Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

  “It’s a theater,” I say. “Or was. It’s closed now, isn’t it?”

  Ollie nods. “It was a theater. They’ve renamed it the Jewish Theater, and now it’s a deportation center. Jews are rounded up around the city and brought to the Schouwburg, kept for several days, and then transported—to Westerbork mostly, but sometimes other transit camps.”

  The dignified theater with velvet curtains is now a massive holding cell for German prisoners. I have clients who live right in that neighborhood. It’s disgusting, the way the Germans take our lovely things and poison them.

  “I didn’t know,” I say.

  “Where did you think Jewish people were sent?” Judith asks.

  “To work camps, or to be resettled in another country. I’m not ignorant,” I say. Work camps is what we’ve always been told. I just never thought about how, exactly, the Jewish prisoners would get to them.

  “‘Work camps’?” Judith scoffs at my description. “You make it sound as if Jews are just going to a job. You have no idea, the sadistic things we’ve heard about those camps.”

  Before I can ask her to explain more, Sanne jumps in, peacemaking. “It makes sense that you wouldn’t know more,” she tells me. “The Nazis try to hide everything they’re doing. At the Schouwburg, they make everyone stay inside until it’s time for their transport. The Council arranges food and blankets, and that’s about all they can do. Judith volunteers there a few times a week, and her cousin works in the crèche.”

  “There’s a nursery?”

  Judith makes a face. “Because the Nazis thought it would be too disorderly, to have the children in the theater with their parents. The toddlers and smaller children wait in the crèche until it’s time for their families to depart.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, and I don’t have to. Ollie clears his throat again, to regain control of his meeting. “So Willem will talk to Utrecht,” Ollie says. “When do you think you can talk to them, Willem?”

  “Wait,” I say.

  “And then, after Willem and Judith consult with—” Leo begins.

  “Wait.” Everyone stops talking then and looks at me. “The Schouwburg. Is that where everybody goes, or only the people who were asked to report?”

  Leo looks confused. “What do you mean?”

  “If someone wasn’t actually scheduled for deportation, and they were just found on the street, but they had Jewish papers, would they be brought to the theater, or to another prison somewhere?”

  Ollie’s voice is neutral as he answers my question. “There are a few smaller deportation centers in other parts of the city. But for the most part, yes. There’s a good chance that a Jewish person who wasn’t where she was supposed to be would be brought to the Schouwburg.”

  I notice his use of she, acknowledging that I’m not merely curious about procedure in general but about one person in particular. This discussion about taking ration cards to the theater has inadvertently led back to my reason for being here tonight. “Mirjam could be there?” I ask. “Right now?”

  Judith and Ollie look at each other. “Theoretically,” Ollie says carefully.

  “How do I find out if she is?”

  “It’s difficult.”

  “How difficult?”

  Ollie sighs. “The Jewish man who was assigned to run the Schouwburg, we rely on him for a lot of things. I can’t approach him with a personal favor. We have to use our resources strategically. We have to think about what actions will be best for the largest group of people, for the movement as a whole.”

  “But maybe if I could just get a message to her. That would be possible, wouldn’t it?”

  He rubs his hands over his eyes. “Can we finish the business on our agenda? And then talk about this at the end of the night?”

  “Your agenda?”

  If I were an outsider watching this conversation, I would tell myself to stop pushing, that no one wants to help someone behaving childishly. But in this moment, I can’t help it. Ollie brought me here under a false pretense, and I’ve finally learned a piece of information that could be useful, but he’s told me help is impossible without really explaining why.

  The others resume talking, about the ration-card bottleneck and fake identification papers. None of this helps me with Mirjam. She’s fifteen. How would she know to find a fake ID through the resistance? How would she know how to do anything? She’s probably alone and afraid, and she’s been missing for forty-eight hours now. Could a fifteen-year-old girl manage to elude capture on the streets for forty-eight hours?

  As the official business winds down, I glue my eyes to Judith and pull her aside the minute she’s not talking to anyone else.

  “Judith?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “We’re talking,” she says stiffly, but every syllable really says, I don’t know why Ollie let you come.

  “I wanted to first apologize. For sneaking into the school like that, and for scaring you.”

  “You didn’t scare me,” she says archly. “It takes so much more than that to scare me at this point.”

  “Surprised you, then,” I compromise. “I’m sorry I walked into the school and didn’t tell you what I was really looking for.”

  “You could have gotten me in trouble.”

  “I was desperate.”

  “We’re all desperate.”

  If Judith was a soldier, now is when I would lower my eyes and talk softly about how she was right and I couldn’t possibly understand any of it. But Judith’s not a soldier. She probably deplores sycophants. “I’ve apologized,” I say. “And I meant it. And I can do it again if you want. But I came tonight because I wanted help, regarding a girl who was also one of the students at your school.” I stare at the bridge of her nose, which is easier than staring at her eyes, willing her to speak first. I’m stubborn enough to remain silent.

  “Mirjam Roodveldt,” Judith says. The air between us parts. “She went to the Lyceum until a few months ago.”

  “You knew her. Were you lying? I mean, when you said the photos were destroyed in a fire, is that the truth?”

  “I wasn’t lying. The photos were destroyed in a fire. I lit it myself.” She juts out her chin, as if daring me to question this act. “I didn’t want the Germans to have one more list of all the students who were left. Not that it matters. They find everyone anyway.”

  Something clicks in my brain. When the war first started and Germans burned down buildings, we hated them for it. But recently I’ve heard of public records buildings burning down, and I wonder if some of them are resistance jobs meant as acts of protection.

  “You did know her, though? Dark hair? Petite? She might have worn a bright blue coat?”

  Judith bites her lip. “I remember when she got that coat. She tripped and caught her old one on a rusty piece of fence and ripped a big chunk out of it. Ripped a chunk out of her knee, too. I remember thinking she was going to have a scar for life. She came back a few days later with stitches and the new coat. It was raining that morning and she asked me if she could come inside before the doors opened so it wouldn’t get too wet.”

  “What else do you remember about her?” I can barely get out the words. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I didn’t expect to find anyone else who knew her. Some twisted part of me maybe believed that Mirjam Roodveldt was a specter created by Mrs. Janssen. But she is real.

  “Why do you care so much about her?” Judith looks at me shrewdly. “Is she a friend?”

  “No. I’m—I’m being paid to find her.” It’s technically the truth, and right now it seems easier than explaining everything else, about me, and Bas, about how finding Mirjam feels like a task that will put order to the world. I’m still embarrassed by how vulnerable I was in front of Judith when I met her at the school.

  “Just her?” Judith looks skeptical. “You’re here because you’re looking for just one person?”

  “Please, do you remember anything
else?”

  Judith sighs. “Not a lot. She was beautiful; I think she had a lot of admirers.”

  “Anyone she was particularly close with? Was there anyone she might have gone to, or told where she was going into hiding?”

  “I’m just a secretary. I only talked to the students if they came in late and needed a pass or something else like that. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know anything else?”

  “I did bring some things for you, though I doubt they’ll be of any help.” She leans over to her handbag and pulls out a rectangular white envelope, unaddressed and unsealed. “Just some old school assignments from her desk. Sometimes students disappear without having a chance to clean out their books or papers. I always think, just in case some of them came back… In any case, I went through my collection, and this is what we had of Mirjam’s.”

  She hands me the envelope, and I quickly thumb through the contents. The top three pages are all math assignments, and the next two are biology quizzes. No photographs, nothing that looks immediately useful. I try to hide my disappointment; it was kind of Judith to bring this for me, and I don’t want to seem more petulant than I already did earlier in the meeting.

  “Ollie says you have connections,” Judith says.

  “It depends on what you mean by connections.”

  “Ollie says you can find things. We need more vendors we can trust, and we need people who can introduce us to them.”

  “That’s not why I came here,” I say.

  “I see.” She’s staring at me evenly. It takes work for me not to return her gaze, to instead focus on Mirjam’s schoolwork in my lap. Before I can look more closely at the other papers, Ollie puts his hand on my shoulder, and I look up in relief.

  “It’s almost curfew. I’ll walk you home; Judith and Willem and Sanne will follow in a few minutes.”

  Judith stands to put on her scarf.

  “Thank you,” I say formally. “For trying to help me.”

  She pauses. “My cousin might have known Mirjam better. She doesn’t come to these meetings, because she’s just a kid, but she helps us sometimes. She’s still a pupil at the school. I could arrange a meeting with her. Possibly.”

  “Please,” I say greedily. “Should I come to the school tomorrow morning?” I’m sure I can find an errand for Mr. Kreuk that will require me to be in that neighborhood.

  “Come to the Schouwburg in the afternoon. We’ll both be volunteering there. Meet me outside. You can see what we’re all about.”

  I don’t want to see what they’re all about, and Judith knows that. It’s why she suggested the Schouwburg to begin with. Judith might have offered to help me further, but it came with a price.

  “Ready?” Ollie asks me.

  I tuck Judith’s envelope into the waistband of my skirt so I won’t have to carry it visibly down the street.

  “Be careful,” Ollie calls out to Judith and Willem.

  Willem calls back, “Be safe.”

  EIGHT

  You had no right.”

  “No right to what?” Ollie scans both sides of the street before pulling me to the left, closing the door behind him.

  “You’re in the resistance.” I don’t bother to phrase it as a question. Ollie walks steadily ahead, but his shoulders tense at my statement. It’s a sullen, vindictive cold outside, colder than it’s been in months, and my breath vaporizes as we hurry along the canal.

  “We don’t have to talk about this now.”

  “You’re in the resistance. You said you were inviting me to a supper club.”

  He halts. “It was a supper club. It used to be. We’d talk about books and politics. I joined with Willem and Judith. When Judith had to leave school because she was Jewish, some of us decided that we couldn’t have a group to just eat dinner. We had to try to fix what was going wrong.”

  He starts walking again and I chase after. He’s so smug with his half explanations, and so cavalier about the fact that he’s dragged me into this. “I can’t believe you, Ollie.” Everything I’ve felt in the past two days, every emotion, every fear, every bitter word I didn’t say to Mrs. de Vries, every doubting thought I had about finding Mirjam Roodveldt—all of it comes spilling out now, on the street, at Ollie. “How could you do this? Why didn’t you tell me that’s where you were taking me?”

  “Because what if someone had stopped you on the way?” he says. “I wanted you to be able to truthfully say you were on your way to see a friend. I didn’t know how well you could lie.”

  I can lie so very well, better than he thinks. Ollie has never seen me, flirting with soldiers while vomit rises in the back of my throat, or convincing my parents that my job is all flower-ordering and consoling sad families. Ollie has never seen the way I make everyone believe that I am a whole person after Bas’s death. Ollie is the one who shouldn’t be able to lie. “You, in the resistance,” I say finally. “You’re such a rule-follower.”

  He cackles, an explosive, mirthless noise. “Don’t you think rule-followers are the best people to organize against the Nazis? It’s not all daring rescues and explosions. It’s a lot of tedious paperwork.”

  “Ollie, why did you bring me?” I demand as he walks ahead. “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want to be involved in any of this. You could have just arranged for Judith to meet me at a café. Why are you trusting me at all? I could tell the police everything that I saw.”

  He whirls around and his eyes are cold. “Are you going to? Are you going to go to the police? Do you think what we’re doing is wrong?”

  “You know I don’t think it’s wrong.” Not morally. But in this world, you can be right, or you can be safe, and the type of danger Ollie is dabbling in makes my own work look like nothing. It’s not finite and contained, like dealing in black market goods or finding Mirjam. It’s huge and sprawling, an endless hole of needs that would swallow me whole. The Nazis might imprison a black market worker. They might imprison people who hide Jews, or send them to labor camps. But resistance workers caught in the act of stealing ration cards, working to overthrow the German regime? Those workers could be shot. The lucky ones, at least. The unlucky ones would be tortured first. How many more ways can my careful world be upended?

  “I just don’t want to join,” I say. “I’m an Aryan poster girl, remember, Ollie? I don’t help the resistance. I find black market cheese.”

  “We need black market cheese! We need food for the onderduikers in hiding. We need false identification papers. We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them.”

  “Judith already made me feel guilty. She made it clear how altruistic the rest of you are. I’m not.”

  He grabs my shoulders, a sudden movement that throws me off balance. “Did you ever think that maybe you’re better than you believe you are, Hanneke?” We smell like wet wool, both of us do, and his fingers are cold even through the layers of my coat. I start to push his arms away, but he tightens his grip. “Did you ever think that maybe that’s why I brought you?”

  “What are you talking about, Ollie?”

  “I’m talking about that’s why. That’s why I brought you. Because despite your insistence that you don’t want to get involved, you know that what’s happening in this country is wrong, and you’re already in a position to help us.”

  “None of that means I’m ready to risk my life. I already take care of my parents, and they would starve if something happened to me. I’m already looking for a missing girl. That’s how I’m resisting. I keep people fed, and I’m going to find a girl I was asked to find. Isn’t that enough, for one person to save one life? What you want from me is too much. I’m not ready to do more, and it’s not fair for you to ask.”

  Ollie’s voice softens and so do his eyes, quiet and blue. “I think you are willing to risk your life. You’ve felt this is wrong for a very long time. You were fourteen and you were already talking about how evil Adolf Hitler was. Re
member the dinner?”

  I can’t look away from him. I know what he’s referring to. A dinner conversation from four years ago, at the Van de Kamps’. I was talking and talking about Hitler, while Mrs. Van de Kamp tried to distract me by passing the peas and then the rolls, and then finally she came out and told me that polite people didn’t discuss politics at the table. Bas hadn’t even been paying attention. Ollie was listening, though. I think he was even nodding along. But that was years ago. That was a lifetime ago. Ollie knows nothing about me now, certainly not enough to make these grand, sweeping speeches. He doesn’t know that Bas is dead because of—

  Ollie gives my shoulders a final shake, and then releases them, raking his fingers through his hair. “We’re losing, Hanneke,” he says softly. “People are disappearing faster and faster, and being sent into God only knows what hell. One of the earlier transports? The families of deported men received postcards from their sons and brothers saying they were being treated well. Then the families received notices from the Gestapo, saying the men had all died of disease. Does that make any sense to you? Healthy young men—first they send postcards saying they’re fine, and then suddenly they’re dead? And now nobody sends back any postcards at all.”

  “Do you think all the Jews are being killed?” I ask.

  “I’m saying we don’t know what to think, or what’s true. All we know is that farms and attics are busting at the seams with onderduikers. The country is running out of places to hide people who desperately need to be hidden. We need help, more help, quickly, from people in strategic positions like you.”

  “You don’t know me,” I whisper. “There are things about me where if you knew them, you wouldn’t—”

  “Shhh.” He cuts me off.

  I start to protest, but he presses a finger to his lips. His whole body has gone stiff, and his ear is cocked as he listens to something. We’re both frozen now that I hear it, too: German shouting, in the distance but growing closer. Muffled crying, and unorganized feet on cobblestones. These days, the sounds only mean one thing.