Prologue

WHEN THE SECOND WORLD WAR erupted over the Netherlands, our grandparents were in their early thirties, raising their family in a town outside The Hague. Opa was a market gardener who grew vegetables on two and a half acres of rich black earth, but by the time we visited sixty-five years later, long after their deaths, only a small corner of the garden remained. A horse was pastured beside the fence, and the rest was an expressway full of roaring cars. In a curious twist of fate, someone had spray-painted a dove on the cement embankment, and written, in heavy red letters, Always in our harts.

We stood together, trying to picture this place as it must have been, alive with tall bean stalks and rows of endive. The garden was Opa’s livelihood, but also the family’s lifeline while the country suffered five years of occupation. In the final months of the war, death from starvation was common.

Our grandparents rarely spoke of those times, and never – to us – of the explosion that cast a shadow over the rest of their lives. So what follows comes not from them but from clues left behind, like ghosts’ footprints. A grenade on the mantel. Snatches of letters and diaries. A cache of photographs, some hazy, some clear. We were compelled to search out their story when we realized it was disappearing, and to recreate their experience based on the remaining fragments. As we pieced the remnants into a narrative, we began to understand the silence that bound those years and nearly erased them.