by Michael Dean
Keeping the drawings of Meijers and Cleveringa pinned up in his room had been dangerous, even reckless. But to Manny, Cleveringa embodied Dutch defiance, and all that was good about Holland. He wanted to keep his drawing of him, and the one of Meijers, as long as he lived. He went into the niche and hid the drawings in the hollow Lard Zilverberg had made.
‘What shall we do now?’ he said, as he came back into the room.
She smiled. ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’
‘I want to draw you.’
‘What now?’ He could see she was pleased.
Just then, they heard footsteps thudding on the stairs, from the flight below. Manny looked at her, in alarm.
‘It’s Max,’ Tinie said. She recognised his tread well enough.
Manny frantically gathered his belongings from the table up into his arms.
‘Manny! What are you doing?’
‘Quick, help me.’
‘But it’s your Uncle Max, Manny!’
‘Maxie has regular meetings with Rauter, and with the NSB. It’s not safe.’
Tinie nodded. She thought he meant that Max might be pressurised, even tortured, into betraying him. But Manny meant that Hirschfeld might betray him voluntarily.
They frantically threw Manny’s possessions into the upper bunk-box, under Tinie’s clothes. Manny then eased himself into the hollow that cupped his body, lying flat out. Tinie replaced the bottom of the lower bunk-box over him. She stood there anxiously, worried that Manny couldn’t breathe. But he let out a muffled ‘I’m OK.’
Tinie drew the curtain across the niche, and curled up in the armchair, just as Hirschfeld came in. She hoped he wouldn’t need to use the toilet. Manny, in his hole, heard Hirschfeld tell Tinie about the Hirschfeld List. He heard him boast about having found Simon Emmerik a job. And then he heard what Hirschfeld made Tinie say and do. He cried, silently, there in his diver’s place, lying on top of his drawings of Meijers and Cleveringa. He hated Hirschfeld.
*
When Hirschfeld had gone, it took Tinie a long while to calm Manny down. Through his sobs, he kept saying, ‘I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.’ Tinie had folded the camp-bed back against the wall. She sat in the armchair, with him half in her lap, half on the floor, cupping his head in her arms, bending over him, pushing the top of his curly-haired head into her small, mauled breasts. And after a long, long time like that, Manny stopped crying.
Gently disengaging herself, Tinie gave him some weak tea and made him eat some rusks. Then she said ‘Why don’t you draw me now?’
‘What after … is that what you want?’
‘Yes. But don’t draw this room. Draw me at the party.’
There had been many parties, but he knew which one she meant. It was late in April; the last party before the German invasion. Her father was still in his job, her family reasonably prosperous; she was still a flower of a girl, with a young girl’s vivacity and a young girl’s dreams.
It was Truus Bosse’s twenty-first birthday party. Truus was a classmate – one of the gang they had known since childhood. Her father was something high up in the railways, so they lived in a great wedding-cake of a place near Vondel Park.
In the elegant drawing room, they had drunk glasses of Pimm’s Number 1 Cup, greatly improved by being made with Dutch Bokma jenever. They had eaten canapés, then, at midnight, a hearty fat sausage buried inside a mound of cabbage – a clever idea by Truus’s mama, to sober the young people up.
Tinie was a good dancer – a fluid and graceful mover, which stood her in such good stead at the sports she loved so much. She did the Charleston; then danced the Black Bottom with Cas Blom, another of their circle. She had spent the end of the evening on Cas’s lap, kissing him. In the middle of one kiss, she had given Manny a wink, and a cheeky wave. He had burst out laughing.
‘Do you want me to pose?’ Tinie said. A tinge of pink appeared in her cheeks at the memory of the party.
‘No … Yes.’
‘Which?’
He didn’t need her to pose, but sensed it would make her happy. ‘Pose.’
She posed. He began to sketch her, humming a Charleston rhythm the while. ‘Do you remember Cas?’ he said, innocently.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
He knew she was delighted with the finished sketch. He could tell when she was faking - she wasn’t. Manny took his block of drawing paper and began sketching something else.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘It’s private.’
‘Meanie!’
He started laughing. ‘Stop it! I can’t draw when I’m shaking. You know Hein Broersen, don’t you?’
‘Which one’s he? Oh yes. I think so …’
‘You can’t remember where he lives, can you?’
‘Um … I think so. Why?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Man- NEE!’
‘OK. I’ll tell you. I heard he’s going to try the crossing tomorrow. To England.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Old Kokadorus.’
‘Kokadorus is mad.’
Manny was sketching, concentratedly. ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t make him inaccurate.’
‘True! When do you want to go and see Hein?’
Manny finished his sketch. ‘How about now? Well, in minutes, or so. I just want to write a letter to my father, first. I’ll give it to Hein, to give to him. If he makes it to London.’
*
Hein lived on Rapenburger Straat – right opposite the Jewish Seminary. As they arrived, he was just going out. Manny solemnly handed over his letter to his father, and the sketch, which he had steadfastly refused to let Tinie see – also for his father. The morose, lugubrious Hein took them with no particular interest or reaction. He said he intended to spend his last night in Amsterdam at the Tip Top theatre. He asked Manny and Tinie to come with him.
‘We can get tickets at the door,’ he said. ‘All together.’
Manny and Tinie looked at each other. So far, the Moffen had left the Tip Top alone, as well as all the other Jewish cabarets and cinemas – the Tip Top was both. It was inside the Jewish Quarter, so they wouldn’t have to cross a checkpoint. Being lost in the crowd there could be safer than staying in Tinie’s room, as well as more fun. They decided to go.
As the three of them walked there, through the clear starlit evening, they talked about Hein’s trip to England. All the Engelandvaarders - the escapees to England – were invited to tea with Queen Wilhelmina. The Queen introduced them to all the others who had made the trip. All being well, Hein could be meeting Manny’s father as soon as tomorrow.
That excited Manny, but he rapidly lost interest in the mundane Hein himself - a tall, bony, horse-faced figure, plodding along in huge boots. Manny and Tinie left him behind, arm in arm, skipping and bouncing along the pavement
There was a long queue outside the Tip Top, even this early in the evening. Like many enterprises in Jewish Amsterdam, the place was owned by émigrés from Germany – Jozef Kroonenberg and his son, Barend. Barend and the Tip Top’s projectionist, Piet Wessendorp, were outside, working the crowd. They greeted Manny and Tinie by name, but could not quite remember who Hein was.
‘So what have you got for us tonight, Barend?’ Manny asked.
‘You haven’t heard? Where you been, Manny?’
‘Down a hole.’
Barend shook with laughter. ‘Down a hole, he says! You’re a hoot, Manny. A hoot! Top of the bill is Leo Fuld. See? It don’t get any better than that. Tip-top at the Tip Top, boychick – as ever.’
‘As ever!’ Manny echoed obligingly. Tinie squeezed his arm, proud of him.
While still in the queue, Manny bought peanuts and shared them with Tinie and Hein. They bought cheap seats in the top balcony. But the ornate décor and red plush seats still lifted Manny’s spirits.
Tinie dug him in the ribs, nodding with her head. There was a sprinkling of German soldiers in the audience - We
hrmacht given leave-time in Amsterdam, before catching a train back to Germany. Most of them had girls with them. Manny grimaced.
The curtain went up on a diamond worker called Jakob Goubitz, in evening dress, with a red cummerbund round his ample middle. Goubitz was semi-professional. He often did the warm-up at the Tip Top:
Manny and Tinie had heard most of his jokes before. There was the one about Saint Nicholas and Zwarte Piet – Black Peter – giving the good children presents and the bad children a smack on the saint’s day.
In Goubitz’s joke, Saint Nicholas asks each child his religion: One child says Protestant, and gets a present. The next child says Catholic, and gets a present. Then a little boy says he’s Jewish. Saint Nicholas tells him, in Yiddish, to take two presents. Black Peter tops that, telling him, also in Yiddish, to take three – nimm dray. Goubitz had Black Peter speaking Yiddish in a negro voice - the joke brought the house down. Hein Broersen was rocking in his seat, laughing open-mouthed.
After the comic, there were extracts from an operetta called De koningin van Montmartre. That took them up to the interval. Manny chatted to Tinie, when the lights went up, ignoring Hein altogether. But Hein didn’t seem to mind. Tinie tried to include him in their stories of past visits to the Tip Top, but when Manny started speaking to her in a private shorthand which amounted to code, she gave up.
The second half was opened by the Nelson Cabaret, singing in German. Before the invasion, Manny had heard them singing political songs, one in particular, by Harold Horsten, was about the tramp of boots coming ever closer. Another went ‘better to wash dishes in America than live a life of fear in Berlin.’ Now they were more circumspect, keeping to anodyne German folk standards – like Hoch auf dem gelben Wagen. Manny was amazed they were there at all.
Then top-of-the-bill Leo Fuld appeared on stage. Manny heard people behind him saying this was his last appearance before he sailed to America. To massive applause, he sang a medley of Jewish hits, kicking off with the classic My Yiddishe Mama, which brought the house down.
‘Wonder what the Wehrmacht made of that?’ Manny whispered to Tinie.
‘They seemed to like it,’ Tinie whispered back, nodding.
Ahead of them, a middle-aged Wehrmacht officer was indeed applauding hard, leaning over to talk to a girl half his age, next to him. Some of the rest of Leo Fuld’s repertoire – like Mein Shtetele Belz, Resele and Az Der Rebbe Tantst - may have left the Wehrmacht rather more puzzled, but they applauded loudly enough.
As the three of them left the theatre, Manny and Tinie still arm in arm, Hein getting lost in the crowd behind them, Manny bumped into the middle-aged Wehrmacht officer, who smiled apologetically. Hanging on his arm, her face thick with make-up, lips bright red, they recognised Truus Bosse – the girl who had held the twenty-first birthday party, just before the invasion. .
Manny glared at her. ‘Moffenmeid! ‘ he shouted.
The Wehrmacht officer looked bemused. Truus flushed scarlet, pushed her long thick brunette hair back and muttered ‘Let’s get out of here’ to her escort.
‘Moffenmeid!’ Manny yelled again. ‘How could you, Truus? You whore!’
Tinie looked horrified. ‘Manny!’
The crowd carried Truus and her enemy soldier away from them. Hein did not seem to have noticed anything. ‘Let’s stop for a beer somewhere,’ he said.
‘No!’ Tinie said. ‘Manny’s wanted by the Moffen.’
When they had parted from Heim, Tinie broke Manny’s grip on her arm. ‘Oh, Manny, you shouldn’t have done that.’ Manny looked sulky. ‘You put yourself at risk. And what about Hein? Suppose you’d got him arrested, just when he was due to sail for England. ’
Tinie never got angry, but this was the nearest to it Manny had seen. He hit himself on the head. ‘Tinie, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I’ve always been an idiot. Tinie, please …’
‘When we get home, you can fetch the washing water for both of us, that’s your punishment.’
He pulled a contrite, little-boy face. ‘Alright. Willingly!’
When they got back to Batavia Straat, Manny crept up the last flight of stairs in his socks, so as not to alert the woman next door. Tinie looked happy again, once the door had closed behind them. Her cheeks were tinged pink, her eyes were wide and shining, as she looked at him. When he made for his curtained niche to sleep, she called him back.
‘Will you lie next to me, in bed?’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything. Just hold me. Will you do that, Manny?’
‘Of course!’ he said, easily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which to him, it was.
PART II
8
Captain Robert Roet was the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Dutch army. He had risen through the ranks in the Royal Netherlands Grenadiers, finishing, at the age of forty-four, as His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard’s adjutant. On the night before the German invasion, Robert had been with the prince in the Huis ten Bosch, in The Hague, when a telephone call came through. As he put the receiver down, Prince Bernhard’s serious, bespectacled face turned to Robert.
‘Sas’s aunt is expected to die in the night,’ he said, quietly.
Robert nodded. Major Sas was the Dutch military attaché in Berlin The message meant that he had heard from Colonel Hans Oster, an anti-Nazi German aiding the Dutch, that the Germans were about to cross the Dutch border.
In the event of an invasion, the plan was for Robert to drive Bernhard’s wife and the two princesses, Beatrix and Irene, to safety in Paris. But when news came that the Moerdijk had fallen, the plan had to be abandoned.
Along with his family, Prince Bernhard would have to join Queen Wilhelmina, his mother-in-law, at Ijmuiden. They would then travel together to meet the British destroyer, which had been put at the Queen’s disposal.
They set off in one car, another car from the Royal Dutch Bank followed; a third, armoured car with guards, went ahead. The convoy was strafed on a bridge by a German fighter, but it was driven off by English planes. They met up with the Queen, as planned, and boarded the British destroyer at the Hook of Holland.
Wilhelmina of Orange-Nassau was sixty. She had been Queen of the Netherlands for forty-two years. She was a tiny, rotund figure. It was as if Queen Victoria, who Wilhelmina had met as a young girl, had continued her life as a Dutch queen.
She had been expecting to sail to the south-west of Holland, where Dutch troops were continuing to resist the invasion. But the commander of the destroyer said the seas there were too full of German shipping. He would have to return to England, he said, while he still could. There was no alternative.
As the coast of Holland disappeared from sight, tears rolled down Wilhelmina’s cheeks, but her fists were clenched. She swore like a stevedore at Adolf Hitler, affixing his name with every obscenity in the Dutch language. Hitler, as head of state, had promised her personally that the Germans had no intention of violating Dutch neutrality.
But not only had he invaded, he had sent a parachute force to kidnap her. They had landed at the three small airfields round The Hague, sealing off the city. The Royal Guards, led by Prince Bernhard, had fought them off, or she would have been a Nazi captive.
It was midday, and she had a long view of the beloved coastline, before it dipped beneath the horizon. Bernhard stood on one side of her and Robert Roet on the other, both of them towering over her. At her feet was an attaché case of state papers. It was the sum total of her luggage. On arrival, she would have to ask cousin George - George VI of England - for a toothbrush.
*
Though far from conventionally good-looking, Robert Roet’s energy and sense of danger attracted girls, especially the shy, mousy sort - like poor, dear, Else Hirschfeld. Else with her shaky nerves and inexhaustible need to give and receive love.
They had met at a dance, run by the Jewish organisation B’nai Brith. She was chaperoned by her brother, but then and later he was powerless to stop Robert charming her. Robert’s full lips folded into a sneer wh
enever he thought of Hirschfeld. To him, the man was a hypocrite: a prude, yet a voluptuary; a man of soaring ambition who affected self-doubt; a narrow-minded obsessive; a coward.
Hirschfeld, not surprisingly, resented Robert’s cavalier treatment of his sister – both before and after his abandonment of her. But Else, dear Else, poor plain warm Else, loved him more and more, no matter what he did.
In middle-age, Robert increasingly reproached himself for his youthful treatment of her and her son – actually their son, though he always thought of Manny as her son. But the pattern had repeated itself with Manny - the more Robert rejected him, the less he bothered with him, the more Manny adored him. Manny wrote to him almost as often as Else, and was equally undeterred by hardly ever getting a reply.
Manny had been a runt from birth. He had not been expected to live. Robert had not cared much, either way. He didn’t know why. The interest just was not there, at the beginning, and it never developed. He had briefly lived in Else and Max’s house, with the baby, then rented a flat for his little family, mainly to get away from Max. It was alright for a while, because the army took him away from home so much.
But in the end he got bored with them. And of course there were other women, lots of them, though Else always pretended not to notice. He had abandoned his wife and child when Manny was five. Manny had written him a letter, and drawn him a picture, pleading with him to stay. It had no effect.
*
Robert was sitting with Queen Wilhelmina, at a tea-table on the lawn, in the shade of a chestnut tree. He sat with his back to the Dutch royal residence, a mews house in Chester Square, just behind Buckingham Palace. The house, number 77, had recently been hit by a bomb. The damage had been repaired, but the Queen would not let it be repainted, because repainting would not be possible for ordinary citizens back home. She also refused to eat any food not available to her suffering people.
