The Hiding Place (17 page)

“No, leave my place,” Mr. Smit instructed. “Why shouldn't you have a guest for lunch? The lady and the little girl could have stayed, too.”

At last we were seated again and silence reigned upstairs.

The whole process had taken four minutes.

A little later we were all gathered again around the dining room table. Mr. Smit set out before him the incriminating evidence he had found: two spoons and a piece of carrot on the stairs, pipe ashes in an “unoccupied” bedroom. Everyone looked at Eusie who blushed to the tips of his large ears.

“Also those,” he pointed to the hats of mother and daughter still dangling from the pegs on the dining room wall. “If you have to hide, stop and think what you arrived with. Besides which, you're all simply too slow.”

The next night I sounded the alarm again and this time we shaved a minute thirty-three seconds off our run. By our fifth trial we were down to two minutes. We never did achieve Pickwick's ideal of under a minute, but with practice we learned to jump up from whatever we were doing and get those who had to hide in the secret room in seventy seconds. Father, Toos, and I worked on “stalling techniques,” which we would use if the Gestapo came through the shop door; Betsie invented a similar strategy for the side door. With those delaying tactics we hoped we could gain a life-saving seventy ticks of a second hand.

Because the drills struck so close to the fear that haunted each of our guests—never spoken, always present—we tried to keep these times from becoming altogether serious. “Like a game!” we'd tell each other: “a race to beat our own record!” One of our group owned the bakery in the next street. Early in the month I would deposit a supply of sugar coupons with him. Then when I decided it was time for a drill, I would go to him for a bag of cream puffs—an inexpressible treat in those sweetless days—to be secreted in my workbench and brought out as a reward for a successful practice.

Each time the order of cream puffs was larger. For by now, in addition to the workers whom we wanted to initiate into the system, we had three more permanent boarders: Thea Dacosta, Meta Monsanto, and Mary Itallie.

Mary Itallie, at seventy-six the oldest of our guests, was also the one who posed the greatest problem. The moment Mary stepped through our door I heard the asthmatic wheezing which had made other hosts unwilling to take her in.

Since her ailment compromised the safety of the others, we took up the problem in caucus. The seven most concerned—Eusie, Jop, Henk, Leendert, Meta, Thea, and Mary herself—joined Father, Betsie, and me in Tante Jans's front room.

“There is no sense in pretending,” I began. “Mary has a difficulty—especially after climbing stairs—that could put you all in danger.”

In the silence that followed, Mary's labored breathing seemed especially loud.

“Can I speak?” Eusie asked.

“Of course.”

“It seems to me that we're all here in your house because of some difficulty or other. We're the orphan children—the ones nobody else wanted. Any one of us is jeopardizing all the others. I vote that Mary stay.”

“Good,” said lawyer Henk, “let's put it to the vote.”

Hands began rising but Mary was struggling to speak. “Secret ballots,” she brought out at last. “No one should be embarrassed.”

Henk brought a sheet of paper from the desk in the next room and tore it into nine small strips. “You too,” he said, handing ballots to Betsie, Father, and me. “If we're discovered, you suffer the same as us.”

He handed around pencils. “Mark ‘No' if it's too great a risk, ‘Yes' if you think she belongs here.”

For a moment pencils scratched, then Henk collected the folded ballots. He opened them in silence, then reached over and dropped them into Mary's lap.

Nine little scraps of paper, nine times the word, “Yes.”

A
ND SO OUR
“family” was formed. Others stayed with us a day or a week, but these seven remained, the nucleus of our happy household.

That it could have been happy, at such a time and in such circumstances, was largely a tribute to Betsie. Because our guests' physical lives were so very restricted, evenings under Betsie's direction became the door to the wide world. Sometimes we had concerts, with Leendert on the violin, and Thea, a truly accomplished musician, on the piano. Or Betsie would announce “an evening of Vondel” (the Dutch Shakespeare), with each of us reading a part. One night a week she talked Eusie into giving Hebrew lessons, another night Meta taught Italian.

© Hans Poley/Nederlands fotomuseum, Rotterdam

The Beje family in 1943, consisting of Corrie, Father, Betsie (third from right), Jewish guests, and Dutch underground workers.

The evening's activity had to be kept brief because the city now had electricity only a short while each night, and candles had to be hoarded for emergencies. When the lamps flickered and dimmed, we would wind back down to the dining room where my bicycle was set up on its stand. One of us would climb onto it, and others taking chairs, and then while the rider pedaled furiously to make the headlight glow bright, someone would pick up the chapter from the night before. We changed cyclist and reader often as legs or voice grew tired, reading our way through histories, novels, plays.

Father always went upstairs after prayers at 9:15, but the rest of us lingered, reluctant to break the circle, sorry to see the evening end. “Oh well,” Eusie would say hopefully as we started at last to our rooms. “Maybe there'll be a drill tonight! I haven't had a cream puff in nearly a week.”

8
Storm Clouds Gather

I
f evenings were pleasant, daytimes grew increasingly tense. We were too big; the group was too large, the web too widespread. For a year and a half now we had gotten away with our double lives. Ostensibly we were still an elderly watchmaker living with his two spinster daughters above his tiny shop. In actuality the Beje was the center of an underground ring that spread now to the farthest corners of Holland. Here daily came dozens of workers, reports, appeals. Sooner or later we were going to make a mistake.

It was mealtimes especially when I worried. There were so many now for every meal that we had to set the chairs diagonally around the dining room table. The cat loved this arrangement. Eusie had given him the Hebrew name
Maher Shalal Hashbaz
, meaning appropriately enough, “hastening to the spoils, hurrying to the prey.” With the chairs set so close, M. S. Hashbaz could circle the entire table on our shoulders, purring furiously, traveling round and round.

But I was uneasy at being so many. The dining room was only five steps above street-level; a tall passerby could see right in the window. We'd hung a white curtain across it providing a kind of screen while letting in light. Still, only when the heavy blackout shades were drawn at night did I feel truly private.

At lunch one day, looking through the thin curtain, I thought I saw a figure standing just outside in the alley. When I looked again a minute later it was still there. There was no reason for anyone to linger there unless he was curious about what went on in the Beje. I got up and parted the curtain an inch.

Standing a few feet away, seemingly immobilized by some terrible emotion, was old Katrien from Nollie's house!

I bolted down the stairs, threw open the door, and pulled her inside. Although the August day was hot, the old lady's hands were cold as ice. “Katrien! What are you doing here? Why were you just standing there?”

“She's gone mad!” she sobbed. “Your sister's gone mad!”

“Nollie? Oh, what's happened!”

“They came!” she said. “The S. D.! I don't know what they knew or who told them. Your sister and Annaliese were in the living room and I heard her!” The sobs broke out again. “I heard her!”

“Heard what?” I nearly screamed.

“Heard what she told them! They pointed at Annaliese and said, ‘Is this a Jew?' And your sister said, ‘Yes.'”

I felt my knees go weak. Annaliese, blonde, beautiful young Annaliese with the perfect papers. And she'd trusted us! Oh Nollie, Nollie, what has your rigid honesty done! “And then?” I asked.

“I don't know. I ran out the back door. She's gone mad!”

I left Katrien in the dining room, wheeled my bicycle down the stairs, and bumped as fast as I could the mile and a half to Nollie's. Today the sky did not seem larger above the Wagenweg. At the corner of Bos en Hoven Straat, I leaned my bike against a lamppost and stood panting, my heart throbbing in my throat. Then, as casually as I was able, I strolled up the sidewalk toward the house. Except for a car parked at the street curb directly in front, everything looked deceptively normal. I walked past. Not a sound from behind the white curtains. Nothing to distinguish this house from the replicas of it on either side.

When I got to the corner I turned around. At that moment the door opened and Nollie came out. Behind her walked a man in a brown business suit. A minute later a second man appeared, half pulling, half supporting Annaliese. The young woman's face was white as chalk; twice before they reached the car, I thought she would faint. The car doors slammed, the motor roared, and they were gone.

I pedaled back to the Beje fighting back tears of anxiety. Nollie, we soon learned, had been taken to the police station around the corner, to one of the cells in back. But Annaliese had been sent to the old Jewish theater in Amsterdam from which Jews were transported to extermination camps in Germany and Poland.

It was Mietje, stooped, care-worn little Mietje, whose offer of help we had discounted, who kept us in touch with Nollie. She was in wonderful spirits, Mietje said, singing hymns and songs in her high sweet soprano.

How could she sing when she had betrayed another human being! Mietje delivered the bread that Betsie baked for Nollie each morning, and the blue sweater Nollie asked for, her favorite, with flowers embroidered over the pocket.

Mietje relayed another message from Nollie, one especially for me: “No ill will happen to Annaliese. God will not let them take her to Germany. He will not let her suffer because I obeyed Him.”

Six days after Nollie's arrest, the telephone rang. Pickwick's voice was on the other end. “I wonder, my dear, if I could trouble you to deliver that watch yourself?”

A message, then, that he could not relay over the phone. I biked at once out to Aerdenhout, taking along a man's watch for safe measure.

Pickwick waited until we were in the drawing room with the door shut. “The Jewish theater in Amsterdam was broken into last night. Forty Jews were rescued. One of them—a young woman—was most insistent that Nollie know: ‘Annaliese is free.'”

He fixed me with one of his wide-set eyes. “Do you understand this message?”

I nodded, too overcome with relief and joy to speak. How had Nollie known? How had she been so sure?

A
FTER TEN DAYS
in the Haarlem jail, Nollie was transferred to the federal prison in Amsterdam.

Pickwick said that the German doctor in charge of the prison hospital was a humane man who occasionally arranged a medical discharge. I went at once to Amsterdam to see him. But what could I say, I wondered, as I waited in the entrance hall of his home. How could I get into the good graces of this man?

Lolling about the foyer, sniffing from time to time at my legs and hands, were three perfectly huge Doberman pinschers. I remembered the book we were reading aloud by bicycle lamp,
How to Win Friends
and Influence People
. One of the techniques advocated by Dale Carnegie was: find the man's hobby.
Hobby, dogs . . . I wonder . . .

At last the maid returned and showed me into a small sitting room. “How smart of you, Doctor!” I said in German to the grizzle-haired man on the sofa.

“Smart?”

“Yes, to bring these lovely dogs with you. They must be good company when you have to be away from your family.”

The doctor's face brightened. “You like dogs then?”

About the only dogs I had ever known were Harry de Vries' bulldogs. “Bulls are my favorite. Do you like bulls?”

“People don't realize it,” the doctor said eagerly, “but bulldogs are very affectionate.”

For perhaps ten minutes, while I racked my brain for everything I had ever heard or read on the subject, we talked about dogs. Then abruptly the doctor stood up. “But I'm sure you haven't come here to talk about dogs. What's on your mind?”

I met his eyes. “I have a sister in prison here in Amsterdam. I was wondering if . . . I don't think she's well.”

The doctor smiled. “So, you aren't interested in dogs at all.”

“I'm interested now,” I said, smiling, too. “But I'm far more interested in my sister.”

“What's her name?”

“Nollie van Woerden.”

The doctor went out of the room and came back with a brown notebook. “Yes. One of the recent arrivals. Tell me something about her. What is she in prison for?”