by Emuna Elon
The child nods excitedly, her eyes shining as Sonia mentions Eddy. When I was little, she says, and we came here with Papa, I thought that the tree was lying down because it was dead.…
Yes, Sonia replies, when you see it lying like that you might think it’s dead. It’s only when you take a closer look that you see it’s alive.
Nettie looks at the tree from the distant observation point permitted for Jews like her. Its leaves are green, she says. It’s a sign that it’s alive.
Leo is quiet in the bicycle carrier; his blond eyebrows are furrowed and it seems that he is listening to the conversation between his mother and sister, listening and understanding.
Sonia recalls an emotional poem she wrote, in honor of this tree, when she was still in high school and still wrote poetry. She thinks the words of the poem were: “O, lonely tree, I am like you / To my heart you are so near / My branches buried, my roots exposed / My shout that people can’t hear.”
Or something like that.
* * *
As she turns her bicycle and her children in the direction they came from, to go home, she is surprised to see someone—a stranger in a dark suit—coming toward them rapidly, his expression grave. She is frightened by the thought that he is a policeman, but a moment later she sees that he is only an elderly citizen striding resolutely toward her and halting a couple of steps away.
He addresses her in an aggressive tone: Are you permitted to be here? It’s hard for her to believe, but that’s what’s happening: A stranger. A stranger is asking her. A stranger is asking her if she and her two children are permitted to be by Vondelpark.
But, sir, she replies politely, trying to conceal her terror and even to smile, you can surely see that I didn’t go into the park. I was just standing here with my two little ones, outside the prohibited area.…
You’d better get out of here right now, he says, raising his voice, otherwise I’ll have to report you!
And Sonia pedals away, her daughter behind her and her son in front, she pedals alongside the wall of trees to Jacob Obrechtstraat, over which a dirty sky, the color of a muddy puddle, hangs low and embarrassed.
* * *
A thousand times a day Sonia puts a hand to her chest to feel the yellow cloth star pinned to each item of clothing she wears. If it weren’t for the star, people wouldn’t know she was Jewish, and the man outside Vondelpark wouldn’t have attacked her and her children. When the law obliging all the Jews of Holland to wear the yellow star was promulgated, Anouk had told her: My father says we should wear the star not as a mark of shame but as a badge of pride. Sonia intended to pass on that pride. But it transpired that every Jew, that is, everyone holding an identity card stamped with a “J,” would be arrested and punished if caught without a star. And Anouk said that her darling father was prepared to save Sonia the trouble of going to the Jewish Council offices and standing in the long line there, by bringing her as many stars as she wanted to buy from the Council.
Sonia sent the required sum to the banker: four cents per yellow cloth star. She did, however, decide that she wouldn’t sew these ugly stars onto her clothes, but only tack them on with a safety pin.
* * *
At night Yoel dreams that he’d been swallowed by a big fish. In his dream he doesn’t know how it happened, but he is lying on his side, his knees bent, inside a pulsing space whose sides are soft, and it’s clear to him that he’d been swallowed by a big fish. Even though unlike his predecessors, from the prophet Jonah to Pinocchio, this fact does not cause him distress. On the contrary: being swallowed is sweet for him. He feels protected, feels loved, feels a longing to remain inside this fish indefinitely, and when he wakes up he can still sense that sweetness.
* * *
And every morning on her way to the home of Nettie’s teacher Sonia sees the Jews, every morning scores of Jews coming to Roelof Hartplein as they had been told by the printed orders given to them, every morning, men and women, the elderly and children, all in their best clothes, each with a suitcase or a bag or a bundle made of a wool blanket with its corners tied together, the babies in the arms of their parents or siblings. They all come from houses which until this morning were their homes, from a life which until this morning was their life, they come to the square and sit on the benches, rows and rows of benches placed there so they could be comfortable as they wait in this beautiful big square in the center of Amsterdam, at the biggest tramline junction in the city. And while all these Jews are sitting on the benches, while they sit there looking like people about to embark on an enjoyable excursion or a nice vacation in the bosom of nature, special attendants move among them speaking to them with exaggerated politeness, making sure they have everything they need and even serving them hot tea sweetened with sugar cubes so they will feel at ease and harbor no worries, no suspicion, no desire to cause unrest that might bother passersby and disturb the peace. And all this is arranged in an exemplary fashion, every morning, how can it be described, where are the words with which one can describe the expression of calm on the faces of those waiting there, the fur coats worn by many of the waiting women, their legs elegantly crossed as they sit in the rows of benches, their high-heeled shoes, the fashionable felt hats on the heads of many of the men, and the glances they steal every now and then at the train tracks and their watches as if they have control of their time. Where are the words to describe the children playing at their parents’ feet, the confidence felt by children playing at their parents’ feet, and the fact that not one of the adults has any idea of where they are going to, not even when a train comes to a halt and they get up off the benches, quietly pick up their possessions, stand in an orderly line, oh, how orderly, and climb aboard, helping one another up, helping one another to board and load the luggage. And they go on their way.
* * *
Roelof Hartplein is so close to Jacob Obrechtstraat, to the Mokum Hotel, Museumplein and the Concertgebouw. Yoel progresses only a short way southward along Van Baerlestraat and there is the square with all its tram stops and the wide expanse at the foot of the long rectangular building that the occupying forces converted into one of the main headquarters in Amsterdam, but before the war was the Jewish hospital’s nurses’ home where Sonia lived until her marriage to Eddy. One of the windows overlooking the square is the window of the room Sonia shared with her good friend Bett, it was through this window that she viewed her future, which at the time looked so enchanting, and now, from the safe distance she keeps at the edge of the square, she looks fearfully at the window and at what is happening below it. Where are they taking all these Jews? Where have her father, mother, brothers, and sister been taken to?
All at once Sonia knows for certain that what she wants—somehow, sometime, if only it will be possible—is to get to Palestine. In the world before the war she had never imagined she would want to go to Palestine, but right now there is nothing she wants more, if only because her beloved father had yearned for Palestine with every fiber of his being. He called it “Eretzyisroel” (Land of Israel), “Eretzhakoidesh” (Holy Land), and only God, who he called “Hakoidoshborchu” (The Holy Blessed One) and believed in with a pure heart, knows if he will ever reach the object of his yearning.
And she decides: when they go to Palestine she will change Leo’s name to a Jewish one. She will name him after her father: Yoel.
* * *
On the fourth evening after the new order forbidding Jews to leave their homes after eight in the evening came into force, Martin knocks on Sonia’s door after the little ones have gone to sleep. Thin, his eyes lusterless, he stands in the doorway and when Sonia sees him she is flooded with longing for Eddy and also with longing for Martin of before the war, the inspirational Martin who seems to have been taken together with Eddy, leaving behind only his degraded shadow.
Now Martin’s degraded shadow comes into her apartment with hesitant steps, declines her offer of a chair, looks at her with an expression filled with defeat, and says: Sonia, I want t
o ask something of you.
What could you possibly ask of me, she thinks. Your family could have taken action to save my Eddy. Your family can still try to save me and my children. But I? What can I do for you?
He stands before her, his arms hanging helplessly at his sides. When she insists that he sit down, he sits on the very edge of one of their three chairs and waits while she wipes the table clean of the remains of her and her children’s meager supper and sits down opposite him. He clears his throat, clears it again, and starts talking several times before he is able to continue. Once he manages to speak, it turns out that he has come to ask that she and her children dive underwater. He knows some people from the resistance, and of course Anouk’s father must never hear of this, but he’s already spoken to his friends about Sonia and the two children and they have promised to arrange an orderly diving for them. There are, of course, several matters that must be attended to—
Just a minute, she says, cutting him short. You’ve come here to suggest that I take my children, leave this house with them, and disappear to wherever we disappear to?
No, Martin replies quietly. Not you and the children together. You’ll have to go into hiding separately, that is, the underground will arrange separate hiding places for the children. You’ve nothing to worry about, Sonia, finding a hiding place for the little ones is easier. Especially for Leo, with his blond hair and blue eyes.
* * *
Two thousand five hundred. According to the documents Yoel has studied, that was the number of Jewish children hidden by Christian families during the war. Two thousand five hundred Jewish children, most of them from Amsterdam. According to Dutch law only those children with a surviving parent were eventually returned, while according to reality only those children whose surviving parent managed to find where they had been hidden were returned. Many children therefore remained with the families that had hidden them.
Many of the hidden children were completely unaware that they were not the biological offspring of the people who raised them. Many are unaware of it to this day.
* * *
The ground dissolves under Sonia’s feet. And what about you, she asks Martin, you, Anouk, and Sebastian? Do you mean to dive underwater as well?
This question greatly embarrasses Martin. He shifts on the edge of his chair, looks sideways, searching for words. In the end his answer is no, they do not intend to go into hiding. Anouk’s father, that is Anouk’s father’s position enables him to take care of himself, his wife, and the three of them—Anouk, Martin, and the child.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say—she slams her words at him with increasing anger—but perhaps you can explain it to me: your dear father-in-law is driving the Jews of Amsterdam from their homes and their lives, with his own hands he’s sending them—
It’s not him who is driving them out, Sonia—
He is, Martin, he is! First he urged us to register as Jews, then he made sure we all had our identity cards stamped, and he let them take Eddy and mark us with these yellow cloth stars to make it easier for them to take us all—
But he’s only—
He’s only what, she yells at him, he’s only one of those responsible for all this? He only executes—who knows in what role, and who cares—the decisions of the contemptible, corrupt Jewish Council that collaborates with the enemy?
But, Sonia—
Not another word, Martin. I trusted Jozef de Lange, I listened to his instructions and advice, and now he’s deporting all the Jews of Amsterdam—with his own hands, with his own hands—while he and his nearest and dearest—you—carry on sitting in your homes in complete safety. And all you can suggest to me is that I, who trusted his word, get rid of my children? That I abandon them God knows where?
Rage roils inside her until she is about to explode, or perhaps it isn’t rage but desperation, and after Martin leaves she goes into the darkness of the little room filled with soft breathing. Nettie is asleep on her back, her face exposed and her arms outstretched as if in an expression of total belief in her mother’s power to protect her from evil. Leo is lying on his tummy across the width of his crib, his legs folded under him and his cheek resting on the blanket she had covered him with earlier. He looks so small, so vulnerable, and in the hollow beneath his collarbone Sonia sees the artery in his neck rising and falling with each beat of his heart. Rising and falling, rising and falling.
41
He wanders the streets, wanders through the museums, wanders through his soul. And sometimes he looks at the beauty of Amsterdam, or at the profundity of works of art, and knows—for only a fleeting flash, but he knows—what he has been looking for all his life. Like the time he visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and saw Jozef Israëls’s Mother and Child Walking on the Dunes, undated. And like on his last visit with Bat-Ami to the Museum of Modern Art in New York when he stood, as he had many times in the past, facing Matisse’s La Danse, and unlike all the previous occasions he suddenly realized that there was no need to decide if the young girls in the painting are holding out their hands to one another or detaching them from one another, since both possibilities are one and the same. Just as it makes no difference if the girl on the left, who is falling from the circle of dancers, has stumbled, or has intentionally torn herself out of the circle.
* * *
Bett, Sonia’s friend from her nursing days, comes to her apartment to rest after her night shift on the maternity ward. Bett works nights because she’s unable to sleep at home: the police have raided her neighborhood twice and she’s afraid she won’t manage to escape a third time.
Her husband was arrested and deported, and they had handed over their only daughter for hiding beforehand. In the first days after sending the child away she couldn’t stop crying, she told Sonia, but as time passed the well of her tears has dried up and her soul is parched. When Sonia asks her where the child is hidden Bett looks at her in surprise. It’s the underground, she reminds her. They don’t tell you what they’re planning and certainly not where they’re taking your child to. In fact, she goes on, as soon as they’d returned home without their daughter, she and her husband had changed their mind about handing the child over, and after an anguished night they’d decided to bring her home even if it meant death for the three of them. But in the morning, when they went back to the apartment where they’d left the child the previous evening, they were told that their daughter had been taken away and no one knew to where. The people we’d given her to the night before weren’t there, she explains, and the new people claimed that they knew them only by their underground aliases, which were changed all the time.
* * *
One morning he is crossing the Amstel on his way to the Old Jewish Quarter, and here and there he sees tourists standing with an open city map trying to find where they are, and there before him are Sonia and Eddy and the two children at a different time, perhaps during the period when they were filmed in the wedding video that’s in the museum. The four of them are standing on the big bridge and watching the huge barges sailing below them, their engines straining with their loads of flour, coal, and other goods, some sailing toward the inner port and from there to the North Sea and other continents, and others going the other way to the southern rivers and the expanses of Europe. Nettie is pointing excitedly at a long line of barges tied to each other like train wagons, and Leo is holding his little hands up to the seagulls gliding above, swooping down to the water and perching with folded wings on the mooring bollards.
* * *
And all his walks begin and end by the house. Tense and alert his feet measure the flagstones of the sidewalk that begins behind the concert hall and ends in the small market square in Jacob Obrechtstraat, or begins on the corner where, in the shop that today houses a real estate office, rare works of art were displayed and sold by a young man who loved art and loved people and believed in the presence of infinity within the finite and the limited, and ends behind the Concertgebouw, in a pleasa
nt café whose walls and furniture are made of natural brown wood. He frequents the brown café quite often, sitting at a corner table that he thinks is suitable for a small group of young, vital, and opinionated people, and as he takes small sips from a glass of beer or a cup of coffee, he takes his notebook from his inside pocket and writes.
* * *
The old brown café on the north corner of our street, next to the Concertgebouw:
A combination of neighborhood café and small, exclusive pub
Dutch beer (Gulpener) with roasted hazelnuts and/or a hard-boiled egg
People coming and going
Lots of loud talking in Dutch spiced with bursts of laughter
A wooden floor covered with faded Persian carpets
A large aquarium with ornamental fish, corals, and marine plants
A few wooden shelves packed with old books
On the walls works of art, photographs, outdated concert posters
Everything is in the old style
Lace curtains frame the window overlooking the street
A Victorian chandelier casts yellowish light
At one of the tables sits a young man with a woman who seems twice his age. Mother and son? Lovers?
At a corner table three men and a woman, most of the time one is talking and the others, including the woman, are listening, riveted
A bald man sits alone at the big round table in the middle of the café, going through the newspapers
* * *
And how I miss Queen Wilhelmina, says Anouk. I hope that this awful war will be over by next summer and we’ll be able to celebrate the queen’s birthday as we do every year! I feel so important, almost as if I’m a queen myself, every time she visits the Spanish synagogue with her family, and how addicted I’ve been since my childhood to her processions here in the center of Amsterdam, with all the people celebrating and waiting on the sidewalks waving all those special colored flags they hand out only for the queen’s procession and the balloons and the colorful paper windmills that turn on sticks.… When I was a girl I climbed up lampposts with all the boys, I wanted to be the first to see the queen arriving.… Remember, Sonke, how we all used to stand waiting, and how excited we’d be when the royal cavalry appeared on their gleaming horses, with their glamorous uniforms and helmets and drawn swords… I almost fainted I was so elated, and right after the cavalry came the army officers and the navy officers, and the wonderful royal band that played as they marched, and all the closed carriages carrying all the ministers and important people, oh, dear Sonia, I get excited just talking about it.… Do you remember? Do you remember the moment—just like a divine revelation—when the open royal carriage appeared carrying our beloved beautiful queen waving to us and returning our love? Oh, how I miss her, my dear Sonke, it’s only in Holland that the queen is so close to her subjects, and how I pray that in the summer I’ll be able to take my sweet little prince, Sebastian, to watch the procession and introduce him to the queen!