austin
“We found the crew member,” she heard the rider say in German. “We’ve captured him.”
“And the people helping him?”
“Yes. Them, too.”
The officer turned back to the row of terrified men. “You may go.”
Lena’s arms went limp and she slipped from Truus’s embrace, collapsing to the ground, her legs no longer able to hold her. “Thank You, God . . . thank You!” she sobbed. Then Pieter’s arms were around her, holding her tightly as they both wept. She felt his body trembling.
At last they dried their tears and Pieter helped her to her feet. “Do you think you can walk? Should we go to the manse?” he asked.
“Home. I want to go home.” Lena wanted to get as far away from the village and the horror of what had just happened as quickly as she could. She needed to see her children and make sure they were safe and hold them tightly. The sight of Pieter kneeling with other men, a Nazi revolver pointed at him, played over and over in her mind like a broken movie reel. She didn’t think she would ever erase the image for as long as she lived.
They reached the edge of the village, still holding each other up, and started down the road to their farm. Lena suddenly remembered their wooden boat. “This isn’t the way we came, Pieter. What about our boat?”
“I’ll go back for it later.”
“No! I won’t let you! I’ll go back—”
“Lena—”
“You need to stay hidden, from now on, where the Nazis can never find you again!”
“I’m not going to hide.”
“Pieter, you have to!”
“We must keep fighting back—now more than ever before.”
“I can’t go through another ordeal like that. They’re inhuman! I thought you were going to die!”
His arm tightened around her waist. “I know. I did too. But you know what, Lena? I felt at peace as I knelt there. I thought of that Scripture that says, ‘For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.’ I understood it.”
“No . . . I can’t lose you!” Lena’s tears brimmed and rolled down her face.
“It isn’t up to us if we live or die. We’re in God’s hands. The Nazis can’t harm a hair of our heads unless it’s His will.”
Lena knew he was right. They’d been in the Father’s hands since the day they were born. But they’d never been as aware of that truth as they were now, after the horror of this day. “I’m so scared,” she said. “For all of us.”
“I know. God knows we both are.”
CHAPTER 40
DECEMBER 1943
It began with a bad cold. All of the women hiding in the tiny chicken coop developed coughs and runny noses that winter, including Miriam. Months had passed since she’d arrived at the Mulders’ farm, and as the nights grew colder, Mr. Mulder gave them a small kerosene stove to heat the space. The women used it sparingly, aware that kerosene was difficult to find. Mrs. Mulder brought more blankets and gave them each a pair of mittens and warm woolen socks that the women in her church had knit. But nothing could dispel the constant chill. As the cold, wet winter dragged on endlessly, Miriam couldn’t shake her nagging cough. She wondered if she would ever be warm again.
As she’d feared, there were days when being in such close quarters got on everyone’s nerves. There also were days when the women managed to laugh as they told stories to each other and read aloud from the books Mrs. Mulder brought. Every once in a while, Mrs. Mulder brought an underground newspaper for them to read, and Miriam wondered if her friends Ans and Eloise had contributed to it. As long as there were no visitors at the farm, Miriam was able to play her muted violin, which caused a great commotion among the chickens but brought smiles of delight to her fellow refugees.
“Has Betsie always been this quiet?” Miriam asked Julie one day when they were alone. “I’ve noticed she rarely talks.”
“Only since we went into hiding,” Julie said. “She misses our brother. They were very close. She wanted to go into hiding with him and Abba instead of with Mama and me, but it was impossible.”
Miriam’s winter cold worsened as the weather grew colder, until the pain in her chest became unbearable. She couldn’t sit up or stagger to the outhouse without help. The simple trip there and back exhausted her. She felt as though she was burning up, yet at the same time, she couldn’t stop shivering. Sleep brought wild, feverish dreams.
“Christina has developed a very high fever,” she heard Lies telling Mrs. Mulder one evening. “I think Dr. Elzinga should come. I fear she may have pneumonia.”
Miriam was only vaguely aware of the white-haired doctor kneeling on the mattress in the tiny space, examining her. She tried to talk, but it brought on a spell of coughing and such terrible, searing pain that she curled into a ball, holding her ribs.
“I need to take her to a hospital,” he said.
Miriam tried to say goodbye to the other women and to thank the Mulders for helping her, but she couldn’t draw enough air to speak without coughing. A heavy boot kicked her in the chest each time she drew a breath. She knew she was very ill, and she longed to see Avi one last time and to hold Elisheva in her arms, to kiss them once more before she died. Avi had begged her to hang on to life and to survive so they could be together again someday, but maybe it was better to let go and slip away from the pain. She would see her loved ones again in the World to Come.
She was aware of Lies helping her crawl out of the shack. Someone carried her to the doctor’s car. She was traveling somewhere. Had they remembered to bring her suitcase? And her violin? She couldn’t be without her violin! It was all she had left of herself, the last thing that bound her to Avi and Elisheva and to Abba and Mother. She tried to ask about it but couldn’t stop coughing. “Shh, just lie still, Christina,” the doctor said.
She lay on the back seat of his car beneath a woolen blanket, shivering and listening to slushy snow spray beneath the car’s tires. Then she was carried inside and she was warm at last, in a place that was white and smelled of disinfectant. Someone laid her in a white iron bed with white sheets and warm blankets. A hospital? Jewish patients weren’t allowed in hospitals. She coughed and coughed and tasted blood. Dr. Elzinga bent over her with his thick, snowy hair and listened to her lungs. He shook his head. Two women in their fifties, dressed in street clothes, brought water and broth and told Miriam to swallow pills for her fever.
Miriam dreamed of her grandmother’s house and of playing tag with her cousins in the summertime beside Lake Constance. She dreamed of Avi and Elisheva, and she didn’t want to wake up, but the pain from coughing always drove the dreams away. Interwoven among her dreams were loud shouts and cries and moans. Miriam wasn’t sure if they were real or not.
One day she awoke and knew the fever was gone. A dull ache replaced the sharp pain in her chest. Her ribs and stomach muscles felt sore as she propped herself up on her elbows to look around. She was in a small room with two hospital beds. The other one was empty. It didn’t resemble a regular hospital room but was more like the bedroom of a house that had been converted into an infirmary. Heavy feet tromped up and down the steps outside her door. Floors creaked above her head as people walked around upstairs. The shouts and cries she’d heard in her dreams were real. The door opened, and one of the two women who’d taken care of her came inside, smiling when she saw her. “Are you feeling better, Christina?” It took Miriam a moment to remember that was her name.
“Where am I?”
“You’ve been very ill. Dr. Elzinga feared we might lose you. Do you think you can eat something?”
“I’ll try.” The woman left and returned a short time later with a bowl of watery pea soup. She propped pillows behind Miriam’s back, then spooned the soup into her mouth. It was warm and delicious, and Miriam remembered being fed this way when she’d been feverish. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
“Get some rest now,” the woman said before leaving. She hadn’t told Miriam her name or where she was. She lay down again
and dozed, and when she awoke, Dr. Elzinga was there.
“Christina! Mrs. Woltheim told me your fever had broken. I’m so pleased.” He sat on the edge of her bed and listened to her chest, then her back before nodding his head and declaring, “Better. Much, much better.”
“Where am I? What hospital is this?”
“It’s not a hospital; it’s called Meijers House. It’s a private institution for residents who are . . . simpleminded. It’s run by the two sisters who’ve been taking care of you. This is their infirmary.”
“So I’ll have to go back to the farm now that I’m well?” The thought brought panic and a feeling of claustrophobia, even though Lies and Julie and Betsie and Alie were pleasant companions. Mr. and Mrs. Mulder had been kind, the food meager but adequate.
“I’ve found donors who’ll pay for you to remain here for a time,” he said, putting his instruments back in his bag.
“Donors? I don’t understand.”
“Many of my countrymen want to help but aren’t able to hide people for various reasons. Their generosity helps others like you to remain in hiding. They’ll pay your room and board, for now, as if you were one of the residents. But we aren’t entirely certain if the people who come and go here, making deliveries or visiting the residents, can be trusted—including the cook, a cleaning woman, and the laundress who come from town during the day. Until you’re fully well and we can find another hiding place, you’ll need to pretend you’re mentally crippled like the other residents.” In her weakened state, she didn’t think that would be too difficult.
Miriam moved into the main part of the house when she was finally well enough and began helping with the other residents. Mrs. Woltheim and her sister, Miss Meijers, known to the residents as Miss Hannie and Miss Willy, were kind, hardworking women who ran Meijers House like their home and treated the residents like their children. “Willy and I grew up in this house,” Mrs. Woltheim told Miriam. “My husband left me after our son Frits was born because I refused to send him to an institution. Frits and I moved back here with Willy, who’d never married, and we cared for our parents until they died. When money grew tight and we could no longer afford to pay the bills, we turned Meijers House into a home for other children and adults like my Frits and charged a fee for their care. We’d like to think that it’s a home and not a cold institution.”
Frits Woltheim was in his late twenties, and like the other two young men, Aart and Jan, he was what physicians called a Mongoloid. Frits yelled whenever he was frustrated or unhappy and was the source of most of the shouting Miriam had heard. Miriam shared a small bedroom with an elderly woman named Miep, who suffered from dementia and sat in a chair, quietly mumbling nonsense all day. Two more women shared another bedroom: Rietje, who was Miriam’s age but had the mental abilities of a small child, and Cornelia, who talked to people only she could see and sometimes suffered from paranoid delusions that made her moan and cry out.
Mealtimes were messy and chaotic but eaten together as a family, even though wartime shortages all across the country meant that the soup was watery and the oatmeal was thin. The sisters didn’t have a radio and rarely talked of the war or current events, so Miriam had no idea what was happening in the outside world. She might have been living on a secluded island in the middle of the ocean or in an imaginary world like Cornelia’s. She felt safe at Meijers House, for the most part, and did her best to avoid interacting with the daytime help. Whenever the other residents’ families visited on Sunday afternoons, Miriam would sit alone on the sun porch, imitating Miep, who was lost in the world of dementia.
The sisters had an old-fashioned windup gramophone and often played music in the evenings. Sometimes Miss Willy played the piano. The house was isolated enough from their neighbors that Miriam asked if she could play her violin without the mute after the daily household staff went home.
“That would be lovely,” Miss Hannie said. “We adore music.”
Everyone enjoyed hearing Miriam play, especially Rietje, who would sit on the floor by Miriam’s feet clapping her hands after each piece and saying, “More! Play more, Christina!”
By the time a few months had passed, Rietje had become so attached to Miriam that Miss Willy allowed her to swap bedrooms with Miep so Rietje could be close to her new friend. Miriam had tried to remain aloof from the women at the Mulders’ farm, closing herself off from close friendships, but there was something about Rietje, a high-spirited child trapped in a young woman’s body, that seeped into a tiny corner of Miriam’s heart. They took walks together around the spacious grounds, away from Frits and his friends who liked to tease. Golden-haired Rietje skipped and danced and exclaimed in childlike delight at every ant and worm and bee they encountered. Her antics often brought a rare smile to Miriam’s face.
One Sunday afternoon, Rietje’s mother and father came to visit. Miriam heard a commotion in the foyer but didn’t dare move from her wicker chair on the sun porch to see what was causing it. A moment later, Rietje burst through the French doors exclaiming, “Christina! Christina! Play music!” She was followed by a worried-looking woman and a tall, red-faced man with a stern expression and an emblem of the Dutch Nazi Party on his lapel. Miriam’s lungs squeezed. A wave of nausea washed through her as she did her best to stare vacantly past her friend, who was tugging on her arm, saying, “Play your violin! Play music!”
Miss Willy scurried into the room and gently took Riejte’s arm. “Come, dear. You know you aren’t allowed to bother the other residents.”
“I want her to play!” Rietje insisted. She sank to the floor, kicking her feet and throwing one of her rare tantrums. Miss Hannie came running to help, and together they managed to pull Rietje from the room and close the French doors. Miriam continued her blank, vacant stare, fighting nausea, not daring to see if Rietje’s father was scrutinizing her and seeing through her facade.
The incident left Miriam badly shaken, even after Rietje stopped crying and Frits stopped adding to the commotion with his shouts. Miss Hannie gave a huge sigh when she came to sit beside Miriam a while later. “They’re gone, Christina. Are you all right?”
“Yes . . . How’s poor Rietje?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She always bounces back quickly, just like a child.”
“Did you call Dr. Elzinga? I’ll need to be moved, won’t I?” The thought of returning to the chicken coop made Miriam want to weep. It meant another change, another loss.
“We won’t call him yet, dear. Rietje’s father was more concerned with how his monthly fees were being spent than he was with his daughter. The very idea that she’s imperfect disgusts him. I don’t think he paid any attention to what she was saying.”
Miriam felt her stomach do another slow turn. “When I lived in Germany, the Nazis not only hated Jews, but people like Rietje and Frits too. We heard rumors that babies who were born with imperfections were left to die.”
Miss Hannie nodded sadly. “My husband felt that way. He was a believer in eugenics.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. But I’m sorrier for him. He missed the joy of knowing and loving our Frits.”
On a warm day in March, Miriam looked at the calendar and realized that it was Elisheva’s birthday. Tears slipped down her cheeks as she tried to picture her daughter as a curious three-year-old, smiling Avi’s beautiful smile, skipping with childish delight the way Rietje did, wearing her shining dark hair in two braids down her back the way Miriam wore hers when she was a girl in Cologne. Her precious baby was another year older. And another year removed from any memory of the father and mother who loved her more than life itself.
“Happy birthday, Elisheva,” she whispered. “Happy birthday, my darling girl . . .”
CHAPTER 41
MAY 1944
The apartment in Zoeterwoude, a few miles south of Leiden, was in Ans’s territory. She delivered ration cards every month for the people who were hiding there—more than twenty Jews, at last count, including several small chil
dren. “The woman who rents the apartment is putting herself and all of those people in great danger,” one of Ans’s contacts told her. “That apartment is so overcrowded it’s certain to draw the attention of her neighbors, especially with so many children living there with an unmarried woman.”
“I tell her that every time I deliver her ration cards,” Ans replied.
“When you make your next delivery, you must convince the families to separate for everyone’s safety. Tell her we know farmers in the countryside who are willing to take small children but not entire families.”
Ans’s overused bicycle was in need of repairs again, so she walked to the Leiden train station with the hidden ration cards, prepared to make her warnings stern and convincing this time. She was in line to purchase her train ticket when she heard someone calling her name. She turned and saw Erik hurrying toward her. She stepped out of line, smiling as she watched him approach.
“I’m glad I caught you,” he said after kissing her cheeks. She wished she could give him a real kiss, but the train station was a public place. Besides, she sensed that something was wrong. Erik was panting as if he’d run a long distance, and he still wore his uniform. He’d been on the night shift again, arresting curfew breakers, and must have come here right after finishing work.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He didn’t reply as he took her hand and led her out of the station. He stopped at a herring cart just outside. “What kind do you want?” he asked, pointing to the fish.
Ans didn’t want any, her stomach drawn into a tight knot by Erik’s unusual behavior. But she made her choice and waited for Erik to order and pay the vendor. He led her off to one side while they ate, his gaze alert and watchful.
“What’s going on, Erik?” she asked after swallowing a few bites. “How did you know I would be here?”