Hunger Journeys (13 page)

On Monday, February 5, 1945, Lena ate her last meagre lunch at home. Piet stood by the window stroking a velvety leaf of the African violet, calm and silent. Lena’s heart twisted in her chest. He was going to think she was running away.

Well, it would be as it would be. She busied herself tidying up the kitchen and awaited her moment. Her old battered suitcase was already packed, hidden under the bed. In her pocket were her ration cards, along with a short note for her family. At last, Piet went out, as she knew he would. Margriet had gone to line up for this week’s sugar beets. Father was in his study, and Bep was in the bedroom with Mother and baby Nynke.

Lena dried her hands, took off her apron and hung it over the back of a chair. Then she went into her bedroom, took the folded papers from her pocket and put them in the middle of the bed, where they could not be missed. She hoped that Bep
and Piet wouldn’t worry about her too much. She had done her best, writing that she was with Sofie, that they would be safe, that she was leaving her ration cards so everyone could have more to eat. She adjusted the note on top of the cards, put on her wool coat, her favourite hat and her funny green mittens, pulled her suitcase from under the bed and walked briskly down the hall and out the front door.

She and Sofie met at Sofie’s house, since their journey was not a secret from Sofie’s parents. And they walked to the station, exhausted long before they reached it from the combination of fear and exertion.

The plan went well at first, though—or seemed to. Sofie led the way into the red brick station, down the incline at the back, and marched up to a man at the bottom of the steps to the first platform. Lena knew he must be Sofie’s contact, but he gave no indication of ever having seen her before. He glanced at their identity cards, smiled politely—a little deferentially, Lena thought—took their tickets, nodded and returned them. Then he took a suitcase in each hand and walked ahead of them up the stairs.

Lena had not been in a train station in years, and in many ways, nothing had changed in all that time. The train loomed in front of them, and the sounds and sights of the station poured over them, promising (if you ignored the men in uniform) a journey, new places, new experiences. Lena felt a longing almost past bearing for the days when trains actually fulfilled that promise.

Well, she thought, there would be a journey, wherever it led.

The man led the girls onto the first car, waited while they settled side by side on a red leather bench, lifted their bags up to the rack, mumbled “Pleasant journey” in German and departed. Moments later, the train creaked and groaned and they were off, travelling into the dark, early in the evening.

The train had to be dark. No lights to alert British planes. That meant blackout on the windows and little light inside the car. Lena’s heart pounded as the train pulled out of the station. Her eyes strained to see in the dim light, her ears strained to hear the other passengers, few though they were. She could not get the gist of any conversations. She had felt eyes on them as they walked down the aisle, but no one spoke to them, and with no seats facing them, they were guaranteed a small measure of privacy.

Beside her, even though their bodies were not touching, she could feel Sofie’s excitement. “We did it,” Sofie hissed in her ear when they had been travelling for a few minutes. “We did it!”

“Shhh!” was all Lena had to say in reply. She gripped the armrest. The train had come to an abrupt halt. She broke her own vow of silence. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Something on the track?” Sofie said back, her voice not quite a whisper.

And Lena remembered that trains had to move at a snail’s pace, with a lookout on the front, watching for sabotage. Derailment and British guns threatened every train at every moment. Lena would have been glad of those threats to the enemy at any other time. Now she prayed for safety.

Then, in front of them, a light glimmered in the aisle. A lantern.

It stopped at the first set of seats, and Lena heard German voices. An officer—as he came closer, Lena could see his cap and
the glint of medals on this chest—was working his way down the aisle, checking tickets and identity cards. Sofie saw him too and gripped Lena’s arm. Hard.

“Let go,” Lena hissed. “That hurts!” In the same moment, she realized that Sofie, the great German speaker, should be sitting on the aisle. It was too late to change places without attracting notice. And once Sofie had let go of Lena’s arm, she seemed to have huddled herself over by the window. Lena poked her.

“Remember, you have to do the talking,” she whispered, her voice sounding like a shout in her own ears in the dark.

Sofie straightened up a little bit.

At last the officer reached them, the metal on his uniform gleaming, his eyes in shadow. He hung the lantern from a hook on the luggage rack. “Tickets and identity cards, please,” he said, but Lena was already holding them out, doing her best to paste a smile on her face. He stood, holding the papers in his hand, and looked down at them.

“Where are you going, two girls on your own?” he asked.

There was a pause in which Lena pinched Sofie’s thigh under her coat. Sofie sat up straighter still and leaned across Lena just a bit, but she seemed to choke on her words when she spoke, and to Lena, her German accent sounded decidedly Dutch. “Uh, Rheine,” she said. “To our
Oma
and
Opa.”
At least the German and Dutch for
grandpa
and
grandma
were the same.

“Rheine,” he repeated slowly, thoughtfully.

Lena’s stomach churned. She was glad that it had been a long time since she ate.

He turned to the papers in his hand. First the tickets. They seemed to pass inspection. And they should. After all, they were real. Then the identity cards. Lena had been worried about those cards from the first. She had never seen a real
German identity card, but the forgeries just didn’t look right to her. She could see where the photo had been attached, where the stamp had been copied over the edges. Maybe in the lantern light, though …

No. He opened the cards, gazed at them for a moment and smiled. “You girls will wait here,” he said then. “I will return.” And he unhooked the lantern and walked on to check the tickets of the next passengers. Ten minutes later, he was back, taking the seat on the other side of the aisle. “You’ll be coming with me in Utrecht,” he said.

Utrecht. That was where they were supposed to change trains, not much more than thirty kilometres south and a little east of Amsterdam.

Sofie put her head against the blacked-out window and started to cry.

Two hours later, the train came to a full stop, and the officer gestured them to their feet. Lena pulled the two bags down, handed one to Sofie and put her hand under Sofie’s elbow, pulling her up. “Stop it, Sofie,” she hissed fiercely. “What are we going to do?”

For the whole journey, Lena had been trying to think, but in all that time, not one useful thought had come to her. And her worry about her friend, as Sofie sobbed on and on, had turned to annoyance well over an hour ago. Now, as she walked down the dark aisle, sheer terror took over.

“They’re going to kill us,” Sofie said, crying all the harder. “I just know they are.”

Lena’s knees turned liquid for a moment. She actually swayed on her feet. What if Sofie was right? They probably wouldn’t kill them exactly, at least not on the spot, but they could ship them off on another train, first to a camp in the Netherlands
and then on to Germany. They might never come back. Lena swallowed hard. The officer was looking over his shoulder, and anger had overtaken his face. Weak knees or not, she had no choice but to take one step and then another, Sofie stumbling along behind.

When they reached the train exit, Lena paused and sensed more than saw the huge open space of the Utrecht station, almost entirely unlit. The voices of other passengers echoed eerily off the faraway walls and ceiling. She remembered coming here to visit cousins during a heatwave the summer she was twelve. How different life had been then!

The man marched them across the platform and knocked smartly on a wooden door with a small window in it. Moments later, the door opened and words were exchanged. Then he stepped back and gave Lena a small shove through the door. Lena felt Sofie’s arm pull free from her hand. She looked back. The officer had pulled Sofie close to him. He took her chin in his fingers, and he was looking into her face and grinning. Sofie tried to pull away, but he laughed and leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Then he said something in German that Lena didn’t understand and sent Sofie stumbling into the room. He walked past them, knocked on a door at the far end of the room and disappeared through it.

Lena stared at Sofie. She had been kissed by the enemy. Sofie dropped her suitcase, grasped Lena’s right arm in both of her hands and huddled halfway behind her.

“I’m going to be sick,” she murmured.

This should not be happening, Lena thought, and for a moment she wanted nothing more than to slap the other girl, to slap her as hard as she could. It occurred to her that this was not the first time she had longed to slap her friend. This time,
though, she had more reason. Instead, she ignored Sofie altogether, kept her head low and looked around as best she could.

The room was large, and it buzzed with activity. Many men and several women sat at half a dozen oversized wooden desks speaking on telephones, barking instructions, again all in German, and typing loudly. No one paid any attention to the two girls.

Sofie tugged at Lena’s arm. Lena raised her head slightly and took a deep breath. “Please,” she said in German, “my friend needs a toilet.” The loud voices and the typing carried on just as before.

The door at the far end of the room opened and three men entered, one of them the smiling officer who had kissed Sofie moments before. Phones clattered onto receivers. Typing ceased. People froze.

“Well, well, well, what have we here?” said the largest of the men. His uniform showed his high rank, but even without it, he would have commanded attention. The other two men stood on either side and a little behind him, smirking. Lena’s own stomach clutched at itself. Was she going to be sick too?

“We are going to Rheine, sir,” she said, willing her voice to cross the expanse of the room.

“Ahh! They are going to Rheine,” the man said, looking to each side as he spoke, informing the room. Everyone laughed obligingly. He turned back to Lena and Sofie. “First, that is a lie. You are not trying to take a train to Germany. Second, your papers are false. Do you think you can trump up false papers and just walk onto one of our trains?”

And Lena saw that he held their papers in his hand.

“I … No, sir,” Lena said.

“Where are you really going?”

She looked at the ground. “Almelo,” she whispered.

“Lena,” Sofie said urgently in Dutch, “I’m going to be sick.”

“Almelo,” the man echoed. “Well, you don’t have much to say for yourself, do you?” He thought for a moment. “But then you are young. You have much to learn.”

Lena looked up and met his eyes. She didn’t know why she looked at him, but she did. He looked back; his eyes locked with hers. There was something very scary in his face. Lena knew it. She could see it clear as day. This was a man who had done terrible things and would not hesitate to do more terrible things.

“You are a pretty little thing, aren’t you?” he said. “And you got all dressed up to come see us today. Such a lovely little hat!”

Lena’s hand flew to her head, and the man laughed. She had loved that hat, and now it was ruined. He might as well have trampled it into the mud.

“Bring them into my office,” he said. And he turned and disappeared through the door.

The other two men stepped forward and grabbed an arm each. They shoved Lena and Sofie ahead of them. Lena looked around frantically as she stumbled forward, her arm twisted behind her. Was there no one here who would help them? But no one was looking anymore. Everyone had returned to work. Or, no, there was one man, way in the back, staring at her. She couldn’t read his look, but it didn’t scare her like the look the officer had given her.

“Ah,” the big man said, looking up from a desk in the next room that would have dwarfed the desks outside. “Now we have a little privacy.” Lena and Sofie stood side by side a metre or so in front of the desk. The two other officers stood behind them, one on either side of the door. Slowly, the man rose, walked around the desk and leaned against it, close to them. “I am willing to
help you,” he said, smiling. Lena looked up at him. She had never seen anyone look less helpful. “A train leaves the station early tomorrow. It will take you to Almelo.” His voice was oily, nasty. Lena blinked. It was as if he was licking her with his voice. She took a tiny step back.

Something about what he had said seemed wrong. Everyone knew that the trains now travelled only in the dark. Surely a train would not depart first thing in the morning. It didn’t make sense.

“You don’t trust me, do you?” he said. “Here I am trying to help you, and you act as if I am hurting you.” He closed his fingers around her wrist and tugged her close again. “Well, you are right that I am not offering you something for nothing. These gentlemen and I have rooms down the street. And you have many hours to pass before your train leaves. You will come with us, you two; you will come with us to our rooms to while away the time until morning. There,” he said, releasing her, “is that too much to ask: a little company in exchange for a train trip all the way across the country?”