Such Good Girls (17 page)

Delft was among the last cities in Western Europe to be liberated. After the Allies’ debacle in September 1944 at Arnhem, just seventy-five miles east of Delft, it was almost eight months before Mr. van Geenan announced that the war was over, and that the Heijmanses were free.

“I don’t believe it,” Carla said. “It’s not true. I’m not going outside. I don’t believe it.” She was in tears. And, in a way, she was right not to believe it. She couldn’t have known yet how unbelievable it was that the three of them had survived. While two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were being exterminated with systematic ruthlessness, Carla, Herman, and Herta Heijmans had escaped detection in a country whose Jews had suffered enormously. Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews at the beginning of the war, only 35,000 remained, a loss of 75 percent. By comparison, France had lost 26 percent of its Jews during the war, Italy 20 percent, Denmark less than one percent.

Liberation was enlivened by the appearance in The Hague of a brigade of Palestinian soldiers, robust Jews who threw memorable all-night dancing parties for the gaunt survivors. The soldiers were irresistible to many Dutch girls, particularly the orphans, some of whom ended up in Palestine with husbands. Carla, who lived with her mother (her brother Herman had made it to Palestine illegally), was now going to school full-time in home economics during the day, and to high school at night to catch up on her studies. She was also increasingly involved in a Zionist group of which she was the youngest member.

In the spring of 1946, she met an older Zionist from Delft, a man all of twenty named Ed Lessing, but who, like the rest of them, seemed older. He too had hidden from the Nazis, but his experience made Carla’s—which her brother Herman would later call “luxury hiding” compared to others’—seem positively uneventful. If Carla Heijmans’s years in hiding amid the Germans were marked by a steady drumbeat of daily jeopardy, Ed Lessing’s were filled with high drama and cliffhangers of which any A-list screenwriter would be proud.

But after meeting Carla, Ed had more pressing matters on his mind than regaling her with his wartime escapades. In fact, it would be decades before he spoke of his experiences to her or to anybody at all.

Ed was born in the Netherlands in 1926 into a nonpracticing Jewish family of modest means. They were living in Delft when, on May 10, 1940, Ed woke up at five in the morning to gunfire. Out the window, he could see German paratroopers floating down in the distance like white silk flowers. For a while, the occupation barely disturbed the very law-abiding Dutch, even as a succession of German decrees kept Jews out of public parks, schools, and eventually out of jobs. When the Jews were required to wear Stars of David, some of Ed’s clueless Gentile friends said, “You should be proud of that star! We think you Jews are wonderful people.” Even after a German SS officer punched the teenage Ed for daring to walk with a cousin of his who didn’t wear a star, Ed did not feel in mortal danger.

The Germans then promised Jews “work relief” in Germany. The trains were waiting. Ed’s parents had already packed their bags when his grandfather reported rumors circulating in Amsterdam that there was no such thing as “work relief” and begged them not to go.

Engeline Lessing walked into the room where her two younger sons, Fred and Arthur, were playing and told them they would have to take off their yellow stars, and that they were going into hiding. When the clueless boys asked why, she said, “I have to tell you boys something. You are Jewish boys and if you tell anyone, they will kill you.”

Early on the morning of October 23, 1942, Ed and his younger brothers, aged six and eight, removed their stars and walked with their parents to a friend’s house outside of Delft. That night Ed’s parents left to go into hiding at the home of an older, childless couple, and his brothers were picked up and taken somewhere else. Ed remained in the house until his mother found a place for him with two elderly unmarried women in Utrecht. From there, he traveled to a small farm outside of Utrecht, where he could stay in exchange for work. He would have to pass as a Gentile, so he dyed his hair blond and spent the next six months in an increasingly depressed state, awaking at four in the morning to milk the cows, his feet bleeding from the wooden shoes. He seriously considered turning himself in to the Germans.

Meanwhile, in the nearby hamlet of De Lage Vuursche, his parents were confronted by the village’s chief of police, a taciturn man named Margrethus Oskam. Oskam revealed that, though he was cooperating with the Germans as head of the village’s law enforcement under the Nazis, he was actually the head of the local Dutch Resistance. He helped Mr. and Mrs. Lessing find sanctuary in a hostel for nature lovers.

Later it was Oskam who would rescue Ed from the dreary farm, arranging for him to join a Resistance camp hidden deep in the woods of the Dutch countryside. A zigzagging route led Ed to a crude wooden hut that had been camouflaged by small pine trees and branches someone had nailed to it.

The Resistance fighters didn’t want to take Ed. “Too young to die,” said the men, who were only a few years older than Ed. “Too Jewish.” But Oskam prevailed over the ragtag group. Ed was not entrusted with a pistol and was left behind when the group of assorted Catholics and one Communist made their nightly raids on town halls to steal weapons, uniforms, and German rubber stamps to make fake identity cards. Ed’s job was to guard the two Canadian flyers hiding with them. They were from the No. 617 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force—the “Dambusters”—who had been downed during one of their missions to destroy three dams with special heavy-duty bombs in order to flood the industrial Ruhr Valley. The group lived off provisions and intelligence brought to them by couriers. In his spare moments, Ed sketched the inside and outside of the hut with enough artistry to surprise even him—they were his first works of art—and that would eventually lead to a career.

On December 28, 1943, an anonymous caller warned an employee of a nearby convent that the Germans were on their way to raid the group. He sounded the alarm and the Resistance fighters fled the hut to regroup near a hotel in the area. After dark, Oskam appeared to say it had been a false alarm and that no Germans had been spotted in the De Lage Vuursche area. The men returned to the hut and set up watch posts, beginning before dawn. Ed and one other man drew the 4:00 to 8:00 A.M. shift and settled in behind the last row of trees before the gravel road a short distance from the hut.

Shortly before dawn on December 29 the dark forest was suddenly raked by the headlights of five trucks full of soldiers and their barking German shepherds. Ed and his watch partner raced back to the hut and tore the blankets off the others, shouting, “Wake up! Save yourselves! The SS is here!” before escaping on foot through the dense undergrowth until they reached a dirt road. When they paused there, they saw the Germans in the distance preparing to surround the area of the hut. As Ed and his partner slipped across the road and disappeared into the forest, Ed couldn’t see how the others would have a chance to make it out alive.

The men had agreed earlier that, in the case of a raid, the survivors would meet at a designated place about eight miles away, which Ed and his partner reached later that day. The two spent the pitch-black night hiding behind some trees, pistols in hand, conjecturing that the Germans would torture their comrades to reveal the location of the meeting place and come to either arrest them or kill them. They had no intention of being arrested and tortured in the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, but at least they hoped to kill a German or two before being mowed down by machine guns.

They soon heard a rattling sound, coming closer in the dark along a dirt road. A small light bobbed in the distance. Would this be the last few minutes of their lives? Eventually they made out the form of a bicycle, but neither of them could make out the rider. Ed figured it was a trap—that the minute they stepped out from behind the trees to investigate, they would be surrounded. The two of them slid the safeties off their guns and waited. The bicycle finally came to a stop several yards in front of them and didn’t move. Ed and his comrade raised their pistols, prepared to come out of hiding and start shooting.

But it wasn’t a German. Nor was it one of the other Resistance members from the hut.

Incredibly, it was Ed’s mother, Engeline, who was in hiding not far away.

“Moeder!” Ed exclaimed as loudly as he dared.

She had found out about the raid that morning, and the meeting place, and on a bicycle with wooden tires—the Germans had taken every shred of rubber in the Netherlands—she had fearlessly pedaled to find her oldest son.

The first thing out of her mouth was, “Bury those guns.”

“Are you crazy?” he said.

“They’re looking for you,” Engeline told the two of them. “We’re totally surrounded by Germans—hundreds of Wehrmacht and SS. If you have weapons, they will probably execute you right here in the woods. Without weapons, maybe we have a tiny chance.”

Ed’s comrade said he knew a place where maybe he could hide, but he needed the bicycle to get there.

“Take it,” she said, pushing the bicycle toward him, along with its hand-operated flashlight, whose battery was charged with a few squeezes of a lever. The flashlight was invaluable. The Dutch company Phillips had developed it during the war, after the Germans had expropriated all the batteries, electricity, and candles in the country.

“Ed, I have just one idea that we can try,” she said after his comrade had pedaled off. “It’s probably not going to work. But we have to try.”

They started down the path in the forest and saw a German sentry with a shouldered rifle a hundred yards ahead of them, at which point they put their plan into action. Ed and his mother put their arms around each other, their faces close together, and began talking and giggling like lovers. They even made kissing sounds as they approached the German in the dark.

They greeted him affably, but the sentry stopped them at rifle point. After inspecting their faces for what felt to them like an eternity, he finally let them pass, and the two ersatz lovers thanked him profusely as they continued on, safe for the time being.

Ed was now a wreck. He had barely escaped when all of his fellow Resistance fighters had undoubtedly perished. His watch partner on the noisy bicycle could not possibly have escaped the German dragnet. After Ed’s mother returned to hiding with his father, Oskam came to his rescue again by finding him a new shelter with a well-to-do elderly man who lived with his sister and a maid. They not only took him in but also gave him his own room. The maid would bring his breakfast to him upstairs, where he had to stay during daylight hours, but he would join the man and his sister downstairs at night for dinner. He lived in this ironic luxury for a few weeks, passing the time reading a copy of the Old Testament he found in his room. It was his first exposure to the Five Books of Moses, which were a revelation to him. He read some of it every night before falling asleep, feeling closer and closer to his Jewish identity. He made a deal with God, that he would follow his laws to the best of his ability if God would only save his family.

Oskam soon moved him again, this time to a farm owned by a prosperous family whom Ed came to love in the few weeks he stayed there. Sadly, in the wake of rumors that there was a Jew in the neighborhood, he was forced to stay at still another farm, then another, each time presenting himself, in his well-worn clothes and manure-stained wooden clogs, as a Christian who needed work. His peroxide bleaching had not succeeded in turning his dark hair blond, but coppery red instead. By now, he was actually adept at plowing and putting up barbed wire and could fit right in. However, because he was flush with his newly discovered Judaism, he ate the bacon that came with most farm meals, and worked Saturdays, under silent protest.

At his fourth or fifth farm, he was once again given room and board in exchange for work. The farmer willingly accepted him, but his wife, a stout woman with a blond braid wound tightly round her head, kept eyeing him suspiciously at the midday meal. He slept uneasily near the animals on a straw-filled bag, listening for the distant whine of shifting truck gears.

The gravest threat to his safety, however, had nothing to do with the Germans. The farm bordered beautiful, wild woods, where a gamekeeper lived in a cottage with a stunning daughter with waist-length hair. The farmer mentioned at a meal that the daughter had noticed Ed and asked his name because she wanted to see him on Sunday after church. Worried that it was a trap, Ed said little, but a couple of days later he looked up from mucking out the cows’ stalls to see her waving at him from the cottage. Seventeen and horribly lonely, Ed agreed to a walk with her on Sunday, during which he experienced, and resisted, alternating currents of lust and fear—and even the desire to blurt out that he was a Jew.

Not long after, Ed made one of his secret visits to his parents and mentioned the object of his affections to his mother. Her reaction was immediate and stern. She said that to proceed with her further could get him killed, especially if the girl’s father had any Nazi sympathies. Ed had no choice but to make his excuses and regretfully leave the farm.

His mother, whose ingenuity and daring had saved their lives in the forest, now ran out of luck herself. Tensions had arisen between Ed’s parents and their rescuers, so Engeline decided to rent a summer cottage in the village of Voorthuizen. First, however, she needed to secure a new hiding place for Ed’s seven-year-old brother, Fred. While traveling by train to find one, she was confronted by a Gestapo document specialist who recognized her ID card as fake. She was arrested and put on another train for Amsterdam, escorted by a Dutch policeman. To her horror, she suddenly remembered that in her handbag she had a scrap of paper on which she had written the addresses of all her family members’ hiding places. That her purse hadn’t been searched yet was a stroke of unbelievable luck, but with the policeman sitting next to her she had to come up with something. And so, over the course of the next two hours, she periodically slipped her hand in her bag to surreptitiously tear off tiny pieces of the list, then just as furtively, concealing her actions with a cough or a turn of her head, she slipped each shred of paper into her mouth, chewed it slowly to a pulp, and consumed the evidence that might have led to the murder of her entire family.