Girl in the Blue Coat(54)
Ollie was going to come and see me himself, Willem explains, but he asked Willem to let him sleep for twenty minutes first. “I’m letting him sleep for a few hours instead,” he says. “He’ll be furious when he wakes up, but he was barely coherent. If I’d let him ride to your house, we’d be fishing him out of a canal this afternoon. He works too much. So it’s just me, and with your help, you and me.”
“You and me for what?”
“Sanne and Leo are bringing food to some of the children in hiding. When Ollie wakes up, he’ll go to Judith’s spot and find out anything she might know about the soldiers who usually lead the transport. You volunteered to get the uniform. And I’m hoping you’ll help me do my job as well.”
“What’s your job?”
“My job is to figure out the escape route.”
I don’t know Willem nearly as well as Ollie, but he has a reassuring kindness that immediately feels familiar. While we walk through my neighborhood, he keeps his head bent toward mine as though we’re having an intimate conversation, but what he’s really doing is explaining the Schouwburg.
Some of it I already know. The theater is only a stopping place—Jews are brought there for a few days or weeks. After the theater, the next destination is a transit camp elsewhere in the Netherlands. Prisoners don’t stay at those for long, either, Willem explains. They’re just way stations before the prisoners are taken out of the country, to other camps with foreign-sounding names, to places where healthy young men may die of mysterious illnesses.
But before any of that happens, Jews are packed onto trains at a station on the outskirts of the city. And to get to the railway station, soldiers sometimes put the prisoners on trams or trucks. But often, they simply force the prisoners to walk.
It’s not far, about two kilometers. They don’t block off the streets or make any special preparations for the transport. Sometimes they do it at night, while the rest of the city pretends to sleep behind its blackout curtains. Sometimes they do it in broad daylight.
So that’s our chance. Sometime in the space between the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the train station, we need to get the camera from the carriage—which will presumably have a child in it. And I need to spot Mirjam, distract the guards, and run with her to safety without anyone noticing. That’s all.
“But the soldiers?”
“That’s Ollie and Judith,” Willem says. “That’s their job today. You and me—our job today is just geography. We can do this. Everything is going to be okay.”
I want to believe him. He sounds sure, and I cling to that certainty. Not because I think he’s right, but because it feels good to have someone tell me everything will be fine.
Beside me, Willem looks at his watch and starts walking faster. “We need to hurry.” He takes my hand to pull me along. “The deportations to Westerbork are usually in the order the people arrived in. The prisoners from the roundup with Mirjam and the carriage should be deported in a night transport tomorrow. I wish we could practice by watching another one happening in the evening, but there isn’t one—we’ll have to follow one this afternoon to figure out what route they take.”
“What if there aren’t any holes in the route?” I ask.
“There’s at least one.”
“Which is?”
“They probably don’t think anyone is stupid enough to impersonate Nazis and stop a transport. So they won’t be expecting it.”
We stop at the end of the Schouwburg’s block, close enough to see the theater’s entrance without looking like we’re actively watching. Willem leans over his bicycle; he’s disabled his chain and is now pretending to fix it, working it back over the sprocket. It gives us a reason to loiter in the area. While he pretends to work, I watch the theater’s heavy door.
It’s a little before four o’clock. Precisely on the hour, it opens. I nudge my foot against Willem’s, and he easily slips the chain back into place, sighing like he’s sorry his broken bicycle held us up for so long. The soldiers appear first, two of them, one younger and one who reminds me of my father’s older brother, the one who still lives in Belgium and used to send money on my birthday.
The prisoners follow, carrying suitcases, disheveled and tired like they haven’t slept in days. The crowd is big, maybe seventy people, and the soldiers march them down the middle of the street. It’s a lovely winter day in Amsterdam, and though there are other people on the street, couples like me and Willem, nobody acts like the forced parade of people is out of the ordinary. Our sense of ordinary has become horrifying.
There’s no Mirjam, but there are girls her age or younger, surrounded by young couples and middle-aged men. One walks past, wearing a green tweed coat and felt hat. He keeps his eyes straight forward, but something in them is familiar, something about them makes me think of chalk dust. It’s my third-grade teacher. The one who used to bring a box of hard candies on Wednesdays and pass them out to us, one by one, as we left. I can’t remember his name. I didn’t know he was Jewish.
The soldier who looks like my uncle yells something. It’s in fast German; I can’t understand the words, but I can understand the meaning as he gestures to the end of the block. In front of me, an older woman trips in the crowd. The man next to her—her husband, from the familiar, tender way he touches her—tries to help her up, and the soldier lifts his gun and gestures for the man to keep going. He moves again to help his wife; the soldier spins his gun around, using the butt of it to shove the man forward. He staggers onward, and now it’s his wife who helps him. I try not to look.