Hidden Like Anne Frank Page 3

  We ate rabbit once a week after that. Everyone thought it was delicious and they all praised me for taking such good care of them. But I was never able to eat a single bite. Just the thought that one of those rabbits was my Sijbeltje made me feel sick.

  Uncle Jo had started to work less and was doing more painting instead. He had an easel, a palette, brushes, and a big box with tubes of paint in every color. The back room was his workroom, where he painted his still lifes, like bowls of apples and pears, or a cigarette in an ashtray. One time he painted a bunch of grapes with a few drops of water on them. It was really good.

  He hung all of his paintings in ornate gold frames. I spent so many hours with Uncle Jo that Aunt Toni thought it would be a good idea for him to teach me to paint. “He’ll have to learn how to draw first,” said Uncle Jo.

  From then on, Uncle Jo and I did art together. I enjoyed it more and more. Uncle Jo thought it was time for me to start signing my drawings. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You have to put your signature on your work. Your artistic pseudonym.” Then he explained to me what a pseudonym was — and I started racking my brain to come up with a good name. Everyone in the house became involved, and we finally settled on Jelle Stout. Jelle, because it was a name from Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. “There are no Jews in Friesland,” they said. So that was perfect. And everyone liked Stout because it means naughty in Dutch, but also bold and wild.

  So I signed my scrawls as Jelle Stout.

  Uncle Sjaak,17 Uncle Jo’s brother, often used to visit. He was also married to a woman of German descent, Aunt Annie. Sometimes they brought their only son, Hans, with them. I didn’t like Hans at all.

  Uncle Sjaak always had a violin with him. When he was out on the street, he used to hold his violin case in front of his yellow star, just as Uncle Jo did with his briefcase. At home, they’d have tea and then Uncle Sjaak would take out his violin. As soon as she heard Uncle Sjaak start to play, Aunt Moeke came downstairs. She would sit down at the piano and dramatically hit four notes, and then Uncle Sjaak would take his time tuning his violin. After a while, he started scraping away, and the performance wasn’t improved when Aunt Moeke sang along in her high, quavering voice. I used to sneak out of the room as soon as Aunt Toni had passed around the homemade apple pie.

  “You’ll have to go into the hiding place tonight,” said Aunt Toni one day. Uncle Sjaak had been picked up by the Germans. His son, Hans, was going to sleep in my room that night, and he wasn’t allowed to know that I was living there, so I had to be hidden by the time he came home from school. I crawled into the hiding place with a flashlight and a blanket just after four, made up my bed, and turned off the flashlight. I tried to think of nice things. After a while, I really needed to go to the bathroom. So I turned on the flashlight, and I went in search of the chamber pot with the blue rim.

  I was awakened by stomping on the stairs. “Ugh!” said Hans, as he came into the room. “It stinks in here!” I could hear him taking off his clothes, and before long the springs were squeaking as he lay down in my bed. I didn’t dare to turn over onto my other side.

  I had to sleep in the hiding place more and more often because there had been a warning about house searches. Luckily it always turned out to be a false alarm, but the tension really affected the atmosphere in the house.

  One night I went to say good night to Uncle Jo, just as he was about to start his daily game of chess with the scary man with the red beard. “Let’s play for the little Jew boy tonight,” said the scary man. I knew right away that he was talking about me. I told Aunt Toni what I’d heard. She tried to reassure me.

  The next morning, some Germans appeared on the gravel path. Aunt Toni hissed, “Scram! Upstairs!”

  I flew upstairs and into my hiding place. A while later, Aunt Toni came to fetch me. “They were here for Uncle Jo, but he was at work.”

  They picked up Uncle Jo at the newspaper and held him for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t stay in Bussum any longer. Aunt Toni and Uncle Jo had some acquaintances who knew someone in the resistance, and they were able to track down my parents’ address. Eventually it was decided that they would find a place for me with them, so the man from the resistance took me to my parents, whom I hadn’t seen for more than a year. Father hugged me tight, and Mother didn’t seem to ever want to let me go. She just kept kissing me and quietly singing the songs she had sung before the war.

  The same man from the resistance moved us to another house. We lived there with a young woman, and my parents didn’t like her at all. I thought she was nice, though. She was always cheerful, which is more than could be said of my mother and father. Sometimes I was awakened at nights by giggling and deep male voices speaking German.

  One morning, Father started sawing a hatch in the cupboard beneath the stairs. There was a space of around thirty inches beneath the floor that might work as a place to hide. There was just enough room to lie down in the sand, but you couldn’t even crouch in there. My father asked me to climb in to see what it was like, and then he closed the hatch. I was terrified.

  The village of Hoograven was so deserted in the daytime that Father thought it was safe enough to go out for a walk. It was wonderful: sunlight, fresh air. On one of our outings, we found a nice little canal. “Hey,” he said, “I have a couple of fishing rods in the shed. Why don’t we try them out?”

  So a couple of days later, we headed out, both carrying a fishing rod. As we were approaching the canal, Father suddenly said, “Keep walking, just keep on walking!”

  He had seen two soldiers with rifles walking toward us.

  A few seconds later, we came face-to-face with them. I had never been so close to “the enemy” before. First I saw their boots. I had to look up to see their faces. Big helmets, big dark sunglasses, and very big guns.

  “Off fishing, are you?” one of them said, looking at me.

  They had what was almost a friendly conversation with my father. In Dutch, not German! After a few minutes, they allowed us to go on our way.

  “Good fishing!” one of them said. The other patted me on the head.

  We walked on in silence. As soon as we were out of sight, my father hissed, “Back home! I know one of them, and he recognized me too.”

  We took a detour home, walking faster and faster as we went. Father kept looking over his shoulder. I’d never seen him so anxious before.

  When I was getting ready for bed, he said, “You’d better sleep in the hiding place this evening.”

  The thought of it made me shiver, but I didn’t dare admit that. I slid into the hiding place an hour later, carrying a woolen blanket. Feet first, then the rest of me. It wasn’t easy.

  Finally I was in position. The hatch went down. The wooden floor was directly above my nose. I lay there on the sand, wrapped up in my blanket. It was pitch-dark. For a while I could still hear muffled voices. Then nothing.

  I woke up some time in the night. It was cold. As soon as I remembered where I was, I started to panic. The sand was so wet. I heard someone screaming, and I realized it was me. I flew out of the hiding place. There was no one in the living room. I tiptoed back to my own bed, where I shivered with cold as I waited for the night to end.

  I was still shaking when I went downstairs the next morning. The woman who was sheltering us gave me a cup of tea. And after a while, Mother and Father came out from their hiding place. They were shaking all over as well. “Come along,” said Mother, pushing me up the stairs. “Let’s get you into some dry clothes.”

  She told me that the Germans had broken through the dikes to put a stop to the Allied18 advance. As a result, large areas of land were now underwater, and the level of the groundwater in the local villages had risen. That’s why the sand down in the hole had been so wet!

  Late that evening, the man from the resistance took us to a new address.

  Together with a number of other Jewish people, we were now hiding in a big old house on Stadhouderslaan, an ele
gant avenue on the outskirts of Utrecht. The couple who owned the house made good money from the people who were in hiding there. She was really bossy and not eager to help. He used to cook and clean, and he sang all day long in a strange high-pitched girlish voice.

  Downstairs was a cluttered basement that ran the length of the whole house. Hardly anyone ever went down there. The back door led to a large yard with a high fence all around. After that, the meadows began. It was a great place. Finally I had somewhere I could play soccer.

  One day we heard someone banging on the front door. “Upstairs!” called Father.

  We flew to our hiding place between the first and second stories. Both floors, upstairs and downstairs, were made up of rooms that were separated by sliding doors and closets. You got to the hiding place by lifting up the floor of the closet in the room upstairs, and then slipping into the space above the closet downstairs. Three or four people could squeeze into the gap above each of the closets. There was barely enough room for one person in the space above the sliding doors, but that was my hiding place.

  I heard the sound of army boots in the corridor and the Germans growing closer and closer. I was terrified. They were sure to hear my heart pounding and the others breathing. They banged on the walls, looking for hollow spaces. Finally the noises died down, and the front door opened and closed. We’d been lucky. But we didn’t know if someone had betrayed us.

  Not long after that, the Germans came back, in the middle of the day. I was playing in the basement and hadn’t heard the banging on the door. A few of the others ran past me on their way outside to hide in the drainage ditch around the meadow. You got there through a hole in the fence.

  Before I knew it, I was alone again. Then I heard Father at the top of the stairs, “Jaap, find somewhere to hide! We’ll be in the hiding place upstairs.”

  There was no time to reply. The basement door was opening again. I had to do something. I was standing next to the metal trash can, so I took off the lid, jumped inside, and pulled the lid back down over my head. Footsteps came closer and then stopped at the trash can. Someone lifted the lid.

  There was no order yelled in German. No one dragged me out of the trash can. Instead, someone dumped a load of vegetable peelings and other trash on my head and replaced the lid. I didn’t move until the basement door opened again and my father called down, “You can come out now. It’s safe!”

  I lifted the lid and crawled out from among the peelings. My father couldn’t stop laughing. He told me to stay there while he fetched my mother. She comforted me and cleaned my face. The cloth she used turned red from all the beet peelings.

  That night, our man from the resistance paid us an unexpected visit. He had a big bag with him. He’d been to see a local farmer and had exchanged sheets and blankets for food. He opened the bag and took out an enormous ham and bread and what must have been a hundred eggs. It felt like a party! The whole place soon smelled wonderful, as the fried eggs sputtered away on our camping stove. I could hardly wait. Such a feast! I wolfed it down, but the whole lot soon came back up again because my stomach could no longer cope with the fat.

  In the days that followed, I was often hungry, and I had problems with a boil on my arm. The man from the resistance stopped coming to visit. For me, that was the worst period of the war. Our firewood supply was getting low, so we chopped up anything that would burn and made it into little sticks. We set fire to the stair rail and the garden fence had to go — all that was left was a small section beside the house that would shield us if we needed to escape into the meadow. But we had heard that the liberators were coming closer.

  One evening there was another bang on the door. We all dashed to our hiding places, and I was soon inside my little space above the sliding doors. There were three more people hiding on top of the closet, close to my head.

  The Germans made lots of noise as they came upstairs, and they stabbed their bayonets into the wall. Then what we’d always feared actually happened: A bayonet went through the thin wallpaper above the closet, exposing the three people who were hiding there. “Raus!” cried the Germans. “Out!”

  One by one, they scrambled down. The Germans didn’t see me lying there in the small space. After what seemed like an eternity, I dared to peep out. The room was empty.

  Father and Mother had hidden with two other people out in the meadow. They came back after a while. Everyone was very shaken, but they kept saying how brave I’d been.

  During the last weeks of the war, all we talked about was liberation. Father had torn a map of Europe out of an atlas, and he stuck a pin in the map in all the places where the Germans were retreating. He tied a red thread from pin to pin so that we could see exactly how far away the liberators were. The red thread was moving closer and closer to our house.

  One fine morning, the big day came. “Go outside,” said Father.

  Outside? “Is the war over?” I asked.

  It was absolutely silent on our street. Feeling rather uneasy, I walked over to Biltstraat, where I saw a whole crowd of people. Right by our street there were German army trucks full of soldiers. They waved at me as I walked past. One of them signaled at me to wait and then slipped me a currant bun. I hesitated: Could I accept something from a German? But I was so hungry that I ate it all up. It was delicious.

  I walked on to find thousands of people lining the street and Dutch flags everywhere I looked. I squeezed my way to the front. Then a wave of excitement passed through the crowd: A green jeep was approaching in the distance. There were two soldiers in it and a crowd of people swarming around them. They were kissing and hugging the soldiers, and everyone wanted to touch them. The jeep had to pull over.

  Then we heard a deep rumbling: It was a tank with a big gun. The crowd stepped back and the jeep started moving again. They were all jumping up onto the tank. People sat on the barrel of the gun and rode along on the tank. Lots of other army vehicles drove along behind.

  I wanted to join in the procession, but I couldn’t see any space for me. But then a small truck with a trailer came by. Before I knew what I was doing, I was already sitting up on the bar between the truck and the trailer. I rode along slowly, waving at the crowd lining the street. It was wonderful.

  Then I started to find it tricky to keep my balance, and I had to concentrate on holding on instead of waving. I wanted to get down, so I decided to jump as we went around a curve, but my pants were caught. I screamed and screamed. My screams were even louder than the rest of the noise. The procession came to a stop, and someone freed me.

  The authorities gave us a place to live in Bussum, but that house needed a lot of repairs, so we all went to stay with Aunt Toni. My sister had also gotten through the war in hiding. But Uncle Jo didn’t survive: He died of a heart attack the day before liberation.

  It wasn’t that easy to get back all of the things that we’d left with friends and acquaintances. No one had expected that the Sitters family would still be alive.

  We’d been back in Bussum a few weeks when our black piano was returned. Less than a week after that, we got the small piano that had belonged to Uncle Dee and Aunt Floor. I hardly ever played it.

  A third piano came some weeks later, together with some other things that had belonged to our aunts and uncles. Gradually it became clear that, out of all our relatives, ours was the only family to have survived.

  Bloeme Emden, December 17, 1941

  After liberation, on my way back to the Netherlands, I sent a postcard to the house on Rijnstraat in Amsterdam that had been my safe house during the war. I wrote to say that I’d survived Auschwitz and was coming home. I got there a few weeks later. It was evening and Rijnstraat was bare, as all of the trees had been chopped down for firewood. As I climbed the steps of the Van Moppes family’s house, I wondered what to expect. Freddy, my boyfriend, opened the door. I was bald and emaciated. He didn’t recognize me until I spoke. Everything about you can change, but voices stay the same. He hugged me and called to his parents, �
�Come see who’s here!” They welcomed me warmly, very warmly indeed. They’d been expecting me ever since they’d received my postcard. Freddy’s father was based at Amsterdam’s central train station as a Red Cross worker, and he’d scoured the platforms for me every day. His mother had sat waiting at the window. “I have two dresses,” she said. “One of them’s for you.”

  Around four years earlier, as I was cycling near Rijnstraat, I suddenly realized just how serious the situation was. Hitler’s words came booming out of large loudspeakers, which hung in the trees every couple of hundred yards: “Wir werden die Juden ausrotten, ausrotten, ausrotten.” (We will eradicate the Jews! Eradicate them! Eradicate them!) I made a decision: I am not going to allow myself to be eradicated. But I was also aware that it would be very hard to hide away from all that violence.

  Until then I had been patient and let the war happen around me. I used to think: We’re not allowed to walk down the street anymore? Fine, then we won’t go for a walk. Then we won’t go to the theater. Then we won’t go to the library. Or out shopping. I saw all of their rules as harassment that we could live with. I only really became frightened when the deportations started and Jews were taken away and families torn apart. The first call-ups started arriving in early July 1942, which is when we received ours. The orders were cunningly vague, stating the date and the place you were to report to, and that you should take clothing, a mug, and cutlery. I had turned sixteen at the beginning of July, and like many of my classmates, I was part of the first group to be called up: Jews between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. Most people obeyed the order. “We’re young and strong,” they said. “We know we’ll have to work hard but there’s no way out, because we’re registered and they know who we are.”

  My father was so desperate that he went to visit the office that was responsible for the deportations. He said to the first German he saw, “My daughter can’t go.” The man looked at him in surprise, but he took the call-up papers and put a stamp on them to say that I was exempted from deportation “until further notice.” This temporary exemption was called a Sperre. When the deportations first started, it was still possible to win over some of the Germans. That all changed later on. My parents also had a Sperre, so they would not be deported for the time being either. My father had once been a diamond cutter, and although he had had a different job for years, the Germans thought that people who knew about diamonds might be useful in the future.