by Lynn Austin
Lena’s arms tightened around Bep. She’d grown to love this child as her own. She knew there was a chance that Bep’s parents were still alive and would return for her after the war. For their sake and for Bep’s, she prayed that they would survive. But that meant Lena would have to give her up, and she knew a piece of her heart would tear away when she did. Once again, the magnitude of the pain and suffering the Nazis had inflicted on the world—and on her—nearly overwhelmed Lena. She stroked Bep’s dark hair. Truus was waiting for her reply. “I’m not sure,” she finally said.
The rumbling motorcycle and painful memories had stirred the ashes of Lena’s hatred, reigniting the flames. Because of the Nazis, Bep had been separated from her family, just as Lena had been. Because of them, Lena’s life and Bep’s life would never be the same. “I hate them,” she said, spitting out the words like poison. “I hate what they’ve done to us and to our country. I hope the Allies show them no mercy when they win.”
Truus drank her coffee. “Is there still no news of Ans or the rest of your family?”
Lena shook her head. “That’s what I hate them for the most—for taking the people I love away from me.” Lena had visited her father’s grave before coming here, and as she’d gazed at the scarred earth, she’d prayed that there wouldn’t be any new graves beside Papa’s when the war ended.
“I think everyone in town feels the same way you do about the Nazis.”
They finished their coffee. Lena slid Bep off her lap and stood. “I should go. Thanks for the coffee.”
She was almost home, with Bep riding on the handlebars and Maaike on the rear fender, when she saw a Nazi soldier standing in the middle of the road. She slowed. He stood alone, without a vehicle, gazing at the new spring grass in her pasture. The sight of her enemy so close to her home filled Lena with a hatred too deep to contain. Every Nazi she encountered, including this one, might be the one who’d killed her father.
Maaike saw him too and said, “Mama, stop! Turn around! We need to get away from him! Hurry!”
Lena braked to a halt, wondering if she should turn around.
“Who is that, Mama?” Bep asked.
“It’s a Nazi!” Maaike hissed.
The soldier faced away from them about twenty yards distant. He hadn’t noticed they were behind him yet. Lena’s heart raced as she debated how to get her daughters around him safely. The fields were too wet to cut across, especially with the bicycle, and besides, he would still see them. She was too weary to cycle all the way back into town. Should she pedal quickly past him? Who knew what he would do? Shoot at them? She helped the girls off the bicycle and gave it to Maaike to hold. “Stay here,” she said. “If I wave at you, get on it and pedal home with Bep as fast as you can, understand?”
“Mama, no! What are you going to do?”
“I’m just going to see what he wants. I’m counting on you to be brave, Maaike.”
“I’m scared!”
“I know. I am too. But what do we always do when we’re afraid?”
“Pray,” she whispered.
“Good girl.” Lena walked toward the man, her rage building with every step. She couldn’t imagine what he was doing here, but she wouldn’t let her enemies take one more thing from her. If only she had a weapon. She would kill him as swiftly and ruthlessly as one of them had killed her father. This soldier didn’t deserve to live. None of them did. “What do you want?” she shouted as her hatred overflowed. He turned as if startled and gazed at her in surprise. “You’re on my property! The town is that way,” she said, pointing. He would see her daughters cowering in the road.
He lifted his hands, palms out. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand Dutch.”
“Why are you here on my farm?” she shouted, speaking Dutch anyway. “Why are you in my country? You’ve taken nearly everything I have and everyone I love! Can’t you see how much we hate you?”
He shook his head and held out his hands again. He might not have understood her words, but he couldn’t mistake her anger. “I’m sorry if I’ve done something to make you upset,” he said in German. “I’ll leave now. I just . . . I just wanted to smell the fields in springtime . . . to remind myself of home.”
His words and the sorrow in his voice threw Lena off-balance. He looked young, surely not even twenty years old.
“I received a letter from my sister back home,” he continued. “She told me that my mother has died. I couldn’t remember her face or her smile, so I thought . . . I thought if I smelled the farm, it would remind me of home . . . and I would be able to picture her.” Tears glistened in his eyes.
He could be Wim, missing his mother, his home.
“Jesus commanded us to love our enemies,” Papa had said in one of his sermons. “He prayed, ‘Father, forgive them,’ even as His enemies nailed Him to the cross.”
Papa had died loving others more than himself. Lena still remembered the calm, peaceful look on his face as he’d gazed at her for the last time. And as she remembered, something deep inside her burst and drained away, easing the unbearable weight she’d carried for so long. She stepped closer to the young soldier and met his gaze.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said in German.
His eyes widened in surprise.
“And I’m very sorry about your mother. I’m sure she missed you very much. It’s hard to be separated from the people we love, isn’t it?”
He nodded and wiped his eyes.
“I have a son who is just a bit younger than you. He’s away from home too, and I think of him constantly.”
“I don’t think I’ll live to see my home again. They’re trying to hide the truth from us, but I know we’re losing the war.” He sighed and looked out at the pasture for a moment. “Is this your farm?” he asked, gesturing to the fields and the house and barn in the distance.
“It is.”
“I’m sorry if I trespassed.”
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. “I forgive you,” she whispered, her heart squeezing.
“I’ll leave now. I . . . I only wanted to walk into the countryside . . . so I could imagine that I was home.”
Lena thought of her own children, longing for home, and her eyes filled. “Is it . . . ? Would it be all right if I hugged you? Maybe you could imagine that I’m your mother, for just a moment, and I could imagine you’re my son.”
He went forward into her arms. She felt a sob shudder through his body. Lena’s tears flowed as well. “Oh, God, end this war,” she prayed. “Bring this young man and all of the people we love back home again.”
At last he pulled away and wiped his eyes. “I must go,” he said. “Thank you for your prayer. And for . . . for not hating me.”
“I hope you make it home.”
“I hope your son does too.”
He turned and quickly strode toward town. Lena saw Maaike cringe and pull away as he walked past her. Lena felt drained as she returned to where the girls were waiting. “Come on, let’s go home.”
Maaike didn’t move. “You hugged a Nazi soldier! Why?”
“He was just a boy, like Wim. He misses his mother.”
“He could be the soldier who killed Opa!”
Lena rested her hands on Maaike’s shoulders. “Opa offered his life so that no one else from the village would be killed. He wasn’t afraid to die. He wanted to show us that we don’t have to be afraid to die either.” She tried to wrap her arms around Maaike, but she pulled away.
“Why are the Nazis here in our country? I hate them all!”
Lena winced, knowing Maaike had learned to hate from her. She had shouted those very words just minutes ago. “I know I’ve said the same things and felt the same way you do, Maaike, but it was wrong of me to hate. Very wrong. God used that young soldier just now to remind me that if we want to be like Jesus, we can’t hate others—even our enemies.”
The bicycle clattered to the ground as Maaike went into Lena’s arms. “I want O
pa! And Papa and Ans and Wim!” she wailed.
Lena stood in the middle of the road with her daughter, rocking her in her embrace. “I do too, my sweet child . . . I do too . . .”
CHAPTER 59
Ans woke from a restless sleep as the roar of a V-1 rocket blasted off somewhere outside of Den Haag, a dozen miles away. A brilliant flash lit up the room as the rocket streaked across the sky, then the sound faded into the distance. Some of those rockets never made it to their targets in Britain but exploded in the Netherlands. She sat up carefully, trying not to awaken Eloise or the ten other people sleeping in the town house’s kitchen, and made her way to the stove to stoke the fire. Hunger made everyone lethargic, and they slept on, accustomed to the noise of war. Planes flew overhead continuously, with some formations lasting as long as an hour. Windows rattled from the heavy loads and roaring engines. Ans and her companions fell asleep at night to the sound of firefights, the clatter of antiaircraft guns, the fatal sputter of injured planes, and “fireworks” lighting up the sky.
With the stove rekindled, Ans measured water and oats and put a pot of porridge on to cook. Eloise had bartered a pair of emerald earrings for the sack of oats, once intended for horses. The butchered animals wouldn’t need it. “Was it only four years ago,” Eloise had asked at last evening’s meal, “when we all ate as much as we wanted? How times have changed when these few morsels make us happy!” They had divided four eggs and four slices of bread among twelve people—and shared each leftover crumb, as well. As sparse as the meal had been, they had bowed their heads and thanked God for it. Thousands of their countrymen had starved to death. There was no wood for coffins, no men to dig graves.
The aroma of cooking porridge awakened the others. Eloise and Meta were spooning it into bowls when the doorbell rang. Ans hurried to answer it and was surprised to see Erik, home from wherever the Nazis had sent him. “You’re back! Do you want to come in?” She longed to embrace him but hesitated. He looked troubled and wasn’t smiling.
“Can you come for a walk with me? I need to ask you something.”
“Of course. Let me tell Eloise where I’m going.” Ans was already wearing her coat and needed only to put on a hat and mittens to be ready. They started toward the park, and she knew something was wrong when he didn’t reach for her hand or wrap his arm around her shoulders. She made him halt before reaching the bridge. “Erik, tell me what’s wrong.”
He stared down at the ground for a long moment, then glanced all around before looking at her. “I don’t want to do the Nazis’ dirty work anymore.” He kept his voice low as if afraid of being overheard. “Can you . . . ? Will you help me go into hiding? You told me once that you knew people—the ones who helped your Jewish friends disappear. I want to disappear too.”
For a terrible, interminable moment, Ans couldn’t reply. As her heart raced out of control, she was horrified to realize that she didn’t know whether to trust him or not. This was Erik, the man she loved, asking her for help. Yet the Resistance had warned her to trust no one. She remembered the young woman she’d suspected of being planted in her jail cell. Traitors were paid well for helping the Nazis. But then she pushed all those thoughts aside. Erik loved her, and she loved him. Why did she hesitate?
“I know you were in contact with the underground,” Erik continued when she didn’t reply. “I saw you delivering their newspapers, remember?” Yes, she remembered, and he had made her promise to stop. “And then, after I told you about the Gestapo raid in Zoeterwoude, you disappeared from Leiden. I figured you were involved in that. Why else would you leave?” He reached for her hand, gripping it tightly. “Please, Ans! Ask your friends to help me!”
She began to shiver. “Even . . . even if I used to know some people . . . ,” she said, her teeth chattering, “I-I’ve been gone for nearly a year. For all I know, they’ve all been arrested.”
“If you love me, please help me. We want a life and a future together, don’t we?”
Ans didn’t know where the panic she felt was coming from, but she struggled to get past it, to gather her thoughts, to decide what to do. The café where she used to leave messages for Havik had closed. She could hide Erik in Eloise’s town house or on her parents’ farm, but did she dare risk endangering them?
“I-I’ll try to think of something. But . . . but I’ll need some time. Can you come back to the town house tomorrow?”
“Please hurry, Ans. I may not have much time!”
She turned and sprinted home without looking back. She was breathless after running the short distance, her legs trembling, her empty stomach rumbling. “Back already?” Eloise asked when Ans found her in the kitchen. “That was quick. We saved you some oatmeal.”
“I need to talk to you. I-I . . .”
Eloise grabbed one of the blankets from the makeshift pallets on the floor and wrapped it around Ans’s shoulders. “You’re shaking like a leaf! Let’s go up to my bedroom. It’s freezing up there, too, but we’ll have privacy.” Ans wanted to weep when she saw what had become of Eloise’s elegant, fairy tale–like bedroom. The wooden bed frame, the bench for her dressing table, and even the picture frames on the walls had all been chopped up for firewood. Eloise made Ans sit on the slipper chair by the window, and then she knelt on the floor in front of her. “What happened?”
“Erik asked for my help. He wants to go into hiding. He doesn’t want to work for the Nazis anymore.”
“Are you sure he isn’t setting a trap?”
Ans’s tears started to fall as she faced the reason for her panic. “No. No, I’m not . . .”
“Ah, no wonder you’re so upset. You love him but you don’t know if you can trust him.”
Ans began to sob. “I-I don’t know what to do!”
Eloise leaned forward and drew her into an embrace. She held her and let her tears fall before pulling back again and handing Ans a lace handkerchief. “What I need to tell you, Ans, may be very difficult for you to hear. Please understand that I’m saying it because I love you.” Ans nodded, wiping her eyes. “Your boyfriend has worked for the Nazis for five years. He’s a member of the Dutch Nazi Party. What better way to win their favor than to expose a Resistance cell and take credit for their arrest? If we offered to hide him here or on your parents’ farm, imagine the reward he’d receive for turning in hidden Jews like Meta and Sientje and Elisheva.”
“I know . . .”
“But even if it isn’t a trap, why does he want to go into hiding now? Is it because the Allies are winning and he may face punishment for working with the Nazis?” She paused as if to let Ans digest her words. “Why did he remain on the police force and join the NSB? Why didn’t he become an onderduiker a long time ago?”
Ans struggled to remember. “They would have sent him to a work camp if he refused. He wanted to stay so he could do good as a policeman. He could protect people from the Nazis.”
“And has he done that? Did he work with the Resistance behind the scenes, sharing information with them? I’ve heard of police officers in other cities who helped prisoners escape. The Resistance wanted to free Herman and the others from the Leiden jail, but there weren’t any sympathetic policemen we could trust. No, Ans. Erik did everything the Nazis told him to do. When they started rounding up Jews, he helped them do it.”
“He could have arrested me when he caught me with the underground newspapers—”
“Instead, he tried to control you. He made you promise to stop doing the work that your heart told you to do.”
“He saved my life when he warned me about the raid in Zoeterwoude.”
“If you had been arrested, he would have been under suspicion too, as your boyfriend. He was saving you but also himself. He didn’t care about the people in that apartment. And did he show any compassion for Avi and Miriam? Did he offer to help them because they were your friends? No. He wanted you to stop saving Jews and working for the underground because he didn’t want to lose you.”
“He loves me.”
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“Perhaps that’s true . . . but he loves himself even more. Instead of going to a work camp, he became a Nazi.” She reached to take Ans’s hands. “Listen, I understand Erik because I acted just like him in the first war. He wanted to be safe and avoid suffering. Cowards think only of themselves. They’re selfish. My parents and my brother took enormous risks to free our country, risks that cost them their lives. I ran away and saved myself. And now in this war, Erik saved himself while everyone else we love took enormous risks to rescue others and to fight the Nazis. The war is coming to an end now, and Erik is still trying to save himself, trying to escape being punished for collaborating with the enemy.”
Ans closed her eyes and wept as the truth of what Eloise said pierced her heart. But could she turn her back on the man she loved?
“Herman knew how I’d behaved in the first war,” Eloise continued. “He knew I’d been a coward, but he loved me and married me in spite of it. And you may still want to marry Erik. Maybe he’ll beg Avi and Miriam and Professor Jacobs to forgive him for his indifference, and maybe they will. With your help, Erik may eventually ask God for forgiveness too. But you’ve seen the damage that selfishness and cowardice and guilt have done to my soul. You’ve seen the price I’ve paid—and dear Herman has paid it along with me. Herman may already be dead because of his great love and courage. I only hope that this time, in this war, I’ve done enough.”
“You have,” Ans whispered. “You’ve sacrificed more than enough. You’re the most courageous woman I’ve ever known.”
Eloise released her hands and looked away as if uncomfortable with praise. “I’ve no doubt that you’ll marry someday, Ans. You’ll make a wonderful wife and mother. You’re strong and compassionate and courageous—and capable of becoming so much more than Erik Brouwer’s wife.”
“He’s coming for my answer tomorrow. I don’t know what to tell him.”
Eloise looked at her again. “Search your heart. I think you do know.”