The liberation that never came

1.

The bright May sun tries to pierce the narrow window, chasing darkness from the cramped living room. It hurts my eyes, just as the blare of trumpets, the pounding of drums and the singing of the crowd torment my ears. "Orange above all," it rumbles through the street, and "Long live the queen."

The crowd goes wild as the first tanks rumble through the street. Americans, Canadians, and British—who, of course out of self-interest, did the dirty work. For a government that had blinkers on for decades. All those years, they refused to invest in the army. For the population, many of whom collaborated with the enemy and helped to plunge their fellow countrymen into misfortune, or at least closed their eyes to reality and continued to live under the terror of the occupiers, cherishing their propaganda pins with the little broken rifles in the darkness of their drawers, convincing themselves that it was not that bad and quietly hoping that it would all go away by itself. Or not. Philips' profits soared. DAF and Fokker joined in enthusiastically. And then there was NS—the Dutch Railways.

The crowd would rather just continue where they left off five years ago. Forget the bombardments, the occupation, thousands of soldiers and civilians simply slaughtered—or, God knows if it was better—locked up, starved under brutal conditions, tortured, or arrested, deported, and gassed for being the wrong kind of person.

Five years in the hell of oppression. Let's quickly forget it, the crowd seems to think. Let’s move on with everyday life. Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Middelburg must be rebuilt quickly, the traces of the bombings erased, as if they never happened. Nijmegen, The Hague and Amsterdam of course too. A few small mistakes by the Allies, so sorry. In our gold mine archipelago in the Far East, it is also time to put things in order, for the looting to be continued as before. Orange above all, long live the queen.

2.

May 1940. Disbelief all around. "We declared ourselves neutral!" How naive can a tiny nation be? The arrogance of thinking, even for a moment, that our miserable little country could lay down the law to the world’s most powerful military force.

When I went to high school seven years earlier, I already shouted around that everyone was stone-blind. That our eastern neighbours had never learned to lose—fifteen years earlier. That a dangerous lunatic had come to power, and that sooner or later they would flatten their miserable little front garden, the Netherlands.

Of course I was laughed at, as I had been a whipping boy all my life. Small, skinny with a chicken chest, deathly pale, wiry flaxen hair, and glasses with lenses as thick as jam jar bottoms. Barely tolerated—except when my homework help was needed. But, of course, I was at the bottom of the pecking order. Even my parents seemed ashamed of me. My mother, because my aunts compared me time and again to my nephews and nieces. My father, because he compared me time and again to my brothers and sisters, and had probably come to the conclusion that my mother had gone off the rails. But he needed a doormat to cook, wash and dust and had likely accepted me into the bargain.

Two years before the war broke out, I graduated from my HBS high school and had had enough of home. In the city, I found an empty hovel—just good enough to bivouac in for a few nights. After three days I unscrewed the government sign 'Declared uninhabitable' from the front with the point of my pocket knife, never to leave again. A squatter avant la lettre. The neighbours seemed to think it was fine. Maybe they were happy that the ruin did not deteriorate any further. Or maybe they had other things to worry about. After all, it was a time of crisis. I found a job at Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. as a courier. Night and day I walked the streets with pockets full of money, jewels and securities, transporting valuables between the bank, its clients and other banks, camouflaged in a shabby grey coat—so worn a tramp might’ve thrown it away. Of course, there was nothing to be gained from someone with my appearance, they must have thought, so it couldn't have been safer. Soon, things would go badly for the bank, I suspected then, but I wisely kept my mouth shut, held out my hand every week for my wages, which weren't even that bad, and enrolled at the university, where I led an equally invisible and unspectacular life—no different than at the HBS. In the evenings, when I didn't have any evening transports from the bank, I was only too glad to retreat to the safe shelter of the hovel where I lived, and where, by the light of a smoking kerosene lamp, I did my college work and threw myself into a morbid hobby: explosives.

3.

Somehow, I must have impressed Rosenthal. On a bleak, stormy November evening, I was asked to deliver a package to his home. He opened the door himself and invited me in. I was cold, and he figured a cup of hot chocolate might do me good. Or something stronger, perhaps.

The maid took my coat with a look of disgust, only smoothing her expression when Rosenthal instructed her to bring two cups of hot chocolate to the study.

“They say you're at the university,” Rosenthal began, motioning me into one of the leather armchairs in his study, lined with mahogany panels and scented with French polish.

“Physics,” I replied. “And occasionally a chemistry lecture.”

“How do you juggle that with your courier work?”

“One of the few advantages of being a student. If I work afternoons, I study evenings. And if I work late, I start early the next morning.”

“Why physics and chemistry?”

“I specialize in electricity. It’s the future. In twenty years, steam trains will be gone. Industry will depend on it. Homes too. In twenty-five or thirty years, everyone will have television.”

He said nothing. He simply looked at me. If he'd called me delusional or laughed outright, I wouldn't have minded—I was used to that. But his dark eyes just studied me, sharp beneath his bushy brows and prominent hawk nose. I couldn’t read him.

“A cigar?” he offered, reaching for a box on the oak coffee table.

“I'd rather not, thank you.”

“But you'll have a drink?”

“I wouldn’t say no to that, sir.”

He returned from the buffet with a bottle of Dutch gin and filled two small glasses to the brim.

“Cheers.” He downed his in one go. I thought it would be appropriate to ignore the hot chocolate and followed suit. He refilled the glasses.

“Don’t you want a different job?” he asked after half his second glass. “That coat doesn’t suit you. A student needs to study—not wander around all night with pockets full of cash. It’s a crisis. Hungry people do crazy things. For a few guilders, they’ll knock you out cold.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, sir. But I need the money.”

“Like I said: I’ve got other work for you.”

He urged me to finish my second glass and started talking. His daughter was getting stuck in the fourth year of high school. Smart enough, but yes, she was at that restless age. Boys, kissing, making out, well, I understood what he was talking about. I didn't understand a thing, green as I was, but I kept a straight face. Fifteen minutes later we had a deal. Tutoring on weekdays from four to six. A banker's daughter who didn't finish high school, that was of course not possible. What she needed was the guiding hand of a university graduate. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, those were the subjects where she went off the rails. The same salary as what I earned as a courier, paid every Friday. When there were rehearsals, also working in the evenings, of course for extra compensation. If I brought a pan myself, I could take dinner home. When I worked in the evenings, I could eat with the maid in the kitchen.

Even if I could have refused his offer, I wouldn't have. Indeed, it had happened a few times in the last few weeks that I’d been getting pointed stares on the street. We sealed the deal with one last drink. In a generous mood, I was given the half-full bottle to take home with me.

About 300 meters from my house, my way was blocked by a scruffy man who was a bit unsteady on his feet, but half a head taller than me. He demanded my wallet, and fast. Normally, I would have complied with his demand, trembling with fear, but the three goblets had made me overconfident. I took the bottle from the pocket of my coat, bent my arm backwards in one movement and swung. His head banged dully against the wall and then on the floor. The bottle wasn't even broken. I looked around. No one in sight. I thought it best to just keep walking.

When I got home, I poured myself one more drink and raised a silent toast to myself.

It was time for a new step in my career.

4.

That’s how we first came into contact. I saw the flash in your eyes—rejection at first glance. Not that I expected anything different. I hadn’t stood a chance with the girls at HBS for five years, and university wasn’t much better. With my poor physical qualities, I’d figured out early on that working hard and getting rich was the only way I’d ever have a chance at a wife, with J. Paul Getty, Joseph P. Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin and Aristotle Onassis as striking examples. Money was power. Even the daughter of the queen had found a husband.

But I had no illusions about a banker's daughter for the time being.

To me you were 'Miss Suzanne', and it would remain Miss Suzanne for a year and a half. After a difficult start, the homework sessions started to run more smoothly when the first successes were scored. Your grades slowly crept up from the valley, the fours and fives became sevens, with even a single eight for chemistry. In a moment of overconfidence, I once explained to you some secrets of explosives. I actually saw a hint of interest in your eyes. So, we had something in common after all.

Six months later your father's fear had been banished. You were likely to complete the year successfully, but the exam year was approaching. Your father was extremely pleased with the results, had even given me a generous raise. In the meantime, you had, against my will, little by little manoeuvred me into a different position, which I did not appreciate at all, but from which there was no escape. I had to listen endlessly, as if I were your personal eunuch—a slave to your stories, how the sons of bankers, insurers and commissioners were lining up in front of you. How often didn’t you ask my advice, mind you, to make your choice: a son of the Asscher diamond family, or a scion of the founders of the Dutch East Indies Trading Bank, who had a lot more to offer physically—but wasn’t a descendant of Abraham’s chosen people, which became all the more painful when he had planted his seed in your belly. In the middle of the night, I took you to an obscure clinic in a suburb where, for a suitable fee, they would help you with your problem. I did it out of loyalty to your father—it would’ve put his head on the block. And, against my better judgment, in the hope of my reward, of which I could only dream, which I did wholeheartedly, withdrawn into the gloomy darkness of my home, to forget, just for a moment, the sound of rats skittering in the ceiling.

Our contact stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The Germans had humiliated our army to the bone and razed Rotterdam to the ground, but the HBS exams had still gone ahead a month later. My services were no longer needed. Your father offered me the courier job again, but I declined the honour. It would become a long war, I knew then, and there was more important work to do. I heard through the grapevine that you’d passed.

5.

Few recognized the seriousness of the situation in the war’s first year. Life seemed to go on as usual, while Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart fed the public fairy tales of a better world—one where Dutch and Germans, kindred spirits, would live together as brothers and sisters.
But my HBS reputation had endured. Once the class idiot, I was suddenly no longer quite so laughable. Turns out the Rat hadn’t been entirely wrong.

They sat down across from me as the university canteen slowly emptied. A pale lout with hollow eyes, slightly taller than me but no broader, and a girl just as pale—high forehead, jet-black hair, and jet-black eyes. She might’ve been called pretty, if not for the heavy shadows under her eyes and her visible thinness.

“Hey, Rat—how’s life?” Inevitable. A former classmate. I didn’t recognize him until he nudged me. His close-cropped hair was perfect camouflage.
“Curly Head,” he said, referencing his old HBS nickname—earned by a prematurely balding, spiky mop.

I’d intended to illegally sit in on a chemistry lecture but reconsidered. Curly Head hadn’t been a close friend, if I’d had any friends at all. But he’d tolerated me. Even respected me, once—one of the few who hadn’t laughed, even gave me a thumbs-up, when I’d argued that the innocent swastika would one day stand for tyranny and genocide.

“Coffee?” He didn’t wait for an answer—just walked to the buffet and returned with three cups of whatever passed for coffee here.
“Willie, do we have something nice for the Rat?”
The girl fished a paper bag from her coat pocket, tore it open, and motioned for me to take a dark brown sandwich. I accepted politely.

“My sister may have a bit of majesty, but Wilhelmina doesn’t sound well,” Curly Head said around a mouthful of bread, then washed it down with coffee.
“But now to the point.”

Over the next hour, he initiated me into a world I’d only vaguely suspected: the shadows of organized resistance. The Netherlands was being handed to the Germans, and Joe Public didn’t seem to mind—not even after Rotterdam. Seyss-Inquart might spin charming tales, but he was as dangerous a madman as his boss in Germany.

Ten months of deception. Ten months of slow erosion.
Deportations were coming. The groundwork was being laid—roads, war equipment, production lines. It was happening fast. And anyone still clinging to doubt about Jewish persecution… well, let them flip through the Leader’s own writings. And just to clarify: Mein Kampf didn’t mean my camp, though the word camp would acquire a sinister relevance soon enough. Kampf meant struggle—and it didn’t take much imagination to predict the consequences for the Jews.

Last February, for better or worse, the country had gone on strike—briefly. Government, transport, factories: shut down. But it hadn’t moved the Germans much. Mostly, it had inconvenienced the Dutch. Still, it was a beginning. This was war, no matter how many refused to acknowledge it. If the government was asleep, the Resistance would have to do the dirty work. Underground if needed.

We’d learned from past wars. Sabotage was the way forward. Breaching dikes was obsolete—planes didn’t care about high tide. But there were other ways.

They needed hands—and more urgently, brains. Expertise in electricity. And in explosives. Or ideally, both.

Curly Head paused for effect. Willie drank her last sip of coffee. She hadn’t spoken once.
Then he leaned forward, his gaze boring into me.

“We need you, Rat.”

And there it was. The one thing no one had ever said to me: “We need you.”

6.

The blinding flash split the darkness, half a second before the shockwave and the demonic boom of the explosion.

The first explosion went as expected, although it rained shards of the blown-out windows dangerously close to us. We were just about to crawl away backwards, when a second explosion really unleashed hell. Blinded by the hellishly intense white flash of light, I lost my mind and my orientation, stood up straight, only to be immediately thrown back into the dry ditch by the shock wave that hit my body like a sledgehammer. I opened my eyes—white orbs floated against pitch-black. Vision gone. No horizon, no bearings. All I could hear was a piercing whistle in my ears. In sheer panic, I crawled back to my feet, but Willie tackled me and held me down at the bottom of the ditch. We must have laid there for minutes, my face pressed to the ground, my teeth grinding on a stale mouthful of damp earth that I had swallowed against my will. Then Willie yanked me onto my back and began to hit me left and right on my cheeks. I slowly opened my tightly shut eyes. My vision slowly returned. Mixed with the white spots I saw the silhouette of Willie. On her knees beside me, she shouted something—but the piercing whistle in my ears drowned it out. She pointed into the forest and began to pull me like a madman. The message was clear. Get out of here, and quickly!

In retrospect I could have named at least ten beginner's mistakes. My textbook knowledge, gathered in the quiet gloom of my study, had nearly killed us both. We’d aimed to destroy only the vehicles. Let the shed burn itself down. No casualties—that would lead to merciless reprisals, as many had already painfully learned after almost two years of war. And in the darkness of the moonless night, we would have enough time to get away unseen.

In fact, it had not been that stupid to choose the cover of the dry ditch, 150 meters from the shed. If everything had gone according to plan. But I had grossly underestimated the power of the explosives. I had also not been very economical with the explosives. My first mission should not fail. Still, I should have done my homework better. I should have expected that a considerable amount of ammunition was stored in the shed, and probably also the necessary barrels of fuel. Fortunately, my sight and hearing had returned quite quickly.

My biggest mistake had been my blind panic. Luckily, Willie had been with me. "Sorry," she had said later, while she had pulled a splinter of glass from my upper arm and applied a pressure bandage that she had fished out of one of the numerous pockets of her long coat. "For that tackle and those blows to your face," she had added, when I had stared at her questioningly. It was one of the rare times she spoke more than five words. After that, we went our separate ways. Safety first. I took the long way back to my shadowed refuge. Willie vanished into who knows what. And that was how it had to be. I would never know where she had been hiding all those years. But that, too, was safety protocol. Just like the cyanide pills we all carried. If we were ever captured, there was only one way out.

7.

Despite the clumsy blunders during my first operation, I had earned a kind of fame. The success was celebrated in our small underground circle with a modest glass of illegal gin. Curly Head, his sister Willie, Skinny Jumbo, the towering Norseman, the Hawk with his beaked profile, and a few others, all with more or less appropriate aliases. Then we split up again, to dissolve into the night. Caution was the key. Only two months ago, a group of fifteen had been arrested and summarily executed, including one of the leaders of the Resistance. It was only much later that I heard about the terrible tortures he had had to endure. The Germans had pulled out all the stops to squeeze his real name out of him. Only after they had finally given him his redeeming coup de grace had it become clear to them that he had never used an alias. IJzerdraat (Iron-wire) had been his real name.

Gradually, the actions became more daring. Blowing up power stations, factories, convoys. We even considered sabotaging the German fighter planes grounded at Gilze-Rijen Airbase, but it didn't get that far yet. Not least because another specter appeared.

The net had closed on the Jews. For two years, the Germans had been thoroughly mapping the whereabouts of Jewish families, with the willing help of the Dutch government, which gave the occupiers unhindered access to the meticulously maintained population registry. The next step was only a matter of time.

The deportations began in July. It took a while before it dawned on everyone, that Camp Westerbork was only a transit camp. A stopover station where the German Krauts herded the Untermenschen, the people they had declared the lowest cast of mankind. They meticulously registered them, and stripped of their last possessions. In the meantime, the German pigs had taken over my former employer, Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co, and had even opened a branch in Camp Westerbork. The Jewish Bank became responsible for the 'management' of all Jewish property. The possessions of those who died were transferred to the State. The German State, to be clear. The machinery of the greatest genocide in history had only just begun to turn.

We shifted our focus to helping Jews. Helping them disappear. False identity cards. Escapes, when the ground became too hot underfoot. Placing children with foster families. False birth certificates. We had immediately stopped blowing up railway lines after those godforsaken Germans had retaliated and blown fire to a railway carriage full of Jews. In this way, they even temporarily brought the Resistance to its knees.

But hatred is a powerful instigator of revenge. After I had sabotaged the railyard—and watched, heard and smelled from a distance as a carriage was turned into a baking oven, I had realized that we were on our own. The royal family and God were gone. The army was a joke. The government, Dutch companies and thousands of citizens had chosen to collaborate. The Jewish people stood at the edge of annihilation—for the umpteenth time in history.

Only this time they were perilously close.

It would be a long, gruesome war. 

8.

Those in the Resistance lived in a constant state of vigilance—always looking over their shoulders, always sleeping lightly, always suspicious first. Our rhythm reversed day and night. Like owls, we planned and executed our operations in moonless hours. Rain was even better. Even the most zealous German patrols cut corners in rain.

I lived and slept on the top floor, except for cooking and bathroom needs. I’d rigged a makeshift flamethrower to the stove. The stairwell was riddled with booby traps. If it ever came to it, I still had an escape route across the neighbors’ roofs.

The macabre thing was—I got used to it. More than that.
From childhood, I’d lived in the margins of life. My father’s scapegoat, the shy boy picked last in gym class, the one who fought to swim through bullying. At HBS and university, real life had passed me by. My books were my refuge. I hoped everything would be better later.

'Later' had arrived. And ‘better’ too. I was someone now. Someone who helped decide when operations happened. Who built radio transmitters and had the underground patent on remote-controlled crude explosives. Someone who drank gin with fellow fighters after success.

I was all too aware of the irony of the war. Millions would lose their lives. Mine had finally begun.

The knock on the door snapped me upright in three seconds. I slept dressed, ready to vanish across the roof tiles. I crept to the front window by feel, flicked on the hidden outside lamp disguised as a flower potpot by the door, and peered through the cut in the curtain toward the small mirror outside the frame—the one I’d mounted to see the front door ‘around a corner’. It took me about ten seconds to gather myself. Too long for someone in the Resistance. But this was no ordinary case, I told myself. I switched off the booby traps and walked down the stairs, towards the front door.

I unlocked the door and pulled you in by your soaked herringbone coat. I glanced left and right—no one else braving the streets in this wretched weather. I slammed the bolts back into place. I groped my way to the kitchen table, lit the smoky kerosene lamp and gestured upstairs to my rickety work desk. Coffee was the least I could do—before I sent you back out into the dark.

But things turned out differently.

It took you half an hour to tell your story. It would change my life—our lives—forever.

Just after dinner, a group of four Germans in Wehrmacht uniforms had knocked on the door. Dürfen wir reinkommen? had not been a question—it had been a command. They had overwhelmed the maid and had marched straight to the study, where Dad sat sipping his well-earned cognac after a busy day of business. The Krauts had left the door open and had kept their voices at their German army level. Your HBS German was enough to follow the conversation. Herr und Frau Rosenthal were to be driven to Westerbork that night, where Herr Direktor would personally be in charge of the brand-new branch office of Lippmann, Rosenthal und Partner. And, of course, Fraülein Suzanne could come too. Suitable accommodation would be provided.

"Get out of here," Pap had urged you, after the quartet of Krauts had withdrawn, with the message in zwei Stunden wiederzukommen, to be back in two hours.

My address had been somewhere deep in his desk drawer —a risk—but he had burned it to ashes with the tip of his cigar, just as he had had the presence of mind to urge you to swap your banker's elegance for black Manchester trousers, a black coarse wool sweater, and the herringbone coat. It didn't even look bad on you. But honestly, even a jute sack would have suited you.

That night you stayed—and never left again. In my rickety bed, you used me to quiet your adrenaline-stiffened body. The next morning the bruises, the welts on my chest and the vague cramp somewhere deep down under were the painful, sweet witnesses. I had not dreamed it. Finally—after all those years of private longing—it had happened.

The fact that I now had a Jewish woman in hiding in my house was a concern for later.

9.

Curly Head and the others hadn’t exactly welcomed you as my new roommate. A banker’s daughter, clueless about real life—or so they assumed. A Jewess, no less. Could it have been any more dangerous?

The pain had been somewhat eased by the fact that Dad had given you a generous stack of banknotes from his safe and you were certainly generous in letting the Resistance have their share. Explosives cost money and of course we all had to eat as well. Your star had risen further when, after a few weeks, you had emerged as a valuable assistant in making explosives. During the sabotage of a bridge, a month or two later, Willie had been blown into the river by the shock wave of the explosion. You dove in after her, risking your own life, dragged her to shore, and breathed life back into her. No one had doubted you anymore.

We arranged a Resistance wardrobe for you. Your hair was dyed a few shades lighter. We had our channels for another identity card. You shed your banker’s accent for the sharp 'r' and 'g', the roll of the Resistance, and your hands looked nothing like your manicured high society hands of a few months ago. Moreover, you developed into a natural talent for making explosives and you were not even afraid of the devil during operations. You ran on pure adrenaline—released only in the darkness of our attic room.

For two years we lived by the day, knowing that it was war, that everything could end abruptly any moment. Two years in which we, with Curly Head, Willie, Jumbo, the Norseman and a dozen others, carried out increasingly daring operations, and further expanded our established hiding-network. We lived on the euphoria of successful attacks and of successful hiding-operations and food transports.

But we also had to deal with tough setbacks. People in hiding who were tracked down and abgeführt, sometimes dozens at a time. Randomly picked up victims who were summarily executed. One night, we had to watch helplessly as Hawk, surrounded out of nowhere by an unexpected German patrol, had pulled out his pistol and shot himself in the head, to spare himself his hellish dilemma: burn himself from the inside out with his cyanide pill, or be tortured to death by the Germans.

Two years, during which sometimes at night, in the shelter of our bed with the sagging mattress and the frayed blankets, between our moments of lust and love, we philosophized about the hopelessness of the war. About your parents who, when your father's services were no longer needed in the Westerbork branch of the Jüdenbank, were eventually put on transport to Sobibor, where your father with his severe diabetes and your mother with her weak heart were doomed to die. About the Allies, who did their utmost, but still had little chance against the German Atlantic Wall. About our dispute with a few other resistance groups, because we refused to risk our lives supporting the dangerous Resistance Corridor to Brittain. If the queen insisted to reign the country, she’d better come back, instead of hiding in her shelter on the British countryside. After all, her son-in-law regularly flew to occupied territory to amuse himself with his mistress, so it was apparently not that unsafe after all.

"May this life go on for years," you whispered once in the darkness. I could not see you, could only feel the warmth of your body against mine. "I finally feel like I'm alive. The HBS-princess hasn't become a fraternity doll. What would have been the point anyway, if I would already be destined to bear babies for yet another banker, yet another money-grubber? No... we face it now. Money is worthless. The Krauts are robbing the country. It's going to be a long winter. Very bad for everyone else. Children, the sick, the elderly especially. But me... I'm finally someone."

I had never felt so connected to anyone. I wanted to freeze time, never let go of the most beautiful moment of my life.

"Come to me. While we still can," you whispered, as you pulled me on top of you.

10.

The Allies had finally broken through the Atlantic Wall. The south of the Netherlands had been liberated, but you were right: the northern part of the country suffered a long winter.

In mid-December, the biting cold arrived. The irony of a white Christmas—plundered country, lost war, yet the Germans still clawed at the last inch of occupied ground. A final death blow. A barbaric reign of terror designed to crush the last fragments of morale.

The cold and hunger became even worse in January. People died in droves, after having tried in vain to survive on potato peelings, flower bulbs and sugar beets. The end of the war was so close, but thousands lost the battle against the hardships of that last winter. That last winter, when we took in a Jewish orphan girl—barely two years old. Left behind in an attic, her parents executed in the street. The SS had gone, leaving their bodies behind like refuse. Then, upstairs, soft crying. You didn’t hesitate.

We named her Hannah, Hebrew for 'mercy'. And despite the hunger, despite the hell outside, I saw you bloom. We knew we’d never have a biological child. We never spoke of it. Maybe something went wrong in that obscure clinic before the war. Maybe it was me. It didn’t matter. We had her. A child to save. A promise to keep. In a world where the war would soon be over.

But the war was not over yet. And the horror winter crept on, with temperatures well below minus 10, in a city where even flower bulbs had become a rare delicacy. One evening, I came home. You were in the kitchen, skinning a captured cat. "Hannah must eat," you whispered—again and again—your voice dull, rhythmic with the knife, as you chopped the skinned cat into pieces. You simmered the meat on our dying kerosene stove. We swallowed revulsion. But Hannah wouldn’t eat. Not anymore.

The next morning, we wrapped her in a sheet. All we had left to bury her was an old overnight bag. We walked through the city at dawn, defiant, silent, stubbornly ignoring the risk of being stopped. When we reached the waterfront, I managed to punch a hole in the ice. After one last look inside the overnight bag, I weighed it down with a paving stone and pulled the zipper closed. We carefully let the bag slide into the hole. You cried. For the first time. And the last.

Spring made early attempts to break through. The mild February weather thawed the streets, but not our home. The people outside brightened up. Yes, they were still hungry, but spring was coming. And the end of the war.

In our home and in our hearts, the darkness of sorrow for Hannah reigned. For three weeks we had been allowed to taste the happiness of saving a child from the terror of the enemy, taking her in as our own, promising her a future in a war-free world.

Fate had decided otherwise.

During the last months of the war, I saw your change. Your fierceness faded. The Resistance left you indifferent. What was there left to resist? The war was coming to an end. Your enthusiasm turned into apathy. Apathy towards the enemy, the horrors of the concentration camps, the last convulsions of the merciless occupation.

Apathy towards me.

A warm, sunny afternoon in April. I came home with a pound of beef and six potatoes. Nice weather for an hour outside, just the two of us, I thought. And then I would cook you a feast, determined as I was to distract you, to make you forget your depression for a moment.

I'm leaving you, read the note on the kitchen table.

You did your best. Thank you for everything. Sorry.

The kitchen and the upstairs were spotless. Your clothes—gone. The bed was made, still with the same bedspread that I’d once carried from my parents' house when I moved in here. No trace left.

Everything was as it had been, three years ago. The silence. The dark gloom.

As if you’d never been here.

11.

I see you sitting on one of the tanks rumbling through the street, together with a few other girls, a green beret tilted on your head, surrounded by a bunch of horny Allies, who can hardly wait for what they're going to do to you girls when the ride is over. Judging by your lips and jaws, you even have the nerve to sing 'Orange above all' at the top of your lungs. And 'Long live the queen.' How low have you sunk.

You don't look up or around when the tank passes my house. Our house—once. For three years.

I understand. Power is irresistible. I tasted it for five years. For five years, I mattered.

But the war is over. And I'm back to square one. Back to being an insignificant physics student—small, skinny with a chicken breast, deathly pale, wiry flaxen hair, and glasses with lenses as thick as jam jar bottoms. And it doesn't help that I walk with a slight limp, a souvenir of a piece a grenade, sustained when my life still had a meaning.

People want to forget the war, so they forget the Resistance too, preferably as soon as possible. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the Resistance, but it's over. Your services are no longer needed. Good luck with the rest of your life.

I don't feel like it anymore. For five years I've tasted real life, and I refuse to crawl back to square one, to the futility of vegetating in the shadows. Let me just take those five beautiful years with me, and leave quietly. My task here is done. I'm quitting. I'm resigning from this thoroughly sick world —this theater of polite denial and revision. We've had a wonderful time together, but after this letter I'll take my memories of you with me, into oblivion.

Good luck with your American, or your Canadian, I can't see from behind my dirty window whether it’s a Yank or a Canuck with his hands under your blouse on top of that tank. Let him marry you first. And then go with him. The Netherlands is a beautiful country, at least if you're content with an idyllic existence in a noisy, damp upstairs apartment for the first 10, 20 years, where you can wash yourself with stinking river water at the kitchen tap and teach your children to write in the soot from the coal stove that settles on the wallpaper. And those 9 million people huddled together in the Netherlands will have become 12 million in 20 years. And 15 million before the end of the century.

If you do decide to stay in the Netherlands, get used to it, but you won't have much trouble with that either: within ten years or so, trade-business with the Krauts will be back to normal, as if they've never been acting like animals here. In the summers, German will echo again in Scheveningen and Zandvoort. As if they never bombed Rotterdam to the ground, and as if those damned concentration camps never existed. As if those tens of thousands of Jews were never deported from the Netherlands to their final breath, the godforsaken gas chambers.

The persecution of Jews will never really stop. At the beginning of the next century, most of those who consciously experienced the war will have died. And with them, the last brake on anti-Semitism will have been buried, and it will only be a matter of time before your grandchildren will witness a new Kristallnacht.

The royal family will continue for a long time, although Wilhelmina's daughter will have a hard time, not least with that German gold digger of hers. But people see what they want to see. Their faith in the Orange fairy tale is rock solid.

Speaking of faith: the eternal polarization between Catholics and Protestants will resolve itself. Churches that will be almost empty at the end of the century. Except on Christmas Eve and—maybe—on the eve of the fifth of May—the day that the last SS-flag was finally removed from our buildings.

I have put on my old Sunday-suit. My parents would be proud, I suppose. Minus the circumstances. I have tidied the house. Doused the kerosene flame. Taken out the garbage.

Upstairs I will pour my final drink. Lie down. The letter will be on the bedside table.

And then I’ll let it all go.

It has been enough.

12.

The past few weeks I watched you slip into sadness. The irony: the famine winter had been chased away by spring. The war was nearly over.

A bright future beckoned—the free Netherlands where the red-white-blue would wave again in the west wind. Apple blossoms, tulip fields, Scheveningen, Zandvoort—all shining in the sun again.
We would rebuild our country like never before.
But you, my love—you slid deeper into the darkness.

I loved you. For four years. So deeply that it hurt. And suddenly there she was — the banker's daughter. That godforsaken rotten bitch, who forced herself into your life.

What could I do? She brought enough money to keep our Resistance group afloat for months. She even saved my life once. The irony cut deep.

Silence was my only refuge. No one would have listened to me. Who listens to an autistic person? No—nothing left but to wait. One day that slut would run away from you. I would wait, even if it took until the end of the war.

I had to see you today. I knew you’d shut yourself away, unable to stomach the frenzied revelry, locking yourself in the dark caverns of loneliness in your own home.

From the last food drop I still had a loaf of bread. I fried the final two eggs —how much didn’t you love fried eggs! I stuffed everything, with some apples, into my bag and set off, pushing my way through the exuberant crowd. The trumpets, the drums, the ‘Long live the Queen’—I tuned it all out.

I knocked. Again. And again. Worried, I rattled and turned the doorknob. To my utter amazement, the door opened. Just like that. Something was very wrong. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me and walked cautiously to the stairs. From a distance I threw my bag on the stairs, but nothing happened. The booby traps were off. I climbed the stairs, slowly.

There you were. Laying so still.
The glass and the envelope on the makeshift bedside table.
Your face was blue—but your cheeks were still warm.
If only I’d come half an hour earlier. If only...

***

I’ve been sitting beside you for half an hour now, my love.
Holding your hand, but I know that I cannot stop your hands from slowly getting cold.
My tears have come—finally. After five years.
Today, I’m allowed to cry. Just for a little while.

I’ll go get the others soon.
Curly Head. Jumbo. The Norseman.
We’ll give you a beautiful funeral.
I’ll keep your grave tidy. So you stay with us.

We’ll keep your memory alive.
So that our struggle wasn’t in vain.
And you—you’ll have the peace you longed for.

I will carry your memory with me, my love…

… as long as I live.