Simple Faith (3 page)

Armed with their new identity papers, Anja and her grandparents had fled their homeland for Belgium. Beth and Josef had followed a few months later after they learned they were expecting their first child. Not that Belgium was any safer. They lived hour to hour in the knowledge that at any moment they might be arrested. But it was easier to remain undiscovered in a larger city or in the isolated countryside where no one knew them than it was on an island where no matter what name they used the locals would know them by sight. And truly the only thing that mattered for Anja was that Daniel had a safe place to be with the nuns at the orphanage. The opportunity to spend even an hour with him was worth everything to her.

Still, once they settled in Belgium where her grandparents managed a small farm while she secured work as a nurse in Brussels, Anja was not content to simply lie low and wait for the war to end. Raised in the faith of the Society of Friends—Quakers like her friend Lisbeth—she was determined to do whatever she could to help others. In a time of war, such charity could get her arrested or shot. Working with Lisbeth and her husband, Josef—who had also adopted the Quaker faith—she had joined one of several underground organizations that ran escape lines for Allied airmen whose planes had been shot down over occupied Europe.

Although Josef was a doctor, he and Beth had decided that opening a small café in Brussels gave them more anonymity. The Gestapo would be looking for a doctor—they wanted Josef for more than his escape from Sobibor. They also wanted him for the connection he’d had to the White Rose resistance movement back in Munich—a group of German medical students who had dared to speak out against the Reich and in several cases paid for their actions with their lives. That did not deter Josef. He was determined to continue to do whatever he could to defeat what he viewed as a bunch of thugs who had taken control of his beloved homeland. It was through Josef and his connection to others in the Resistance that Anja had become involved. As perilous as it was for her, Anja had also felt called to take a stand against the evil forces that had taken the lives of her husband and daughter and made life a hell of uncertainty and fear for her son and her grandparents.

Her volunteer work with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee gave her a good cover for carrying food and messages to the safe houses the network had established in Brussels and the surrounding countryside. These were apartments, farmhouses, and in one case the country home of a wealthy beer baron where fugitives could stay until they could be safely moved to the next place. It was Anja’s job to secure safe houses, clothing, false documents, and food for the “evaders,” as those who had not been captured were called. The escape line ran for thousands of kilometers all the way from Belgium through occupied France, across the Pyrenees Mountains, and on to Spain, where the government walked a tightrope between appeasing the Nazis and trying to stay on the good side of the Allies. If the airmen managed to reach the British embassy in Madrid, they had a good chance of making it back to England.

In spite of Anja’s protests, her grandparents as well as Lisbeth had insisted on doing their part. Ailsa collected clothing from neighbors, telling them it was for those refugees who had fled their homes with nothing. Olaf had used his horse-drawn cart to move Allied airmen from the farm to town and the next safe house under the guise of bringing goods to market. Meanwhile, Josef had used his medical skills to treat wounds the evaders might have sustained as well as the colds and viruses they developed from having to hide outside in the cold.

As an American, Lisbeth should have gone home years earlier when the Nazis were allowing foreigners to leave, but instead she had given her passport to a woman she knew only slightly—a Jewish woman who would surely have been arrested and sent to one of the camps if she had stayed. Even after Josef had gotten her papers replaced, Lisbeth had continued to defy the government. Once she had literally saved Anja and her family. In fact, it was indirectly because of Lisbeth—and Josef—that Daniel had ended up safe in the orphanage. Anja shuddered to think what might have happened without their help.

The train from Brussels chugged on, unencumbered by the need to stop and wait. Outside it was completely dark. Anja was bone weary from working a double shift at the hospital and being up most of the last few nights moving the latest group of Canadians from one safe house to another, making sure they had the right clothes and identity papers, quieting their nerves about the necessity of being separated for the next leg of their journey into France, and reminding them again and again about the tricks Gestapo agents often used to catch an evader.

“They will ask for your documents, examine them, and all the while make conversation to each other in German. And then all of a sudden as they hand back your papers, they will say in English, ‘Have a good journey.’ Your instinct will be to say, ‘Thank you,’ but you must feign confusion as if you have no idea what they spoke in English. Otherwise you are caught.”

Every time she turned a group of these young airmen over to the next contact on the line, Anja worried. They were so young, so very trusting, so very afraid. And every time she knew that their fate was now in the hands of others—people whose names even she did not know because the danger was so great and it was better to have less information in case she was brought in for questioning—and she prayed again. She remembered all the young airmen she had encountered—their names, their faces, their stories. They shared a great deal with her on those occasions when she visited to bring them food or clothing or news. They were very eager to talk once they realized she spoke English. Most of the locals providing hiding places did not. So many stories. This one was supposed to marry his childhood sweetheart, and he was having second thoughts. Another was determined to make it back alive so that he could start a business. A third just wanted to get home so he could see his son—born in his absence.

Some of them were out there now. They might be walking through the fields she was passing or riding one of the bicycles the underground kept for them to use as they went from one village to the next. Some of them might be on this very train—crammed with her and other locals into the rear cars because the Nazis had taken over several cars for their exclusive use.

She rested her forehead against the window as she felt the train round a curve and the sleeping woman sitting next to her press against her. The train was crowded with people like her—men and women who worked in the city and made the journey home to the farms to visit family and help out whenever they could. All around her passengers clutched paper sacks or boxes wrapped with brown paper and string that no doubt held some special treat they had been able to get for their family—extra rations, a candy bar for the children, cigarettes or pipe tobacco, perhaps a piece of linen or lace. In her bag she carried a single orange for Daniel.

As the train wheezed and belched to a stop in the station, Anja waited for other passengers to press forward and fill the exits. Then she gathered her things and walked slowly to the door at the rear of her car. A railway worker was busy unloading luggage as she stepped onto the station platform. He wheeled his loaded cart past her, and as he did he slipped her a folded scrap of paper. They said nothing. Neither did they so much as make eye contact. But they knew one another. He was Mikel Sabarte, a refugee from the Basque region of Spain, a guide on the escape line, and a man who Anja suspected was in love with her.

They shared much in common. While Hitler had a particular hatred of Jews—including Anja’s late husband—the dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, had that same hatred of the Basque people. Once he took power, the Basques living in Spain along the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains were stripped of all political autonomy and rights. Those who dared to stand up and speak out—and many who did not—were imprisoned or killed. In 1937 Franco requested that Guernica—Mikel’s hometown—be bombed by the Germans. Several hundred civilians, including most of Mikel’s family, died, and he fled to the mountains.

Like Anja, Mikel had lost those dearest to him. Like her, he had been forced from his home. Like her, he was on the run and always aware that at any moment capture could occur. But unlike Anja, Mikel had little hope for the future—his or anyone else’s. He was a dark, brooding man who had once told her that he found her search for some Inner Light to be sad and stupid. “There is no God,” he had argued. “Do you think God would allow this?”

But Anja held firmly to her belief in God’s breath within every human being—even dictators. The Light was there. It was up to each person to bring it to the fore.

Now as she glanced quickly at other passengers and railway employees along the platform, she slid the scrap of paper inside her glove. She hoisted her bag higher on her shoulder as she crossed the platform past the rack of bikes lined up and waiting for their owners to claim them. Dumping her bag in the willow basket of one, she steered the bike away from the station where German soldiers prowled the platform, smoking and laughing as they waited to board the train. Among them were three men wearing the uniform of the dreaded Nazi secret police—the Gestapo.

She walked her bicycle past them. One of them glanced her way and dismissed her as their kind usually did. Her protection came in two forms: she wore the uniform of a nurse, and she was so petite that she often passed for a mere girl rather than a woman of twenty-six who had seen her husband and daughter murdered and who even now carried incriminating information that could get her arrested.

Her job was to pass the scrap of paper on to the local baker, who was just closing up his shop for the night. As she parked her bicycle, she waved to the baker, who waved back and went behind the counter. When she entered the shop, he handed her a loaf of bread. It was hard as a rock, and because rationing limited the baker’s resources, she knew the inside would be gray, gluey, and tasteless, but the baker had clearly made the bread that day especially for her and her family. She handed him a coin and the scrap of paper.

They made small talk while he glanced at the paper and handed her some change. All of this in spite of the fact that they were alone in the shop. One never knew when someone might be watching from the street. Using the house number as code, he gave her news about a compromised safe house. “But all’s well that ends well,” he said. “No one was home.”

“I know a place near the farm and—”

He laughed heartily as if she had made a joke then walked her to the door and turned the sign to show that the shop was closed. But under his breath he told her his news.

“A plane went down near your grandfather’s farm … Americans. Search is on. Take care, little one.”

Now Anja pedaled frantically. If the plane had crashed in her grandfather’s field, then the first place the Germans would come would be to their house. They would ransack the house despite Olaf and Ailsa’s protests that no evaders were hiding there. They might even burn the outbuildings—simply because they could. They would certainly take any food supplies they found in the search as spoils of war and their due as conquerors. They would surely terrify Daniel, who also lived with the memory of seeing his father arrested and knowing that his sister had been murdered even as the stranger at his side—a contact of Josef’s—had steered him into the shadows, protecting him and eventually getting him to safety.

And what if one or more of the survivors from the plane had found their way to the farm—unbeknownst to Olaf? What if even now a man was hiding in the loft of the barn or in the shed behind the house that doubled as a stable for her grandfather’s horse? What if …

Anja blinked, unwilling to believe what she was seeing ahead of her on the side of the road. The sky was dark, but the moon played hides-and-seek through the drifting clouds. Suddenly it broke free and shone onto a cluster of trees. Not just any trees. These trees were covered in a white shroud that blew and flapped in the winter wind. And beneath the bare, outstretched tree branches something more—something heavy and dark—swayed slowly.

A body. A man.

He had been shot several times as he hung there helpless. Had he died in the fall or faced his killers and known his fate?

Anja’s legs felt like lead as she slowly pedaled past. To stop and try to cut the man down and give him some proper respect even in death was of little use. If someone saw and reported her, she could be arrested. The Nazis had left him hanging there purposely—as a warning. Oh, how she hated this war—all war. All violence. There had to be something—some way that she and those she worked with could prove the pointlessness of such carnage.

She pedaled on, her legs heavy with weariness as she prayed for the enlightenment of her faith, that faith that taught her to believe that there was good in every person—or at least the potential for good in every person. Those raised in the tradition of the Society of Friends believed that every person came into the world in possession of an Inner Light—a light that came directly from God, that was the very soul and spirit of their being. The challenge each person faced in life was to connect with that light and spirit, to live life guided from within. To hold others in that light.

She smelled the lingering stench of oil, charred wreckage, and gasoline and knew that the downed plane was nearby and still smoldering. Just ahead she saw the lane leading to the farm and in the farmyard a truck—its lights focused on her grandparents and her son as if they were on a stage. She saw a soldier guarding them with pointed rifle. And as she came closer, she heard the clatter of broken glass and splintered furniture as the guard’s cohorts rummaged through the house.

Sheer fury threatened to overwhelm her as she realized that Ailsa was shivering, having been forced from the house in her bedroom slippers and a thin sweater. She had wrapped her arms in the skirt of her apron for warmth. Olaf was wearing his work shoes—probably he had been feeding the livestock when the soldiers came. His shirtsleeves were still rolled to his elbows, as was his way when he worked with the animals. His head was bare, and the cold wind flattened the thin wisps of his white hair.