Such Good Girls

by R. D. Rosen

  “What’s three more?” he’d say at the dinner table, where he didn’t expect them to say grace with the rest of the family. He actually seemed to relish the challenge of defying Nazi orders. Referring to the German soldiers among his barbershop clientele, he said, brandishing a phantom straight razor, “When they come in for a shave, I’m the one with the upper hand!”

  Although Carla, her mother, and her brother were largely confined to their room on the third floor, from time to time they might be helping Corrie van Geenan in the kitchen on the second floor when Walter would come up the stairs from the shop, whispering that one of his German customers needed to use the toilet. This was the Heijmans family’s cue to retreat soundlessly to the third floor and remain there until well after they heard the toilet flush.

  While Walter seemed to take their intrusion in stride, Corrie van Geenen was quietly oppressed by their presence, and unhappy about stretching food meant for nine to feed twelve. She never said anything, but her lower lip quivered when she thought no one was looking.

  There couldn’t have been less privacy in their situation; not only was everybody on top of one another, but the house sat on a square that became a sheep and pig market once a week, so the opportunities for being discovered were never ending. The Heijmans family was hiding in a busy house in one of the busiest parts of town above a barbershop where Nazis came and went daily.

  After only a month with the van Geenens, the Heijmans family found out just how close they had come to being discovered at their previous sanctuary, with Mrs. Van Nooyen. Word filtered from The Hague that a neighbor in the same stairwell as the Van Nooyens’ apartment had recently been betrayed—not for hiding people, but for hiding Jewish property—and taken away. It seemed to confirm that the Heijmanses hadn’t actually been “discovered” while they were there, but rather that Mrs. Van Nooyen just couldn’t take the stress of hiding them any longer. But what a stroke of good fortune that seemed now; another two or three weeks and the Germans surely would have found them.

  Herman soon discovered that the neighbors’ radio, tuned to the BBC, could be heard through the wall of the van Geenens’ toilet. He began to spend more time there than was necessary and would emerge armed with news of the latest German atrocity or Nazi propaganda. To put this new information to use, and to relieve his boredom, Herman would occasionally pick political arguments with the van Geenen teenagers, which frightened Carla. Would the van Geenens throw them all out? Why couldn’t Herman keep his mouth shut when even the youngest van Geenen children knew better than to say anything about there being Jews in the house? How much longer would it be before someone tipped off the Germans? What were the odds that all three of them would survive this mess? The growling sound of every truck coming down the street could mean disaster. In any case, Herman’s pugnacity just made Carla even more committed to remaining a good girl who said as little as possible.

  German soldiers came to the apartment once searching for blankets, and twice to look for boys over sixteen to work in German munitions factories. On one of those occasions, Herman escaped with one of the van Geenen sons to a neighbor’s apartment, whose owner, a carpenter, had built a false wall. Walter van Geenen often knew about these searches in advance from contacts in the Dutch Resistance. Another time he arranged for the Heijmanses to walk alone at night to a Catholic church, where the priest concealed them for two or three days in the sacristy, except during Mass, when he instructed them to participate as if they were congregants. The three of them rejoiced not only in the interruption of their tense routine, but also in the entertainment that the church services provided after months of sensory deprivation. The “Kyrie,” “Gloria,” and “Credo” were joys transcending all religion. And yet, being in church reminded them that, through the accident of being born Jews, they lived on the edge of deportation and death while for the rest of Delft it was business, and religion, as usual.

  For the most part, though, their lives at the van Geenens’ were so tedious that sleep itself was cherished, since it reduced the number of hours that had to be filled and gave them a break from the fear and boredom that saturated their days. During daylight hours, they couldn’t look out a window, walk around the third floor, or even use the toilet, for fear they would be heard and reported by the nosy Dutch collaborators who surrounded them. In the stifling vacuum of their existence, Carla and her mother savored every chore. They peeled potatoes, chopped cabbage, and helped with the cooking, careful always to stay away from the windows. They helped Mrs. van Geenen darn the endless parade of worn-out socks produced by nine children. Carla learned to knit. The van Geenens were not big readers—the house was devoid of books—so Carla, her mother, and even Herman had no choice but to read and reread the romance novels that the eldest daughter, also named Corrie, took out of the library for them.

  Most of the Heijmans family’s conversations consisted of reminiscing about the past. They talked so endlessly of what had been, about who had once said what to whom, and when and why, that their hosts could barely stand to hear it. They even bored themselves. New experiences, though usually the product of some fresh threat to their existence, at least gave them something new to talk about. Once, when Walter was warned of an impending house search, he hustled the three Heijmanses into the attic of a neighbor’s house. The three of them silently followed the owner up a narrow staircase and entered the dimly lit gabled attic. There in the gloom, blinking like some surprised nocturnal animal, was a poor, unshaven soul in a soiled shirt and suit pants cinched around his diminishing waist by a length of rope.

  The man introduced himself. “I was a banker in Amsterdam before all this. Besides the visits from my hosts, I have been here alone for almost a year. Anyway, welcome. I wish I had something to offer you,” he added with a dry cackle. “I’m afraid I can’t even offer you enough chairs.”

  Carla was shocked to see another Jew in hiding, and so nearby; she had come to think of her mother, brother, and herself as sole survivors of a catastrophe. She could barely remember life before hiding, and she couldn’t imagine there would be life after it. She no longer thought much about Fanny or her other friends who had simply disappeared what seemed ages ago. But now it occurred to her that a big X-ray of Delft would reveal dozens of Jews secreted everywhere. There were dramas just like theirs going on in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. And surely elsewhere. Carla tried to imagine the staggering complexities of history, the manipulations of the masses, the forces invisible to little girls and even barbers and bankers, that had produced this disaster.

  The banker asked them for news, and Herman was only too glad to tell him of the Russians’ production of over a thousand tanks a month, but also of huge losses and famine. Their soldiers weren’t very well trained, but there were lots of them, and the Germans were suffering horrendous defeats.

  The banker nodded, playing with the knot of the rope that held his trousers up. Here, at last, was someone Carla could feel sorry for besides herself, her brother, and her mother. Gratefulness for having her family welled up inside her. No one asked the banker about his own. No one wanted to ask the question, and no one wanted to hear the answer.

  After they were able to return to the van Geenens’, Corrie would silently serve up soup and boiled potatoes. Carla watched as she tremblingly passed a serving dish at dinner. She felt too guilty to meet Mrs. van Geenen’s eyes, although she seldom looked at Carla anyway. Carla retreated further and further inside herself, becoming in her own mind a mouse: timid, silent, invisible, yet always scared, always listening for trucks, for the sound of boot heels, imagining the Nazis getting their sideburns squared away in Mr. van Geenen’s barber chair. His Nazi customers, if they knew of their presence, would think nothing of imprisoning or deporting every last person in the van Geenen household. Death was like the thirteenth person in the household, crowding out all other thoughts, making it hard to breathe.

  They had meant to stay with the van Geenens only a few months, while the underground
came up with another hiding place for them, but a year and a half passed before Carla was able to get out of the house. When Mrs. van Geenen’s sister in Delft had a baby girl, Mr. van Geenen put a scarf on Carla’s head and walked her there to help out for six weeks, during which the new mother looked frightened every minute. Other times, especially during the merciless “Hongerwinter” of 1944 to 1945, Carla would venture out in the cold to pry precious bits of coal out of the asphalt with a kitchen knife.

  Throughout, Mr. van Geenen remained as friendly as always, but Mrs. van Geenen continued to suffer visibly under the stress, particularly when her oldest son, Walter, received a letter demanding that he leave for a work camp in Germany. They all knew that, had the family not been hiding Jews, Walter might have hid or run away, but defying the order would bring the Germans around to investigate. Walter Jr. had no choice but to go. Apart from the parents’ agreement to risk their lives for strangers in the first place, it was by far the biggest sacrifice any of them had made. So Walter went to Germany, and not long after, the eldest girl, Corrie, decided abruptly to marry and left the house as well.

  When the parents and their remaining children said grace before dinner, Carla almost couldn’t bear it. She too wanted to pray to the God of people as good as the van Geenens, people who asked nothing of them, but who had given them, for more than a year, the daily gift of possible survival.

  Delft was among the last cities in Western Europe to be liberated. After the Allies’ debacle in September 1944 at Arnhem, just seventy-five miles east of Delft, it was almost eight months before Mr. van Geenan announced that the war was over, and that the Heijmanses were free.

  “I don’t believe it,” Carla said. “It’s not true. I’m not going outside. I don’t believe it.” She was in tears. And, in a way, she was right not to believe it. She couldn’t have known yet how unbelievable it was that the three of them had survived. While two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were being exterminated with systematic ruthlessness, Carla, Herman, and Herta Heijmans had escaped detection in a country whose Jews had suffered enormously. Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews at the beginning of the war, only 35,000 remained, a loss of 75 percent. By comparison, France had lost 26 percent of its Jews during the war, Italy 20 percent, Denmark less than one percent.

  Liberation was enlivened by the appearance in The Hague of a brigade of Palestinian soldiers, robust Jews who threw memorable all-night dancing parties for the gaunt survivors. The soldiers were irresistible to many Dutch girls, particularly the orphans, some of whom ended up in Palestine with husbands. Carla, who lived with her mother (her brother Herman had made it to Palestine illegally), was now going to school full-time in home economics during the day, and to high school at night to catch up on her studies. She was also increasingly involved in a Zionist group of which she was the youngest member.

  In the spring of 1946, she met an older Zionist from Delft, a man all of twenty named Ed Lessing, but who, like the rest of them, seemed older. He too had hidden from the Nazis, but his experience made Carla’s—which her brother Herman would later call “luxury hiding” compared to others’—seem positively uneventful. If Carla Heijmans’s years in hiding amid the Germans were marked by a steady drumbeat of daily jeopardy, Ed Lessing’s were filled with high drama and cliffhangers of which any A-list screenwriter would be proud.

  But after meeting Carla, Ed had more pressing matters on his mind than regaling her with his wartime escapades. In fact, it would be decades before he spoke of his experiences to her or to anybody at all.

  Ed was born in the Netherlands in 1926 into a nonpracticing Jewish family of modest means. They were living in Delft when, on May 10, 1940, Ed woke up at five in the morning to gunfire. Out the window, he could see German paratroopers floating down in the distance like white silk flowers. For a while, the occupation barely disturbed the very law-abiding Dutch, even as a succession of German decrees kept Jews out of public parks, schools, and eventually out of jobs. When the Jews were required to wear Stars of David, some of Ed’s clueless Gentile friends said, “You should be proud of that star! We think you Jews are wonderful people.” Even after a German SS officer punched the teenage Ed for daring to walk with a cousin of his who didn’t wear a star, Ed did not feel in mortal danger.

  The Germans then promised Jews “work relief” in Germany. The trains were waiting. Ed’s parents had already packed their bags when his grandfather reported rumors circulating in Amsterdam that there was no such thing as “work relief” and begged them not to go.

  Engeline Lessing walked into the room where her two younger sons, Fred and Arthur, were playing and told them they would have to take off their yellow stars, and that they were going into hiding. When the clueless boys asked why, she said, “I have to tell you boys something. You are Jewish boys and if you tell anyone, they will kill you.”

  Early on the morning of October 23, 1942, Ed and his younger brothers, aged six and eight, removed their stars and walked with their parents to a friend’s house outside of Delft. That night Ed’s parents left to go into hiding at the home of an older, childless couple, and his brothers were picked up and taken somewhere else. Ed remained in the house until his mother found a place for him with two elderly unmarried women in Utrecht. From there, he traveled to a small farm outside of Utrecht, where he could stay in exchange for work. He would have to pass as a Gentile, so he dyed his hair blond and spent the next six months in an increasingly depressed state, awaking at four in the morning to milk the cows, his feet bleeding from the wooden shoes. He seriously considered turning himself in to the Germans.

  Meanwhile, in the nearby hamlet of De Lage Vuursche, his parents were confronted by the village’s chief of police, a taciturn man named Margrethus Oskam. Oskam revealed that, though he was cooperating with the Germans as head of the village’s law enforcement under the Nazis, he was actually the head of the local Dutch Resistance. He helped Mr. and Mrs. Lessing find sanctuary in a hostel for nature lovers.

  Later it was Oskam who would rescue Ed from the dreary farm, arranging for him to join a Resistance camp hidden deep in the woods of the Dutch countryside. A zigzagging route led Ed to a crude wooden hut that had been camouflaged by small pine trees and branches someone had nailed to it.

  The Resistance fighters didn’t want to take Ed. “Too young to die,” said the men, who were only a few years older than Ed. “Too Jewish.” But Oskam prevailed over the ragtag group. Ed was not entrusted with a pistol and was left behind when the group of assorted Catholics and one Communist made their nightly raids on town halls to steal weapons, uniforms, and German rubber stamps to make fake identity cards. Ed’s job was to guard the two Canadian flyers hiding with them. They were from the No. 617 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force—the “Dambusters”—who had been downed during one of their missions to destroy three dams with special heavy-duty bombs in order to flood the industrial Ruhr Valley. The group lived off provisions and intelligence brought to them by couriers. In his spare moments, Ed sketched the inside and outside of the hut with enough artistry to surprise even him—they were his first works of art—and that would eventually lead to a career.

  On December 28, 1943, an anonymous caller warned an employee of a nearby convent that the Germans were on their way to raid the group. He sounded the alarm and the Resistance fighters fled the hut to regroup near a hotel in the area. After dark, Oskam appeared to say it had been a false alarm and that no Germans had been spotted in the De Lage Vuursche area. The men returned to the hut and set up watch posts, beginning before dawn. Ed and one other man drew the 4:00 to 8:00 A.M. shift and settled in behind the last row of trees before the gravel road a short distance from the hut.

  Shortly before dawn on December 29 the dark forest was suddenly raked by the headlights of five trucks full of soldiers and their barking German shepherds. Ed and his watch partner raced back to the hut and tore the blankets off the others, shouting, “Wake up! Save yourselves! The SS is here!” before escaping on foot through the d
ense undergrowth until they reached a dirt road. When they paused there, they saw the Germans in the distance preparing to surround the area of the hut. As Ed and his partner slipped across the road and disappeared into the forest, Ed couldn’t see how the others would have a chance to make it out alive.

  The men had agreed earlier that, in the case of a raid, the survivors would meet at a designated place about eight miles away, which Ed and his partner reached later that day. The two spent the pitch-black night hiding behind some trees, pistols in hand, conjecturing that the Germans would torture their comrades to reveal the location of the meeting place and come to either arrest them or kill them. They had no intention of being arrested and tortured in the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, but at least they hoped to kill a German or two before being mowed down by machine guns.

  They soon heard a rattling sound, coming closer in the dark along a dirt road. A small light bobbed in the distance. Would this be the last few minutes of their lives? Eventually they made out the form of a bicycle, but neither of them could make out the rider. Ed figured it was a trap—that the minute they stepped out from behind the trees to investigate, they would be surrounded. The two of them slid the safeties off their guns and waited. The bicycle finally came to a stop several yards in front of them and didn’t move. Ed and his comrade raised their pistols, prepared to come out of hiding and start shooting.

  But it wasn’t a German. Nor was it one of the other Resistance members from the hut.

  Incredibly, it was Ed’s mother, Engeline, who was in hiding not far away.

  “Moeder!” Ed exclaimed as loudly as he dared.

  She had found out about the raid that morning, and the meeting place, and on a bicycle with wooden tires—the Germans had taken every shred of rubber in the Netherlands—she had fearlessly pedaled to find her oldest son.

  The first thing out of her mouth was, “Bury those guns.”