Page 2 of Winter's End
“Evi, hurry your breakfast,ja?”
She glanced across the small barge kitchen, saw Mam packing powdered milk and tins of sardines into a brown leather satchel. Another poor soul fleeing Hitler’s wrath would soon be secreted in the hold of the old yellow barge.
She returned her gaze to the approachingschnellboats,sleek and fitted with torpedoes. They neared the shore in perfect precision. Her breath stopped in her throat.
They have no reason to board,she told herself.But she watched, rapt, the swell of the River Spaarne rising under her as they veered north, away from the pier. Only then did she let out a ragged breath.
Mam, apparently, had not seen or heard the commotion.
“We will need you at the Dans Hal this afternoon, Evi. Right after school. You won’t forget?”
Evi nodded, though she barely heard the words. Theschnellboatswould likely tie up a few kilometers up shore – a restricted wharf where Nazi seamen would unload provisions the likes of which Hollanders had not seen or tasted in years.
Her mouth watered at the remembered taste ofstroopwaffelandchocolat,and her mother’s delectable puff pastry in the days before sugar became a prize. She was not sure which she hated more, the constant fear that any day could be your last on this earth or that the Nazis had been slowly starving them to death for four long years.
The bastards would likely drive the lot to the old vegetable market in thestadsplein, in the city center, which the SS had long ago commandeered for their headquarters. Evi had watched them once, unloading cured hams tied with string, and big sacks of flour and sugar.
Her stomach rumbled. Air raid sirens had brought her awake more than once during the night, and it was harder and harder to go back to sleep when her stomach ached with hunger.
“Evi, did you hear me?” Lotte’s voice was sharp.
“I hear you, Mam. I’m ready.”
She swept crumbs into her teacup – the last few bits of a tasteless cracker Mam had managed to concoct from rolled oats and water.
“All right, Mam, I am on my way. I will see you later at the Dans Hal.”
That she was needed meant there were underground messages for her to deliver to Resistance volunteers – altered identification papers, perhaps, or packets of stolen ration cards. It irked her that she was not doing more vital work, but it was the one good thing about looking younger than her sixteen years. Even with contraband stowed in her schoolbag, she was less likely to be stopped at a German checkpoint.
“Goed, then,” Mam waved distractedly. “Be off then, lieveling. Try to have a good day at school.”
Grabbing her book bag from a hook by the door, Evi ducked slightly to exit the narrow doorway of the barge and climbed the three steps to the pier. A stiff breeze, cold for early November, sent a shiver throughher small frame. She hoped the gray wool sweater she had chosen would see her through the afternoon.
She blended into the crowd of students, merchants, and fishermen jostling for space along the narrow walkway, off to pursue whatever passed for normal in the midst of daily chaos.
She glanced at the street lamp where, for so many mornings, she had met up with Sissi Weissbauer. She stared for a moment, then moved on.
She had been nearing her fourteenth birthday, three years ago in February, when the world fell off its axis. The Germans had begun purging thousands of Jews from all over the Netherlands, whole families disappearing into Nazi hell – as though barring them from nearly everything and making them wear yellow stars on their clothing were not enough to torment them.
But Sissi….
Evi had held out hope for many mornings, one day walking past the Weissbauers’ shuttered tailor shop, peering through the dusty glass. But it was silent inside…and dark.
She remembered the uproar in that winter of 1940, the riots in the streets as thousands went on strike to protest the round-up of their Dutch Jewish neighbors. But the Germans had only multiplied their sweep, openly shooting dissenters in the street, and sending trains full of Dutch Jews to near certain death.
She moved more quickly as the crowd dispersed, making her way around an ugly, bombed-out crater near the turnoff to the old school road that had not been there the day before.
Nothing in that long ago February had shaken Mam’s decision to deepen her commitment to the Resistance – nor had it stopped Papa from leaving them because of it – and it hadn’t stopped Evi from siding with Mam, no matter that it put them both at risk.
She walked past a pair of SS lieutenants standing to the side of a horse chestnut tree, their black boots half-buried in an avalanche of dried, fallen leaves. In their brown tunics and field caps, faces half-hidden by deep visors, the Germans seemed indistinguishable one from the other. They nodded stiffly as she passed.
She was past them when she heard her name.
“Evi!”
Annemarie Haan came up swiftly on her left. “Goedemorgen, Evi! May I walk with you?”
She shrugged at the lower-level student, a skinny, freckled, redhead whose mother helped assembleHet Parool, the underground newspaper, at the Dans Hal.
