Authors: R. D. Rosen
When her brother, Herman, was soon conscripted to a German work camp, he was the first of their family to go into hiding. A Jesuit priest they knew arranged for him to live with a Christian family in The Hague. One night after school, he simply ripped off his star and walked to his new home. The priest would not tell his mother its location. An official letter arrived shortly after, instructing Carla and her family to take the trolley to the train station a few days hence, from which they would be taken to Westerbork for “relocation.” Herta immediately contacted the priest, begging him to send her and Carla to the same family Herman had joined.
The next night Carla’s mother made her take off her vest with the yellow Star of David sewn on it. Carla was afraid. At first she had been proud of the star, proud to be Jewish. Then she became so accustomed to wearing the proof of her Judaism that she barely noticed it anymore. It was as much a part of her as her dark hair, and, ironically, she felt exposed without it.
“When we get outside,” her mother said after they packed their bags, “I want you to just drop it in the gutter. From now on, you’re no longer Jewish.”
The two of them walked alone, along the trolley tracks, until they came to a house right by the trolley. To Carla it hardly seemed like a place to hide, but, sure enough, Herman was waiting inside for them, along with Mrs. Van Nooyen, the owner of the house, and the foster son who lived with her. Carla’s relief at having a safe haven soured soon enough as the three Heijmans crowded into a small, dark, stuffy room in the tiny apartment. They had to avoid all windows and ask permission to go to the bathroom. Carla’s asthmatic brother Herman was under strict instructions from Mrs. Van Nooyen to wheeze and cough only while muffled by blankets, for fear that the neighbors would turn her, and them, in.
At times Carla felt there was nothing to do but watch the minutes pass. At least Mrs. Van Nooyen could cook. Her kidney bean soup almost made life bearable. The most priceless diversion in their tight quarters was a dictionary that helped relieve the mixture of boredom and fear that now ruled their lives. The only good thing that could be said so far about the Third Reich was that it led to a rapid expansion of the two children’s vocabulary.
After just three months—though it already felt like a dark and idle eternity to Carla—Mrs. Van Nooyen’s foster son knocked on their door one morning to tell them that their presence had been discovered by neighbors and that they would have to leave immediately. As plausible as this was, they all suspected that having two quietly bickering teenagers hiding in her little apartment, one of them asthmatic, had simply proven to be too much. The real mystery was why Mrs. Van Nooyen had agreed to shelter them in the first place. How badly did she need the small amounts of money they could pay her? Only later would they learn from a priest that she felt she had sinned quite a lot in her life and that she believed that hiding a Jewish family would be just the thing to restore God’s confidence in her. However, her anxiety over past transgressions was no match for the reality of risking her life for total strangers.
The Jesuit priest made new arrangements, and one night, after being engulfed by Mrs. Van Nooyen’s farewell embraces, Carla, Herman, and their mother were on the street again in the dark, this time headed to the Haag train station. They had not been outside the apartment for three months and the life of the city was a jolt to their systems. The trolleys startled her. The streetlights alarmed her. Carla felt unseen neighbors scrutinizing them from darkened windows. Even without their yellow stars, she wondered if it was obvious they were Jews. At last they were on a train for the short ride to the city of Delft, with directions to their new home, an apartment over a barbershop.
The apartment was bigger, but so was the family. The Van Geenens—it was Walter’s barbershop; his wife, Corrie, was the beautician—already had seven children, most of them hungry teenagers. Mr. and Mrs. van Geenen slept in the dining room while Carla, her brother, mother, and the van Geenens’ eldest daughter stayed in the front room on the third floor. The other six children were scattered in the third floor’s other bedroom and in the hallway just outside. Why had this good couple, who didn’t have enough space for their own brood, taken in three Jews? It was not something anyone talked about, yet it didn’t take long for the Heijmans family to discover that the bespectacled, chain-smoking Walter van Geenan was a very unusual man.
“What’s three more?” he’d say at the dinner table, where he didn’t expect them to say grace with the rest of the family. He actually seemed to relish the challenge of defying Nazi orders. Referring to the German soldiers among his barbershop clientele, he said, brandishing a phantom straight razor, “When they come in for a shave, I’m the one with the upper hand!”
Although Carla, her mother, and her brother were largely confined to their room on the third floor, from time to time they might be helping Corrie van Geenan in the kitchen on the second floor when Walter would come up the stairs from the shop, whispering that one of his German customers needed to use the toilet. This was the Heijmans family’s cue to retreat soundlessly to the third floor and remain there until well after they heard the toilet flush.
While Walter seemed to take their intrusion in stride, Corrie van Geenen was quietly oppressed by their presence, and unhappy about stretching food meant for nine to feed twelve. She never said anything, but her lower lip quivered when she thought no one was looking.
There couldn’t have been less privacy in their situation; not only was everybody on top of one another, but the house sat on a square that became a sheep and pig market once a week, so the opportunities for being discovered were never ending. The Heijmans family was hiding in a busy house in one of the busiest parts of town above a barbershop where Nazis came and went daily.
After only a month with the van Geenens, the Heijmans family found out just how close they had come to being discovered at their previous sanctuary, with Mrs. Van Nooyen. Word filtered from The Hague that a neighbor in the same stairwell as the Van Nooyens’ apartment had recently been betrayed—not for hiding people, but for hiding Jewish property—and taken away. It seemed to confirm that the Heijmanses hadn’t actually been “discovered” while they were there, but rather that Mrs. Van Nooyen just couldn’t take the stress of hiding them any longer. But what a stroke of good fortune that seemed now; another two or three weeks and the Germans surely would have found them.
Herman soon discovered that the neighbors’ radio, tuned to the BBC, could be heard through the wall of the van Geenens’ toilet. He began to spend more time there than was necessary and would emerge armed with news of the latest German atrocity or Nazi propaganda. To put this new information to use, and to relieve his boredom, Herman would occasionally pick political arguments with the van Geenen teenagers, which frightened Carla. Would the van Geenens throw them all out? Why couldn’t Herman keep his mouth shut when even the youngest van Geenen children knew better than to say anything about there being Jews in the house? How much longer would it be before someone tipped off the Germans? What were the odds that all three of them would survive this mess? The growling sound of every truck coming down the street could mean disaster. In any case, Herman’s pugnacity just made Carla even more committed to remaining a good girl who said as little as possible.
German soldiers came to the apartment once searching for blankets, and twice to look for boys over sixteen to work in German munitions factories. On one of those occasions, Herman escaped with one of the van Geenen sons to a neighbor’s apartment, whose owner, a carpenter, had built a false wall. Walter van Geenen often knew about these searches in advance from contacts in the Dutch Resistance. Another time he arranged for the Heijmanses to walk alone at night to a Catholic church, where the priest concealed them for two or three days in the sacristy, except during Mass, when he instructed them to participate as if they were congregants. The three of them rejoiced not only in the interruption of their tense routine, but also in the entertainment that the church services provided after months of sensory deprivation. The “Kyrie,” “Gloria,” and “Credo” were joys transcending all religion. And yet, being in church reminded them that, through the accident of being born Jews, they lived on the edge of deportation and death while for the rest of Delft it was business, and religion, as usual.
For the most part, though, their lives at the van Geenens’ were so tedious that sleep itself was cherished, since it reduced the number of hours that had to be filled and gave them a break from the fear and boredom that saturated their days. During daylight hours, they couldn’t look out a window, walk around the third floor, or even use the toilet, for fear they would be heard and reported by the nosy Dutch collaborators who surrounded them. In the stifling vacuum of their existence, Carla and her mother savored every chore. They peeled potatoes, chopped cabbage, and helped with the cooking, careful always to stay away from the windows. They helped Mrs. van Geenen darn the endless parade of worn-out socks produced by nine children. Carla learned to knit. The van Geenens were not big readers—the house was devoid of books—so Carla, her mother, and even Herman had no choice but to read and reread the romance novels that the eldest daughter, also named Corrie, took out of the library for them.
Most of the Heijmans family’s conversations consisted of reminiscing about the past. They talked so endlessly of what had been, about who had once said what to whom, and when and why, that their hosts could barely stand to hear it. They even bored themselves. New experiences, though usually the product of some fresh threat to their existence, at least gave them something new to talk about. Once, when Walter was warned of an impending house search, he hustled the three Heijmanses into the attic of a neighbor’s house. The three of them silently followed the owner up a narrow staircase and entered the dimly lit gabled attic. There in the gloom, blinking like some surprised nocturnal animal, was a poor, unshaven soul in a soiled shirt and suit pants cinched around his diminishing waist by a length of rope.
The man introduced himself. “I was a banker in Amsterdam before all this. Besides the visits from my hosts, I have been here alone for almost a year. Anyway, welcome. I wish I had something to offer you,” he added with a dry cackle. “I’m afraid I can’t even offer you enough chairs.”
Carla was shocked to see another Jew in hiding, and so nearby; she had come to think of her mother, brother, and herself as sole survivors of a catastrophe. She could barely remember life before hiding, and she couldn’t imagine there would be life after it. She no longer thought much about Fanny or her other friends who had simply disappeared what seemed ages ago. But now it occurred to her that a big X-ray of Delft would reveal dozens of Jews secreted everywhere. There were dramas just like theirs going on in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. And surely elsewhere. Carla tried to imagine the staggering complexities of history, the manipulations of the masses, the forces invisible to little girls and even barbers and bankers, that had produced this disaster.
The banker asked them for news, and Herman was only too glad to tell him of the Russians’ production of over a thousand tanks a month, but also of huge losses and famine. Their soldiers weren’t very well trained, but there were lots of them, and the Germans were suffering horrendous defeats.
The banker nodded, playing with the knot of the rope that held his trousers up. Here, at last, was someone Carla could feel sorry for besides herself, her brother, and her mother. Gratefulness for having her family welled up inside her. No one asked the banker about his own. No one wanted to ask the question, and no one wanted to hear the answer.
After they were able to return to the van Geenens’, Corrie would silently serve up soup and boiled potatoes. Carla watched as she tremblingly passed a serving dish at dinner. She felt too guilty to meet Mrs. van Geenen’s eyes, although she seldom looked at Carla anyway. Carla retreated further and further inside herself, becoming in her own mind a mouse: timid, silent, invisible, yet always scared, always listening for trucks, for the sound of boot heels, imagining the Nazis getting their sideburns squared away in Mr. van Geenen’s barber chair. His Nazi customers, if they knew of their presence, would think nothing of imprisoning or deporting every last person in the van Geenen household. Death was like the thirteenth person in the household, crowding out all other thoughts, making it hard to breathe.
They had meant to stay with the van Geenens only a few months, while the underground came up with another hiding place for them, but a year and a half passed before Carla was able to get out of the house. When Mrs. van Geenen’s sister in Delft had a baby girl, Mr. van Geenen put a scarf on Carla’s head and walked her there to help out for six weeks, during which the new mother looked frightened every minute. Other times, especially during the merciless “Hongerwinter” of 1944 to 1945, Carla would venture out in the cold to pry precious bits of coal out of the asphalt with a kitchen knife.
Throughout, Mr. van Geenen remained as friendly as always, but Mrs. van Geenen continued to suffer visibly under the stress, particularly when her oldest son, Walter, received a letter demanding that he leave for a work camp in Germany. They all knew that, had the family not been hiding Jews, Walter might have hid or run away, but defying the order would bring the Germans around to investigate. Walter Jr. had no choice but to go. Apart from the parents’ agreement to risk their lives for strangers in the first place, it was by far the biggest sacrifice any of them had made. So Walter went to Germany, and not long after, the eldest girl, Corrie, decided abruptly to marry and left the house as well.
When the parents and their remaining children said grace before dinner, Carla almost couldn’t bear it. She too wanted to pray to the God of people as good as the van Geenens, people who asked nothing of them, but who had given them, for more than a year, the daily gift of possible survival.