Lilli's Quest (12 page)

PART III

Summer 1946

Fourteen

On a bleak morning in late June, 1946, I step out of a lodging house in Amsterdam and venture into unfamiliar streets. Having arrived in the Dutch capital only yesterday afternoon, I still don't have my land legs. In fact, in this city fortified with dikes and laced with canals, I can still feel the watery presence of my transatlantic journey from New York as a passenger on a large cargo vessel.

It was Karl who got me a place to stay here. After the war ended, he elected to remain in England. He now speaks and writes English well, and works for a refugee organization in war-battered London. His job consists of tracing the backgrounds of the Kindertransport children to see if they can be reunited with their families.
It is discouraging work
, Karl wrote shortly before I sailed for Europe.
Even though the German government has started to open up the records of the Nazi regime, chances are miniscule that parents who sent their children to Holland or to England have survived. What will we do with all these orphaned survivors? What country will take them? How will they make their futures?

Safely tucked away in my pocket is the address of the beauty salon where Mutti was working in the months before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. In one of her letters, Mutti had described Margreet de Jong, the woman who owned the shop, as a member of the Dutch underground resistance. I have set out with a map of the city that marks all the streets and canals. I am shocked by the glumness and chilled by the mist that wreathes the tall, narrow houses, a mixture of shops, businesses, and warehouses, with floors that tower above them for living quarters. I assume that, like the room I am staying in at the lodging house, these quarters are cramped and claustrophobic; many of them located in attics with sharply sloping ceilings. But, of course, my view is so distorted by my American life.

After Aunt Harriette died, Uncle Herman could no longer bear to live in the big house in Westchester. Instead of my staying with the Brandts and continuing my rocky education at Singleton Junior High, everyone agreed that living with Uncle Herman in a roomy apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and attending a girls' high school in that part of the city, was a much better idea. Since I moved, Isabel and I see less of each other, but we seem to get along much better. Did it have anything to do, I wonder, with the revelation that I was fifteen-year-old Lilli instead of fourteen-year-old Helga?

As I progress through Amsterdam on this dreary morning, I become increasingly aware the war-ravaged the city around me. While Amsterdam was not bombed to rubble by the Nazi air force like the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, the streets are still littered with broken paving blocks mixed with sand and dirt. Along the canals are the crude stumps of trees that were cut down for fuel during the terrible “hunger winter” of 1944.

The few people that are out are poorly dressed, and I keep having the sense that someone is following me. When I look over my shoulder, I see no one. Yet I can't help thinking that I am furtively being peered at from this or that doorway. Perhaps it's my American clothing—a navy woolen pea coat, a beret, sturdy shoes with medium heels—the same outfit I wear on campus. Nothing showy, but I suppose it's easy to recognize that I am from “somewhere else.”

With much anxiety, I finally reach the street where the beauty salon is located. Soon, I will enter the shop and meet Mrs. de Jong, to whom I had written from New York about my search for my family. Her answer was brief:
When you arrive in Amsterdam, come to the shop. Someone will help you.

I now stand upon the very ground where Mutti and my sisters once walked. But, to my dismay, the “shop” is only a large solitary pane of smeared-over glass, making it impossible to see inside. There is no outward sign
of this space ever having been a beauty salon. My heart sinks. I try the door, find it locked, and knock on it with a mixture of panic and dismay. I learned nothing from Margreet de Jong's letter, and now I've come all this way, for . . . nothing?

Suddenly, someone taps me on the on the shoulder. I turn around. He's an older man, unshaven, and shabbily dressed. I've seen several of his kind on the street. He speaks in Dutch, but the words are close enough to German for me to make out. “No good.” He shakes a finger at me. “It's closed.” His fingers reach out to stroke my long hair. “You want to sell?” He rubs the same two fingers together. “Good money for that. Very beautiful. I can arrange.”

I shrink back in horror. Is this why he thinks I've come to the closed hairdresser's shop? To sell my hair? The Nazis brutally cut off the hair of their victims.

But the war is over now . . . or is it? Its effects seem to still be everywhere here in Holland, where there is so much poverty and need.

I turn away from the man, prepared to bang harder on the shop door. But I find it open, and am now face to face with a tall young man of perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He has a thatch of white-blond hair, and long white eyelashes. His first words are in English: “You are Lilli Frankfurter. I am Margreet de Jong's grandson, Pieter.” He tells me apologetically that he was in another part
of the building when I first knocked. The man who had offered to buy my hair has, of course, vanished.

Pieter invites me into the “shop,” which I discover had indeed been a beauty salon at one time, as there are remnants of sinks and chairs for customers. It is also filled with mysterious cartons, as well as old brooms and mops. Were these what Mutti used when cleaning the floors littered with hair cuttings and spilled shampoo?

Pieter grins, while I stand there puzzled and helpless. “Don't be alarmed. I am here to help you until my grandmother returns. She has instructed me to see to your needs. I can show you the city.”

“But . . . But when will she be back?” I stammer. My tongue has turned to cotton wool.

“In a few days,” Pieter says casually.

“No!” I cry out. All of the self-confidence that propelled me to undertake this journey has vanished in a flash. “I expected to see her when I arrived. I told her the exact date. There is so much I need to know. What shall I do now?”

Pieter seems only vaguely disturbed by my outburst. “Let us go have a coffee,” he suggests. He steps out into the street, and I follow. “May I take your arm?” he asks. “There are many broken walking places.” Again, that grin. “It is even possible to fall into a canal. The embankments have lost their guard rails.”

* * *

That night, alone in my attic room, I compose three letters: one to Uncle Herman, one to Karl, and one to Isabel that is also meant for her family (as well as Sybil, Leona, and Ruth.)

The letter to my uncle is one of reassurance, to let him know that I arrived safely and am in the care of Mrs. de Jong's family. I say nothing about her peculiar absence, which I hope is only, as Pieter said, for “a few days.”

In my letter to Karl, I describe the awful ruin of the beauty salon and of Amsterdam itself, and reveal my discomfort regarding the absence of Margreet de Jong. She is, after all, a political person, involved for many years in a resistance movement that has many enemies. Even though the war has ended, Dutch Nazi elements may still be a threat to her. Or perhaps it's something quite different, and
she
does not trust
me
?

I write to Isabel on a lighter and more optimistic note. “Here I go again, Lilli, but I want to know
everything
.” Isabel had implored me before I left. “Please, please write as soon as you get there.” So I tell her about Pieter:

            
He's fifteen, very tall, and so blond and pale-skinned.

            
He grins a lot but in a nice way. I think you'd like him. Today he showed me around the city and I was very grateful. You see, I don't care for Amsterdam
very much. It's cold here and unfriendly, even a little frightening.

            
For example, I had an unpleasant surprise on my way to the beauty shop this morning. I thought I saw a telephone booth, which was sort of unusual because the city has been wrecked by the war, and it's incredibly different from New York in every possible way.

            
When I got closer, I noticed that the sides of the “booth” were raised above the ground and I could see a man's feet standing on the pavement. At the same time, I was attacked by the most horrible reeking odor. The “telephone booth” was a street urinal! For men. (I don't know if they also have them for women. I hope not.)

            
Pieter took me for coffee to a little hole-inthe-wall place that was really a bakery. The coffee was terrible. I think they use ground, roasted grain instead of real coffee, as they were doing in Germany when I left. But the freshly baked bread smelled good, and I treated us to a currant bun.

            
Pieter then gave me a tour of the city, and I tried to imagine what it was like before the Nazi invasion. Alas, the squares are now filled with rubble and the fountains are cracked and dry. The Rembrandt and Van Gogh museums are either closed or on short hours. The famous canal tours are not yet operating.
What things Pieter told me! In the “hunger winter” of 1944, Amsterdammers sold their personal belongings for food, they ate tulip bulbs, and the ground was so frozen that the bodies of the dead had to be stacked in the churches. Nor was there any wood for coffins, as the trees had been chopped down for firewood.

            
Well, I won't go into any more horrors. Tonight my landlady gave me a supper of thick pea soup. It was hot and filling. Tomorrow, Pieter will come and take me to the post office to buy stamps and mail my letters.

            
I am thinking of all of you at home and send my love. Lilli

I go to bed sad and worried, after finding my way down a dark, narrow staircase to the floor below, where the bathroom is located.

I rise early, still feeling anxious. After a breakfast consisting of a hard roll with cheese and a nameless hot beverage in my landlady's kitchen, I descend to the street with my letters. I look around, but there is no sign of Pieter. Perhaps I am too early? The few passersby in the morning gloom look at me with curiosity.

Several uncomfortable minutes that feel like hours pass until I see Pieter sauntering toward me. My relief
is so great that I have to restrain my greeting. Pieter is grinning again. “I have good news,” he tells me. “My grandmother has returned. She will meet with you in the rooms above the beauty salon. First we will mail your letters. Have you eaten?”

Starved for information only, I nod emphatically. Twenty minutes later, we are back at the messy, disguised shop, mounting two long flights of narrow stairs to an apartment on the third floor, which appears to be the home of Pieter and his grandmother.

To my surprise, the parlor room into which I am led is comfortably furnished with old-fashioned warmth. A moment later, a fleshy, ruddy-faced woman, her blonde hair streaked with gray, enters. I have to quench my impulse to grasp her hands, hands that have perhaps touched those of my loved ones.

“Excuse me for my absence yesterday,” Margreet de Jong apologizes, almost gruffly. “This war,” she declares, “has been a never-ending disaster, for there is now no end of matters that demand repair.” She pauses to sigh heavily. “I hope you realize that your mother and sisters were among many, many refugees from Germany who came to me from 1939 on. But,” she adds in a softer tone, “sit down. I remember them and I will tell you what I know.”

That evening, I write an urgent letter to Karl, telling him that what I had feared most appears to be true.

After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, anti-Jewish measures went into effect. Dutch Jews and Jewish refugees were forced to wear the yellow six-pointed star with the Dutch word for Jew,
Jood,
sewn onto their outer garments. They also had to carry identity cards marked with a large letter J. Dutch citizens like Mrs. de Jong could no longer protect the newcomers. “I had to send Martina and the little girl to the countryside, where I thought they would be safer,” Margreet de Jong told me. “As in so many cases, they were soon apprehended and sent to a Dutch transit camp. From there, trains departed daily for concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Their fate was sealed. I can't tell you more.”

But
, I wrote frenziedly to Karl,
Helga may have escaped
. I then tell him the amazing story that Margreet de Jong had related to me that morning, about a little-known Kindertransport that sailed from the Dutch port of Ijmuiden to Liverpool, England, on May 14, l940, four days after the Nazi invasion:

            
Karl, this journey on a cargo passenger ship called the SS
Bodegraven,
is known in Amsterdam as “the last Kindertransport.” It was organized by a brave and daring Dutch woman by the name of Gertruida Wijsmuller Meijer. She was known in the resistance and among those who were shielding
refugees as Tante Truus, or Aunt Trudi, for she had long been helping children to escape from the Nazi's.

I then share Margreet de Jong's words. “I knew Gertruida and, when I learned of her bold plan to put sixty or seventy refugee children from the city orphanage on buses, bound for the only major Dutch port still open, I contacted her immediately to see if she could take Helga. She was a strange child, often silent and a bit sullen. Martina cried and begged her to go. There was no time to lose. Suddenly she agreed. I saw her onto one of the four or five buses, and I believe that she boarded the ship. Others in the group missed it, for it sailed at very short notice. And, of course, more than two thousand refugee children in Amsterdam never had a chance to escape after the departure of ‘the last Kindertransport.'”