Lysbet liked having Jo come home with her to review for exams, though she always insisted on having a glass of milk and a cookie first, so that it was almost time to go before they opened their books. At home Jo raced through her homework. Sometimes it was interesting, sometimes not, but it was never work. Writing was, when there was a word or a sentence she had to change again and again, because it was important that it be the right one, and there was no easy way to know when it was.
She sat on the wall in the sunshine and thought about Lysbet. She mustn’t be insulted again, it wasn’t about her. They didn’t have to sit next to each other and go everywhere together. She would sit in the back, and Lysbet would understand. That’s better, she thought. When her father asked her what she’d learned today, she would tell him about the biology class. They’d dissected frogs. The boys went at it with excitement, wielding sharp little knives and splattering their tables with sticky yellow stuff. She and Lysbet and the other five girls were careful and slow and, at the end of the class, Mrs Elte had complimented them on their drawings. That was the kind of story her parents liked to hear. They didn’t need to know everything.
They were standing in front of the house waiting for her. Jo stopped at the corner and watched them. Even on a warm windless summer day like this, her father wore his dark gray winter suit and his black fedora pulled down over his forehead. A small plump woman, Mama stood looking up at him from under her unfashionable felt hat. She was shaking her head and looking toward the door, as if she wanted to go inside and he was holding her back. Someone came out of the house next door, stepped into his car and slammed the door so hard that she leaned back against the wall behind her. Jo’s father put both hands out to steady her, and they stood that way, her head pressed against the sleeve of his jacket, until he released her, turned and saw Jo. As if nothing had happened, he called out, ‘Come, we’re late!’ and her mother waved.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Put your books in the hall, they’ll be safe there.’ She linked arms with Jo’s father, as though getting ration cards was a good reason for a stroll in the sunshine. She hadn’t gone outside their neighborhood for weeks. The German soldiers were everywhere in the center of the city, she said, and they made her nervous.
‘I went past a café yesterday,’ she told Jo one afternoon, whispering so that Jo’s father couldn’t hear her. ‘They were sitting at a table outside, three of them, drinking coffee and reading German newspapers.’ He had put down his book to listen, and she said, ’David, I’m sorry, I know everybody says they’re polite and friendly, but there are so many of them.’
‘They expect the English to attack across the channel,’ he explained. ’It makes sense for them to have many troops here. If the soldiers are polite, Jacoba, what is the problem?’
There was no more talk about the Germans after that. They had invaded Paris, carefully, reverently, the papers reported, because the Nazis admired the city and wanted to own it the way it was. There was no British invasion. Instead, their troops already in France had been pressed back to the beaches and rescued by sailboats, fishing boats, and everything else that could get safely across the channel and back. The pro-Nazi newspapers like the Telegraph crowed about that. Did the Dutch need the British to rescue them? How? From what? What nonsense!
These ration cards, for example, of course they were necessary. There was plenty of food, but nobody wanted to be accused of taking more than his neighbors. And look how well-organized it was! In just a few days, thousands of families all over the country were registering and getting their stamps and books and instructions. It proved once again how efficiently the Dutch managed things.
Ahead of them, Jo saw two long lines waiting to get into the district office. A policeman stood on either side of the door, letting people in a few at a time. Jo’s mother pressed closer to her and took her hand, then let it go to wave to somebody, a neighbor. Jo saw the woman look at them quickly and then turn away to speak to the man standing next to her.
‘Wasn’t that Mrs Kok?’ her mother asked.
‘I don’t know, Mama, I didn’t see.’ She squeezed her mother’s hand and smiled. ‘It’s going to be a long wait. I can stand in line for us, if you and Papa want to go and sit down somewhere and have something to drink.’
‘You won’t mind?’
‘No, go on. There’s a café over there at the corner. You’ll be able to see when I get up to the door.’
They walked away and Jo joined the end of a line. Then a fat man, his thin wife and their little boy came up behind her, and then more people behind them. The fat man was breathing loudly, and his son was begging for a drink he wouldn’t get. When she was fourth from the door, Jo turned to look for her parents and waved. They were sitting on a bench outside the café, and they waved and came back. ‘Thank you, darling,' her mother said. ‘I saved my cookie for you,’ and she gave Jo the tiny brown wafer that always came with a cup of tea or coffee.
‘Look out there,’ the fat man exclaimed. ‘Get back to the end of the line!’ He was looking at her father, his stubbled cheeks and bald head flushed with anger.
‘This is our place, sir,' her father said. 'This is our daughter.’
‘I don’t care who she is, you just walked up here and muscled in. We don’t do that, we Dutch.’
The people in front of them turned to look and hear better, and one of the policeman took a step forward.
‘These are my parents,’ Jo told him. ‘We came here together.’
His eyes went up and down her body, looking at her blond hair, her green eyes, how tall she was. Then he looked at her father and mother and started to laugh. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘These yids never had a daughter like you.’
That word again. She’d never heard it before today but, when that boy said it, she knew what it meant. Everybody knew it, boys at her high school and sweaty fat men and all the people standing there watching them. It was an ugly word that was supposed to make her feel ugly, and she knew it was her fault that it did.
‘Leave us alone, please. We’re here for the same reason you are.’ She took her mother’s hand and pulled her to stand in front of her, as far away from him as possible.
His wife was tugging at his sleeve, and he shoved her away with his elbow. People coming out of the building were walking past slowly, watching them, and Jo blushed and looked away.
‘Why hello!’ a woman said, stopping next to her. ‘How are you today? What a long wait you’ve had! It goes fast once you’re inside,’ she said. Then she looked at the fat man who was staring at her. ‘Is there something?’
‘You know these yids?’
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that? Oh, you mean my neighbors? Of course I know them. They’re practically family. I’m this pretty girl’s godmother.’ She winked at Jo with the eye he couldn’t see. When he grunted and turned his back to her, she leaned forward and mouthed, ‘Say goodbye Elsie.’ Then louder, ‘Bye bye, nice to have seen you.’
‘Bye, Elsie, say hello to everyone,’ Jo called after her, and her father touched his hat as a greeting. They were at the door a few minutes later, and the policeman stopped the fat man from entering behind them. Inside the door, another policeman waved them toward one of the lines and told them to have their papers ready.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ Jo’s mother said.
‘No, you are not, Jacoba. You can be sick at home, not here. We are going to stand here and get our cards like everyone else.’
When it was their turn, Jo’s father showed his driver’s license and explained that his wife had no proof of identity, but that his daughter had a card from her school with her name on it. When he heard his pupils needed some kind of identification, the rector had given a card to everyone who asked for it. The children of NSB-ers had their own membership cards, of course, they were all in one club or another, and they were proud of the rank they held and liked to flash it around.
‘I only need to see who you are,’ the official said. ‘You’re Dav
id Hermans? Right. And you have Dutch nationality?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘There’s no of course about it,’ the man corrected. ‘There are a lot of you people in Amsterdam who belong somewhere else.’
He meant the refugees who were coming to a country where they thought they’d be safe, Germans mostly, Jews and Christians.
After the riots in Germany, when shop windows were broken and synagogues set on fire, when people were beaten and arrested, so many German Jews had come that the Jewish organizations in Holland couldn’t help all of them. The government couldn’t help them either, and anyway it didn’t want to, because it needed to have good relations with Hitler. Closing the border was finally the wisest thing to do. Whoever was already in but didn’t have friends or enough money to care for themselves went to a camp in the east of the country.
Mr Stoffels told his history classes about Westerbork. The first people sent there built barracks for themselves and, when more people came, they built their own. It wasn’t as bad as a prison, he said, but Jo thought he used the word prison to let them know what he really thought. There was a school and a hospital where people who had been teachers, doctors and nurses in their own country could work. Since the occupation, Mr Stoffels hadn’t talked again about the refugees at Westerbork, the Dutch soldiers who were prisoners in Germany, or the Queen who had escaped with her family and ministers to England. His lessons concentrated on the Royal House of Orange and the first king, William the Silent, in the 16th century. They could be that patriotic.
‘Well,’ the man insisted, ‘are you Dutch or not?’
‘Yes yes, I have been here since a child, and my wife also, and my daughter was born here.’
‘All right, all right, I get the idea. Here are your books and the coupons for bread, flour, coffee, tea,’ he counted them as he pushed them across the table. ‘And gas for your car.’
‘I don’t have a car,’ David said. ‘I won’t need those.’
‘You have a license and no car?’ The man looked at him with surprise.
‘A car is not necessary in the city.’ David slid the coupons back.
‘You have to take them.’
‘But I don't need them.’
‘For God’s sake,’ the man said angrily. ‘Sell them!’ He leaned to look past them and motioned to the next in line.
Jo reached past her father’s hand and scooped up the books and coupons. ‘Come on, Papa, we’ll sort it out at home.’
Everyone was staring at them, some laughing, some shaking their heads. It wasn’t nice to make a fuss.
At home, Jacoba went straight into her bedroom. When Jo went in, she was lying on her back on the big bed, still wearing her skirt and jacket but with her shoes under a nearby chair, her hat on its seat and her stockings draped neatly over its back. Her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes were open, her face pale.
‘Mama,’ Jo whispered, ‘are you all right?’
Jacoba stared at the ceiling as though she hadn’t heard. When Jo touched her mother’s forehead, Jacoba lifted a hand and pushed her arm away.
‘I am being sick,’ she muttered. ‘I have his permission to be sick now, so I am being sick.’
‘Oh Mama, of course you are. Those people were awful. But not everyone was, were they?’ Not the cheerful woman, she thought, who understood exactly what was happening.
Her mother looked at her angrily. ‘That woman who didn’t look at us, that was Mrs Kok, wasn’t it!’ It wasn’t a question. ‘In the street yesterday too, she passed me and didn’t say hello. We have been neighbors for how long? Ten years? More! And now she doesn’t know me? I curse her! I curse all of them!’
‘Mama!’
‘You think I don’t mean it? I mean it!’
David appeared in the doorway. ‘What is this? Jacoba, are you suddenly crazy? What are you saying?’
‘You think I don’t mean it? I’ll say it again!’
‘No, you will not! Jo, go study.’ He stood aside for her and then sat down on the bed. ‘Come on, my darling, it’s all right,’ he whispered, and she began to cry.
From her room, where she sat at her desk and sorted out the papers she’d scrambled to pick up on the school’s steps, Jo listened until it was quiet again. She heard her father leave the bedroom and go into the living room. She pictured him picking up his book and adjusting his reading glasses. Was he reading or sitting with his eyes closed, trying to understand what had just happened to them?
She wanted to go in to him and say, ‘Explain, Papa,’ the way she had done as a child. This time, she knew, he had nothing useful to tell her. It was simple enough, history had caught them up in its snares. She thought, ‘We’re like fish thrashing around in a net, wondering where our water is.’ The image came from somewhere, she couldn’t remember where, but it felt right. Do fish panic? Is that what she was doing? No, she wouldn’t, she mustn’t. She knew what she had to do. Write it, remember it. She took a pen, opened her notebook and wrote down what she had been thinking. Then, on the next page, she wrote ELSIE. It was important not to forget her.
4 Pam, October 1940
Just before sunset, the clouds that hung over the city drifted east, and a red glow from the west lit the buildings opposite. Pam put her hand on the windowpane to judge how cold it was. Scarf and hat weather. It was a brisk fifteen minutes walk across the park to Uncle Abel’s house, lovely after hanging over her books all day. There would be a sherry waiting for them and then Aunt Rezi’s Friday night dinner.
The whole family met around the table, even Simon and Adrian who had so often before turned up their noses at family gatherings. It was as though they needed to look at each other, shake hands, hear each other’s voices in order to know that they were all safe.
More German troops had arrived. They seemed to be everywhere, goose-stepping in their shining boots and battle helmets to loud music, roaring down the widest streets in trucks and official cars, or walking around in small groups enjoying the city. There were photographs of them in the newspapers buying raw herring or ice cream from a pushcart, or sitting in the October sun on a terrace having coffee with pretty Dutch girls.
Then there were the blackouts at night and the curfew and the signs in German: BAHNHOF pointing the way to the train station, UMLEITUNG if they blocked off a street and you had to go another way. Nazi newspapers were sold on street corners, enormous swastika flags hung outside all the buildings they had taken over, and posters in both German and Dutch appeared almost every day with new regulations, the funniest one being that all the clocks had to be set to German time, an hour and forty minutes later.
Week by week, as the pressure increased, the Shabbat dinners became more traditional. By now there were two ritual candles, Simon had bought a silver cup in an antique shop for the wine that went around the table, and the two loaves of challah Rezi learned to bake came to the table under a white napkin. She had looked up and memorized the little prayer she needed to say, and even Ben, the unbeliever, liked the idea of thanking God for the bread they were eating.
If they felt that this Amsterdam was not the city they loved, inside their house the world had not changed. There were books everywhere, paintings on the walls, old worn Persian rugs on the dark wooden floors, beautiful china and silver on the table, and good wine in the cellar. Nothing had changed, except that they had. But they didn’t talk about that.
The evenings began with jokes and gossip. Simon often had a funny story for them. He had stabled his horse in the country and bought himself a motorbike. When he was finished for the day at the newspaper office, where his father had put him to work writing up news items, he did errands for people whose names they weren’t supposed to ask. He had a new passport with a pompous Christian name on it, Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm Smit. The Smit was a joke.
‘Some of their soldiers look as though they’ve been plucked straight out of primary school. This morning one of them stopped me, gaped at my identity card and said, “That’s
my name too, Ludwig!” “A good solid name,” I told him. “We’re named for a good solid German king, you know that.” Well of course he didn’t, so I explained about the Fairy Tale King of Bavaria, and he was flattered. I left out the part about Ludwig being insane, I didn’t want to confuse the boy.’
Everybody laughed, and Simon went on to say that it helped being handsome, at least he thought he was, and taller than the German soldiers thought Jews were.
Pam’s father said, ‘Since it’s Shabbat, shall we pray for the safety of our relatives with hooked noses and humped backs?’
‘Oh Ben,’ her mother begged, ‘don’t say things like that!’
Adrian leaned forward and looked down the table at her. ‘Ma, he’s right, we’re lucky we look Dutch.’
Abel held up a hand to attract their attention. ‘Adrian’s right. It’s better not to look like a Jew. How long that will help is anybody’s guess. Yesterday I had to ask everybody who works for my paper to swear they aren’t Jewish and that they are loyal to the new government. If they refuse to sign, I’m supposed to fire them. Some of my best people have left rather than comply, even though they’re church-going Christians. I haven’t fired anybody yet, but I don’t know how long it will be before I have to. Myself too, of course.’
‘Some people say the best thing is just to ignore orders like that,’ Simon said.
‘That’s passive resistance, and I don’t think you’ll find many historical examples of its achieving anything,’ Ben instructed him. ‘Revolutions come out of the barrel of a gun, I’m afraid. Given the moment, even the nicest people will turn to violence. The nicer they are, the easier they find a suitable excuse for sabotage or murder or the regrettable but inevitable need to torture someone. Passive resistance is useless and violent resistance makes things worse, not better.’ He picked up his wine glass, drank the last drops and held it out to Simon to be refilled.
The Time Between Page 4
