MEMORY IS A funny thing these days. I forget appointments, misplace keys, wander about Kroger’s parking lot looking for my car. But the past springs to life vividly, sparked by the smallest nothing. Combing my short gray hair, I fall into a memory of Emma, her musical Dutch-accented voice muttering as she detangled and braided my hair. I hear the bark of a nervous dog and my heart races, remembering Rudi’s sharp yip-yip of warning. When I walk with my grandchildren through the woods near their home, a sudden rustle from the underbrush bathes me in adrenaline, my breath quickens and I fight the urge to run. And smells! Sardines, starch, Pall Mall cigarettes—all carry me to long ago and far away.
IN MAY 1942, after our father died in a sea battle, Mama, Giles, and I left our home in Rouen and went to live with Grand-papa in a village outside Lille. His house was tiny, with only two rooms; mattresses on the floor in one room, a stove and table in the other.
It was an unhappy time. There were no servants, and Mama had too much work to do. She hated cooking and besides, food was scarce. She fixed brick-hard bread, applesauce, carrots, and eggs, always eggs. Grand-papa drank apple brandy all day and fussed at me for being loud and bouncy. But what was I to do? I missed my friend Anna, our games in the schoolyard, ballet lessons. I pouted and whined until Mama said, “Leni, your incessant crying is making me crazy. Go into the bedroom, shut the door, and count your blessings.”
“What blessings?” I shouted between dramatic sobs. “The Nazis want to kill us!” I slammed the door and buried my wet face in sour-smelling blankets. “I hate it here! I hate my life!” My tears flowed until I was bored and went out to find Giles.
I would pester Giles, follow him into the woods, down to the trickle of a creek, watch him climb and dig holes and catch tiny fish. He was thirteen and I was seven, a mile-wide chasm. If Giles ever humbled himself to play with me, we constructed forts, stocked them with stick-guns and knives. I had to be the Nazi soldier. The soldier ran, hid, was caught and tied up with rope. Giles was cowardly in most situations, but brave enough to capture this little Nazi.
In the village, real Nazis stood on the sidewalk, looking us over, staring at the yellow stars on our coats with sour expressions on their cold faces. One of Giles’s eyes wandered outward, especially when he was anxious or upset, and he was self-conscious, worried a soldier would notice him. He had a bad stutter, and the Nazis knew it. “B-b-b-bumble b-b-b-bee eyes,” they jeered, as Giles lurked behind Mama and me. “Stand tall,” Mama told him, but he skulked along, like he was trying to be invisible.
ONE DAY A man in a black suit drove up to Grand-papa’s house.
“The doctor will take you to a place where you will be safe,” Mama said.
Giles said, “I won’t g-g-g-go. I’ll run away. He’ll take us to a c-c-c-camp to be k-k-k-killed!” His stutter was worse when he was upset.
We had heard stories of trains to death camps. It scared me that he was so upset. Mama calmed us, saying, “You will be safe. The Nazis won’t find you. I promise.”
We put on almost all our clothes until we looked like stuffed bears. I clutched my doll, Giles carried a small suitcase. His face was white and stony. Mama stood at the iron gate, blew kisses, smiled, though her face was wet with tears.
The doctor unpinned the yellow stars from our coats. He told us, “At the checkpoints, I will say I am taking you to a hospital. You must pretend to be sick. Cover up with blankets until you are hot and feverish-looking. Close your eyes and be very quiet.”
Wearing so many clothes, I was burning up and it was easy to look hot. The doctor drove for hours, it seemed, until reaching a small farm on the outskirts of a Belgian village.
Be very quiet. A order we were to live by.
“CALL ME TANTE,” the woman said, though she was not our aunt. She helped us remove most of our clothes, clucked and hissed, “Too thin!” After a meal of fried sausage and potatoes, she led us to her bedroom, opened a hatch in the ceiling, and pulled down a ladder. She shooed us into an attic, a dirty space filled with boxes, bundles, and broken furniture. There was a window with a black curtain, and a pile of blankets for a bed.
“You will stay here, because people gossip and there are collaborators,” Tante said. “Never come down unless I tell you.”
In the corner of the attic stood a tall oak dresser and next to it, a stovepipe through the floor and up out the roof. She stooped and reached behind the stovepipe, tugged on a board until a cupboard door opened, revealing a dark space under the sloped roof.
“Here’s your hidey-hole,” she said. “You can latch it securely once you are inside. No one will know you are here if you are quiet. Go on, try it out.”
The hidey-hole had a low ceiling but was big enough for Giles and me to lie down, elbow to elbow. We both sneezed from the dust. I began to cry. I missed my mother, I was afraid, and I didn’t want to live in a dirty attic. Giles tried to shush me, sang silly songs, but I wailed until Tante climbed the ladder and poked her head into the hidey-hole. “The Nazis will hear you,” she said, “and we will all be shot. Be very quiet.”
Many times Tante fussed at me for crying. I learned to cry in silence.
TANTE WORE THICK glasses, fixed her black hair in tidy braids wrapped round her head, and spoke with a strong Dutch accent. Her husband and three sons had been forced into factories in Germany. She worked the small farm with her father, Opa, and Emma, her sixteen-year-old daughter. The farm was perhaps five acres, with a chicken coop, rabbit hutches, and bee boxes. There was a small barn, a pasture for two cows, and a large garden for growing potatoes, beans, cabbage, carrots, beets. Their nervous cloudy-eyed dog, Rudi, walked slow from arthritis, and barn cats showed up every evening for pans of milk but scattered at the approach of people.
Opa was old, white-haired and bent over. He walked with a stick, but never rested until evenings. Then he sat by the stove and listened to Radio Belgique, turned low because it was forbidden, growling curses at the Boches until Tante shushed him.
Emma had thick chestnut hair in a complicated braid woven around her head. She was jolly with rosy cheeks and, like Tante and Opa, never stopped in the daytime–cooking, baking, cleaning, washing. Tante and Emma spent mornings outside in the garden, weeding, picking fruits and vegetables, then pickling and canning them. In the cellar they buried cabbage and turnips, laid out potatoes, onions, and carrots in boxes. Opa tended the rabbits and bees, repaired tools, hunted wild hogs in the oak forest beyond the pasture.
Tante promised to fatten us up. Giles joked we were like Hansel and Gretel, prisoners of a witch who will cook and eat us. His stutter was worse, or perhaps I just noticed more, being shut up with him all day and night.
We became Emma’s project. She climbed the ladder with a food bucket and climbed back down with the shit bucket. Giles said it was shameful work for her, emptying that bucket. She was kind and cheerful, never severe like Tante. When the terrible smell of his feet made me gag, Emma filled a bowl with hot water and vinegar and he soaked his feet. It worked! Giles said we made a lot of extra work for her.
The attic’s one grimy window was stuck closed but we folded back the cloth covering a bit to peek out: at Tante in the garden, Emma walking the cows to the barn at dusk, a person riding past on a bicycle. Sometimes we saw children and I was so sad, missing Anna, missing our play with our dolls under the lilac bushes behind her house. We couldn’t even write letters to our mother, Emma said, since not even the postman could know about us. But on each of our birthdays—three of them—somehow Mama managed to get us a letter and some sweets.
AFTER DARK, TANTE allowed us to come down the ladder and put us to work. My chore was churning butter, to burn up my energy; Giles helped Opa outside. Afterward we played tag and climbed the fruit trees. Giles wanted to explore the oak forest but Opa said, “No, the wild hogs will eat you.”
Rudi was a good watch dog, with different barks for neighbors and strangers. The bark for neighbors was a deep woof woof. His tail wagged, and his ears perked up. He greeted strangers with a higher-pitched bark, a yip-yip, and he was stiff and alert. We knew to be quiet when someone approached; no one must know we hid in the attic.
As an extra signal, Tante banged a pot on the wood stove.
Two clanks meant be very quiet. Someone was coming, to talk, or to buy eggs or honey.
Clank-clank-clank meant German soldiers, go into the hidey-hole. Giles said, “They are d-d-d-devils and I wish I had a gun.”
Five quick clanks meant all clear.
I WAS ALWAYS frightened. I didn’t sleep soundly; even dreaming, I was alert to small noises. The loud hoots of owls would wake me. One perched right outside our window and others answered it from the woods. During the night, Rudi barked, at stoats, deer, squirrels. In the dark attic, with only a crack in the curtain to allow moonlight, things in the room seemed to move. The floor moved like quicksand, a witch hid behind a chair, a bundle was full of slugs and snakes. Hands with long fingers worked the attic hatch. Nightmares took me down into dark places until I woke, terrified, grunting strangled screams. (Even asleep I remembered to keep quiet.)
Then I would sit by the window to watch the stars slowly rotate in the sky, clouds pass before the face of the moon. I wondered if Mama saw them too; maybe we watched together. Often, a pack of wild hogs came to dig for acorns beneath the giant oak in front of the house. Then, like Giles and me, Rudi was very quiet, holed up in his dog-house next to the chicken pen.
LATE ONE MORNING Emma brought us a can of sardines, drizzled with vinegar. At the sight of the little black-eyed silver fish, I cried and refused to eat them but Giles said they tasted so good, mashed on a piece of toast, and after one little bite I decided yes, they were delicious. We were licking our fingers when came clank-clank-clank. My heart beat with a terrible fright and I began to cry, I couldn’t stop. Tante made Emma go in the hidey-hole with us, to calm me. Two soldiers stomped about below, talking harshly to Tante. Giles and I understood a little German—our grandfather had spoken German to our mother. The soldiers said Tante must give them butter, rabbit meat, and eggs every week. She will have to meet a quota.
The hidey-hole was hot as an oven. We lay quiet until the stomping and the voices ceased. Clank five times. I sat up, dripping with sweat. My heart would not slow down.
The soldiers took—no, stole—eggs, honey, jars of pickles and beans, and three loaves of bread that had been cooling.
PASSING THE TIME was so difficult. I made paper dolls, drew pictures. We played checkers. Emma brought us arithmetic and history books. Giles taught me a bit of English and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aloud to me. We studied a book of maps over and over, planning where we’d go. After. We listed ways to kill Nazis. Sharp things to stab them with: knives of course, ice picks, spears, arrows. Hard things like hammers to bash their brains out. Ropes, scarves, wire, string to strangle them with.
We talked constantly of after. After this, after the war, after the Nazis all died. It helped, to think about a future.
EVERY WEEK, THE German soldiers, always the same two, came on motorbikes for Tante’s food. Spots was tall and pimply, Tiny Eyes had slicked-back black hair and, well, tiny eyes set back in his skull. After the first few times, as soon as Rudi began to yip and we heard the putt-putt of their bikes, Tante made Emma go into the hidey-hole with us.
Emma would lie squished between Giles and me, her eyes closed, her cheeks pale. She smelled like sweat and starch. I lay rigid, too frightened to sleep, breathing a sort-of prayer, angels surround us. Anges nous entourent. I imagined enchanted glowing creatures, their silver swords poised to protect. I buried my face against Emma’s arm, silently wetting her sleeve with my tears.
Giles too turned his face toward Emma, watching her with one eye as the other wandered upward to the spider-webbed ceiling.
I thought she was there to shush us.
WE WERE NOT the only hidden ones. Through cracks in the floorboards, we heard hushed talk about Allied airmen moving from farm to farm, eventually to Paris and escape routes into Spain. We were intensely curious but also afraid, because Tante, Opa, and Emma would tell us nothing, and their silence only added to my worry.
Moving some boxes and bundles around in the attic, I found a wood rocking chair with arms and a carved back. One runner was missing, and Opa fixed it for me. I rocked all day, cradling my doll. Creak creak creak creak . . . Giles didn’t protest.
OUR THIRD WINTER was frigid with lots of snow. Snow covered the farm, the road, and the barn with a pure white thick blanket. Another time, it would seem magical to us. But two feet of snow was no protection against Nazis, or a witch behind the chair, a floor of quicksand. The owl was just as loud, the dog just as nervous.
On the evening before his sixteenth birthday, Giles was shoveling paths through the yard, to the road, the barn, the rabbit, and chicken coops, when Rudi began to bark. Giles ran into the house. A neighbor from a nearby farm had made his way through drifts and Opa let him in. We tried to overhear what they talked about, but they went outside, to the barn, without speaking.
I went back to my sketches. I was drawing a bouquet of flowers for Giles, for his birthday. Tante promised an apple tart, and Emma was making over some clothes of her father’s for him.
That night, Tante made us stay in the attic instead of coming down for chores, play, and warm milk. She didn’t explain, but said firmly, “Be very quiet.”
It was late, after curfew, when Rudi started to bark again. Strangers. “Something’s going on,” Giles said, and we crowded together to peek out the window. A half-moon cast a dim light over the yard, crisscrossed with shoveled paths. Two men walked into the yard. Opa went outside, hushed the dog, and led the men into the barn.
“Nazis?” I asked. “Should we get into the hidey-hole?”
“No. Civilians,” Giles said. “Wait and see.” His voice was a man’s, now.
One man came out of the barn and walked away. Opa returned to the house. We put our ears to the floor to listen, and heard Emma ask, “Who is he?”
Opa said, “An American airman. He has a concussion.”
“Oooo,” Tante said. I could almost see her pursed lips and frowning eyes.
Giles and I looked at each other with big eyes. An airman! An American!
“He will stay here at least a few days,” Opa said. “Then he’ll be taken to Paris.”
“The Germans will be looking for him,” Emma said.
“Of course,” Opa said. “But Adrian burned his parachute and clothing, and we have hidden him well.”
“He will want to eat,” Tante said. We heard the crackle of potatoes dropped into hot oil. Tante made the best fries.
“I want to see him,” Giles whispered to me.
I nodded. An American airman!
THE NEXT DAY we were crazy to see the airman but Emma said, “It is too dangerous, for him and for you. What if he was captured? He might tell about you two.” She had helped me bathe, and was trying to comb my hair, not an easy job. It was so long, almost to my waist, and tangled easily. But she was patient, working on it strand by strand.
“He wouldn’t tell,” Giles said. “He is a b-b-b-brave man.”
She looked up at him, shook her head, then went back to combing.
“Don’t tell him we’re Jewish,” I said. “Tell him we are your sister and brother.”
“P-p-p-please?” Giles begged.
“No. It’s not safe for you or him.”
I was wildly disappointed, sick of being safe.
SO, THE NEXT afternoon, when Tante and Opa had gone somewhere on the train, and Emma was in the garden, Giles and I crept out of the house and dashed into the barn. Cats scattered as we tiptoed around looking for the airman, going from stall to stall, climbing to the loft, peeking into cupboards. We couldn’t find him! Emma caught us coming out of the barn.
“Idiots,” she said. “What are you doing?” She carried a pan of rabbit meat.
Giles shrugged. “Nothing. Just looking in the b-b-b-barn.”
Emma looked us up and down. Giles had grown a good six inches taller, and his pants barely covered his knees. “What did you find?” she asked.
“Cats,” I said. “Many cats.”
“Good. Now back inside. I’ll bring you some stew later.”
Just then, Rudi’s sharp yip-yip and the rumble of a motorbike coming down the road jolted us into a panic, and we ran across the yard, inside, and up into the attic. Giles pulled up the ladder, and we squatted by the window and opened the curtain a tiny sliver to see who it was. Tiny Eyes, by himself. He banged on the door and Emma let him in. We crept into our hidey-hole. My heart thumped the way it always did when a Nazi soldier was in the house.
“Is he looking for the airman?” I whispered.
“He asks her for the food,” Giles told me. He frowned. I could hear arguing and Emma yelling, “No, stop.”
“What shall we do?” I whispered. “What’s he doing?”
We heard thuds, like chairs falling over, and Emma screeched, “No, no!” The soldier yelled, “Quiet, you bitch!” and more thuds then suddenly she was silent.
“Has he left?” I whispered.
Giles was so red I thought he would ignite. He opened the door to the hidey-hole. “Stay here,” he said.
But I followed, scrambling down the ladder. Whatever was happening, I wanted to be part of it.
The soldier was on top of Emma, on the floor, struggling with her. He had one hand around her throat, and the other pulling on her clothes, and she squealed and squirmed, pushing against him. His pants were down and his bare bottom shoved against her. It was a horrible sight and as I started to cry, Giles lifted Tante’s big black fry pan and swung it onto the side of the soldier’s head, knocking his face into the floor. Giles whammed the fry pan into the soldier’s head over and over as Emma wriggled away and her noises changed from squeals to sobs, just one or two, then she stopped. Emma was as tough as they come.
The soldier lay still. Blood poured from his head. “He’s dead,” Emma said, but when Giles nudged him with his foot, the soldier moaned. He wasn’t dead. More blood. Oh, so much blood. The soldier’s pants were clumped around his ankles, and I couldn’t help seeing his stiff penis, like a mule’s, in its hairy nest. Disgusting. Poor Emma.
She was all right. “You two saved me,” she said. “He didn’t get very far.” She took our hands—Giles’s all bloody and sticky and trembling—and we stood, joined in a circle, over the soldier’s body, until she kicked him, then I gasped and kicked him too. Oh, how Emma and I kicked that Nazi soldier until our shoes were bloody. We tried to be quiet, choked on strangled laughter, excited, though I wanted to shriek to the heavens Filthy Boche! Dead Nazi! Giles backed away, watching us celebrate. When the Nazi stopped moaning, Emma and I turned to Giles to praise his bravery, but he stood rigid and the color was gone from his face.
“They will hang us from trees for this,” he said. “Your mama and grand-père too. They will find the airman and shoot him.”
“No. He will help us,” Emma said, and she darted outside.
We listened to the soldier gurgle through his broken nose. “You were brave,” I said to Giles. He ignored me and walked back and forth.
Emma came back with the airman. He was sandy-haired and stocky, and there was a big lump on his forehead. At the sight of the Nazi, he took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Nice job,” he said. “Who are you?” His French was very good.
“I am Giles, and this is my sister Leni,” Giles said.
“That’s a Nazi soldier,” I said. “He was hurting Emma and Giles hit him!”
“Good for Giles,” the airman said. “Let’s get rid of the bastard.”
“Get rid of the bastard,” I yelled. Emma grinned. She went into her bedroom, came out with a sheet. The airman and Giles rolled the Nazi onto the sheet, wrapped him up. He was still breathing. They dragged the bundled soldier outside, and I watched through the open back door as they heaved him through the yard, past the chicken pen, the garden, the bee houses, the sheds and into the woods.
Emma fetched cloths and a bucket of water. “We have to clean this up,” she said. “They’ll be looking for him.” I set to work, frantically sopping up bloody water, emptying the bucket, filling it again, over and over. We washed the floor, cupboards, our shoes, the wood stove, chair legs until every speck of blood was gone. She wrung out the cloths, put them into soapy water along with the small rag rug that lay before the sink.
We sat by the attic window, hip to hip, and waited. I lay down onto Emma’s lap, but my muscles felt tight and shivery and I couldn’t rest.
It was dark when Giles and the airman came back. They stopped in the yard and pumped water to wash, and I climbed down the ladder and ran out to them, crying, so glad the Nazis hadn’t caught them and hung them from a tree.
“Where’s your mom? The old guy?” The airman asked. He squatted to rub Rudi’s ears.
“They will be back late tonight,” Emma said. “Come in, have something to eat.” She cut bread, spread butter and jam.
“What did you do with the Nazi?” I asked.
Giles and the airman shared a glance. Giles said, “We took him very far into the trees, burned his clothes, then waited.”
“For what?”
“For the hogs to smell his blood.”
The airman shook his head and said, “We got pigs back home, but I never saw them do a man like that.”
A feeling of glee stabbed me. Glee on top of terror and exhaustion, and I couldn’t help it, I let go of a warm gush of pee, pee I’d been unable to release all day.
“Poor girl,” Emma said. “But that will explain the wet rags, and the clean floor. Now go up to bed.”
THE AIRMAN LEFT with the motorbike.
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
“To ditch it,” Giles said. “So no one will know Tiny Eyes was here.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
I pulled a blanket around me and curled onto the rocking chair. I was wide awake, worried about the airman. When Rudi woofed softly, I peeked out the window; the moon was bright enough to see Tante and Opa, returning in the mule-driven wagon. Emma had said it was better that they didn’t know what happened, and we should say nothing to them.
Then I must have slept because the next thing I knew, the hatch to the attic was opening and the airman was climbing through it. “Hey there, kids,” he said. “There’s German soldiers coming up the road and the old man told me to hide up here with you two.”
“You had a good hiding place in the barn,” Giles said. “We couldn’t find you.”
“I wasn’t in the barn. I was off in the woods having a smoke because the old man told me not to smoke in the barn. Anyway, what’s the plan up here?”
“Follow me,” I said, and opened the cupboard to our hidey-hole. We crawled in, latched the door, and lay down with the airman in the middle, squashed together in a sandwich. My head was under his arm, and I could feel his heart thump, his ribs move as he breathed. He smelled of cigarettes, of hay, and leaves.
Rudi barked hysterically as motorbikes pulled into the yard. Bam-bam pounding on the door, then sharp voices questioning Tante about Tiny Eyes. She would be in her nightdress and robe, black braids hanging down.
“No, no soldiers were here today,” she told them. “Should I wake my old father and child?”
The soldiers stomped through the kitchen, into the small parlor, then outside. As Rudi barked and barked, I guessed they were searching the barn. We lay in silence until we heard the motorbikes putt-putt away.
“We’ll live another day, guys,” the airman said. “Say, how long you been hiding here?”
“Almost three years,” I said.
“The war’s almost over,” he said. “We’re bombing the shit out of Berlin.”
My brave brother Giles smiled, and I felt my muscles uncoil, for the first time since I put on all my clothes for the car ride from Lille. I stretched a little to get more comfortable, and rested my head on the airman’s chest. His heart had slowed, but I could still feel it thumping beneath the scratchy wool of his shirt. Anges nous entourent, I breathed, closing my eyes to conjure up flickering lights, tiny silver swords.
The airman asked what I had said.
“Anges nous entourent,” said Giles.
“Indeed they do,” the airman said.