Chasing Shadows Read online

  Ans could tell from his expression that he had no idea what she was talking about. They had laughed and kissed and talked and dreamed of the future together, yet Ans had never shared her faith with him. Lord, forgive me.

  “I have to finish getting ready or I’ll be late,” Erik said. “Ans, please—”

  “Stop! Don’t ask me to promise anything until you give me a chance to explain what my faith means to me. Let me tell you why I can’t make any promises.”

  She turned and left without saying goodbye. Without kissing him.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Gestapo returned to the town house two nights later, pounding on the door and ringing the doorbell at two o’clock in the morning. Ans leaped from her bed and ran up to the third floor, ducking through the little door to the attic. Avi and Miriam now slept there at night and were already climbing out the dormer window. Ans teetered across the joists to close it behind them and move the crate. She heard the baby whimpering from being awakened and Miriam soothing her. Ans glanced around to make sure the attic looked untouched, then raced downstairs again, praying they wouldn’t see her emerging from the tiny attic door. The men were older than the first two and had no regard for the mess they left in their wake. They took longer, searching more thoroughly. They didn’t find the Leopolds.

  Ans huddled in the parlor with Eloise and Herman after the Gestapo left, sipping tea as they tried to calm down again. No one would be able to get back to sleep. Eloise stared at nothing the way she had on the night the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, only this was much worse. The Nazis had invaded her home, her bedroom.

  The Gestapo returned a third night, in the pouring rain this time. Miriam and Avi were drenched and shivering by the time the men left, the baby wailing in distress.

  The intrusion roused Eloise from her lethargy. “The Leopolds need a better hiding place,” she said. “I’m not afraid for my own safety, but if the Gestapo keeps coming back, sooner or later we might make a mistake. Besides, that poor baby can’t hide on the window ledge in the wintertime.” If the Leopolds were discovered, Eloise would never recover from their loss.

  “How do we go about finding a safer place to hide them?” Ans asked.

  “Someone from the underground newspaper will know. We should start there. Every issue has called for greater action, more resistance. Surely they’ll have contacts with a network of people. That’s how the Resistance operated during the first war.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Ans said. “We already know we can trust them. But who can we ask?” Ans had been delivering Eloise’s news reports and editorials to an unknown contact in a variety of meeting places, making a simple exchange. This month, it had been on the observatory grounds. Neither Ans nor Eloise knew who else was involved with the newspaper or where the underground press was located.

  “Start with your regular contact person when you meet with them tomorrow.”

  Ans was waiting at the observatory the next day at the appointed time. “Listen,” she said, after the exchange had been made. “I need help. My friends need to go into hiding.”

  “Are they Jewish?” she whispered.

  Ans nodded. “The newspaper is calling for active resistance, so I know there are people who feel the same way I do, people who want to fight back. I assume you have contacts in the Resistance. Can you put me in touch with them?”

  The woman glanced around as if afraid they’d already talked for too long. “I’m just a link in the chain. I don’t know the answer. But I’ll convey your message.”

  As the days passed, Ans longed to see Erik and explain her faith. They’d spoken on the telephone a few times, but he still worked at night and slept during the day, and she wanted to be with him in person when she shared her faith with him. “I love you, Ans,” he said each time. She loved him, too, and needed him to understand why she made the choices she did.

  After Ans’s next meeting with her contact from the newspaper, she found this message inside the bag: “Go to the Hortus Botanicus on Sunday at one o’clock. Look at the plants. Someone will find you.”

  The enormous glass greenhouse at the botanical gardens was almost unbearably hot on the July afternoon when Ans arrived. She wandered around, gazing at the tropical plants, until a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses approached her. He had fair hair and a bushy blond mustache and appeared unremarkable—an ordinary schoolteacher or bank clerk—and not at all how she pictured a Resistance fighter.

  “Hello, my dear cousin!” he said, spreading his arms. “So wonderful to see you again!” He kissed both of her cheeks. “Now walk beside me,” he said in a low voice. “We’re admiring the plants. Call me Havik.”

  Ans’s heart thudded in her chest as if trying to escape. She could see how his hawklike nose and alert eyes had earned him the code name Hawk. He strolled by her side for a few moments, giving her time to calm down. “I understand you’re dating a policeman,” he said at last. “A member of the NSB.”

  She halted, frightened by his knowledge of her private life. “How . . . how do you know that?”

  “It’s our business to know. That’s why you deliver your articles to a contact and not to the newspaper. It’s why you don’t know where the printing press is.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Spare me your outrage. Lives are at stake. They can’t torture you into revealing our whereabouts if you don’t know where we are. Or who we are. Keep walking.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow.

  Few people had come to the greenhouse in the summer heat, but as Ans and Havik passed another couple, he murmured softly, pointing to plants and trees as if enjoying a leisurely afternoon. “Does your policeman friend know you’re meeting me?” he asked when they were by themselves again. “And that your Jewish friends need to go into hiding?”

  “He knows they’re my friends and that I’m outraged by what the Nazis are doing to them—and what they’re forcing him to do. But I told him my friends moved to Amsterdam. I didn’t tell him I was contacting you.”

  “Good.”

  “But Erik isn’t like them. He’s just playing along with the Nazis. He joined the Nazi Party to keep his job.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask him for help? Why didn’t you tell him you needed to hide your friends?”

  The question startled her. She didn’t know why. And yet she did know.

  “You aren’t sure if you can trust him, are you?” Havik asked.

  “I don’t want to get Erik into trouble. He saved me after he caught me delivering your newspapers. He didn’t turn me in.”

  “You’ve learned the first lesson of working with the Resistance—don’t trust anyone.”

  “I’m trusting you.”

  Havik waited until another couple walked past. “Never forget, if we were able to follow you and learn all about you, then your boyfriend and his Nazi friends could too.”

  It frightened and enraged Ans to think that she was vulnerable. Then she thought of Miriam and Avi being hunted and pursued by the Nazis, and she put her own feelings aside.

  “I would do anything to save my friends. Please tell me how I can do that.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Three. Mir—”

  “Stop. Don’t tell me their names.”

  She let out her breath and started again. “They came to the Netherlands as refugees from Germany. My friend is a little older than me, married to a man from Berlin. They have a baby—”

  “A baby!” Havik stopped walking. “How old?”

  “She was one year old in March.”

  He shook his head. “It’s very difficult to hide small children with their parents. Families are too conspicuous. Babies cry and give away hiding places. Alone, a child can pose as an orphan.”

  “I know. That’s why we need to move them to a safer place. The Gestapo has searched our house three times. They haven’t discovered my friends, but we’re worried that the baby will cry at the wrong time or that our neighbo
rs will hear her.”

  “You’re wise not to trust your neighbors. Some of them notice too much. That’s why we hide small children by themselves, ideally with families in small towns or out-of-the-way farms.”

  Ans immediately thought of her parents’ farm. Elisheva would be safe there.

  “Could either the mother or father pass for Dutch?” Havik asked before she could mention it.

  Ans pictured their dark hair, the dark stubble on Avi’s chin. “No. Neither of them could. They speak Dutch with a German accent.”

  “That’s a problem.” Havik appeared to be deep in thought. His expression didn’t look hopeful.

  “Can you help my friends? Will you help them?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. The baby will be the hardest to place. I can find places for the parents, but not together.” Ans’s heart ached for them, forced to endure even more separation. And giving up Elisheva was unimaginable. “Many of our hiding places are fluid,” he continued. “There are raids, informants; people get moved around and seldom stay in the same place for very long unless they’re native Dutchmen and can pose as a maid or a distant cousin who has come to stay. By necessity, families get separated in the shuffle—a place for one here, for two there. Often, they’re hidden for a while, then something puts them in danger and the cards are shuffled all over again. You understand?”

  “I think so . . . and I may know a place for the baby. My parents own a farm in the country outside of Leiden. But we would need to invent a story to explain where the baby came from because everyone in their village knows each other’s business.”

  “Would your family understand the risk and be willing to take it? They’ll be arrested if they’re caught hiding Jews.”

  Ans hesitated. Mama and Papa would gladly do it. She knew their unshakable faith. The question was, did she want to put her family at risk? Not just Mama and Papa, but Wim and Maaike too.

  “I can go there and ask.”

  “No. Don’t be seen traveling back and forth without a reason. Don’t do anything to make their neighbors or your boyfriend suspicious.”

  “Erik cares about me. He’s a good man—”

  “Is he friends with this Jewish family as well?”

  Ans looked away, shaking her head, remembering all the excuses Erik had given for why he couldn’t meet them or eat at their apartment. “Erik never met them.”

  “Trust no one!” he said vehemently. They had circled the paths inside the greenhouse a second time and had come to the door leading out. Ans felt relieved as they stepped from the steamy mugginess. “When was the baby born?” he asked.

  “March 7 of last year.”

  “Her name?”

  “Elisheva. Her Dutch name is Elisabeth.”

  “You know the bridge over the Oude Vest near the Beestenmarkt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stand on the bridge one week from today at four o’clock, tossing bread to the swans.”

  “With my friends?”

  “Just you. But bring their identification cards with you. Tell your friends to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Do you have any cousins?” It seemed like an odd question.

  “Yes. Several.”

  He kissed her cheek again. “I am one of them.”

  She watched Havik go, then walked back to the town house to tell her friends the hopeful, heartbreaking news.

  CHAPTER 30

  Miriam stood on a wobbling board in the center of the airless attic, as far as she could get from the walls of the adjoining town houses, and drew her bow across the strings of her violin. Avi had fashioned a mute that fit over the bridge of her instrument to help dampen the sound, but she still worried every time she played. But she had to play. The sound soothed Elisheva to sleep, and it helped Miriam feel alive and whole.

  Elisheva was asleep on a blanket beside Avi, wearing only her diaper as he fanned her to cool the air. He loved hearing Miriam play too. Her music had drawn them together in the refugee camp and had comforted them along with the psalms Avi read aloud. He read sorrow-filled ones now, laments that asked the Almighty One Why? and How long? This afternoon, as they waited for Ans to return from her meeting with a Resistance contact, they had used a psalm as a prayer: “Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me, for in you I take refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.”

  Miriam played Tchaikovsky’s haunting theme, still grieving for Abba. “Why wouldn’t he come with us?” she asked again and again.

  “He couldn’t have endured this,” Avi explained after the Gestapo returned for yet another surprise raid. “He didn’t want to ruin our chances for survival. I think your mother knew the same thing. I think that’s why she didn’t leave Cologne with you.”

  The air in the stifling attic made it difficult to breathe. She and Avi lived up here all the time now. The Gestapo came at random times, each unannounced visit heart-stopping. Professor Huizenga had installed a buzzer near the front door that rang in the attic to warn them when they needed to hide. So far, the heavy pounding on the door alerted them, but what if the Nazis decided to knock softly and catch them by surprise? Or if a nosy neighbor came?

  Miriam couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept soundly or had gone outside in the daylight and fresh air. How lovely it would be to walk along the canals again and sit beneath the trees. And how lovely it would be to feel warm sunlight on her face again. But Miriam and Avi were too frightened to even sit outside in the tiny backyard after dark, fearing the neighbors would see them, fearing the Gestapo would return. If they kept the attic window open, they could sometimes glimpse stars through the canopy of trees at night.

  “We’re not trying to get rid of you,” Professor Huizenga had said when they’d made the decision to contact the Resistance. “But you need a better place to hide, a safer place. The Americans are still a long way from freeing Europe, and you can’t live this way much longer.” He didn’t say it, but the Gestapo raids and the possibility of being discovered were taking a toll on everyone, especially Eloise.

  Miriam had just begun playing the theme from Mendelssohn’s violin concerto when she heard the attic door open and footsteps ascending the stairs. “I’m back,” Ans said. “Come downstairs and I’ll tell you and the Huizengas what I’ve learned.”

  “Is it good news?” Avi asked as he lifted the sleeping baby.

  Ans exhaled. “It’s hard news.”

  They gathered in the Huizengas’ bedroom, a frilly, ethereal space that seemed to Miriam like something from a fairy tale. She had slept in a pretty bedroom like this in her grandmother’s house in Cologne. She wondered if Elisheva would ever be able to sleep peacefully in a room of her own. Avi laid the baby on the bed and sat beside her, patting her gently so she wouldn’t wake up. Miriam was too nervous to sit, ready to run at any moment to their attic hideaway.

  Eloise sat in a chair by the window, the closed curtains ruffling gently in the warm breeze. She appeared calm today as she waited for Ans to tell them what she’d learned. Her moods seemed to swing wildly up and down, seldom settling in the middle, and she either raced around expending nervous energy and typing reports and editorials, or sat staring at nothing. Her husband and Ans knew how to keep her stable, but Miriam sometimes wondered if the war might drive all of them crazy.

  “Tell us what you learned, Ans,” Professor Huizenga said. “We’re all hoping you have good news.” He’d just returned from work and stood beside his wife, his hand caressing her shoulder. He no longer worked at the university. Even after the Nazis reopened it, the faculty and students had chosen to let its doors be closed for good rather than sign the loyalty oaths the Nazis demanded. “It’s the first time Leiden University has closed since its founding in 1575,” he’d told them. The professor’s older brother, a banker, had offered Herman a job rather than allow the Nazis to send him to a work camp.

  Ans seemed nervous as she prepared to explain what she’d learned. “The good news is that the
y’re willing to find a safer hiding place for you. The Resistance will provide false ID cards for you without the J. But I’m sorry to say that the three of you can’t stay together.”

  Miriam’s lungs squeezed as if gripped by a giant fist.

  “But surely Miriam and the baby can remain together, can’t they?” Avi asked.

  Ans shook her head. “I’m so sorry . . .”

  Miriam sank down on the bed beside Avi, her thoughts whirling. “But . . . Elisheva is still nursing! She needs me!”

  “I know; I know. But you and Avi will need to hide in out-of-the-way places, and you may be moved around a lot. The biggest obstacle to finding a permanent place is that you’re not Dutch. Your accents give you away. Dutch Jews can hide as servants or evacuees, and they’re familiar enough with this country to pass interrogation. But as soon as you speak, they’ll know who you are.”

  “And the baby?” Miriam wheezed. “Where will she go?”

  “I’m going to take her to my parents’ farm, where she’ll be safe. We all know how hard it’s been to confine her and keep her quiet. She can’t grow up properly if she’s hidden away. The safest place for her is in the countryside. The Resistance can provide papers saying that she’s an orphan.”

  Miriam moaned.

  “I know it’s going to be hard,” Ans said, kneeling in front of her. “But my parents will raise her and love her like their own daughter until the war is over. They’re wonderful people, and Elisheva will be safe there. She’ll have plenty of food and milk to drink, and she can run and play outside with my sister, Maaike, in the sunshine and fresh air.”

  Miriam lowered her face into her hands and wept. Everything Ans said was true. But how could she leave her baby? And her husband? Avi wrapped his arms around her, rocking her. His body shook with his sobs. The room was silent for a few minutes, then Eloise spoke.

  “Tell your Resistance contact that while Herman and I may not be able to hide Miriam and Avi, we could hide Dutch Jews posing as maids or a nurse.”