Ten
When Lien and Auntie step from the bicycle they are on top of a high dike facing an even broader stretch of water than the one they crossed by ferry. This is the Nieuwe Maas, on the other side of which, a few miles downstream, lies Rotterdam. Lien has no idea where she is or where she is going, but this is the place where—according to the story that they told everyone in Dordrecht—her parents are supposed to have died. Three years ago, in 1940, German bombers smashed the heart of the old city, leveling twenty-five thousand homes in a single raid. The destruction and the threat that the same would happen to Utrecht if there was no surrender broke the Dutch war effort. Without an air force there was nothing that could be done.
When Rotterdam was engulfed by a firestorm on May 14, 1940, the war meant almost nothing to Lien, who was only six, and even now, she has never seen bombing, or shooting, or even anger from a uniformed man. A square mile of rubble that was once the center of a Renaissance city lies just beyond the horizon. Yet from where Lien stands on the great river she sees only sunshine and newly cut grass.
In Rotterdam, though, in the spring of 1943, resistance is growing. This is the industrial base of the Netherlands, a place of union power, where the now-banned Social Democratic Workers’ Party (of which the Heromas and the Van Esses are members) has deep roots. Across the river from the city is a landscape of farms, outhouses, and small villages where it is easier for the resistance to hide. This, therefore, is the logical place to take a Jewish child now that the situation in Dordrecht has become too dangerous for her to remain.
Lien does not remember the moment of arrival in IJsselmonde. Following her departure from the Van Esses and the period of lonely isolation at short-stay addresses in Dordrecht, she has struggled more and more to engage with the outside world.
Once again Lien is passed from one adult to another, without a real explanation or a proper good-bye. It was the same when she was collected from the Pletterijstraat by Mrs. Heroma just eight months ago. The Lien who is handed over this time, however, is a different creature: no list of funny street names could catch her attention now. You will not see her crying because she misses her parents or the Van Esses, or reaching out to befriend a fresh set of children as she arrives at her new home. A curtain of self-protection has descended. Lien thinks little about the past or the future, and even the present is reduced to just a small number of necessary things. When she later looks back at IJsselmonde, she will see it only in black and white. Almost all that registers in her memory is the cold stone floor and the lack of natural light.
THE COTTAGE WHERE SHE STAYS is a single-story whitewashed building, rather like a barn, that is half smothered by the dike. There are ten people in this small building: a couple with six children, then Lien and another hideaway, Jo. The parents are teachers and, like Auntie and Uncle van Es, members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Mieneke, the mother, tells her children to make room for Lien at the kitchen table and afterward shows her where she can sleep. There is a back room for the girls and the grown-up daughters. It is so full of bedding that you can barely see the floor. Lien should be able to squeeze in on the right, up against the wall, Mieneke tells her, then checks in Lien’s bag that she has enough clothes to wear and points out where the chamber pot is kept.
Once Lien is hidden inside the dike cottage, unable to return to the daylight, the heat within her turns cold and she barely speaks. The family—who are lively, friendly, and interested in her welfare—comes into the house with flushed cheeks as if from a different world. Lien hardly sees them. She moves from the bedroom to the kitchen, doing a bit of cleaning, peeling potatoes, and washing dishes. She is unused to housework, and the knife sits awkwardly in her hand as she cuts a still-muddy potato, revealing a thick, clean slab of yellow beneath. She has to tell her fingers, as if they are somebody else’s, to cut more gently so as not to waste the food. Mieneke gives her direction, standing behind her and guiding Lien with her hands.
Mieneke is there in the kitchen at mealtimes but she often goes out straight after. It is only to Jo, with whom she is left in the house once the others have gone, that Lien ever feels close. Jo talks and she listens. He is eighteen and has escaped from a camp in Germany, but he is not Jewish. They are not taking only Jews now, he tells her; all men who are not in essential professions are being forced to go to work in Germany. If you are under thirty-five you can’t get food stamps without a right-to-stay permit and if you’re caught without one they’ll send you to an Arbeitslager, which is worse than prison. There’s no way Jo’s going to work again for the Moffen, as he calls them, and, if things somehow work themselves out, he’ll find a way to fight.
With his big frame Jo is like a giant cooped up here under the rafters, looking almost straight across at the four small, square, strangely familiar windows below the roofline that let in a little light. Jo has a sense of the outside that doesn’t need a window to see it. He laughs with the family, asks what they have been doing, has views on farming, teases the girls, and remembers their names.
Weeks turn into months in IJsselmonde—light shines more brightly through the square windows, and then as July turns first to August and then to September, it gradually fades. Lien loses track of time amid the sameness of the days. The house, which never got warm even in the height of summer, grows ever colder with the stove left unlit. There are itchy spots on her legs. She hardly noticed that she was scratching them at first, but as time passes more and more hard purple lumps appear that bleed when they are broken open, leaving gashes of black scab. She wants to hide them but they call out with a thumping rhythm. They burn hot and sharp if she pulls her socks up over them, so she walks shivering with her bare feet swollen purple, feeling the eyes of the other girls as she steps.
At night Lien sleeps in the crowded room with the others, women and girls turning their weight in the darkness, thickening the air with their breath. She wraps herself tight under her cover, surrounded by the sense of the other bodies. Her legs, with their heat in the midst of the coldness, keep her awake. In the morning she stands up when the room stirs around her. It is hardly any brighter than it was during the night. Inside, she feels a numbness, keeping everything at a distance, not once having a sense of fear.
THEN, ONE EVENING in the late months of 1943, another moment of crisis arrives, another knock at the door. Lien is doing the washing-up in the kitchen, but she is told to go and hide. From the bedroom moments later, Lien hears excited talking, and then Mieneke comes in telling Jo and her they must run because the police are on their way.
It is odd how shoes matter at these moments. When the men came to the Bilderdijkstraat she had to go out in the big boots that stood by the doorway, but now her feet are so swollen that nothing will fit.
Lien feels almost calm, but a charge runs through the rest of the household, and before she knows it the freezing night air and the darkness is upon her and she is being jogged roughly on Jo’s shoulder, one of his arms wrapped across her sore legs. He knows where he is going and edges along the sides of barns and outbuildings in a crouching run. Then there is a thump to the ground and a feeling of wetness and the scratching of thorns around them as they lie hidden, Jo’s chest quietly heaving against her, in a ditch.
There are invisible voices around them and they hear the barking of dogs. Not very far away there are lights on the road. The lights and voices grow stronger, come to a stop very near them, and then begin slightly to fade. Without warning, Jo grips her legs tightly again and pushes them forward through the brambles at half pace. Though it ought to be hurting she feels nothing but elation as she digs her fingers into the material of his coat. Jo jerks his head from left to right and then breaks into a second run, this time up the slope of the dike. His feet slip beneath them but he carries on scrabbling with a ferocious energy until they are for a moment high up on the road where the wind hits them and where she sees the glimmer of the great river below them in the dark. Then down again, sliding as the grass turns to mud at the weight of them. On the slope, they lie still, with their faces against the wet. For an instant, Lien is reminded of the bank she used to climb down to fetch tadpoles with Kees back in Dordrecht and of her feeling of dread for the murky water below.
“It’s going well,” whispers Jo encouragingly. After resting a moment he tells her to climb onto his back. Like this they move as fast as possible along the steep, slippery surface. It is curfew time, so the occasional sound of movement on the path above them must come from the police. As Jo runs he has to loosen Lien’s fingers, which she has gripped hard to his throat in her eagerness to hold on. After a bit, Jo turns to her in a whisper: they are getting near the village now and they’ll need to go back over the dike and then in among the houses. They will have to be deadly quiet.
Now that her eyes have adjusted she can see more by the moonlight, though right at this moment it’s just Jo’s broad and thinly bearded face that she can pick out in the darkness. That and the angle of the slope. She trusts Jo utterly. He is always kind.
On reaching the edge of the village they move farther up to the top of the dike, with Jo again frantically glancing from left to right. All is clear and he darts up over the road with her, holding tight to her legs so that she notices again how much they hurt. But then, in the excitement, she feels nothing apart from a strange wakeful, happy alertness that makes her see and hear everything more sharply than before. She registers the scrapes and bumps as they move between the buildings: the skin that is grazed off her knee against a wall; a twig that comes out of nowhere and strikes her in the eye. These injuries, though, come with no pain attached. They feel like they are happening to somebody else.
The two of them are in the thick of the streets now and as Lien looks upward she sees the outline of housefronts against the lighter gray of the sky. The houses flick by as Jo runs with her. One has a squared top with curved edges. Another is like two staircases coming together with a tower in the middle on top. Then, at the end of the street, she sees what must be a square and beyond that a church steeple. And across the darkness in the distance there are two lights moving about.
The lights mean danger, and when Jo spots them he crashes over a low wall into a garden, where they lie still for a long time next to a shed.
They hear nothing except the sounds of the night.
Eventually they dare to move again and go back over the wall and then left down a cobbled street with smaller buildings, where Jo’s foot catches a pebble that goes bouncing across the stones. As they stand for a moment in the absolute stillness she watches the steam of his breath.
Then, as quickly as it started, it is over. Jo knocks on a door and they wait for agonizing seconds. It opens. There is a quick exchange of whispers and they tumble inside.
WHERE EXACTLY THEY GO AFTER THIS is confusing. Everything is dark and constricted. A man she can barely see leads them first upstairs and then downstairs, through a corridor, and then up a ladder. There is a movement of hinges, a heavy carpet rolled across the floor. Twists and turns lead them down a narrow passageway to a cupboard, which somehow moves forward to form the entrance to a room.
It is the dirtiest place that Lien has ever been in. The large central area makes her think of a tavern, although she has never been in a tavern and certainly not in one like this. There are a couple of chairs and sofas against the walls and she can see people moving about. In the center, half a dozen men sit at a table around an oil lamp, playing cards. A few sets of eyes turn toward them as they enter. She walks by herself now, her bare feet picking up grease from the carpeted floor. The smell of the place is incredible. She wonders if there is enough air to breathe. But still Lien is without fear and keeps everything at a distance; the heightened awareness and wakefulness of the night excursion is starting to fade. The man who showed the way did not come into the room and has shut up the cupboard behind them. Jo is now the only leader and she waits, without impatience, to be told what to do.
Even with Jo, Lien feels no deep connection. As he moves to talk to the men at the card table she remains staring into the middle distance, aware of the dirt in the room around her and of the bodies shifting position from time to time on the furniture around the walls.
Her one thought is “I ought not to be here,” but this is not a cry of rebellion, just an observation that keeps running through her head.
After a bit, Jo returns and says that she should sleep upstairs where there are bunk beds. He hunkers down and nervously puts his hand on her shoulder, so that she feels its weight and its warmth. They were pressed together all the while that he carried her, but now for the first time he is reaching out with affection, tentative, as if fearful to hurt. He talks, in an embarrassed mumble, about how she should “do her business” in the two buckets in the adjoining room. Lien nods as she listens. When she stands beside the buckets a moment later, her bare feet on the yellow wet of the tiles, she is nearly sick with the stench.
Then, having followed Jo up a ladder, she finds herself in the bedroom, in which all of the bunks are already occupied. Jo tells her to join the bottom one on the far left. The bedclothes feel damp as she lifts them to step under the covers. An old woman’s face blinks up at her momentarily, says something in a dry-mouthed whisper, then rolls over to face another sleeper who lies against the far wall. Lien has never shared a bed with anyone before and it feels strange to sense the weight of the others pulling her to the center of the mattress as she lies down beside them, fully clothed. She holds one hand to the cold metal of the bed frame and lies as straight as possible, facing outward into the room. Below, where she can still hear him, Jo has joined the circle of card players and is telling them about the adventure of the raid and their escape. It must now be long past midnight and she has no idea what kind of place it is that she is in. As she lies there, sleep closes in upon her. When she shuts her eyes it feels like the room is swaying and as she listens to Jo telling their story she can see herself again on his back looking up at the outlines of the housefronts, black against the moonlit clouds. She loosens her grip on the bed frame and one foot moves under the blanket toward the old woman, but when it touches she instinctively snaps it back. Nothing here is familiar except the regular throb of the sores on her legs.
THE DIRTY DARK HOUSE in IJsselmonde is Lien’s home for just a few days. By the time she leaves, Jo has gone off in some other direction.