The Dutch Orphan, page 30
Forty-Eight
Johanna Vos
July 2, 1945
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The tense dinner with Liesbeth had set something off in me, a series of tiny explosions like the firecrackers the neighborhood boys would light on New Year’s Eve. I knew the war’s end would bring its own set of problems, but I hadn’t anticipated the frustration it would unleash. Something was eating at me. I felt like I was still on the run, being hunted, unable to sleep in peace. I rarely left the house and found myself avoiding the friends I’d missed so dearly.
In need of an escape, I took Aletta down south to visit my aunt and uncle, who were still staying with relatives while they waited for the damage in Zierikzee to be repaired, for the sea-drenched fields to be drained and the sodden houses made livable. I spent two heartwarming weeks with them, sharing what we’d endured over the past year and swapping memories of Gerrit that made us cry and laugh and then cry again. Every day, stories poured out of me, the ones I could speak aloud and those I chose to keep to myself and put down on paper. The weight I’d been carrying lessened, yet, still, whenever tante Rika or oom Cor mentioned Lies’s name, I grew tense and tried to change the subject. When two weeks were up, I knew I wouldn’t sleep peacefully until I put the truth to rest. I needed to hear Jakob’s side of the story, about what happened with Dirk and Ida.
I returned to Amsterdam and dropped in on Jakob one afternoon in early July unannounced. Maybe I was afraid to face the great loss that had become his reality or maybe I wasn’t sure I could replay the events of the betrayal yet again, but I circled the block three times before convincing myself to approach the apartment, and when the door swung open, I paused, for once at a loss for words.
Jakob let out a whoop and pulled me into a hug. “You’re back! Willem said so, but I refused to believe it until I saw you in the flesh. Those moffen just couldn’t sink their teeth into you, could they?” He chuckled, a laugh laced with pain. I thought of Ida and wondered what other bad news had started trickling back to him from the death camps out east.
I pulled back to look at him. No words could capture what I needed to say, express the hurt I felt for him. He hadn’t just lost a wife but a whole community. “I’m so sorry about Ida,” I said.
He pressed a fist to his lips, like the words wanted to spill out, the list of names of everyone else he’d lost as well. Instead, a tiny voice interrupted, calling “Papa.”
Jakob stepped aside to reveal the little one teetering toward him, a boy with a fine head of hair and Jakob’s wild eyebrows. Jakob bent down to pick up his son. “Rudi, this here is Johanna. Your tante Jo.”
The word tante gave me pause, reminding me how excited Liesbeth had been to call herself auntie for the first time. But I pushed this thought away and leaned in to admire the boy. “Rudi, what a handsome young man you are,” I said, as he waved a floppy hand at me. I smiled at Jakob. “And the mirror image of his father.”
“Sometimes I wish I saw more of Ida in him,” Jakob said. He kissed Rudi’s forehead and tousled his hair before leading me into the sitting room. “Come here, there’s someone you’ll want to see.”
At first, I thought it was Ida sitting in the reading chair in the corner. The woman looked vaguely familiar, as if I’d seen her once in a dream. A second passed before the connection came to me. It was Marijke de Graaf, the violinist who had been there during my labor, the very woman who had brought Aletta into my life.
“Mevrouw De Graaf,” I said.
She stood up to say hello. “Please, no need for formalities. After all we’ve been through, we’re hardly strangers.”
“What a relief to see you. Nobody knew what had happened.” The phrase hung in the air, its true meaning unspoken: if you would make it out alive.
“They had me at Ravensbrück,” she said, “and then Buchenwald.”
“Ravensbrück—I was there, briefly, near the end.”
My heart went out to her. Buchenwald was a men’s camp, but something told me I shouldn’t ask what had brought her there. Marijke looked so frail, her skin that luminous milky blue of a pearl, veins crawling up her thin arms, and her eyes held a deep, stirring sadness, so haunting I wanted to look away. Whatever this woman had been through in the camps, it was far worse than what I had seen. She nodded and something passed between us, a kinship, built on an understanding of things too painful to share.
Jakob placed Rudi in the crib and gestured for me to sit down beside Marijke. “Coffee?” he asked, on his way to the kitchen.
Marijke turned to me. “I often thought about you and the baby. Is she well?”
“Aletta grows stronger every day.” I opened my purse to show her a piece of paper, a portrait that a young Jewish woman hiding in the zoo had sketched of Aletta. It captured her months earlier, at an age I’d missed, and I found myself reaching for it whenever I was away from my daughter for more than a few minutes.
“She’s beautiful,” Marijke said.
“Can you tell me something about her parents?”
“Aletta’s mother was a kind soul, the type of woman who would never say a bad word about anyone. And her father was a mathematician, apparently brilliant, although I never had the chance to meet him.”
I nodded, trying to add these pieces to the puzzle of Aletta’s life. “And your husband, is he—”
“He’s fine.” She laughed, her voice tinkling like a china teacup against its saucer. “Well, fine, fine—what does that mean anymore? He’s alive. Weak, but alive. He was one of the lucky ones.”
We sat there, mulling this over, both of us mourning our own losses. I thought of Gerrit, of Ida, of Aletta’s birth mother. When Jakob returned with the coffee, I asked him about his family.
“So far, nobody has returned,” he said, “not a single person.” There was talk of a second cousin someone had seen alive, but that was four months earlier, before the Nazis marched prisoners for days on end across frostbitten terrain. Jakob feared the worst. As I tried to grasp the extent of it all, I blinked away tears. So much death, so much sorrow.
“We did what we could, Jo,” he said. “It could never have been enough, but every bit helped. And with each loss comes fresh beginnings.” At this, Marijke rubbed a hand absently against her belly. Jakob didn’t seem to notice, but I wondered if she was carrying a child. A blessing after all she’d been through.
“Theo is waiting for me at home,” she said. “It was so good to see you, Johanna. I’m glad Aletta is safe and well.”
“Let’s make music together someday soon,” Jakob said. “It would be good for you, for all of us.”
“I’d love to hear you play,” I said.
Marijke turned to me with a melancholy smile. “Yes, perhaps one day.”
* * *
When she left, the atmosphere in the apartment shifted. Jakob topped up my coffee and took a seat across from me, sitting straight and tall. Somehow a wall had formed between us, a wall that needed to be dismantled brick by brick.
“That poor woman,” I said. “I can only begin to imagine how much she’s suffered.”
“All for trying to help people in need,” he said.
“And to think that it was probably one of her friends or neighbors that turned her in. Who else would have been close enough to monitor her every move?”
Jakob must have sensed that I needed to unload, because he sat back and let me talk.
“Haven’t you noticed,” I said, “how many people are coming out of the woodwork, with gutsy tales of everything they did for the Resistance?” I’d heard such claims from people I’d never seen lend a hand. The neighbor who had stood by and done nothing, the butcher who had closed his store to Jews. Everyone wanted to make it clear that they had secretly been good; they had been loyal beneath it all.
“A nation full of heroes,” Jakob said dryly.
“Exactly. But where were these people when we went to them for help? Full of excuses on why they couldn’t take someone in, why they weren’t the right person to ask. And now we’re supposed to believe they were fighting evil all along?”
“We all did what we could, within our limits.”
“Did we? Did we really act out of the goodness of our hearts or did we act on our own agendas?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Come out and ask it, Jo. Ask and I will tell you everything I know.”
I paused. For so many months, I’d sat in that cell, trying to construct answers—full of rage, full of hatred, judging my sister and Ida for everything they might have done. What good would it do now to draw my own conclusions? That hadn’t gotten me anywhere in the past. It was time to truly listen.
“Why did she do it?”
Jakob folded and unfolded his hands on his lap, his eyes clouding over. “If only I’d known,” he said. “If I’d known in time, I would have turned myself in and put a stop to all of it.”
“I thought your marriage protected you. That and her pregnancy.”
“From what? From a capricious beast with talons that reached across the continent? Nothing was certain, Johanna. Nothing.” He let this sink in before continuing. “My friend Rifka, who was married to the Catholic headmaster? They arrested her for walking her dog after curfew. They sent her to Bergen-Belsen. She hasn’t come back. My cousin Abraham, the one who fell in love with a good Calvinist girl? Sobibor—for running across to the neighbor’s without a star on his jacket.”
“I am so sorry.”
“I could go on. You see, the fact that I’m still here while so many others are gone is nothing but a fluke. Maybe the Almighty was watching out for me, or you might say I had enough strings to pull, enough agility to dodge a few near misses. Or you could say it was Ida who saved me.”
“Yes, but at a terrible cost.”
Jakob cleared his throat. “She told me everything before she died. Of course, she never meant to hurt anyone, but Dirk’s threats got worse by the week. The guilt of what she’d done consumed her, most of all with Aletta. You have to believe me when I say that Dirk forced that out of her. He came asking for dirt on you, anything she had. He had her trapped.”
Like he had my sister trapped.
“She shouldn’t have given in,” he added, “shouldn’t have given him any names. I wish it had been me in those camps, instead of everyone else, instead of you. I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
He wiped at his eyes, while I sat numbly, trying to take it all in. He told me how Dirk had found out about the house concerts—the ideal opportunity to gather names and addresses of Jewish artists in hiding and their protectors. He told me how Dirk had instructed Ida to leave this information tucked in the spine of a book at a used bookshop.
“The Black Tulip?” I asked, recalling the day I was sure I’d seen her in the bookshop near Utrechtsestraat.
“Yes, by Alexandre Dumas. How did you know?”
“Like the black tulip that had marked the house concerts.” I grimaced. “A man with a sense of humor to match his soul.”
“He was relentless. Once, when Ida said she wanted out, he showed up here at the apartment while I was away. He had a copy of a form all filled in for my arrest, awaiting a date and signature.”
“No wonder she was so frightened.”
“She should have let him arrest me. What’s one death compared to dozens?”
I got up and picked up a framed photograph of Ida and Jakob from the side table. Ida looked down at him adoringly, clutching his hand like she couldn’t let go. I remembered taking the shot during Willem’s birthday celebration. Had she already known then the threats that lay ahead? When I looked at the image, at the love in her gaze, I didn’t feel the rage I had before. All I saw was a wife who would do anything to save her husband. If Willem’s head had been on the chopping block, wouldn’t I have done anything to try to save him? What about Aletta’s?
“Dirk is dead,” Jakob said. “You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“Piet did it, but I wish I’d done it myself.”
The anger seemed to ooze from his pores. I didn’t want to tell him I couldn’t imagine him ever pulling a trigger. Even now, his hands were trembling. “You don’t need to say anything more,” I said. “It’s over now. And it was her choice, what she did, not yours.”
A soft suckling noise came from the crib, Rudi sucking his thumb as he dozed. I walked over to the crib and looked down at him. Here was another little boy, waiting for love, just like Aletta.
“Besides,” I said, gesturing to Rudi, “it wasn’t only you she saved.”
“Yes,” he said. He nodded several times, like he was trying to convince himself of that. “There’s no telling what might have happened to him otherwise.”
“Just like there’s no telling what any of us would have done. I admit, I was very angry at her for a long time. But now I realize all we can do now is try to heal and move forward.” I bent down to adjust the blue baby blanket, tucking it over Rudi’s shoulders. In that moment, it was my sister I was thinking of, my sister and Maurits, my sister and Dirk. If I could forgive Ida, could I learn to forgive Lies, too?
Forty-Nine
Liesbeth de Wit
October 19, 1945
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The notice arrived in their mailbox on a Friday, just before noon. Liesbeth saw it on the hall landing on her way out for a walk, lying there inconspicuously, as if it were any regular piece of mail: a bill to be paid, a flyer advertising the reopening of a department store. She picked it up and studied it. Maurits’s full name was stamped on the front.
She slipped it into her jacket pocket and continued out the door toward the park, where she found a lone bench that overlooked the pond. Before the Hunger Winter, lush trees had framed the pond and played home to chattering birds. However, like so many teddy bears, books, and rags, the branches of the park’s trees had disappeared into the bellies of the city’s stoves and now the park looked bare.
Liesbeth sat and looked out over the water. In two days, it would be the anniversary of the darkest day in her memory. One whole year since Gerrit had passed. On Saturday morning, she and Johanna would take the train down south to meet their aunt and uncle. While Liesbeth couldn’t wait to spend some time with tante Rika and oom Cor, she couldn’t say the same of the trip down with Johanna, which she was certain would pass in silence, if her sister didn’t find a way to end up on a different train all together.
Something beside the bench caught Liesbeth’s attention. A scrap of tartan fabric, part of a doll’s dress, by the looks of it, maybe a gift from a relative who had traveled to Scotland before the war. A lifetime ago. She closed her eyes and thought of the outfit her mother had sewn for her own childhood doll. It was dressed in the traditional costume of the island, with a little floral dickey and a jacket over a long skirt and apron. Gerrit had fashioned the lace cap himself, and he’d been so proud to present it to her. Never once had he refused to play with her; never once had he pushed her away.
She clung to those memories of him: his flippant smile, like a joke was constantly on the tip of his tongue, how he’d pulled her aside and pointed out her sketches, telling her that they were good, really good. Now he would never get to play uncle to Aletta or to her own children, if she were ever so lucky to be blessed with them.
But the notion of having children with Maurits no longer left her with the elated feeling it once had. Instead, she felt cold and empty. She resented him for everything he’d done, not just to her, but to her family. Everything he stood for. She saw it now, as clear as the North Star on a cloudless night. The only thing Maurits cared about was himself.
Her fingers met the envelope in her pocket. She pulled it out and turned it over. It was neatly typeset, aside from the letter s, which was worn out in the lower curve, but what caught her attention was the return address, a department of the Ministry of Justice. She pressed it to her chest. Whatever the letter contained, it would certainly shape their fate.
No, she assured herself: his fate. This was her final chance. If she wanted a future of her own, real prospects for a family, for following her dreams, she had to seize it. And that was only possible if she first pulled out some shears and cut the threads that bound them. It was time for her to create a life that was worth living.
She got up from the bench and left the park in a hurry. Any delay would only create room for doubt, and for once, she felt certain about her decision. On her way to the pharmacy, she practiced everything she intended to say.
However, she arrived at the pharmacy to find a delivery driver unloading a shipment of medicines, and his crates and clipboards cluttered the tiles of the waiting area. She stood in the corner, egging herself on, as Maurits finished up with the supplier.
“Hello, darling,” he said to her, when the shop was empty. “Aren’t you the perfect way to brighten my day.” He kissed her on the lips, looking delighted to see her.
She paused, that wave of doubt crashing in. There were periods when he was so sweet and caring, when his love seemed so genuine. No, she told herself, this is your chance to be free. It’s now or never.
“You may want to hold that sentiment.” She passed him the envelope. His expression hardened as he saw the return address. When he opened it, he seemed to shrink, his chest caving inward.
“What does it say?”
This is to inform you that you are under investigation for reputed activities during the occupation that were disloyal to the crown. You must report to the authorities by October 30 or face impending arrest.
This meant prison time; that much was almost guaranteed. Liesbeth thought of those men she’d seen rounded up in the neighborhood, the rumors of the internment camps for the “traitors.” She tried to picture Maurits sleeping in a bare cot, washing himself in a dirty latrine, as Johanna had been forced to do.
“Maurits.”
He backed away, his eyes darting around the shop. Then he turned and swiped his arm across the counter, sending medicine jars shattering to the floor.
