Page 112 of Winter’s End

Evi cocked her head. “Really?”

“Yes…I’ve been trying to find out more about for my own beginnings, and Doctor Visser thought perhaps you could help.”

Her eyes widened. “And how is that?”

He leaned back in his chair, brows slightly furrowed, gave her a quick half-smile. “Well…all I know about my birth, really, is that it was sometime late in 1944 – or perhaps early in 1945 – and that I was found by a fisherman, screaming my head off, on an old. abandoned barge somewhere off the coast of Rotterdam…”

Evi felt the blood drain from her face.

Now the man leaned forward, concern on his face. “Mrs. Reese – are you alright?”

Evi worked to find her voice. When she did, it was little more than a whisper. “Lieve god…baby Jacob,” she whispered finally.

She sat forward, grasped both the man’s hands and looked into his earnest dark eyes.

“You are Jacob Rood,” her voice was soft. “Your name is Jacob Rood.”

Now the man sat perfectly still, his mouth falling open.

Evi took a shaky breath. “You were born to a Jewish mother sometime in the last week of January of 1945, I think. What I know from my own mother is that your mother died while hiding from the Germans, with you and other Jewish refugees, in one of the old limestone caves near Limburg…”

Evi became aware of a growing stillness in the room. But all she could see was the rapt face of Anton/Jacob. “My mother, who worked for the Dutch Resistance, rescued you and brought you home in that barge.”

The words spilled out of her. “You were no more than two or three weeks old, and amazingly robust in spite of being malnourished – but there was something wrong with your hip – or your leg. We thought you needed medical help…”

The man who had been baby Jacob seemed to hang on every word.

She told him of Mam’s resolve to get him to Belgium, where she could be sure no doctor would report him to the Germans for being Jewish. “You had been circumcised, you see…”

He nodded.

“And so, we headed south in the barge, toward Belgium – a route my mother had navigated many times, ferrying Jewish escapees toward the border…”

Her voice broke as she told him of the Nazis ambushing the barge, murdering her mother in cold blood – and of her own very narrow escape.

“We could both have been killed that day by the Nazis,” she said. “In fact…I was certain you could not possibly have survived…”

“I would have died,” he said, sitting perfectly still, “if your mother hadn’t somehow concealed me – or if my father – I mean the man who found me and raised me - had not heard me wailing in that barge. He found me hidden in a small compartment beneath the controls…”

Anneke was the one to break the silence. “Oma,” she said. “You never talk about those days – how you and Opa escaped from Haarlem, or how you came to America….”

Evi covered her mouth with her hands, rocked slowly in her chair. Then she rose and left the room. When she returned, she held in her hands a blue knit cap, with a yellow butterfly on its side.

Zoe gasped when she saw it.

“This is all I have to remind me of that day,” she said softly. “My mother – my dear Mam, God rest her soul – made this for me on our last Christmas together. I wore it on the day Jacob and I left Haarlem…”

In the silence, Evi took a deep breath. “We left in a little motorboat on a chilly morning in March of 1945, hoping, foolishly perhaps, to make our way through the North Sea and into the English Channel…”

She felt the spring of grateful tears. “We were fortunate,” she said. “The seas were calm, and we were spotted and rescued by a British patrol boat somewhere in the Wadden sea on our second day out in the boat.”

She felt every eye in the room fastened upon her.

“By the time liberation came, in May of that year, I was already in this very kitchen, learning to bake challah with my mother-in-law, Jacob’s mother – watching freedom come to the Netherlands on a tiny, black-and-white television screen.”

She looked over at her eldest son. “I was already pregnant with you, Thomas, and learning to live as an American…”

She paused and looked at her oldest friend. “And you, Zoe? You went home?”