Girl in the Blue Coat(77)
When I get home, Mama and Papa will ask where I’ve been. I’ll go and have dinner with Ollie and Willem and Sanne and Leo. I’ll visit Mina when I can. My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it’s possible to be healed without feeling whole.
I found a girl who wasn’t the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.
The first time I realized I loved Bas: He was sixteen, I was fifteen. It wasn’t the afternoon in his house when we listened to the radio. That was when he realized he loved me. I actually realized it the week before. It was in the school yard. Someone was saying how they liked to read the last pages of books first, to make sure everyone turned out okay. Bas said that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. Bas ordered that the book in question be passed to him, and when it was, he flipped to the back page, took out a pencil and started writing on it. I thought he would write Everyone turned out okay, but when he passed the book back, he’d actually written, Everyone was mauled by a bear, it was very sad, let’s go get ice cream.
Then he grabbed my hand, pulled me up from where I’d been sitting, and said, “Maybe the bear didn’t maul you. He just scratched you a little bit.” Then I made a face, and then he kissed me, and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.
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A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY
Though the stories and characters in this book are all fictional, the locations and historical events mentioned were real places and occurrences in Holland during World War II. The Netherlands was invaded in May 1940. More than two thousand Dutch servicemen were killed in the Battle of the Netherlands, and German occupiers began to put into place a series of increasingly severe restrictions on the Jewish population.
Some one hundred thousand Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust—nearly three-quarters of the Jewish population, a much higher percentage than in nearby countries. There’s a lot of speculation as to why this happened: The Netherlands was a flat, developed country without many forests or natural places to hide. The countries that bordered it were also occupied, limiting escape routes. Resistance work was slow to be organized—the Netherlands had been neutral in World War I and so citizens didn’t have the infrastructure or knowledge for creating underground networks. The Dutch collaboration rate was comparatively high, and even those who disapproved of the occupation were lulled into a false sense of security by the gradual way that Nazi restrictions were enacted: The country was a frog in slowly boiling water.
The Jewish Council, composed of leaders in the community, originally believed that their role as liaison between Nazis and the Jewish population would improve the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands. Instead, many today believe that the Council’s acts inadvertently made it easier for Jews to be tracked, persecuted, and deported to their deaths.
There were, however, extraordinary acts of heroism within the country. Ollie and Judith and their friends represent an amalgamation of several different types of resistance activities, but they are most closely based on the Amsterdam Student Group, an organization of university students who specialized in rescuing children, and on the mostly Jewish workers who were assigned to work in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The Schouwburg was a place of terror, but also one of Amsterdam’s bravest rescue operations. An estimated six hundred Jewish children were sneaked out of the nursery across the street: sometimes hiding in laundry baskets, sometimes passed over the courtyard wall to neighboring buildings, and sometimes escorted out in plain sight by workers who conveniently “miscounted” the number of children they were supposed to be looking after. The acts of my characters were inspired by reading about, or listening to the oral histories of, many people who were affiliated with the theater. To name a few: Piet Meerburg, the cofounder of the Amsterdam Student Group; Henriette Pimentel, who ran the nursery and was killed in Auschwitz in 1943; and Walter Süskind, who falsified children’s records while running the Schouwburg and was killed in 1945.
The resistance work of photographers was real: A loosely joined network of professional photographers became officially known as the Underground Camera in 1944. They risked their personal safety to take secret photographs of soldiers and civilians, and their images remain some of the most illuminating records of Dutch life during Nazi occupation. Female photographers were particularly adept: They hid their cameras in purses and handbags. Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw, though not a member of Underground Camera, did live in an apartment abutting the Schouwburg’s rear courtyard, and she did take photographs of the Jewish prisoners when she recognized a childhood friend among them. Mina’s storyline draws from this experience.
Het Parool was a real newspaper; in fact, it still exists today. The publishers risked their lives to print every issue: Thirteen of its workers were executed in February 1943, just a few days after the events of this novel conclude.