Page 2

Haarlem, The Netherlands

EVI

Evi Strobel watched the three German schnellboat s race quickly toward shore.

“Evi, hurry your breakfast, ja ?”

She glanced across the small barge kitchen, saw Mam packing powdered milk and tins of sardines into a brown leather satchel. Another poor soul fleeing Hitler’s wrath would soon be secreted in the hold of the old yellow barge.

She returned her gaze to the approaching schnellboats, sleek and fitted with torpedoes. They neared the shore in perfect precision. Her breath stopped in her throat.

They have no reason to board, she told herself. But she watched, rapt, the swell of the River Spaarne rising under her as they veered north, away from the pier. Only then did she let out a ragged breath.

Mam, apparently, had not seen or heard the commotion.

“We will need you at the Dans Hal this afternoon, Evi. Right after school. You won’t forget? ”

Evi nodded, though she barely heard the words. The schnellboats would likely tie up a few kilometers up shore – a restricted wharf where Nazi seamen would unload provisions the likes of which Hollanders had not seen or tasted in years.

Her mouth watered at the remembered taste of stroopwaffel and chocolat, and her mother’s delectable puff pastry in the days before sugar became a prize.

She was not sure which she hated more, the constant fear that any day could be your last on this earth or that the Nazis had been slowly starving them to death for four long years.

The bastards would likely drive the lot to the old vegetable market in the stadsplein , in the city center, which the SS had long ago commandeered for their headquarters. Evi had watched them once, unloading cured hams tied with string, and big sacks of flour and sugar.

Her stomach rumbled. Air raid sirens had brought her awake more than once during the night, and it was harder and harder to go back to sleep when her stomach ached with hunger.

“Evi, did you hear me?” Lotte’s voice was sharp.

“I hear you, Mam. I’m ready.”

She swept crumbs into her teacup – the last few bits of a tasteless cracker Mam had managed to concoct from rolled oats and water.

“All right, Mam, I am on my way. I will see you later at the Dans Hal.”

That she was needed meant there were underground messages for her to deliver to Resistance volunteers – altered identification papers, perhaps, or packets of stolen ration cards.

It irked her that she was not doing more vital work, but it was the one good thing about looking younger than her sixteen years.

Even with contraband stowed in her schoolbag, she was less likely to be stopped at a German checkpoint.

“ Goed , then,” Mam waved distractedly. “Be off then , lieveling . Try to have a good day at school.”

Grabbing her book bag from a hook by the door, Evi ducked slightly to exit the narrow doorway of the barge and climbed the three steps to the pier.

A stiff breeze, cold for early November, sent a shiver through her small frame.

She hoped the gray wool sweater she had chosen would see her through the afternoon.

She blended into the crowd of students, merchants, and fishermen jostling for space along the narrow walkway, off to pursue whatever passed for normal in the midst of daily chaos.

She glanced at the street lamp where, for so many mornings, she had met up with Sissi Weissbauer. She stared for a moment, then moved on.

She had been nearing her fourteenth birthday, three years ago in February, when the world fell off its axis.

The Germans had begun purging thousands of Jews from all over the Netherlands, whole families disappearing into Nazi hell – as though barring them from nearly everything and making them wear yellow stars on their clothing were not enough to torment them.

But Sissi….

Evi had held out hope for many mornings, one day walking past the Weissbauers’ shuttered tailor shop, peering through the dusty glass. But it was silent inside…and dark.

She remembered the uproar in that winter of 1940, the riots in the streets as thousands went on strike to protest the round-up of their Dutch Jewish neighbors.

But the Germans had only multiplied their sweep, openly shooting dissenters in the street, and sending trains full of Dutch Jews to near certain death.

She moved more quickly as the crowd dispersed, making her way around an ugly, bombed-out crater near the turnoff to the old school road that had not been there the day before.

Nothing in that long ago February had shaken Mam’s decision to deepen her commitment to the Resistance – nor had it stopped Papa from leaving them because of it – and it hadn’t stopped Evi from siding with Mam, no matter that it put them both at risk.

She walked past a pair of SS lieutenants standing to the side of a horse chestnut tree, their black boots half-buried in an avalanche of dried, fallen leaves.

In their brown tunics and field caps, faces half- hidden by deep visors, the Germans seemed indistinguishable one from the other. They nodded stiffly as she passed.

She was past them when she heard her name.

“Evi!”

Annemarie Haan came up swiftly on her left. “ Goedemorgen , Evi! May I walk with you?”

She shrugged at the lower-level student, a skinny, freckled, redhead whose mother helped assemble Het Parool , the underground newspaper, at the Dans Hal.

“Quickly, then,” she said.

Annemarie scowled. “You heard the air raids last night…”

Evi nodded.

“More holes in the streets, and the guards pay no mind. They scare me, those Germans. I hate them.”

“You are young, innocent, and not Jewish, Annemarie. They are not apt to bother with you.”

“Still. I hate them.”

“There is reason to hate them. Just don’t be shouting it about.”

The first bell sounded from the brick-fronted schoolhouse looming just ahead of them, small clusters of students jostling toward the entrance.

“Walk faster,” Evi said. “We’ll be late.”

With school buildings all over Haarlem commandeered by the Nazis, the school once meant only for upper-level students now took up the overflow of younger children with nowhere else to go. AnnMarie hung back the last few yards.

Sophie Van der Oost, in her old blue corduroy jumper, gestured wildly near the entrance. “Evi, you are nearly late.”

“I know. I did not sleep well last night – and Annemarie slowed me down.”

“Who can sleep with sirens blaring – and bombs going off half the night?”

The second bell sounded as they stepped into the building. Annemarie took off down the hall .

“Did you hear?” Sophie lowered her voice. “The Germans are cutting gas usage to two hours a day!”

Evi shrugged. Mam had told her so last night.

“How are we to keep warm with winter coming on?”

“Likely they will cut the power again as well.”

Sophie groaned.

“Shh . Keep your voice down. There are spies everywhere. Even here.”

She hoisted her bookbag over her shoulder and hurried down the hall, wondering why she bothered when classes were hit-and-miss at best and surely there was more important work she could be doing...

ZOE

It had been a busy morning. By half past eleven, Dr. Zoe Visser had treated an ear infection in a squirmy little beagle pup, diagnosed kidney failure in a cat with a distended stomach, and performed emergency surgery to repair the hind leg of a little dachshund who hadn’t been fast enough to get past the wheels of a moving car.

The dachsie was resting comfortably and would likely be fine, Zoe reflected, scrubbing out of the pet kliniek’s OR. Medications were hard to come by these days, but the cat was young and otherwise healthy enough to survive, and perhaps even to reverse the kidney failure.

In all, the outcomes had been mostly positive, and she was more than ready for her lunch break. Shrugging off her white jacket, she slipped into the old gray coat she had taken with her to university.

“I will be back in an hour, Lise,” she told the receptionist.

“Not a problem,” the girl said. “Short of another emergency, no appointments until one, and Dr. Mulder should be back soon from Amsterdam. He went in this morning for supplies.”

Zoe paused, pulling a woolen cap over tawny curls. She had not been aware that Daan had gone to Amsterdam. There would likely be work for her to do tonight.

.. .

Walking into the wind, she put her hands in her pockets and made her way past a deserted playground to the other end of the stadsplein , the heels of her practical black oxfords sounding dully on the cobblestones.

She walked quickly, past the frankly appraising stares of the SS officers standing about, and turned into a market street hastily put together after the Nazis had commandeered the old market hall.

Two more shops, she saw – a juice vendor and a kaffie shop she’d patronized over the years – were closed and boarded up. Zoe felt the air sucked out of her. More food shops forced to close because they had no goods to sell.

She passed the green grocer’s, glanced at half-filled crates of carrots, potatoes, and beets, a few winter melons, and wilting heads of cabbage available to those who could afford them.

More than four years into a war thrust upon them had made more and more Hollanders – even those like her parents, who had never before put a hoe to the soil – dependent on what they could grow themselves, or catch.

Zoe shivered in her woolen coat. With the cold descending, the Nazis commandeering the lion’s share of food, and spring planting months away, the last of even these meager crops would soon be gone. God help us, she silently mouthed the words , to survive till winter’s end .