by Monica Hesse
She smiles. “Have you been here before, then?”
I shake my head, and her name breaks from my mouth. “Mirjam. Mirjam, I know.”
Color drains from Mirjam’s face. She looks over her shoulder, seeing if anyone heard the secret name. The door behind her is closed. The streets outside are empty. “Who are you?”
“I wrote you a letter. I folded it into a star.”
“I never got a letter.”
Of course, Christoffel would have passed it to the real Amalia, not the girl pretending to be her in an inn by the ocean. “I’ve been looking for you,” I say, and then I realize that if she never got the letter, she doesn’t know any of what happened, and I am going to have to be the one to tell her, from the beginning.
It takes me a long time to explain everything: Christoffel, Amalia, the Nazis, the bridge. I keep repeating the things she doesn’t seem to understand, because she assumed Amalia would be coming to visit her soon. She assumed Amalia was safe. She listens to me with a frozen, stunned expression and her lower teeth biting her upper lip, a habit I never imagined for Mirjam. I spent a week trying to learn about this girl, but I really don’t know her at all. Everything I heard was an amalgamation of her and Amalia. I knew people’s memories of each of them, and I stitched them together to form a person, but it’s a different person than the one standing in front of me.
Mirjam sinks down in a chair next to the doorway. “Are you sure?” she asks when I’ve finished. “Could you have made a mistake?”
It’s the same thing I asked Ollie, when he told me someone named Roodveldt had arrived in the theater, wanting deeply for there to have been a mistake.
“I’m sure. She died because she was acting like she was you,” I say. I didn’t mean for it to sound harsh. I said it because I’m still trying, so desperately, to understand how it happened.
Her eyes fill with tears. “Have you ever had a best friend?”
I nod. My throat is tight. “Once. Not anymore.”
“Then you know. You know what it’s like to love someone like you love yourself and then lose them.”
I don’t know whether to leave her with her grief or to push on, but I’ve come this far and I can’t help wanting to go further. “What happened on that night, Mirjam? The night you changed places?”
She drops her head. She doesn’t want to tell me, or she doesn’t want to remember, and for a while I think she’s not going to answer me at all.
“We only had a few minutes. I was running from the furniture store. I didn’t know where I was going, and then Amalia was there, with me, in the street. She was already crying; her hair was undone and her blouse was untucked, and when she saw me, she grabbed me so hard I could barely breathe. It was before curfew, and the streets were so busy with people rushing home that nobody paid attention to us. I told her what happened—that my family was dead—and she didn’t even have to think before she took off her coat. She said that I would become her, that there were identification papers in the pocket, and money. She was supposed to be on a train that night anyway. To come here. The ticket was already booked. Her aunt hadn’t seen her since she was a child. So she told me to go to her aunt’s house, and then she promised that she would never reveal where I was or what had happened until I told her it was safe.”
“And that was it?”
“Almost.” She looks at me again, but her eyes are harder now, somehow, closed off and protective.
It’s the almost that keeps stopping me, that has stopped me all week. I’ve had so many occasions of thinking I almost understood something only to realize I didn’t understand anything at all.
“Mirjam, Amalia had a secret. She told it to Christoffel. It’s why he made her leave his house. It made him so angry that Amalia was afraid of him. Do you know what it was? What Amalia could have told him that would have upset Christoffel so much that he sent her away from a place where she was safe?”
She pinches her lips and looks away. “I don’t know anything.”
“Please, I’m just trying to understand what happened. You have no idea how badly people wanted to find you. Mrs. Janssen would have given anything to know what happened.”
She wants to tell me. I can tell that she wants this to be done with as much as I do, so that we can all start over.
“Mirjam. You said Amalia was already crying when she ran into you. Why would she already be crying? Why was she out that night to begin with?”
Tell me. Tell me and let us be done with this.
Slowly, deliberately, Mirjam reaches into a pocket on her dress. She pulls out something shaped like a star. “In Amalia’s coat pocket, when we traded. In the pocket was the money to come here. And also this.”
I take it from her and unfold the flaps. Mirjam rises from her chair and goes to stand by the window, looking out into the sea.
Dearest Elizabeth,
Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me even though I have done something you shouldn’t forgive me for.
I’m writing this on the tram, and if I get to you in time, I won’t have to give this to you at all. This is just in case. A just-in-case letter.
T and I have become close while you’re away. He listens when I talk. He laughs at my jokes. It’s like he really sees me, for the first time, and I know you wouldn’t mind, because you never loved him like I did, because you always said that you wished he felt about me the way he felt about you. And I thought he was starting to love me back. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t, because this afternoon he looked at me and said, “You should wear your hair like Mirjam’s. Hers is so pretty. When the war is over, maybe she’ll show you.” And I could see in his face that he was never going to love me, not ever.
I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that I was heartbroken. Even though it’s not an excuse, I want you to understand that I was heartbroken when I got home and my uncle was visiting and he asked me why I was looking so blue. I want you to understand that I wasn’t thinking when I told him that I was blue because the boy I loved would rather pine after a girl who had to hide in a furniture shop until the war was over than be with me. My uncle laughed. He told me the boy was dumb. He asked me to tell him more about this girl. I did. I told him all about you. I forgot he’d joined the NSB.
Or did I? Dearest Elizabeth, I’ve been thinking about this from the moment I realized what he’d done, from the moment I ran for the tram. Did I really forget that he joined the NSB? Or did part of me remember and know exactly what I was doing? I’m going to try to stop this. I’m going to fix it if I can. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
“She turned you in,” I say. “She was the reason the Nazis raided your hiding space.”
Mirjam turns to face me. “Didn’t you see? She regretted it almost as soon as she realized what had happened. That was why she was out that night in the street. She was running to warn us all that she’d told. She was hoping there would still be time for us to run.”
“But it was too late.”
Mirjam’s eyes are webbed with tears. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like that night. Two best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I’m sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.
“You’ll want to hate her.” Mirjam stares down at her folded hands. “I did. More than I ever hated anybody. But she didn’t know. I have to believe that now. When she told her uncle, I think she did it without realizing what could happen. She didn’t mean to.” She looks up at me with enormous eyes. “Do you believe me when I say that?”
“I believe that if you believe that,” I say.
I don’t know why Mirjam should care, if I think well of Amalia or not. She doesn’t even know me.
Except that, it occurs to me, I would care if it were me or my friends. All of us—Bas, Elsbeth, Ollie,
me—I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.
Mirjam goes to the bed and sits, and I sit beside her, and neither of us says anything. We just stare out the window as waves batter the barricaded shore.
THIRTY-FOUR
In the end, I don’t stay the night at Amalia’s aunt’s hotel. Mirjam doesn’t know me well enough for me to be a comfort to her, and after a while I realize I don’t know what to say. I tell her I’ll go back to Amsterdam, where she would have a home with Mrs. Janssen if she wanted it, but in truth it’s probably better for her to stay here until the war is over, tucked away in a guestless hotel with safe papers.
I walk back toward the railway station and pester the station agent until he gets me a spot on the next train back to Amsterdam. The woman in the seat next to me whispers that the Battle of Stalingrad is over and the Nazis lost—their first official surrender of the war.
“Thank God,” I say, which I soon realize is taking a chance: If she’s a collaborator, my response should have been neutral or despair. But she’s not, because she reaches down and furtively squeezes my hand, a shared gratefulness. And then we’re done talking, because neither of us knows who could be listening, and we keep to ourselves as the train heads home. I feel tired. More so than I would have expected, after so much resolution. Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.
When I get home, Mama and Papa will ask where I’ve been. I’ll go and have dinner with Ollie and Willem and Sanne and Leo. I’ll visit Mina when I can. My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it’s possible to be healed without feeling whole.
I found a girl who wasn’t the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.
The first time I realized I loved Bas:
He was sixteen, I was fifteen. It wasn’t the afternoon in his house when we listened to the radio. That was when he realized he loved me. I actually realized it the week before. It was in the school yard. Someone was saying how they liked to read the last pages of books first, to make sure everyone turned out okay. Bas said that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. Bas ordered that the book in question be passed to him, and when it was, he flipped to the back page, took out a pencil and started writing on it. I thought he would write Everyone turned out okay, but when he passed the book back, he’d actually written, Everyone was mauled by a bear, it was very sad, let’s go get ice cream.
Then he grabbed my hand, pulled me up from where I’d been sitting, and said, “Maybe the bear didn’t maul you. He just scratched you a little bit.” Then I made a face, and then he kissed me, and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.
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A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY
Though the stories and characters in this book are all fictional, the locations and historical events mentioned were real places and occurrences in Holland during World War II. The Netherlands was invaded in May 1940. More than two thousand Dutch servicemen were killed in the Battle of the Netherlands, and German occupiers began to put into place a series of increasingly severe restrictions on the Jewish population.
Some one hundred thousand Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust—nearly three-quarters of the Jewish population, a much higher percentage than in nearby countries. There’s a lot of speculation as to why this happened: The Netherlands was a flat, developed country without many forests or natural places to hide. The countries that bordered it were also occupied, limiting escape routes. Resistance work was slow to be organized—the Netherlands had been neutral in World War I and so citizens didn’t have the infrastructure or knowledge for creating underground networks. The Dutch collaboration rate was comparatively high, and even those who disapproved of the occupation were lulled into a false sense of security by the gradual way that Nazi restrictions were enacted: The country was a frog in slowly boiling water.
The Jewish Council, composed of leaders in the community, originally believed that their role as liaison between Nazis and the Jewish population would improve the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands. Instead, many today believe that the Council’s acts inadvertently made it easier for Jews to be tracked, persecuted, and deported to their deaths.
There were, however, extraordinary acts of heroism within the country. Ollie and Judith and their friends represent an amalgamation of several different types of resistance activities, but they are most closely based on the Amsterdam Student Group, an organization of university students who specialized in rescuing children, and on the mostly Jewish workers who were assigned to work in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The Schouwburg was a place of terror, but also one of Amsterdam’s bravest rescue operations. An estimated six hundred Jewish children were sneaked out of the nursery across the street: sometimes hiding in laundry baskets, sometimes passed over the courtyard wall to neighboring buildings, and sometimes escorted out in plain sight by workers who conveniently “miscounted” the number of children they were supposed to be looking after. The acts of my characters were inspired by reading about, or listening to the oral histories of, many people who were affiliated with the theater. To name a few: Piet Meerburg, the cofounder of the Amsterdam Student Group; Henriette Pimentel, who ran the nursery and was killed in Auschwitz in 1943; and Walter Süskind, who falsified children’s records while running the Schouwburg and was killed in 1945.
The resistance work of photographers was real: A loosely joined network of professional photographers became officially known as the Underground Camera in 1944. They risked their personal safety to take secret photographs of soldiers and civilians, and their images remain some of the most illuminating records of Dutch life during Nazi occupation. Female photographers were particularly adept: They hid their cameras in purses and handbags. Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw, though not a member of Underground Camera, did live in an apartment abutting the Schouwburg’s rear courtyard, and she did take photographs of the Jewish prisoners when she recognized a childhood friend among them. Mina’s storyline draws from this experience.
Het Parool was a real newspaper; in fact, it still exists today. The publishers risked their lives to print every issue: Thirteen of its workers were executed in February 1943, just a few days after the events of this novel conclude.
I’m a journalist by trade, and I’ve always believed that people’s real stories are more moving, more interesting, and more heartbreaking than anything I could invent in fiction. My initial interest in this project began with a vacation to Amsterdam and visits to several Holocaust-related sites there. I subsequently did a lot of research and have a lot of people to credit for helping me discover the real stories of Amsterdam in 1943.
Over repeated visits, the librarians at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, helped me find stacks of books and DVDs on topics ranging from ration coupons to what kind of coded language resistance workers would have used when talking to each other on the telephone.
Greg Miller at Film Rescue International had several patient exchanges with me about the tricky process for developing color images in the 1940s. Paul Moody, who directed the Dutch documentary The Underground Camera, was similarly patient in corresponding with me about the role of photographers during the war; he
recommended the book De illegale camera (1940–1945), a collection of war photographs containing many of the images that I described and credited to Mina. Military historian Allert Goossens dug through his research files to help me come up with a plausible scenario allowing Bas to have joined the navy at seventeen years old, which was below the draft age. In Holland, Michigan, the staff at Nelis’ Dutch Village fed me lots of Dutch food, including banketstaaf, which makes an appearance as one of Hanneke’s favorite treats. Pat Boydens, a native Dutch speaker who now lives in Virginia, read the manuscript for linguistic truthfulness, helping me determine, for example, which types of curse words would be most likely used by a teenage girl. Laurien Vastenhout was a meticulous fact-checker, combing the manuscript for historical accuracy, and the staff at Sebes & Van Gelderen Literary Agency also provided invaluable historical feedback related to character names and Dutch culture.
There were some occasions in the book when I did veer from history books. A few examples: I have the nursery in the Schouwburg closing in January when in fact it didn’t close until several months later. Het Parool did not have a classified ads section, at least not in the winter of 1943, and it was not, as far as I know, used by individuals to pass secret messages. Those decisions, along with any other departures from history, were made solely by me for artistic purposes, and I hope that none of them are unforgivable.
Hanneke Bakker was not, after all, a real person. Nor were Bas and Ollie Van de Kamp, Mirjam Roodveldt, or any of the other characters mentioned by name. But as people continue to ask how an event as monumental and atrocious as the Holocaust ever could have happened, I wanted to tell a story of small betrayals in the middle of a big war. I wanted to illustrate the split-second decisions we make of moral courage and cowardice, and how we are all heroes and villains.
