The Time Between Read online

  The Time Between 1940-1945

  Bryna Hellmann-Gillson

  Contents

  1. Hannah, November 1938

  2. Pam, May 1940

  3. Jo, June 1940

  4. Pam, October 1940

  5. Hannah, December 1940

  6. Jo, February 1941

  7. Hannah, February 1941

  8. Pam, April 1941

  9. Jo, June 1941

  10. Hannah, September 1941

  11. Pam, April 1942

  12. Jo, May 1942

  13. Pam, October 1942

  14. Hannah, November 1942

  15. Jo, December 1942

  16. Pam, March 1943

  17. Jo, June 1943

  18. Hannah, August 1943

  19. Pam, September 1943

  20. Jo and Pam, October 1943

  21. Pam, October 1943

  22. Hannah, April 1944

  23. Jo, September 1944

  24. Hannah, September 1944

  25. Jo, December 1944

  26. Pam, August 1945

  A Calendar of the Occupation

  About the Author

  Also by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © Bryna Hellmann-Gillson, 2018

  ISBN 13: 9789492371867 (ebook)

  ISBN 13: 9789492371850 (paperback)

  Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers, The Netherlands

  [email protected]

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Voices

  Ideal and beloved voices

  of those who are dead, or of those

  lost to us like the dead.

  Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;

  sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

  And with their sound for a moment return

  sounds from our life’s first poetry -

  like music at night, distant, fading away.

  Constantine P. Cavafy

  1 Hannah, November 1938

  In that time, in Berlin, Hannah had school friends. Well, friends. Most of them had stopped talking to her when their parents forbid it. The last time she went to Trudie’s house and saw Hitler’s photo on the wall, she knew she couldn’t go there anymore. Trudie didn’t say, but she understood.

  Vera’s favorite teacher and the assistant principal of the gymnasium retired, ‘fired was more like it,’ Mutti corrected her. Hannah thought she was safe in school as long as she sat quietly and pretended to listen when the teachers told them how wonderful everything was now, and how much more wonderful it would be when the rest of Europe joined their great nation. The teachers knew she was Jewish. One of two managed to find something insulting to say about Jewish bankers or Jewish communists in every lesson, and the others just ignored her.

  ‘Just keep your mouth shut, liebling,’ her mother said sternly one evening, the ‘darling’ tacked on to soften her command.

  Vera had come home to report that Frau Demel, the school principal, had taken her out of the spelling team. She was the best in the whole school, though she was one of the youngest. The competition with the boys’ school had been won by the same pupil two years running, but he had graduated and gone into the army, and Vera’s teacher was certain there was nobody else at the boys’ gymnasium who could beat her.

  ‘I just wanted to know why, Mutti, but she said she couldn’t tell me. It was just no. She wants the school to win, why won’t she let me do it?’

  ‘She can’t, that’s all. And you can’t and Hannah can’t, and that’s all there is to say about that. It’s just kids’ stuff anyway.’

  That hurt Vera more than anything but, under their mother’s flat voice and behind her expressionless face, they sensed something that silenced them.

  The city was being cleaned and decorated for the Olympic Games, and every day the front page stories were about the enormous stadium, the sports fields, the houses for the athletes, and the hotels and restaurants for spectators from all over the world. There were photos of avenues lined by hundreds of flags on which black swastikas proclaimed Germany’s pride in its Aryan heritage. Hitler had said it didn’t matter how much all this cost, Germany was prosperous as never before, and the world would now see what National Socialism had accomplished.

  Hannah didn’t want to hear about Hitler, about how he was making Germans proud of themselves again. When there was a parade in Berlin, she stayed inside so that she couldn’t hear the band and the shouts from the crowd. She’d always known that it didn’t matter who was in charge, they were going to be unfair to somebody.

  Vera graduated and started her first job, coming home every evening with stories about the other girls she worked with. Like her, they lived at home and gave part of their salary to their mothers, but the older ones were already making plans to marry. They talked about window-shopping on Sundays with their fiancés for furniture, about the damask tablecloths and linen pillowcases they were embroidering their initials on, even about wanting to have a baby, many babies.

  The hard years after they’d lost the war and had to pay the winners were over. For a few years, the government had printed more and more money, and you needed a suitcase full of bills to go shopping for dinner. If you bought a loaf of bread for a hundred million marks in the morning, it would cost two hundred million in the afternoon. Hitler knew what to do about that. Now everybody who wanted a job could find one, a mark was a mark yesterday and today, they had new clothes to wear and food to eat, and they loved Hitler for promising them prosperity and then keeping his promises.

  The police closed the nightclubs and the foreigners went home. Berlin was the capital of a new prosperous Germany that didn’t want or need their dollars and pounds. They didn’t have to be ashamed of being German, Hitler told them, they were a great people who had done great things and would again.

  ‘Rosella said today that Rudi has to leave next week,’ Vera told them. ‘He can’t say where his regiment is going but she’s not to worry.’

  ‘Who’s Rudi?’ Muti asked.

  ‘That’s the man she’s going to marry. He came to the office last week, and she introduced him to the rest of us. He’s very shy, he hardly said anything, but Rosella talks enough for both of them.’

  ‘You like her, do you?’

  When Vera didn’t answer, Mutti said, ‘You don’t? Why not?’

  ‘She says things sometimes. You know.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Oh Mutti, she says Jews are dangerous, they aren’t Germans even though they pretend to be, and you can’t always tell who’s pretending. It’s better if they all leave the country. And all the girls agree with her.’

  ‘I hope she doesn’t know who you are.’

  ‘They’re so nice to me, I guess not. But, Mutti, we don’t pretend.’

  ‘Was I pretending to be a German,’ Vati interrupted, ‘when I fought in the trenches in France and came home with a scar on my arm and an Iron Cross on my chest? Perhaps I should wear it every day to prove I am a real German!’

  ‘Nobody wants to be reminded of that war, liebling,’ Mutti said. ‘We lost, remember? Walk out in the street wearing it, and some thug will rip it off your coat and ram it into your face.’

  Hannah stared at her mother. She’d never seen her so talkative. She was often silent, only her half-closed eyes telling you she was angry or disappointed, or she would say something in a voice that shut the door on anything you wanted to ask or answer. She wouldn’t talk about a lot of things
that worried Hannah and, now it seemed, Vera too. ‘I hope she doesn’t know,’ her mother had said. It was as close as she would get to admitting it might be dangerous.

  Their doctor came to say goodbye. He had friends in London, and it was his last chance, he said, to take all his possessions and money with him. Other neighbors were just gone one day, their furniture carted off to an auction house, their apartment rented a day later to loyal members of the party. What did ‘last chance’ mean, if you weren’t planning to emigrate?

  When Hannah graduated, she thought she’d like to be a nurse, but none of the training hospitals would take her, and by that time Vera had lost her job. Mutti let them sleep late and gave them small errands to do for her, and Vera helped in the shoe shop, though there were fewer customers. Vati hardly talked to her, she told Hannah. The wholesale shoe company he’d always dealt with had been sold to a competitor who immediately raised all his prices. Vati sat in his little office staring at order forms, making calculations in his neat old-fashioned handwriting and sighing. It was driving her crazy, but she felt he needed her there and, anyway, it was a way to get out of the house.

  One night the windows of the shop were smashed and a sign saying ‘Juden’ nailed onto the door. After that nobody dared to buy shoes from him. He stayed in bed all day, and Mutti sold everything cheaply to the owner of a shop that was allowed to stay open.

  ‘Go,’ she told Vera and Hannah. ‘Go while you can. Your Uncle Bernard will take you in, and Holland will be safe.’

  ‘You and Vati should come too,’ Vera said. ‘Let’s sell what we can. Other people have done it, years ago already. Why do you want to stay here?’

  ‘We’ll be all right. Vati will get better soon, and we’ll go to your grandmama. This wildness is only in the city, I’m sure.’

  They didn’t want to go without them, but they wanted desperately to go. A whole month of arguing and hesitating and feeling selfish went by, and then a student friend of Vera’s offered to drive them over the Dutch border to a small town where nobody would notice two girls taking a train to the big city.

  * * *

  They were welcomed in Utrecht with hugs and kisses and a million questions that they tried their best to answer. For a few weeks they slept late, went out for walks together or shopping with Aunt Mina, listened to the German radio with Uncle Bernard. They wrote letters home, there were telephone calls to and from Berlin. Mutti wouldn’t agree to leave, not yet. Then nothing, no post, a phone ringing in what felt like an empty room. Aunt Mina said with relief, ‘Good, they’ve gone to your grandmother’s house.’

  Living in Utrecht was wonderful. The canals, the curvy bridges, the cathedral and so many little churches, flower markets everywhere, it was a fairy-tale city.

  Vera found work in a company that sold tobacco to cigar makers in Germany, so her perfect German was well-paid. When she brought home a folder advertising a shorthand and typing course, Aunt Mina said, ‘That’s perfect for you, Hannah! You’ll meet other young people and learn something useful too.’

  ‘It’s in Dutch,’ Hannah said doubtfully, but her aunt clapped her hands and said, ‘Well, we’ll both do it! I’ll help you with your homework, it will be fun, and I’m not too old to learn new tricks!’ She was so enthusiastic that she went with Hannah the next day to sign her up and pay the fee.

  It was a small school on one floor of an office building, with only twelve people in her class. They were all girls, and all the teachers were women except for the man who taught them blind typing and turned out to be the owner.

  Hannah enjoyed sitting in the classroom with the other students, even though she didn’t understand most of what they said. There was one, Heleen, who didn’t say much, but everybody liked her. Hannah hoped they could be friends when she knew enough Dutch, but Heleen only smiled at her when she ran past in the hall.

  Bending over her desk and concentrating on what the teachers dictated, she worked harder than she ever had in Berlin. At the end of the day her fingers were cramped from holding a pen so tightly and from banging away at an old stiff typewriter. She thought she would rather die than be a secretary like Vera, sitting all day in a room with piles of paper and a telephone and a boss who yelled at her if she made a mistake.

  She was learning Dutch faster than Vera, who had to read and write German all day. For an hour every evening after supper, Aunt Mina taught both of them, using a book she’d had since she was a child. So many words were the same as in German that sometimes Hannah didn’t know whether she’d answered a question in one language or the other. Only the pronunciation was different, all those ‘g’s’ that stuck in your throat.

  Their aunt and uncle were so good to them in so many ways that it made Hannah and Vera feel a bit guilty. They wouldn’t take any money for their meals, so Vera paid for school books for Hannah, and the rest went for clothes, the compulsory bicycles, a film every week, and a tiny savings account at the post office. They were becoming Dutch. Whatever happened, they agreed, they would never go back to Berlin.

  While German troops invaded one small country after another, everybody was sure they would respect Holland’s neutrality. They had during the Great War.

  Uncle Bernard had been a young man in 1914, just married to his Dutch wife and with no plans to go back to Berlin. ‘I suppose it was good for business not to take sides,’ he told them. ‘We needed coal from Germany, and we had enough food and other things to trade, and having a place for the spies from both sides to operate was useful. Some people got killed by accident, of course, mostly on the borders with Belgium and Germany, but thousands of young men who would have had to fight just went on doing what they always did. Nobody lost a leg, a face, his sanity or his life, and that’s what everyone hopes this time. We can do that again, stay out of it, I mean.’

  ‘But that’s like saying the Nazis can do anything they want everywhere else!’ Vera protested. ‘It’s not the same this time!'

  He put his hand over hers and squeezed it. ‘It’s never exactly the same, but it’s still war. You don’t get into it if you don’t have to. Besides, look at the two of you and think about all the other people who’ve come here to be safe. We don’t want the Germans here!’

  She shook her head, not knowing what to answer. The man she worked for was a good man, and he had connections in Germany. ‘I wonder what Mr Braun thinks is going to happen,’ she said. ‘The people he deals with in Munich seem so nice. When he phones them, I hear him laughing and thanking them for their good wishes. He’s done business with them for years, and his father did too.’

  ‘Your Mr Braun is an NSB-er, you know that, don’t you? I’d be very careful what you say to him. Does he know you’re Jewish?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Then you’d better hope we stay out of it, or he’ll have to choose between being a good Nazi and being good to you.’

  The Dutch National Socialists, who had their headquarters in Utrecht, were mad with excitement at the idea that Holland might soon be part of Hitler’s Germany. Most of their members were successful businessmen like Vera’s Mr Braun. All they said about England and France going to war against Hitler was too bad about the lost business, but it was a small price they were happy to pay. They admired the way Hitler had lifted Germany out of the terrible depression it suffered after the Great War, and the way he’d broken the unions and the political parties who supported the working class.

  ‘People like your Mr Braun are afraid of the communists and the socialists and even the people who work for them, people like you and me. They trust the Nazis more than they trust us. If their party wasn’t so anti-Semitic,’ Uncle Bernard explained, ‘and had so little respect for the other people in the parliament, they might have had more influence. Now nobody with any decency wants to vote for them. Or work for them, Vera! We all know which side they’ll choose if the Germans do come here. Idiots!’

  ‘Traitors,’ Aunt Mina corrected.

  Hannah hated that kind of talk. She had plans
and she didn’t want anything to stop her. She wanted Holland to stay just the way it was. But of course it couldn’t, and it didn’t.

  Thursday evening was their night out. Vera only had to work a half-day on Friday and again on Saturday and didn’t mind staying up a bit later. That evening they saw a film about an orphan who got into all sorts of trouble in the Rotterdam harbor, until he was rescued by a minister who turned him into a good little church-going boy, and a Mickey Mouse cartoon that made them laugh until they were breathless. Coming out of the theater, Vera said, ‘Even when I’m laughing, I feel I shouldn’t be so happy.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you be?’ Hannah protested. ‘Do you think Mutti and Vati want us to be sad? Well, I‘m not.’

  They were walking along the low stonewall that bordered a canal, and she looked down at a boat going by. It slid through patches of shadow and reflected lights, slowly and silently. That’s what she wanted to do, have a boyfriend and go out rowing in the evening. Maybe she’d start to drink beer and smoke. Utrecht was full of people she wanted to know and things she wanted to do.

  ‘Oh Hannah, yes, be happy. But let me worry. I can’t help it. I’m your big sister, let me do the worrying for us both.’

  Hannah linked her arm through Vera’s and pulled her closer. ‘I just mean there’s no point. Doesn’t it look as if they got out of Berlin and are safe with Grandmama? Maybe they’re even planning to come here!’ She wanted them to be safe, but living with them again, being a good daughter, wasn’t what she imagined her life was going to be. Anyway, it wasn’t her fault if they couldn’t be happy where they were.