‘Something’s wrong. It doesn’t feel right. I’m going to look.’ Just as she stood up, they heard somebody banging on the front door and shouting, ‘Open up! Open this door!’
‘Oh God! I knew it! Jo, run! Tell them to hide!’ She dropped the knife and ran into the hall, shutting the door behind her. ‘I’m coming!’ she called out cheerfully.
When Kris saw her coming, he waved her back, and she saw the boys behind him disappear out the back of the barn. Then Stella came running, grabbed her arm and shoved her back into the kitchen. ‘Sit!’ she commanded and dropped into a chair next to her.
When Kitty opened the hall door and stumbled through it, a hand on her shoulder, she grabbed the back of the nearest chair and righted herself, then sat down heavily. ‘What was that for?’ she burst out. Her anger must have surprised the man. He took a step back, his hand on his gun holster, and stared down at her, then at the two girls. They had heard Gunther’s car drive away or thought they had. Now they realized it had been a trick, the German officer had stayed behind to surprise them.
Over their heads, they heard somebody stomping through the hall, banging open doors to look into the bedrooms, and Jo thought of Tamar being waked by a stranger. The boots came pounding down, and Gunther looked in and said, ‘Nobody.’
He must have seen Tamar, but he wasn’t telling. Jo kept her eyes down, she was still holding the knife, hidden under her folded hands. It was no use against them, she knew, but it made her feel brave. What nonsense, look at him, he has a gun, she told herself, and he would use it if he had to.
The older man went to the door and looked across the yard. Kris and Cal were standing just inside the barn doors and, when he walked toward them, they came to meet him. From the kitchen, they could see Kris pointing toward the field where the sheep were grazing. Gunther stood in the doorway to watch until his officer waved to him to get back inside. When Kitty stood up, he jerked around to see what she was doing.
‘I need a drink,’ she said calmly, ‘and so do you.’ At the sink she ran the tap until the water was cold, gave him a glass, took one for herself and turned to the girls. ‘Anybody else?’
‘Thanks, Ma.’ Stella looked up at the young German and smiled. When she took the glass, she raised it and said, ‘Zum wohl, to your health,’ as if it were a glass of wine, and Jo saw his eyes widen with surprise. Behind him Kitty grinned and lifted her hand as if to slit her throat.
‘I’m glad you didn’t wake the baby,’ Stella said.
‘I did, I guess, but she’s all right. She didn’t cry. I only looked in.’
‘She’s my little cousin. Do you have cousins back home? Or a sister?’
‘Just a brother, but he’s a lot older.’ He grinned, enjoying their talk. ‘I’m the baby.’
‘A big guy like you, you're not a baby.’ Stella was standing now, leaning on the table with both hands and looking up at him. He was looking at her breasts. She was flirting, and Jo hoped she didn’t mean it. She couldn’t bear to see Dutch girls being friendly to the enemy. You couldn’t really blame them for going around with the Dutch police, even if they were working for the enemy, but the SS!
Before he could answer her, the older man called him to come outside, and they disappeared around the corner of the house. A few minutes later, they heard the car turning and going away. Kris went to look down the road, stuck his thumbs up to say all clear and went back with Cal into the barn.
They found Tamar sitting up with the blanket piled around her. Stella took her into the bathroom and washed her face and hands, smoothed down her hair and put her sandals on. Watching from the doorway, Jo saw Tamar holding up her face to Stella. She would be all right, she liked Stella. If someone could tell her mother, she would be pleased!
Just before dinner, they went downstairs and joined the men and boys around the table. Some of the boys still had mud around their ears, though they had slicked their hair down with water and scrubbed their hands. They were all enchanted by Tamar, who sat on Kitty’s lap and ate small spoonfuls of mashed potatoes.
‘She’s going to be fine,’ Stella said, ‘living with all these admirers. They’ll be fighting to entertain her, wait and see.’
While Kitty and Stella did the washing-up, Kris took Jo into the parlor, and she told him about Elsie and Dirk and the boys. Nothing about her parents, and he didn’t ask why she was staying with Elsie. ‘Can you take food back for them?’ he asked. ‘We’ve more than enough. If they can’t come here sometimes, you can come back again, can’t you?’
‘Oh yes, I’d like to see Tamar again and maybe get a message to her parents. This is a good place for her, thank you.’
She slept with Stella that night with Tamar between them. In the morning, Kitty came in and dressed Tamar and took her downstairs for breakfast. While Jo ate fresh bread with real butter and homemade jam, Stella took Tamar to see the baby lambs, and then Cal took Jo to the station with a sack of potatoes and carrots, a basket of green beans and ten eggs wrapped in cabbage leaves to protect them.
Waiting on the platform, Jo asked, ‘Weren’t you scared when that policeman came looking for you?’
‘Sure I was. The thing is, sometimes I think about this going on for years and years, maybe my whole life, wondering who’s watching us, who’s going to be arrested if we’re not careful, maybe I will. You bet it scares me. I don’t like being a guy who might get somebody arrested and maybe murdered, but that’s who I am. The trouble is, we’re getting used to it, Jo, and that’s not good. It’s been too easy. That Gunther is okay, he’s a kid, and he doesn’t even want to be here. But they aren’t all like that. I’ve never seen that other German before, where did he come from all of a sudden? And why? We’re going to have to be even more careful.’
‘You’re so brave!’
‘Oh. brave!’ He thought a moment, then said, ‘Brave is when you do something even when you think you’re too scared to do it. We haven’t gotten to that yet. I hope we never do. Here’s your train.’ He helped her up the steps, swung the sack of potatoes after her and saluted. ‘See you again, I hope!’ and was gone before the train started off.
13 Pam, October 1942
‘I can’t hire you,’ Mrs Pimentel said. ‘I’m sorry, Pamela, we’re all Jewish here.’ When Pam laughed, she looked surprised, even a little offended, and she pushed the identity card Pam had shown her back across her desk.
‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ Pam said, ‘It's just that I was already sure you wouldn’t take me.’
‘Then why did you come?'
‘I heard the nursery needed help, and I thought well perhaps, and I do want so much to help.’ Mrs Pimentel was giving her a chance to explain herself, not smiling, still surprised, but listening. 'And I thought you wouldn’t want a Jewish girl, but my name would make you think I’m not and so you would.’
‘Wait, wait!’ Mrs Pimentel had started to smile, her plump cheeks lifting to narrow her blue eyes. ‘Start over, slowly, and tell me who you are.’
‘My name is Chambers. It doesn’t sound Jewish, I know, but I am, and I thought that’s why you wouldn’t want me. That’s why I laughed.’
Mrs Pimentel put up her hands to smooth the waves of gray hair above her ears, then ran them down her cheeks and folded them under her chin. Pam waited, her eyes fixed on the older woman, her mouth half-open. ‘It’s nice to hear somebody laughing,’ Mrs Pimental said finally.
Pam leaned back and sighed. ‘Does that mean I can work for you?’
‘Yes, my dear, I suppose it does. That card,’ she meant the one she’d rejected, ‘is a very good forgery. Take good care of it, you’ll need it. Just let me have it for a few days, I’ll have to show it across the street.’
Across the street was the theater, or what had been a theater until the Gestapo began using it to hold Jews before shipping them to Westerbork. Pam had looked at it just before she rang the doorbell of the nursery. The two German soldiers on either side of the doorway were talking to each other, laughing, but one
had his hand on his gun holster, and the other kept turning to check the sidewalk behind him.
Later that afternoon, after one of the nurses, Fanny, had taken Pam around the building, they went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. ‘Are you going to be living here?’ she asked. ‘I’m sharing a room with Sieny and Betty, that’s three of us already, but if Mrs P wants you,’
‘I told her I can live at home and come every day,’ Pam said, ‘and she said that was fine.’
‘We’ll be glad to have you during the day, and we manage most nights. Just once in a while the SS come over and say they want some of the children back, and we have to get them dressed and bring them across the street.’
‘I thought they lived here.’
‘Oh no, they’re just here for a while, because they don’t want to have crying babies over there and kids running around. There’s hardly room for them, anyway, there’s hardly room for all the grownups. Mrs P says it’s filthy, there aren’t enough toilets and running water, and the few beds they have they give to the old people.’
‘But why do they take the children back?’
‘For the transports! You know what those Germans are like? They get a call that they have to send one hundred people to the railroad station, and if they only have ninety, they come and get ten kids to make up the difference. See, the numbers have to come out right.’ Uncomfortable talking about it, Fanny stirred the tea in her cup, then went on, ‘It’s mostly the older kids, and they want to go back to their parents anyway, don’t they? To be together? And some parents want their kids to go with them and don’t want them come here at all. When are you starting?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Pam said. She would go home and think about what she had seen, the babies sleeping in their cribs, the big, shadowy room where dozens of cots were lined up, each with a flat pillow and a neatly folded blanket, children playing in the sandbox in the garden, two of them wearing sunglasses too big for their little faces, the cook Hester in the kitchen shaking her hand and saying, ‘Oh good, we do need more help here, don’t we, Fanny.’
Walking home, she knew she couldn’t disappoint them, not turn up for work, but she didn’t know whether she could bear it if a child she liked was taken away. One little girl had run over to her in the playroom and asked, ‘Are you coming to take care of us?’ When Pam said yes, she asked, ‘Do you like to read books? Will you read to us?’ and clapped her hands when she said yes again. She might be there one day and be gone the next. Pam didn’t think she could bear that.
Telling Ted about it at supper made up her mind. He was enthusiastic, pleased for her that she’d found something useful to do and that she liked this Mrs P. ‘Can she pay you something?”
‘Oh, I didn’t ask!’
‘Never mind, if she can, she will, and if she can’t, we’re managing. And you'll get a meal at least.'
So she started. Putting on her uniform every morning, the starched white apron and little white cap, made her feel she would be useful. Fanny asked her to help with the babies, but she wasn’t much good at that and, after awhile, Mrs P rescued her and put her to work with the bigger children, the kindergartners, she called them.
The first time Pam came in and missed two of them, a brother and sister, she hid in the bathroom and cried. ‘Look,’ Sieny told her, when she came in and saw her scrubbing her red face, ‘if it’s any comfort, those two wanted to go. They hated it here, the older ones always do. They wanted to be with their parents, whatever happens.’
‘That’s terrible, Sieny, I can’t believe it!’
‘What? That they want to go? Sorry, kiddo, that’s how it is.’
‘But they don’t know where they’re going, do they? To Westerbork? Is that what you tell them? My brother says it’s just,’
‘Shut up, Pam!’ Sieny interrupted. ‘We don’t tell them anything!’ and she went out and slammed the door.
Fanny and Sieny went to the theater to pick up the children the Germans wanted to get rid of. When the guards weren’t watching, they talked to the parents, asking them if they would let their child go to a family somewhere where it would be safe until afterwards. Pam couldn’t understand a mother agreeing to give her child to a stranger, but Fanny said some of them knew right away it was better. They were smart enough to see what was coming, and they realized they had to trust someone, even if it was a stranger.
It wasn’t true that people can get used to anything, but it made it easier when Mrs P asked Pam to help get the children into safe hands. Smuggling a child out was called disappearing it. One way was out of the playground behind the nursery. Mrs P would speak to one of the children beforehand and explain what was going to happen. Somebody had found a safe address, a family willing to take a child, and there were couriers they could trust to do it safely. While the boys ran and wrestled and the girls swung dreamily or skipped rope, somebody would look over the fence and motion to Pam, she’d whisper to the child who had been chosen, pick it up and hand it over.
When the plan was to take some children for a walk, she knew how to count them before they started off, the guards watching and counting along with her, and then, when she came back, to count them so quickly that they couldn’t see there was one less. She had to make it look as if she’d come back with the same number or there would be trouble. The Germans had records and numbers for everything, even the infants they didn’t want to be bothered with. It was easier than it sounded, because the guards were half-drunk most of the time. Mr Suskind, the Jewish man who managed the theater, made sure they got their beers for lunch.
That summer morning, Pam parted the curtains with one finger and peered out. The theater gate was still closed, and the guards hadn’t come out yet. The children were waking up, and Hester was in the kitchen cooking porridge for them. ‘It’s lovely weather, a good day for a walk,’ she said.
‘If we can arrange a courier,' Mrs P asked, 'can you take the baby we got last Sunday? The sooner it goes to a family the better.’
'We can go to the zoo.’
It was around the corner and out of sight and, since there wasn’t enough food for the big animals and many of them had to be killed, there were almost no visitors.
‘I’ll call Dr Slump,' Mrs P said, 'and ask if he has an address, and I’ll try to reach one of the couriers.’
‘You know a man took little Mina from me yesterday?’
‘What? Who?’
‘Didn’t Hester say? I told her. A man just walked up to us in the street and lifted her up and walked away. He didn’t even look at us.’
‘Did she cry?”
‘No,’ Pam said. ‘She put her arms around his neck, so I thought she knew him, and I didn't try to stop him.'
‘All right, I suppose. I hope! I hope nobody would take a child except to bring it somewhere safe. Safer.’ She sat down behind the desk, picked up the phone and nodded when she heard the buzzing that meant it was still connected.
Pam went upstairs. In the biggest bedroom, the toddlers were lying quietly and the older ones were sitting up, looking at a picture book or playing with the doll or the model car that was the only toy they’d been able to take with them from home.
‘Who’s hungry?’ Pam called out and all the hands went up.
Sara, the oldest at ten, jumped out of bed to help her. She had been the youngest at home and treated like a baby, and here she could help the other children get dressed, tie their shoes, brush their hair, all the things she needed to do to show what a big girl she was.
Over the chorus of voices, Sara’s voice rang out, teasing and giving orders. What would happen to her if they passed her on? She was happy now. If she went to a family that couldn’t see how eager she was to grow up, she’d hate it.
In the dining room, Pam put her charges at their table near a window and helped Hester fill the porridge bowls and milk glasses. There was always milk, Mrs P had her contacts with farmers, and the Germans didn’t stop the daily deliveries. Porridge, potatoes, margarine, apples and carrots, a
growing child needed all of that and more, but they were never hungry and they never complained, the way some of the nurses did about how much they used to have and how too little it was now.
Just as breakfast ended, the doorbell rang. Pam’s hand jerked, dropping her spoon noisily onto the table. Hester, who was standing at the door to the kitchen with an armful of bowls, went in and shut the door behind her, and Mrs P stood up, ‘I’ll go.’ She was always firm with the soldiers and they liked that. They knew where they were with her.
Pam couldn’t see the front hall, and there was too much noise around her to hear anything. Sara was telling Gerd, who was bouncing up and down in his chair, that Pam would read them a story after they brushed their teeth and not before. ‘Isn’t that so, Pam?’
‘We’ll have a story, Gerd, I promise,’ she said. ‘But you know, it’s such a nice day, maybe we’ll go look at the monkeys.’ She looked around and saw Mrs P coming back with a young man she didn’t know. A policeman? No, she was smiling. So was he, he wasn't wearing a uniform, he must be a friend.
‘Girls, this is Dr Hans, Dr Slump’s assistant. He’s come to look at the babies.’
They shook hands and he told Pam, ‘You look like somebody I know.’ Behind him, Mrs P shook her head, and Pam said, ‘Oh,’ and that was that.
While the children splashed around washing hands and brushing teeth, she tried to choose a book. The school next door had given them their whole library when the Germans moved the pupils out and moved some clerks in. When she started to leaf through them, she realized most of them wouldn’t do. Peter Rabbit’s mother gave him medicine for his stomach-ache, Goldilocks sat first in the father’s chair and then in the mother’s, even Babar got married and had a family. She couldn’t read those. One after another, she put the books back in the box.
Gerd came to stand near her. ‘Read about the wolves.’
‘Again?’ He loved that story, they all did. She had looked up at them once while she was reading. They were sitting on the floor around her, quite still, some with their mouths hanging open, one of two sucking their thumbs. It was an exciting story about a wolf hunt, and the hero, Walter, was very brave. She thought maybe they needed to hear how to be brave.
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