Hallum

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
Anne Frank, Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex
I hated early mornings in the autumn when the sun didn’t bother getting up before me.
My sister loved them. She was weird like that.
The third morning in October was no different from any other. I crawled out from the warmth of my covers, stretched, stopped by the bathroom to pee, then headed toward the kitchen. My stomach gurgled as I whiffed the bacon frying down the hall.
Is that Sarr? I wondered.
Our moeder and vader told us never to name the animals, but we couldn’t help it, and Lianne was worse than I was. She saw most of them before their own mother did, all gooey and gross. She practically wrestled them out of Papa’s arms. Some of them wouldn’t open their eyes for a while, but others, like Sarr, would blink up and make me want to squeeze them on the spot.
I hoped breakfast wasn’t Sarr.
Sometimes, in war, we had to do things we hated, like eating the animals we’d named rather than selling them in the market or giving them to the Nazi collectors. I knew we had to do our part. The Hitler Youth at school taught us that. Still, it felt worse seeing them go to men with rifles than to other farmers or Meener Vermeer. He was the town’s butcher—whatever that meant. He was always nice.
“Good morning, my schat,” Mama sang as I stepped into the kitchen. She knew I hated when she called me “sweetie,” but she did it anyway. “Hungry?”
I nodded and climbed into the wicker chair I always sat in when we ate. Lianne was already halfway through her breakfast. One of her long braids drooped in front of her chest and wiggled every time she used her fork. I giggled as it nearly fell into her plate when she reached for her juice. She glanced up and stuck her tongue out, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.
A plate of two strips of bacon, a boiled egg, and toast with grape jam landed before me.
“Eat up. No school today. Papa needs your help,” Mama said, before brushing my mop of fiery hair back and kissing my forehead. As soon as her hand left my head, the curls flopped back into place.
I couldn’t decide whether to be more excited or frustrated. Papa needing help meant work. School meant work. The Hitler Youth made us work. It didn’t matter where we were or what we wanted, we had to work.
I glanced at Lianne, hoping for some hint of the day to come. She shrugged and focused on her plate.
Barks rang out.
Mama peered out the window above the sink then laughed and shook her head. Our pack of Patrijshonden were as loyal as dogs came, but they were more goofy than helpful around the farm. Half the time, Papa had to scold them for terrorizing our poor chickens.
Their floppy ears were funny.
“Hurry up and finish,” Mama said. “Papa should be in the barn with the cows.”
At least we didn’t have to work the fields. That was the one good thing about autumn and winter. The plants were asleep and the ground was solid, so the only things left to tend were the animals. Most of ours were cows. Sometimes, it seemed like we had too many to count, but Papa always knew exactly how many there should be. He was smart like that.
We had a few sheep and a bunch of pigs too.
The pigs were my favorite.
I swallowed the last bite of bacon and downed my juice, then scooted the chair back and made for the door. Lianne reluctantly followed.
When we started before the sun, the days felt like they lasted forever.
***
By the time the sun reached her peak, we’d milked all the cows, fed the pigs, and shooed the sheep so they could eat whatever grass was still alive in the field. Papa had scattered hay along one fence row in case they were still hungry after the grass was gone.
As we stomped back toward the house, surrounded by our ever-present ring of pups who likely thought they were herding us home, Papa held his hand up to shield his eyes.
“Nazis are coming for their week’s allotment,” he said, more to himself than to us. “Go on, you two, get to the house. Tell Mama to get ready for Lieutenant Huber.”
Lianne’s eyes glazed over and her cheeks flushed. “What?” She shoved my shoulder. “He’s handsome.”
Papa rolled his eyes. “Go, run home. I want you inside before they get here.”
The kitchen door swung shut behind us just as the German car ground to a halt, kicking up dust from our gravel drive in every direction. The truck that followed created an even larger cloud.
More than an hour later, the squeal of the kitchen door announced Papa’s arrival.
“Isa,” he called out to Mama. “Isa, they are gone. Where are you?”
“Coming.” Mama’s footfalls echoed against the wood of our hallway a second before her voice did the same. “Bauke is working his sums, and Lianne is reading another of her romance novels. I swear that girl will turn into a pool of syrup before she grows up.”
Papa’s rich laughter filled our home with warmth.
The moment they started whispering, Lianne and I tossed our books and headed closer. We hated when the grown-ups tried to keep secrets.
“… three pigs, two sheep, and they’re coming back for a dozen cows,” Papa said.
The groan of one of the kitchen chairs told me Mama had sat at the table. “So many?”
“Ever since the strikes …”
Their voices were drowned out by the dogs braying at who-knew-what outside.
“The strikes?” I whispered to Lianne.
She cupped her hand to her mouth to hamper the sound. “Remember? In the spring, when miners and other workers walked off the job to protest how the Reichskommissar was forcing everybody to work for the Nazis.”
Ah. Those strikes. The spring ones weren’t the first, but they were the biggest. The papers—at least, the ones we could still get—said a lot of people had stopped working. So many farms in one region were set on fire that the sky turned red.
Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart
had a lot of people shot after that.
Papa stopped letting us read the papers from then on. I never understood why reading a newspaper was dangerous, but that’s what he said. Most of the big Dutch ones quit printing when the Germans came anyway.
We could listen to the radio some, but most of it was in German now. We studied German in school, but I still wasn’t very good with it. For some reason, all the Dutch shows we used to listen to stopped airing a while back, too.
We waited in silence for a long time before the sounds of Mama banging pots and pans told us their conversation had ended then scurried from our hiding spot as Papa rounded the corner, headed toward the living room and the comfort of his favorite chair. Most afternoons, after a long day outside, he would clean up, grab the same book he’d pretended to read for years, and fall asleep with it in his lap, only to wake when Mama poked him with the business end of a spatula or wooden spoon. The sudden hack of his interrupted snoring was our cue to get ready for dinner.
That night brought the smoky scent of sausage mixed with the tang of turnips, as Mama laid a steaming bowl of stamppot
on the center of the table. Since the Germans took over, a lot of people talked about how meat was rare, but I never noticed that. I guessed that was one of the lucky things about living on a farm. We had to contribute to the troops, but if the Nazis wanted milk, they couldn’t take all our cows. I didn’t know why they let us keep the others, but I was glad for it. Stamppot was one of my favorites and it wasn’t nearly as good without the sausage.
Lianna helped Mama clear the table and clean up, while Papa and I headed into the living room. We’d barely sat before his lids were closed and his breathing became low and steady. I sat on the couch opposite him, scanning the coffee table for anything to occupy myself. The corner of a newspaper peeked out from below a disheveled pile of old magazines. I reached down and pried it free.
I was surprised to find Dutch, rather than German, on the page. The title read Trouw
in bold block lettering. A hand-drawn image of Queen Wilhemina watching a rising sun underscored the forbidden nature of the page in Nazi-controlled Holland.
DE KONINGIN SPRAK (The Queen Speaks)
Countrymen in the Netherlands …
“Son, what are you doing?” Papa snatched the paper out of my hands before I could sound out anything following the Queen’s greeting. He folded it neatly, rose from his chair, and shoved it into a drawer in his rolltop desk. What he did next surprised me more than his snatch-and-grab had: he locked the drawer and pocketed the key.
When he returned to his chair, rather than lay back and drift off, he leaned forward and gripped my gaze with his own. “Listen to me, Bauke. I want you to forget you saw that, alright? It never existed. We are loyal to the Reich, and hold no love for the Queen. You hear me?”
My brows knitted together as I struggled with whatever bigger picture was at play here. All I could see was the Queen gazing at the sun. I knew Mama and Papa loved the Queen. None of this made any sense.
“Okay, Papa. But—”
“No buts. You do as I say. The only paper you’ve seen in this house for years is Deutsche Zeitung, and you don’t read German well enough to know what it says.”
“At least that part is the truth,” I muttered.
His calloused hand gripped my shoulder. “Bauke, stop. This is important.”
“Sorry, Papa. I promise.”
He stared a moment, then released me and sat back. Still, he didn’t relax. I could tell by how his forehead wrinkled and his eyes moved that he was thinking hard.
“Papa,” I asked.
He looked toward me and grunted.
“Why don’t we like the Queen anymore? You used to say she was like our moeder or something.”
He stared, and his brow did that thing again. “The moeder of our nation, that’s right.” He nodded slowly. When he finally spoke again, it sounded like he was struggling to form his words. “Son, when you are older, you will find a wife of your own and leave our house. You will turn from your moeder to create your own family.”
He gulped a time or two and looked down at his hands as he spoke. “Our nation has left our moeder. Now, we are married to the Germans.”
His lips twisted like he had eaten something bitter, but he didn’t go on.
I thought a moment. “Does that make Hitler our vader now?”
Something crossed his eyes and his whole body tensed, as if everything about him had seized up at the question.
“No, son, no. We have no parents now.”
We didn’t talk anymore that night. Papa stared into the bookcase until Mama and Lianne joined us some time later.
“Can we go outside now?” Lianne broke the interminable silence that had cloaked our living room in a feeling I didn’t like.
“If you wrap up first,” Mama answered. “And don’t leave the farm. No further than the fence, alright?”
“Yes, Mama,” Lianne said, hopping up and turning toward me. “Come on.”
That’s all it took.
I darted off the couch, determined to move faster than any protest our parents might issue. They’d given my older sister permission, but hadn’t agreed to let me out of their sight. Fortunately, neither of them even watched me leave the room.
Moments later, Lianne and I were bundled in layers of sweaters and heavy coats. Winter had come early this year and the wind coming off the water was frigid.
We didn’t care. Anything was better than the boredom of being cooped up in our house.
“You think they’ll come again tonight?” I asked, smiling at the puffs that billowed from my mouth after each word.
She nodded. “I think so. They’ve come every night for almost a month.”
As if hearing us from thousands of feet above, the distant hum of American bombers sang through the skies. I spun around and squinted up, seeing nothing but darkness and clouds. A second later, the distant wail of the air raid sirens in Emden sounded
. The bay was huge, and we were on the farthest point opposite the port, but sound carried over the water, sometimes making it feel like we were in the middle of the bombing runs rather than a country away.
“Here they come!” I hissed.
“Come on,” she called, shifting from a steady walk into a jog.
My pride wouldn’t let a girl beat me in a race, so I kicked it up another notch and ran past her, nearly slamming nose-first into our picket fence. One of our cows, chewing lazily nearby, glanced up with mild interest.
The anti-aircraft guns fired first, then falling bombs screeched, followed by blasts that had us ducking like they were dropping on us. The night that had been black only moments ago was now lit with hues of scarlet and ginger. The city of Emden blazed even brighter.
“Two dozen,” Lianne muttered as the bombs continued to fall. “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine …”
“Why are you counting?”
She shushed me. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three …”
One of the bombers was hit and hurtled toward the ground, exploding into a million pieces somewhere on the other side of the town.
“Whoa! That was bigger than any of the bombs,” I said.
Lianne was quiet a moment—still counting, I assumed—before she said, “They probably had bombs on board before they crashed.”
She crossed herself and closed her eyes briefly.
I stared up at her. She didn’t know anyone in those planes. She didn’t even know anyone in Emden. Why would she pray over—
“Come on, let’s get closer,” she said. I watched, wide-eyed, as she climbed over the fence and hopped down onto the other side. “You need help?”
“Mama said—”
She cocked her head. “You coming or not? We’ll be able to see better closer to the shore.”
I started to argue, but the bombers were making their turn. They would likely go past us, then fly a wide arc until they were pointed back at Emden. They usually did two or three runs before the night stilled.
Fueled by a desire to better see the bombing, and aided by the thrill of doing something rebellious, I gripped the fence and climbed. Lianne had to grab my shoulder and help me over the top, but soon enough, I’d joined her on the other side and we were running toward the bay.
The bombers had made their circle and were nearly overhead. I could feel them as much as hear them.
I looked up to watch them pass and that’s when I tripped, and the cold, hard ground reached up and smacked me in the nose.
Pain shot through my face and into my spine. When I reached up and touched my nose, my fingers came away wet and slick.
“Li!” I shouted, fruitlessly trying to raise my voice above the bombers. “Li!”
I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.
It took a few seconds for her to realize I was no longer behind her, but then her hands were on my shoulders, lifting me into the light of Emden’s embers as she examined my face. “Are you alright? Looks like you got your nose pretty good.”
I nodded and bit my cheek, determined to be a man about my tumble, just like Papa taught me.
“I tripped over something big,” I said.
We knew these fields like our own, and there were no boulders or logs, like there were near the forests further south.
Lianne’s gaze moved from my nose to the ground behind me. She stared; her eyes narrowed, then they popped wide and her hand flew to her mouth.
She rocked back and rose to her feet, like someone had shoved her upward. “That’s … there’s a body over there.”
I leapt up and darted behind her, as though my sister could shield me from any danger the world had to offer. Sure enough, the long form of a prone body lay on its side a few meters away, the owner’s face turned so we couldn’t see it. The light of the bombs only offered a silhouette of whoever might lay there.
“What should we do?” I asked.
Slowly, she took a step forward, then another.
“Li, what are you doing?”
“Shh.” She held a finger to her lips as she took several more steps toward the body.
I thought my heart might beat out of my chest. Plumes of heat exploded from my mouth as frightened breaths escaped.
When Lianne kneeled and reached toward the figure, I nearly bolted and ran for the safety of our house, but curiosity froze me in place.
“It’s a man,” she said, her hand pressing to his cheek. She carefully turned his shoulders so he lay on his back, then looked him up and down, hovering a hand over his mouth and nose.
“He’s alive. But he’s freezing,” she said. “And his leg is bleeding.”
“Is he a Nazi?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine who else would dare bleed on one of our farms in the middle of the night.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. He needs help. Go back to the house and fetch Papa.”
“Li, I can’t leave you—”
“Bauke, go. Run!”