1943
- Max Cardozo
- Jul 28, 2021
- 21 min read
Updated: Dec 1, 2021
I was now six years old. My family members were all in different hiding places. By design, I did not know where my parents lived. I mustn't—for they were not merely Jews in hiding; they were also active members of the underground resistance.
I was now six years old. My family members were all in different hiding places. By design, I did not know where my parents lived. I mustn't—for they were not merely Jews in hiding; they were also active members of the underground resistance.
At the beginning of the occupation, not many Jewish people joined the resistance. Most of them felt no need for organized Jewish resistance, trusting as they did in their Jewish Council. However, once Jews began to hear the BBC broadcasts about the killing centers in Poland, they became more aggressive against the Nazis—at least in local resistance groups. Still, they tended to stay out of the national resistance until help came from the Jewish Brigade of the English Army in 1944.
When the Jews did join the resistance, they were among the best in the field. Even then, they were mistrusted by some of the commanders. You see, many of Holland's Jews had come as refugees from Germany and Austria, so they had a strong German accent. This unfamiliar sound, the audible badge worn by all our oppressors stomping across the land, was the natural way for Dutch people to sort those they could trust from those they couldn't. And apart from this—the suspicion of all things German— even among the resistance. There could be undercurrents of real antisemitism.
As time went on, some of the resistance groups were infiltrated by collaborators and German secret police, and the authorities caught many Jewish resistance workers. Everyone was at significant risk—including my Papa.
Papa had joined his friend, Arie Broers, who became regional commander of civil command service in the NBS—Nederlands Binnenlandse Strijdkracht, or Dutch Interior Military Force. They worked together out of Alkmaar in North Holland, performing sporadic economic sabotage against the Nazi regime.
Although the Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II developed relatively slowly, its counter-intelligence, domestic sabotage, and communications networks provided vital support to Allied forces beginning in 1944 and through its liberation. Discovery by the Germans of involvement in the resistance meant an immediate death sentence. .
If my adventure seems peripatetic so far, my brother Ido was even more of a wanderer. He would end up staying in over a dozen different places during our time in hiding. I think this is because Ido was a young, proud adolescent, struggling to come of age in a time of terror—so understandably, he could be a bit difficult for his hosts to deal with. It was a constant puzzle for the protectors to try and find a place to save thousands of secret Jews.
Mama would live in some eight different hiding places during the war. And for his part, my Papa might sleep in another house every night. That depended on his work with the resistance. Arie Broers soon recruited my mother to work as a writer for the underground press in the town of Schagen. Up there in the farmlands, it was difficult to find people who could even use a typewriter. My mother turned out to be an excellent writer, indeed—so good that she would almost lose her life because of it.
But of course, I didn't know all of this at the time. I never knew where my parents were or what they were doing. All I knew was that Papa came to visit me on the sly, whenever possible, or whenever circumstances dictated that I must move again. I wouldn't see Mama until the war was nearly over—and even then only under the most desperate of circumstances.
Sometime in the late winter of 1943—I don't know precisely when—my Papa tried once more to save a member of our family. He sent Arie Broers to the flat of my uncle Flip and Aunt Jansje in Amsterdam South to persuade them to hand over my little cousin Ernest—so that he, too, could be transported into hiding up in the country of West Friesland.
It's worth pointing out that the West Friesian farm districts weren't chosen for any illusion that they were a haven for Jews; in fact, many country people were themselves somewhat xenophobic and hostile toward Jews. But because it was remote, West Friesland was at least temporarily safer than the main population centers, where Jews were systematically called up and deported in staggering numbers.
My Aunt and Uncle trusted in the Joodsche Raad (Jewish Council) as the only group who could help us Jews. The Council had promised Uncle Flip that families would not be broken up and that close relatives of an exempted person would not be deported. The Council was also of the firm opinion that the war would be over sometime in 1943.
Because they were diamond merchants, my aging grandparents, Eliezer and Rebecca Gompers, also appeared to have a chance to avoid deportation—provided they surrendered fifty karats in diamonds to the German authorities. Jansje, therefore, believed she could save her parents, the Barmes, her in-laws, the Gompers, and of course, her husband Flip.
Despite their hopeful outlook, Flip and Jansje agreed to send Ernest off to the country with Arie Broers. It must have been a sad choice for them, not knowing for sure if they would ever see their only son again. Had they not given their son into Arie Broers' custody that day, within a couple of months, young Ernest would likely have been sent to the children's camp at Sobibor, where he'd have been immediately murdered.
Instead, Ernest was taken to a hiding place with a family up in the West Friesian town of Nibixwoud. My cousin and I would be almost neighbors for three years. At the same time, Papa was also trying desperately to persuade Oma Betje to come into hiding up north—again, through the agency of his friend Arie. But Oma Betje would not hear of it. For one thing, she did not want to be a burden. Moreover, she seemed to believe the Joodsche Raad promises that nobody would touch her. She was sixty and no good as a laborer. Indeed, she would be left alone.
My father did not share his people's enduring faith in the Jewish Council and their reassuring pronouncements. He had walked out of one of their meetings at the beginning of 1941, and he had never gone back. For this reason, people like me, my brother Ido, and Ernest Gompers are alive today. But for the rest of his life, my father suffered a pang of awful guilt for not forcing Oma Betje to come into hiding. We had one photo of her, and whenever he looked at it, his eyes filled with tears.
Jews and others could only avoid deportation through an exemption. In March 1943, the number of legal exemptions for Jews and other Dutch citizens was unceremoniously cut to 30,000—and the Nazis announced that all remaining exemptions would expire by the end of June. My Aunt Jansje had an exemption and hoped to use it for her parents and in-laws.
The records show that during March 1943, the number of Jewish deportations rose to precisely 52,403. Two of this number were Eliazer and Rebecca Gompers—my Opa and Oma, from the house in the Nieuwe Keizersgracht—the people who had given me my Mama.
Aunt Jansje accompanied her parents and her in-laws (my grandparents) to the Jewish Theater in Amsterdam. Approaching the theater, Aunt Jansje saw the crowd who the authorities had rounded up. Among them were non-disabled Jews who could work; there were also elderly Jews, Jewish children, Jewish babies, and Jewish people so sick they had to be brought in on stretchers. Jansje had been warned not to go too close to the theater. The Nazis were always on the lookout for people who'd escaped through the side door. And once you were brought into the theater, for whatever reason, there was a slim chance of getting out again. Aunt Jansje still hoped to help her parents and in-laws avoid deportation by using her exemption.
But it turned out that despite the assurances of the Council, Aunt Jansje's exemption did not extend to family members. There was plainly nothing she could do except to say goodbye.
Sometime after midnight, the Dutch police helped load these people onto unique streetcars bound for the Centraal Station, from which point they would be loaded onto trains bound for the Westerbork transit camp.
After a brief stay at Westerbork, the authorities put my Opa and Oma onto a cattle train wagon with about 150 other people. They placed a bucket in the middle of the car. After a very long, very dark journey, they arrived at their final destination—a place called Sobibor in the district of Lublin.
Eliazer Gompers and Rebecca Zwaab Gompers were murdered at Sobibor on April 2, 1943.
Opa and Oma died believing that Mama and I were already dead. When the Germans had come looking for us, the cover story circulated that Maxje had "talked" and gotten us all in trouble. They thought we had all been sent to our deaths at Auschwitz.
When she returned to her parents' house, Aunt Jansje noticed that most of the things in the house had been stolen by the local NSB-ers. All of the diamond jewelry, silverware, and books were taken and sold by the NSB-ers at the markets. "I found this frightful and full of grief," said Aunt Jansje.
Sometime that spring, Aunt Jansje returned to the Gompers' house in the Nieuwe Keizersgracht and peered inside through the windows. The people had looted the place. The furniture had all been put into containers, and the containers were marked: "Gift from Holland." Even the clothing had been taken away and put up for sale in shops owned by the Dutch Nazi party members. After the war, my Papa would sometimes see people on the street wearing clothes that had once belonged to our family. In June 1943, all remaining Jewish exemptions ended.
On June 20, the Jewish camp police from Westerbork were detailed to help the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence agency, round up 5,550 Jews in Amsterdam South. Now, it was Jews against Jews. And nobody believed the Jewish Council anymore.
The day had come for Uncle Flip and Aunt Jansje to take leave of their beloved Amsterdam—and each other. Jansje was sent to the transit camp at Vught while her husband went to Westerbork. Exactly one month later, Phillip Gompers was shipped off by rail to Sobibor, where, on July 23, 1943, he was murdered. He was Jansje's husband, Ernest's father, my mother's brother.
Of course, these are all things I couldn't have known at the time. I was just getting used to my
new home with the Koopman family. The Koopmans, who took me in, were known to me as "Uncle" Kees and "Aunt" Cor. They had two sons, Wim and Piet. One daughter, Annie—a husky, strong farm girl, quickly became my big sister, and another daughter, Trientje.
My third hiding residence was more of an authentic old-fashioned Dutch farmhouse—complete with what we called bedstees. A bedstee is like a big closet whose door is a hatchway above the ground, and inside there's a raised platform with a big, straw-filled mattress. If needed, three or four people could curl up in one of these tiny cells, and I must say they were rather cozy. I slept with the two boys, who quickly adjusted to my presence.
In this farmhouse style, the front side was for human habitation, while the animal barn was in the back. The bedstees would typically be built in between. The farmer would have a little window in his bedstee, so he could peek out at night and check on his animals. And the whole place was kept scrupulously clean.
The large size of the Koopman farm, and its distance from the population centers, made it possible for me to spend more time outdoors, at least for a time—even as a Jew in hiding. Sometimes Trientje and Annie even took me for rides on the back of Annie's bike. In this respect, I was vastly more fortunate than those countless Jews who survived only by way of concealment in the tiny secret rooms, airless closets, and attics scattered throughout the cities and towns of the Netherlands. Indeed, I was blessed—more than I could know, until much later.
Still, I cannot say I was always as aware of my good fortune as my brave protectors may have hoped. Under the best of circumstances, a little boy can sometimes be selfish, even demanding. Like any little boy at my age, I didn't look at the world from the world's point of view. I saw it through the eyes of a six-year-old, trying to find his way. Lucky or not, I hadn't asked for these circumstances. The Nazi occupation was no invention of mine. And it wasn't my idea to be separated from my family. But I would try to make the best of it, with the help of my new friends. And I would learn.
On the last day of April 1943, the boys had the delightful task of cleaning out the restroom, so the family could use the human and animal waste to fertilize the fields. It was a Friday morning. We were just finishing breakfast. Trientje was an excellent pancake maker. Traditional Dutch pancakes are wide and thin, maybe twelve inches in diameter. In our case, they were made using milk from a cow who had just calved—it's ultra-rich in calories and has a slight pinkish tint. In a word—lekker!—which means "delicious." With my breakfast, I'd also get a nice hot cup of regular volle Melk—which always had a layer of fat on top, and that would stick to my upper lip. I looked like I had a mustache, and I thought that was pretty funny—but it didn't get me much attention at the table. When we finished eating, the oldest boy, Piet, stood up from the table saying, "Well, come on, Wim, Dickey. It's a beautiful day, and we have a week's worth of work to do."
I stood up and went with them. I was already wearing my beautiful, white, hand-knitted socks and my leather insoles. We walked through the excellent clean stalls to the back of the farmhouse, and now I put on my natural, white-colored wooden shoes. Everything was so neat!
"Come on, Dickey," Piet said. He led me outside, down to the back of the outhouse. Suddenly, I
was muck up to my ankles. And now, Wim came riding up with the wooden waste cart, drawn by a robust and heavyset horse.
Wim and Pete each had a bucket on the end of a long pole. They would repeatedly dip their buckets into the lavatory and pull up loads of wastewater, dumping it into the wagon specially sealed to hold urine. Boy, what a stink! Then, when we filled the wagon tank, all three of us climbed up and sat on a seat that covered the tank. We drove out to the fields and re-distributed the waste to fertilize the land for the newly growing grass. It was quite a job—and cleaning up at day's end was another job.
I guess that was the most excitement we had—until the middle of May. While our rural location did place us further afield from the control centers of the Nazi monster, this did not mean that life on the Koopman farm was an idyllic pastoral of unbroken serenity. Far from it. West Friesland directly on the Atlantic coast of Europe, between the airfields of England and the many industrial targets deep in the Third Reich. During that spring and summer, with the Allied strategic bombing effort now swinging into high gear, our skies would become a theater of horror—bits and pieces of which might at any moment come sprinkling down right into our hay fields. By day, it was the American airplanes; by night, the British.
During the night, between the years of 1943 and 1944, just a mile from our farm, specially adapted bombers took off from England, with either bombs or weapons strapped underneath them. Their mission was to provide the lifeblood for the resistance or in case the enemy dropped their bombs.
On the night of May 15, 1943, there was an incredibly bloody air battle in our skies. I went out behind the house and saw searchlights coming on from all directions on the horizon. I could see the antiaircraft fire streaking up into the heavens. If you heard an explosion, that meant an airplane had been hit. Moments after the planes had passed, we heard strange sizzling sounds in the sky. Those were parachutes opening, Piet said.
On this night, a large group of Canadian paratroopers had landed on the Zomerdijk near
Wognum. They'd been ruthlessly shot at, and many were injured. Soon, Dutch resistance workers were rounding up the wounded and bringing them straight here, to the Koopmans' farm—and they ended up hiding in our cellar.
By Wednesday, May 19, all hell had broken loose. There were now about two dozen Allied servicemen camped in our cellar—not much more than a crawlspace, many of them wounded and in pain. Over the next few days, resistance members would come to retrieve these men, bearing them off to other secret places, where they might receive medical care or even be smuggled back to Britain.
But it wasn't just the Dutch resistance that was looking out for these men. The Nazis, too, were searching eagerly for them since they could be prime sources of information if caught. All we could do was lie low and pray that their search didn't lead them to the Koopman farmhouse.
It was a time of incredible stress for the Koopman family. Uncle Kees developed a terrible temper, which sometimes made my stay very unpleasant.
To my good fortune, early on, nineteen-year-old Annie had taken to me as if I were the little brother she never had, although I had a difficult time with her only younger sister, Trientje. I believe Annie's friendship helped me hang on to my sanity.
One of my lowest lonely moments came on a Sunday at the end of that May. Aunt Cor asked me to go to the front room. Looking out the window, I saw my brother Ido come marching by, following a man on a bicycle. I wanted to run out to greet him, but Aunt Cor told me that wouldn't be a good idea just then. She explained to me that my brother had to be transferred from Obdam to Abbekerk. There were troubles in Obdam. The latest dropping of Allied paratroopers had made this area very dangerous. Nazi sympathizers looked to turn people in left and right, so Ido had to move to a safer place. The man on the bicycle was our good friend, Arie Broers. Ido had had to leave his bike behind, and he didn't look a bit happy about that.
I guess I was lucky. Because I was so young, I benefited from being treated like a kid. But Ido was a young man, and it is challenging to become a man at a time when you are not even supposed to exist.
The very next day, Monday, May 31, something astonishing happened. I looked up in the sky and on the fields and thought I was seeing God.
Grown-ups had sometimes told me that whenever there was a thunderstorm, the thunder was the noise of God shaking his comforter in bed. I don't think they expected me to believe that. But this morning, I looked up and saw that it was raining silver. All through the sky and on our hay fields were millions of thin strips of shiny foil coming down, each about a foot long. I ran back into the house and told everyone. At first, they thought I was crazy. Then, Piet came outside and saw what I was talking about. He said he'd heard of this stuff—it was what the English called chaff. They would dump loads of it from their airplanes to try and confuse the German radar. That way, they could steal across undetected. So, it wasn't God, after all.
I found that it took every ounce of my strength to try and get along with Uncle Kees. I'm not sure if maybe he had come to resent the burden imposed by his family's connections with the underground, or if it was just the strain of his fear of the Gestapo, who were increasingly sniffing around for Jews, enemy soldiers, and saboteurs. Whatever the reason, he had developed a violent temper. To me, it often seemed that I was the confidential source of all his vexation—me, the little city brat, who had to be taught every little thing about the ways of life on a farm. It made me feel just awful.
At the beginning of July, we had yet another episode. We were having breakfast when a terrible argument flared up. I don't remember what it was about, but I was so upset, I couldn't even eat. This incensed Uncle Kees even further. He got so mad that he started taking the dishes and smashing them. Aunt Cor got so upset; I was afraid one of the two would have a heart attack.
I suppose Uncle Kees was frustrated by this dumb child, refusing to eat the good food he had put before him. In his way, he probably loved me, but he had such a miserable temper, what could I do?
Luckily Annie came and put her arms around my shoulders and took me back to the barn.
That day, I helped Annie do some organizing to get ready for the haying season. It was a scary, steep climb to the hayloft now. Early in the season, there would be lots of hay below, too. If you fell from the ladder, you'd land in grass, and that was fun. But this late in the season, the barn below was empty. If you missed a step, you might well break your neck.
The air battles continued every day and every night through midsummer. There would be searchlights coming from everywhere, and then the explosions. We lived close to the Allied dropping fields, so it was fireworks every night. Sometimes, the Allies would parachute down weapons and support equipment for their men behind the lines. Other times, they would drop explosives to scare off the collaborators. The resistance members were getting their coded secret messages from the Allies via BBC broadcasts of the Dutch Radio Orange in London.
But during the days, ordinary farm life continued as best it could. Even little Dickey Kramer was getting a lesson or two.
One sweltering day in July, Aunt Cor had me help her make butter. We filled a wooden container with cream to churn butter and then used a stick with a disk at the bottom. I had the job of plunging up and down, up and down, for what seemed an eternity. Eventually, we ended up with lumps floating in a fluid. The nuggets were butter; the liquid was buttermilk.
I was learning to be a farmer. A couple of towns away, so was my Papa. He worked in the fields and greenhouses belonging to Arie Broers and Frans Feld.
Poor Aunt Cor put up with a lot of abuse from her husband's nasty tongue, sometimes even from his bare hands. But because she was a good Catholic, she stayed with him and stood by him. Frankly, I think the fact that Uncle Kees eventually died a natural death proves that Aunt Cor was an excellent Christian.
Aunt Cor often asked me if I'd like to go with the family to church. Typically, I declined politely. In the absence of the traditional rhythms of Jewish life, I felt remote from even my familiar faith, to say nothing of their strange one. But then, one lonely Sunday in August, after living with the Koopmans for six months, I suddenly accepted the invitation.
The urge to pray somewhere had come over me—to pray, pray for my parents' safety, and the safety of all my by-now invisible loved ones. My father had always wished me "God Bless." So, my people related to God, and—in some way, I didn't understand. It seemed to me this might be a way for me to reach out to my family.
So, when asked once more if I'd like to come along, this time, I said yes. Just this once.
As I walked into the church with Annie, Trientje, and Aunt Cor, I wondered, am I going to be struck by lightning? I didn't know quite what to expect. I'm not even sure under what pretext Aunt Cor explained my presence to the other members of her parish. As the mass began, I saw people kneeling. Jews didn't kneel so that I couldn't do that—I was here for my plan, remember. But I did meet them halfway—by making the sign of the cross! All that didn't matter. I was there to pray. I prayed with my whole heart and soul. They prayed their prayers, and I prayed mine. The end of August came.
On a beautiful morning, the whole Koopman family got ready to start bringing in the hay. Before this, they had already worked to stack the hay up in beautiful piles, maybe twenty feet apart, across the hayfield. I had tried to help as best I could.
That day, we took out three wagons and six horses altogether, with hay-forks for each wagon. They needed three people to load each wagon and one person to stack. Annie and Trientje did the stacking on our wagon, and I helped them. As we took it in, Annie and Trientje and I distributed our hay so carefully, so squarely and evenly into each corner, that we were able to build our wagonload up maybe twenty feet high and then tie it up with rope. And we watched the others do the same to their wagons.
Now, at some point, we looked up and noticed it was getting rather dark in the east. Then, we saw lightning. A storm was coming in, very fast. Annie still had to go back and milk the cows.
Piet Koopman called out, "Trientje, you and Dickey take the first wagon back in and get it unloaded in the barn. We'll be along in a few minutes."
So Trientje and Annie and I took off toward the barn with our wagonload. It seemed like we were in a race. As we bumped along, Annie explained to me that rain is very much not a good thing for hay. Of course, water usually quenches the fire in the open air. But the heat inside a heavy pile of wet grass can get so extreme as to burst into flame spontaneously — and that's something you'd not want to happen inside your barn. So, we had to hurry before the whole pile got soaked. Of course, we couldn't move quite fast enough. The thunderstorm passed right over us as the rain began to fall. Furious lightning danced all around us in the sky. I was sitting on the front bench of the wagon, holding the reins, and Annie got down and started tugging both of our horses forward, holding them down low.
One thing I knew was that lighting was known to strike horses because they were tall—and that I was now connected to these horses by this length of moist rope I held in my hands.
Alas, I realized, this is it. After all that people had done to save my life, now I was a goner—God was angry with me for going to that Catholic church last Sunday, and now He was going to get me but well! As Annie kept walking, the other two wagons passed us by, also heavily laden with hay.
Trientje decided to jump on board and take over the reins, and on we drove to the barn. We got there just in time; the rain now began coming down by the bucketful. But I didn't get struck by lightning that day. God wasn't angry with me, after all.
At the beginning of October 1943, bad news came. Piet Koopman received a call-up to report to the nearest office to work in one of the labor camps operated by the Nazi government. Since the Koopmans had two sons, one of the two had to go.
However, there was no way Aunt Cor would let him go. We would just have to make sure that when the Nazis came around looking, one of the two—either Wim or Piet—would not be around.
I can tell you this: the willpower of big sister Annie was something to contend with. Nobody got past that door if Annie didn't want them in. She was more "like a man" than either of her brothers. I could well imagine her stopping the Nazis in their tracks with no more than her bare fists.
Early in November, Annie showed me how to make cheese. First, we put milk into large, flat containers, and then we added acid to it. After a few days, the milk would become sour. Then, we'd take an oversized filter and scoop the lumpy bits out and press them into cheese forms. We buried the cheese under the hay in the barn, as this would help it age faster. The excess fluid we fed back to the calves and pigs.
That month, things became even more dangerous at the Koopman farm because even with the Gestapo already searching high and low for Jews and saboteurs, Aunt Cor chose to take in three more Jewish family members—the Veermans. There was Sjaak Veerman, his wife, and his mother. At first, it seemed like a good thing for me to have other Jews around. But it wasn't long before my new cohorts-in-hiding began to rub me the wrong way.
While arranging for the Veerman family to hide there, my Papa had appealed to Sjaak Veerman to try and teach me to read and write. I was, after all, at an age when a boy should be going to school. Circumstances notwithstanding—war or no war—I was a Jew, and a Jew should have an education. Unfortunately, my family had discussed none of this in advance with me.
Sjaak took Papa's request as a grave mandate of authority. His efforts to educate me were surely already rattled by tension; now, we had even more battles. Here I was, on my way to becoming a real farm boy, schooled in the ways of a dairyman, helping with the hay, making cheese, tending the cows. Now, this strange new man in my life was lording over me, trying to force me to pay attention to letters, words, pencil, and paper—and doing his best to play substitute for my absent father. I didn't like it one bit. Thank you very much, but I'd rather have my real Papa.
Well, on December 5, Papa did come—bearing gifts. It was Sinterklaas's day. The Dutch celebrate their own unique Christian holiday saint—related, as his name suggests, to the English Santa Claus. Papa brought me some handmade wooden toys. Best of all, my Mama—wherever she was—had knitted me a beautiful black sweater, some black underwear, and socks.
It's hard to explain how magnificent Mama's gift made me feel. A child of today might not be so thrilled about a gift of socks and underwear. But the way I saw it, babies wore white underwear and socks, so having black made me feel grown up—right at a time when I needed to feel grown-up. And besides, they came from Mama. And I so dearly missed Mama.
I think the Veermans may have been a little uncomfortable with the way Papa and I were using a Christian holiday as an excuse for a celebration. Pretty soon, it was getting dark, and Papa took his leave. But before going out the door, he handed me a big chunk of chocolate.
I devoured it. Maybe a little too quickly. Not long afterward, my guts were in turmoil. I usually made my trip to the outhouse around midday, but I was delayed because of Papa's wonderful visit. Now, it was pitch dark outside.
A trip to the outhouse on a winter night is not something you look forward to. Even the toughest young dapper couldn't have relished the thought of leaving his cozy, quilt-covered bed to trek across the backyard, through rain, snow, and biting winds, and press his flesh against that icy seat when nature called. But compared to the job of cleaning out a commode in the morning, it was the lesser evil.
Now, when I got out there with my oil lamp in hand, I found that the outhouse was already occupied—by rats! With one hand, I picked up a brick to throw, then another. The rats disappeared into the freezing water below. Even then, as I lifted the seat cover, I saw them staring up at me. Then I sat, listening to the rats slithering around below me and crawling over the roof above. My heart was in my mouth. I was terrified of those animals—not so much because they might attack me, but because I'd been told what dreadful diseases they carried. It was nighttime, so I had to hold the oil lamp in one hand— which left me only one hand free for rat-swatting.
That winter, my relationship with Sjaak Veerman became increasingly hostile, and it became clear that something had to give.
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