The Time Between

by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson

  She got up and looked out across the city at what was left of the cathedral, parts of two towers, broken walls, empty windows. Shards of stained glass, red, blue, violet, green, would be lying like jewels on the ground. It would be collected, piece by piece, stone by stone, discarded. Would they want to rebuild it?

  Ilse called her in from the hall. The sitting room was her dining room, bedroom and office too. She’d moved all her belongings into this one room and rented out everything else.

  Hannah sat down and waited. Ilse said nothing at first, smiling at her as if to say, ‘You first. Tell me how desperate you are.’ When she didn’t speak, Ilse rapped the table with her palm. ‘You aren’t from around here, so what’s going on? Why are you in Münster, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘I came by train from Amsterdam. This was the first stop, so I got off.’ What had Willy said, at least you’re in Germany? ‘I just wanted to be back in Germany.’

  ‘You’ve chosen a hell of a place. If I were you, I’d take the next train out.’

  ‘Oh, I will, but Willy said there won’t be one for a while. I just need a place to stay until I can leave.’ Well yes, she thought, that’s obvious.

  ‘Let’s talk business then. What have you got besides money?’

  ‘You don’t want money?’

  ‘It’s worthless, nobody knows whether Reichmarks are worth anything, whether there’s even a bank open in Berlin, for God’s sake. I need things I can trade for food from the farmers.’ She looked around the cluttered room. ‘Most of this stuff I got in exchange for a place to sleep and a few meals. I pass the things on to someone else, that’s how it works. So what have you got?’

  Hannah opened the purse on her lap and drew out a thick gold link necklace Conrad had given her. There was a gold and red enamel swastika hanging from it. When she laid it on the table, Ilse put out a finger and slid the swastika from side to side. Then she picked up the chain and said, ‘All right.’

  ‘How long can I stay?’

  ‘A week, six nights.’ Hannah nodded, it was more than she’d hoped for. Ilse took a knife from a tray on the sideboard. ‘We’ll just get rid of this,’ she said, and she flicked the point between the chain and the swastika, broke it off and pushed it back toward Hannah. ‘Want it? No?’ and she threw it into a wastepaper basket. ‘We don’t need any of that stuff anymore.’

  They smiled at each other, two women who agreed that the war and the crazy people in Berlin had nothing to do with them. ‘Is there someplace to eat?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘I’ll give you meals, but that’s extra of course. Come back at five, the other people will be back by then. You can show me later what else you’ve got for me.’

  Hannah went out and stood on the street in front of the house. Without her suitcase, it would be an easy walk to the station. She’d go back there first thing in the morning to ask whether a train was coming. If she met Willy, she would thank him. At least now there was food, a bed, a chance to think. About what? Not about Conrad, that was over. About Adrian and Pam? ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to them silently, but even as she thought it, she knew it was herself she was sorry for.

  During the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, there was too little food and less coal. Trees were felled, abandoned houses looted for floorboards and window frames, and the wooden ties under the tram tracks carted home for firewood.

  25 Jo, December 1944

  Jo woke up slowly, unwillingly. She was in a warm safe place, somebody's arms held her and somebody’s heart was beating steadily next to her ear. If she kept her eyes closed, she could stay there forever. Then her legs jerked and her eyes snapped open. Pushing the blanket away from her face, she saw a tattered blue shirt and Hendrik’s arm holding her close to him.

  After winter storms had blown away some roof tiles, wind swept through the attic, and rain and snow fell on the floorboards, the beds and David’s books and papers. Hendrik carried Jacoba down the stairs and laid her in Jo’s bed. David slept on a mattress on the floor, so that he could soothe Jacoba back to sleep when she cried, and Jo took Jan’s place in the boys’ bedroom.

  She and Hendrik had been sharing one bed for several weeks. ‘You’re safe with me,’ he told her. He had always treated her like a little sister, and having her in his bed didn’t change that. All she had to do was whisper good night and lie very still until she knew he’d fallen asleep. Then she could move closer to him and, feeling his warm breath on her face, let herself sink into her own sleep, her dreams, her safe place.

  What should have been spring was as cold, windy and snowy as all the months before. After a short rainy summer, the temperature dropped steadily week after week, the canals froze and meters of snow piled up on the streets. People made jokes about the Germans giving up on the war but keeping control of the weather.

  Before they moved their headquarters from Amsterdam to the east of the country, the Germans blew up the cranes and docks along the river and sent to the fatherland everything they could take from warehouses and shops, food, clothing, furniture, even small machinery. Allied bombers were smashing Germany, and the rest of Europe was being looted to replace what they were losing.

  Just as Dirk had predicted, the strike had made things worse. The food and coal they depended on getting from the east and south of the country stopped coming or, long before it reached the cities, was stolen. There was so little food in the shops that women spent half a day standing in line for a quarter loaf of stale bread or a few potatoes or sugar beets. If there was anything left by the time they got to the door, it was worth it.

  Elsie and Jo took turns going to the community kitchen for a pot of soup made from scraps of vegetables, potato peelings and bones. When Hendrik joked about whose bones they were, Jo had cried and Elsie had reached out and slapped him for the first time in his life. Bed was the warmest place, so everybody slept late and went to bed as soon as it was dark. When they sat together in the kitchen, the only room they could keep warm, they were almost too tired to talk.

  There was no gas and electricity, and Hendrik started to go out at daybreak looking for wood for the kitchen stove, usually in the empty houses in the Jewish Quarter, where men were tearing up floorboards and ripping out window frames to take home for fuel. Sometimes he found clothes hidden away, once a blanket and another time a pair of shoes that fit Dirk and now lay unused under the bed.

  ‘We’ve never been rich enough for jewelry,’ Elsie said. ‘Wedding rings and crosses, that’s about it. That woman across the street, the one whose sons in America used to send her money? She told me she’s swapped just about everything she could carry for food, now it’s a Persian rug she’s planning to give up.’

  It reminded Jo of the market, years before, the white linen tablecloths and napkins, the fur coat and candlesticks, beautiful cherished things that had gone to Dutch families and were now being handed on.

  ‘She told me she made soup from tulip bulbs, but if I try it, she said, be careful to throw away the yellow part. People died, she said, not knowing it’s poison. She said to try dahlias, they’re safer. Can you get us some, Jo, do you think?’

  Stealing wood was the only exercise Hendrik had, and even that had become dangerous. When he heard that men were being rounded up at gunpoint to build bomb shelters along the coast, he decided the dawn raids to the Jewish Quarter were over. Starting with the table, chairs and beds in the attic, Elsie gave him permission to chop up whatever furniture she could bear to part with.

  It was December, still half a year to go before summer, if they were lucky enough to have one. Jo slid off the bed and added another sweater and a second pair of stockings to what she had slept in. Holding her shoes, she tiptoed across the hall and looked in at her sleeping parents. Jacoba’s thin arm in its tattered nightgown hung over the edge of the bed, her crooked fingers not quite touching the top of David’s head, all that lay outside the tangle of blankets wrapped around him.

  Every time she looked at her mother, Jo felt both heavy sorrow and shar
p anger. Jacoba was dying. She’d been ill for months with what they agreed was despair. Even last summer, when there was still enough food, she had refused to eat her share. David could get a few spoons of soup or water into her, and then she turned her face away, closed her eyes, pretended to sleep until she did. She was starving to death, like thousands of others and, even though the Germans were retreating and the Allies were already in the country, it was too late for them.

  Refusing to get up except to shuffle to the toilet, Dirk was at least willing to eat whatever Elsie brought him. It drove her crazy the way he muttered and shook his head and wouldn’t say what he was thinking or how he felt. In December, when the temperature dropped far below zero and the last horses had been slaughtered, the trams had stopped running, he had no work, no salary, no reason to get out of bed. Where it was at least warm, he sighed. She heard him coughing and said oh my poor man, but there was nothing she could do for him. And if he wasn’t going to talk to her, she decided he might as well stay up there out of her way.

  Jo’s bones ached most of the time, it was tiring to shiver as much as she did, but she and Elsie and Hendrik got up every morning and did whatever they could to keep the family alive. Life had come down to buying something, anything, to eat. It was a day’s work, every day.

  Elsie was sitting in the kitchen wrapped in two unraveling sweaters and an old blanket. They had pulled the black paper off the windows when the electricity was cut off and they had to go to bed as soon as it was dark. She looked out the window and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, Jo, it’s the middle of the night.’ She was pulling her rosary beads slowly one by one between her fingers.

  ‘What is it, Elsie? Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Am I? Maybe I’m going crazy, maybe I can’t do this anymore.’

  ‘Oh, I know! It’s awful, thinking it’s over and then it isn’t, but it will be soon, you know that!’

  ‘Oh, the Germans! To hell with the Germans!’ She looked at her beads and snorted. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, send all the Germans to hell! See, Jo, that’s the way crazy people talk.’

  ‘That’s not crazy, it’s what we all think.’ Jo knew what David would say. He would watch his wife die, and he would mourn her death all the rest of his life, but he would not curse the people who had killed her.

  ‘But it’s not exactly a good Catholic prayer.’ She dropped her beads on the table and rubbed the tears from her eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking about Jan, and I want the door to open and Jan to come in. I want Jan to come home. But he won’t. So I want him to be dead, safe dead.’ She banged her fists on the table. ‘What kind of mother says that? A crazy one, right, Jo?’

  For a few minutes they sat silently, not looking at each other, Elsie twirling her beads around on the table and Jo staring out the window, where the clouded sky went from dark gray to light gray as the sun came up. Elsie wasn't crazy, though grief can undo you and despair or fear can too. About Jacoba, for instance, Hans said she was making herself ill, because she thought the Germans would stay a hundred years, and she knew she would die long before that.

  David said, ‘She has learned acceptance, at least. She is not angry anymore.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if she were?’

  ‘No, it is better that she accepts it with joy.’

  They were talking about death.

  ‘Oh, Papa, joy!’

  ‘Yes, my darling, if I may bring God into it again, it is wrong not to be happy for what we are given, however little it is. Nobody likes to give a gift that is not appreciated.’

  Well, that was Jacoba, and not everybody could face life the way Elsie did. Her mother had decided to sleep through the occupation, because in her sleep she could be somewhere else and in another time. Now she was sleeping herself into death. When her eyes were open, staring past them at the wall, they couldn’t tell whether she saw them or anything.

  In all the months since Jan had not come home or sent a message, Elsie had insisted he’d taken his boat to Haarlem and decided to stay and help there, Dirk thought his boss had put him to work on another canal, and Hendrik said he would ask around and then never told them whether he’d heard anything. Since only the Germans had working telephones, and nobody posted a letter that would be read by the police, they could go on believing Jan was safe.

  ‘I’m not crazy, I know that, and don’t listen to me. It’s just that I know I’m right about my son and I wish I weren’t. Jan was caught doing whatever he was doing with that boat of his, and either they shot him or they sent him to prison in Germany. Am I right?’

  Jo nodded. ‘Yes, sweetie, so that’s why I hope he’s dead, because then his suffering is over. We women, you and I, we can face facts. Don’t tell Dirk what I’m telling you.’

  Jo looked around the kitchen. On the counter, Elsie had put out five plates and divided onto them their half-loaf of bread and the square of margarine she’d swapped her wedding ring for. ‘The grocer said he’d take Dirk’s wedding ring too. He’ll go into the jewelry business someday. I’ll have to ask Dirk if he’ll give it to me. I hope he doesn’t get angry.’

  ‘There’s Mama’s silver.’

  ‘No, Jo, that’s hers and it will be yours. No, I’ll manage.’

  ‘People are going to the farms to get food, the farmers take things if you don’t have money. I know my father would let me have some of the silver. We'll never need all of it. I could go to Kris and Kitty, so we could get the silver back if we want it.’

  ‘Kris wouldn’t take your silver! What an idea! And anyway, it’s miles away. How would you get there?’

  ‘On my bike.’

  ‘With no tires!’

  ‘Everybody rides that way.’

  ‘It’s a whole day from here even on a good bike! And in good weather!’

  ‘I could stay overnight, couldn’t I? Oh Elsie, I know your brother would want to help, you know it too.’

  ‘Of course he would, and especially if you come all the way from Amsterdam, but it’s bitter cold, it’s going to snow again, and along the river the wind would be fierce. No no, it’s impossible.’

  ‘No it’s not! Anyway, is it possible to stay alive without eating? You have to let me go. I’ll be all right, I know the way and, if I leave really early, the police won’t see me.’

  ‘Hendrik should go,’ Elsie began, but Jo shook her head.

  ‘You need him here. Besides, didn’t he say the Germans were rounding men up to work for them? Didn’t he say he had to stay indoors or he’d be caught too?’

  ‘You’ll get lost, I know it! No, Jo, it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Not if I’m careful. It might not snow, and I can wear your winter coat over mine, and I’ll take your bike, it’s better than mine. Please, Elsie, say yes.’

  ‘To what?’ Hendrik asked from the doorway.

  ‘Jo wants to go to Uncle Kris and see if he can spare something for us.’

  ‘Maybe he can,’ Hendrik said. ‘But it’s not a good idea.’ When Jo started to protest, he said, ‘It’s not. Menno told me the police are taking the food away from people when they come back from the farms. They say you can’t have anything without turning in your ration stamps. That’s a joke, isn’t it? Everything goes straight into their own mouths. You won’t be able to dodge them, they’re everywhere.’

  ‘They can’t be everywhere!’

  ‘Do you know all the back roads?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well then, you won’t be able to dodge them. You might get to the farm, but it’s not likely you can come back.’

  ‘Please, Hendrik, please tell me how to do it, let me do it.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he sighed, ‘you’re as stubborn as a mule. All right, I'll get a map, see if we can figure out a safe route for you. I doubt if there’s one the police don’t know, but let’s see.’ He found a map in a drawer and spread it out. ‘Look, here’s the main road to Muiden. Uncle Kris’s farm is about here.’

  ‘I k
now,’ Jo said. When he looked surprised, she said, ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘You have to go through Diemen. See, you follow the signs to the cemetery there, and then you can go east along the railroad. Since the trains stopped running, the police don’t bother patrolling the lines. You can ride alongside the tracks, the embankment will keep the wind off you.’

  ‘I’ll recognize their train station,’ Jo said. ‘It’s Hout-something.’

  ‘What were you doing out there?’ Hendrik asked.

  ‘I took a little girl to the farm, oh, ages ago.’

  ‘Ma!’ Hendrik asked accusingly. ‘Did you know that?’

  When she didn’t answer, he asked, ‘Anything else I don’t know?’

  ‘It’s all right, son, she came back safe, didn’t she? Go on, what else should she do?’

  He poked a finger at the map, ‘The station is here. When you get to it, you turn left and go around it. Will you know the farm when you see it? Yes? All right, let’s go look at the bike. I’ll see if I can strap a basket on the back.’

  He went into the front hall, and Jo went with him to get her coat and her rubber boots. While she wound a scarf around her neck and put on a woolen cap, Elsie stuffed two slices of bread into her coat pocket and hugged her. ‘I’ll pray for you, sweetie.’

  ‘Don’t tell my father where I am, please, Elsie. If he asks, tell him I’m visiting Virrie.’

  Hendrik wheeled the bike out onto the street. ‘Stay there, Jo, don’t try to come back. You’re better off at the farm than here.’

  When she shook her head and tried to mount, he put his hand on the saddle to stop her. Then he leaned forward, kissed her cheek, said, ‘Go, you idiot,’ and went back inside.

  The sky was a thick roof of snow clouds. The wind came in waves, pushing against her as if she were wheeling through water. She kept her head down, looking up only for a quick survey of the empty road ahead. There was no sign of the police, who were probably sitting in some warm room eating a better breakfast than she’d had in years.