Hunger Journeys

by Maggie De Vries

  She and Sofie met at Sofie’s house, since their journey was not a secret from Sofie’s parents. And they walked to the station, exhausted long before they reached it from the combination of fear and exertion.

  The plan went well at first, though—or seemed to. Sofie led the way into the red brick station, down the incline at the back, and marched up to a man at the bottom of the steps to the first platform. Lena knew he must be Sofie’s contact, but he gave no indication of ever having seen her before. He glanced at their identity cards, smiled politely—a little deferentially, Lena thought—took their tickets, nodded and returned them. Then he took a suitcase in each hand and walked ahead of them up the stairs.

  Lena had not been in a train station in years, and in many ways, nothing had changed in all that time. The train loomed in front of them, and the sounds and sights of the station poured over them, promising (if you ignored the men in uniform) a journey, new places, new experiences. Lena felt a longing almost past bearing for the days when trains actually fulfilled that promise.

  Well, she thought, there would be a journey, wherever it led.

  The man led the girls onto the first car, waited while they settled side by side on a red leather bench, lifted their bags up to the rack, mumbled “Pleasant journey” in German and departed. Moments later, the train creaked and groaned and they were off, travelling into the dark, early in the evening.

  The train had to be dark. No lights to alert British planes. That meant blackout on the windows and little light inside the car. Lena’s heart pounded as the train pulled out of the station. Her eyes strained to see in the dim light, her ears strained to hear the other passengers, few though they were. She could not get the gist of any conversations. She had felt eyes on them as they walked down the aisle, but no one spoke to them, and with no seats facing them, they were guaranteed a small measure of privacy.

  Beside her, even though their bodies were not touching, she could feel Sofie’s excitement. “We did it,” Sofie hissed in her ear when they had been travelling for a few minutes. “We did it!”

  “Shhh!” was all Lena had to say in reply. She gripped the armrest. The train had come to an abrupt halt. She broke her own vow of silence. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “Something on the track?” Sofie said back, her voice not quite a whisper.

  And Lena remembered that trains had to move at a snail’s pace, with a lookout on the front, watching for sabotage. Derailment and British guns threatened every train at every moment. Lena would have been glad of those threats to the enemy at any other time. Now she prayed for safety.

  Then, in front of them, a light glimmered in the aisle. A lantern.

  It stopped at the first set of seats, and Lena heard German voices. An officer—as he came closer, Lena could see his cap and the glint of medals on this chest—was working his way down the aisle, checking tickets and identity cards. Sofie saw him too and gripped Lena’s arm. Hard.

  “Let go,” Lena hissed. “That hurts!” In the same moment, she realized that Sofie, the great German speaker, should be sitting on the aisle. It was too late to change places without attracting notice. And once Sofie had let go of Lena’s arm, she seemed to have huddled herself over by the window. Lena poked her.

  “Remember, you have to do the talking,” she whispered, her voice sounding like a shout in her own ears in the dark.

  Sofie straightened up a little bit.

  At last the officer reached them, the metal on his uniform gleaming, his eyes in shadow. He hung the lantern from a hook on the luggage rack. “Tickets and identity cards, please,” he said, but Lena was already holding them out, doing her best to paste a smile on her face. He stood, holding the papers in his hand, and looked down at them.

  “Where are you going, two girls on your own?” he asked.

  There was a pause in which Lena pinched Sofie’s thigh under her coat. Sofie sat up straighter still and leaned across Lena just a bit, but she seemed to choke on her words when she spoke, and to Lena, her German accent sounded decidedly Dutch. “Uh, Rheine,” she said. “To our Oma and Opa.” At least the German and Dutch for grandpa and grandma were the same.

  “Rheine,” he repeated slowly, thoughtfully.

  Lena’s stomach churned. She was glad that it had been a long time since she ate.

  He turned to the papers in his hand. First the tickets. They seemed to pass inspection. And they should. After all, they were real. Then the identity cards. Lena had been worried about those cards from the first. She had never seen a real German identity card, but the forgeries just didn’t look right to her. She could see where the photo had been attached, where the stamp had been copied over the edges. Maybe in the lantern light, though …

  No. He opened the cards, gazed at them for a moment and smiled. “You girls will wait here,” he said then. “I will return.” And he unhooked the lantern and walked on to check the tickets of the next passengers. Ten minutes later, he was back, taking the seat on the other side of the aisle. “You’ll be coming with me in Utrecht,” he said.

  Utrecht. That was where they were supposed to change trains, not much more than thirty kilometres south and a little east of Amsterdam.

  Sofie put her head against the blacked-out window and started to cry.

  Two hours later, the train came to a full stop, and the officer gestured them to their feet. Lena pulled the two bags down, handed one to Sofie and put her hand under Sofie’s elbow, pulling her up. “Stop it, Sofie,” she hissed fiercely. “What are we going to do?”

  For the whole journey, Lena had been trying to think, but in all that time, not one useful thought had come to her. And her worry about her friend, as Sofie sobbed on and on, had turned to annoyance well over an hour ago. Now, as she walked down the dark aisle, sheer terror took over.

  “They’re going to kill us,” Sofie said, crying all the harder. “I just know they are.”

  Lena’s knees turned liquid for a moment. She actually swayed on her feet. What if Sofie was right? They probably wouldn’t kill them exactly, at least not on the spot, but they could ship them off on another train, first to a camp in the Netherlands and then on to Germany. They might never come back. Lena swallowed hard. The officer was looking over his shoulder, and anger had overtaken his face. Weak knees or not, she had no choice but to take one step and then another, Sofie stumbling along behind.

  When they reached the train exit, Lena paused and sensed more than saw the huge open space of the Utrecht station, almost entirely unlit. The voices of other passengers echoed eerily off the faraway walls and ceiling. She remembered coming here to visit cousins during a heatwave the summer she was twelve. How different life had been then!

  The man marched them across the platform and knocked smartly on a wooden door with a small window in it. Moments later, the door opened and words were exchanged. Then he stepped back and gave Lena a small shove through the door. Lena felt Sofie’s arm pull free from her hand. She looked back. The officer had pulled Sofie close to him. He took her chin in his fingers, and he was looking into her face and grinning. Sofie tried to pull away, but he laughed and leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Then he said something in German that Lena didn’t understand and sent Sofie stumbling into the room. He walked past them, knocked on a door at the far end of the room and disappeared through it.

  Lena stared at Sofie. She had been kissed by the enemy. Sofie dropped her suitcase, grasped Lena’s right arm in both of her hands and huddled halfway behind her.

  “I’m going to be sick,” she murmured.

  This should not be happening, Lena thought, and for a moment she wanted nothing more than to slap the other girl, to slap her as hard as she could. It occurred to her that this was not the first time she had longed to slap her friend. This time, though, she had more reason. Instead, she ignored Sofie altogether, kept her head low and looked around as best she could.

  The room was large, and it buzzed with activity. Many men and several women sat at ha
lf a dozen oversized wooden desks speaking on telephones, barking instructions, again all in German, and typing loudly. No one paid any attention to the two girls.

  Sofie tugged at Lena’s arm. Lena raised her head slightly and took a deep breath. “Please,” she said in German, “my friend needs a toilet.” The loud voices and the typing carried on just as before.

  The door at the far end of the room opened and three men entered, one of them the smiling officer who had kissed Sofie moments before. Phones clattered onto receivers. Typing ceased. People froze.

  “Well, well, well, what have we here?” said the largest of the men. His uniform showed his high rank, but even without it, he would have commanded attention. The other two men stood on either side and a little behind him, smirking. Lena’s own stomach clutched at itself. Was she going to be sick too?

  “We are going to Rheine, sir,” she said, willing her voice to cross the expanse of the room.

  “Ahh! They are going to Rheine,” the man said, looking to each side as he spoke, informing the room. Everyone laughed obligingly. He turned back to Lena and Sofie. “First, that is a lie. You are not trying to take a train to Germany. Second, your papers are false. Do you think you can trump up false papers and just walk onto one of our trains?”

  And Lena saw that he held their papers in his hand.

  “I … No, sir,” Lena said.

  “Where are you really going?”

  She looked at the ground. “Almelo,” she whispered.

  “Lena,” Sofie said urgently in Dutch, “I’m going to be sick.”

  “Almelo,” the man echoed. “Well, you don’t have much to say for yourself, do you?” He thought for a moment. “But then you are young. You have much to learn.”

  Lena looked up and met his eyes. She didn’t know why she looked at him, but she did. He looked back; his eyes locked with hers. There was something very scary in his face. Lena knew it. She could see it clear as day. This was a man who had done terrible things and would not hesitate to do more terrible things.

  “You are a pretty little thing, aren’t you?” he said. “And you got all dressed up to come see us today. Such a lovely little hat!”

  Lena’s hand flew to her head, and the man laughed. She had loved that hat, and now it was ruined. He might as well have trampled it into the mud.

  “Bring them into my office,” he said. And he turned and disappeared through the door.

  The other two men stepped forward and grabbed an arm each. They shoved Lena and Sofie ahead of them. Lena looked around frantically as she stumbled forward, her arm twisted behind her. Was there no one here who would help them? But no one was looking anymore. Everyone had returned to work. Or, no, there was one man, way in the back, staring at her. She couldn’t read his look, but it didn’t scare her like the look the officer had given her.

  “Ah,” the big man said, looking up from a desk in the next room that would have dwarfed the desks outside. “Now we have a little privacy.” Lena and Sofie stood side by side a metre or so in front of the desk. The two other officers stood behind them, one on either side of the door. Slowly, the man rose, walked around the desk and leaned against it, close to them. “I am willing to help you,” he said, smiling. Lena looked up at him. She had never seen anyone look less helpful. “A train leaves the station early tomorrow. It will take you to Almelo.” His voice was oily, nasty. Lena blinked. It was as if he was licking her with his voice. She took a tiny step back.

  Something about what he had said seemed wrong. Everyone knew that the trains now travelled only in the dark. Surely a train would not depart first thing in the morning. It didn’t make sense.

  “You don’t trust me, do you?” he said. “Here I am trying to help you, and you act as if I am hurting you.” He closed his fingers around her wrist and tugged her close again. “Well, you are right that I am not offering you something for nothing. These gentlemen and I have rooms down the street. And you have many hours to pass before your train leaves. You will come with us, you two; you will come with us to our rooms to while away the time until morning. There,” he said, releasing her, “is that too much to ask: a little company in exchange for a train trip all the way across the country?”

  Lena’s stomach heaved. He wanted them to sleep with him and the other men. On her arms and her back, Lena’s skin tightened. Her thoughts tore around in her head, but she could find no escape, just deeper and deeper fear.

  “Please,” Sofie said, loudly now, no longer whispering in Lena’s ear. “I’m sick.” And she bent over and retched.

  “Sir,” Lena said, “is there a toilet? My friend is sick.”

  “A silly trick,” he said. “There is a toilet back at our rooms. You can wait.”

  And Sofie vomited, her hands on her knees, her hair swinging into her face. They had had nothing to eat since their departure, so she was throwing up thin, clear liquid, but it splashed off the stone floor and onto the cuffs of the officer’s pants.

  “You little bitch!” the man shouted and raised his arm. Lena wrapped her arms around Sofie and pulled her backwards, out of his reach.

  “She’s really sick,” she said. “She was throwing up before too. Please, can’t you let us go?”

  He lowered his arm, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his pants. “Get someone in here to clean that up,” he said sharply, and instantly the room was abuzz with activity. The man who had taken the girls off the train opened the door and shouted into the other room. A woman appeared with a bucket of soapy water and knelt before the big man, sponging away at his shoes and the cuffs of his pants. Someone else came in with another bucket and began cleaning the whole floor. The phone rang, and the officer took the call, barking into the receiver and listening for a long moment. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “All right, everyone out,” he shouted.

  Lena didn’t need to hear anything more. Determination took her over. “Take your bag,” she whispered, grabbing her own small case with one hand and Sofie’s wrist with the other, and slipping out the door. Her back crawled. Any second a shout was going to stop her like a hook in a fish. But no shout came. Keeping herself straight and tall, she walked through the huge outer office and headed for the door that led back onto the platform. Dimly, she was aware that someone was walking with them, not far behind. She let go of Sofie’s hand and reached for the doorknob. What if it was locked? But it was not. The man came through the door just behind them. It was the man who had looked at her so oddly (was it kindly?) from the far side of the room. On they walked, down the stairs, through the long tunnel under the tracks and straight out of the station. Footsteps followed them. A bench loomed. Lena dropped the bags, pushed Sofie into a sitting position and turned to face their new companion.

  Darkness had settled in long ago, but there was a moon, and she could see enough to tell that he was a small man, short and slender, clean-shaven, though not within the last day or so, with dark hair that curled around his ears. He needs a trim, Lena thought, but then many German soldiers were looking a bit scruffy these days. His uniform was neat enough, but it had been mended here and there and was a bit stained. His jacket showed his low rank. An ordinary soldier, more or less, as expected from one so young. He didn’t look more than twenty to Lena, but he was probably older. He shivered.

  “Ladies,” he said, “might I offer you my assistance?” He spoke in German and his teeth chattered violently, but Lena found that she could understand. She looked at him in sympathy. He had followed them outdoors in his shirtsleeves and his jacket. “Where were you going on the train?” he asked.

  “Almelo,” Lena said without thought.

  Sofie glared up at her, but Lena found that she did not regret her honesty. Anyway, she had already announced their destination inside.

  “Come with me,” the man said.

  Lena was slowly feeling the cold herself. At their feet, where it had been cleared of snow, the ground was covered in a thick layer of ice. Tree stumps cast squat shadows in
the garden area behind them. As far as Lena could see, the street was deserted, except for one man who wandered by, looking more like a bundle of rags than a respectable citizen. And she was sure that the ghostly stores and restaurants that lined the other side of the street were abandoned. Nothing to sell; nothing to serve. Just like Amsterdam.

  Occasional flakes of snow floated down out of the dark.

  The young man looked at Lena for permission as he bent and picked up their bags. “Please,” he said, “follow me.”

  There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

  Lena met Sofie’s gaze but found no help there. Sofie was not crying anymore, but her eyes pleaded for rescue and she was shaking hard. Lena turned inward and was surprised at what she discovered. Her stomach, which had churned with fear just moments ago, had now settled down. She felt calm. Maybe this was a man they could trust.

  Huddled together, Lena and Sofie shuffled after the German stranger, who carried their lives along with all their possessions. He led them right back into the station.

  Lena pulled Sofie to a stop as they approached the entrance, and their leader stepped back to their side. “You’re going to Almelo,” he said. “The train leaves soon. If you are to be on it, you must board now. I can find you a place to hide. You must board now. I will be on the train as well. I go home to Germany. I will protect you.”

  “He’s lying,” Sofie whispered, but not so quietly that he wouldn’t hear. “I know he is.”

  Lena shrugged off her words and kept her focus on him.

  “Why would you protect us?” she asked, her voice as quiet and calm as she could make it. Two men pushed by the small group. At any moment someone might accost them. “We don’t know you,” she added, but desperation made her step forward anyway. They had to keep going. They couldn’t just stand there. And even as she said the words to him, she knew somehow that he would not lie to them. He would help them and protect them if he could. It was right there in the way he looked at her.

  Lena had no time to reflect on exactly what the look meant, what he might want in exchange for his assistance, why she felt calm before him when she squirmed before boys her own age. No time to reflect on anything but the need to get to a safe place. “That officer said the train to Almelo leaves in the morning,” she went on, but of course the big man had lied. Once she and Sofie had set foot in his rooms, they would have been trapped there until the men tired of them, and after that, she could only guess at their fate.