The Safekeep(61)
April 17, 1961
I could make him marry me. I think it would be easy. I don’t think it’ll take me long. I’m writing this and I am seeing the words on the paper and my head is saying, this is crazy, this is a crazy idea, what are you saying you crazy girl. But then I think, haven’t people married for bad reasons always? I could’ve met him at a bar without knowing who he was or where he came from. I could’ve met him just as easily and he would’ve still fallen for me, because he is that kind of man. He has security and he has a good future and who doesn’t want security and a good future? There are worse men. It is an accident that he has something of mine. It is an accident that he can give it back to me. This could’ve happened any other way, too.
April 18, 1961
Saw a woman at the market today with a number that was two numbers off Mum’s number. I wanted to talk to her. What could I have said to her? There was nothing to say. One time Mum told me that she and the other Dutch people were the last ones to leave the camps. That the Red Cross came for the French and the Swiss and everyone and that the Americans kept saying, Oh you need to wait for someone to come get you to bring you back. And that some people just went because who was going to stop them? But some of them stayed and slept in the same bunks and some of them died in those days. Later they heard it took a long time because no one was coming. The Dutch didn’t send anyone to bring back their Jews. She told me she knew a father and a daughter who survived but the mother didn’t and they didn’t want to wait so they went with the Swiss Red Cross and ended up in Switzerland. They had a really nice time recovering there, nice beds and food and the dad was a dentist. He helped anyone who needed something fixed. They were there for a few years and then, when they came back here, they get this bill for something like thousands of guilders, thousands. The Swiss government had sent a bill to the Dutch government and the Dutch government said: pay up! They didn’t have the money of course. They were sent to the old factories in Eindhoven that they used like a big barn to send all the leftover Jews. I was in one of those for a while. Mum said that when she arrived at Amsterdam Centraal in that summer of ’45 in that dirty uniform the lady at the returnees reception table said that she should count herself lucky to have been in those camps, that at least she’d been fed in those camps. The whole of the Netherlands had suffered a great hunger, that’s what the lady told her. Mum didn’t know where I was, if I was alive or not, if they’d got me and sent me to some camp. She asked the lady at the desk if anyone with my name had come by. The lady said she didn’t know and that Mum needed to move along. Mum said she started screaming and pulling at the lady and that some goyim who worked there dragged her away and made her stay outside the station and that was the first time she saw Amsterdam again.
April 22, 1961
Yesterday Louis said, “I can tell you one thing about my mum. Her favorite animal in the world was a hare.” I thought I was going to die. He said, “She had these plates, no one was allowed to touch them.” We used to eat off those plates every day, and then that birthday party and the wild hare and one of them broke, and Mum wasn’t even that upset. Life happens, she said. We took almost nothing when we left. Mum kept saying, Don’t worry we’ll come back we’ll come back so soon, and it was a lie. I think now to how they found that house with everything still in it, Papa’s book still left open on the page where he stopped, and I am sick I am sick to my stomach. Whose stuff did they think that was? They must have known I can’t imagine they didn’t know. Who doesn’t know a thing like that? They must’ve known.
April 23, 1961
He will marry me and if he won’t marry me I will make him take me to that house and I will stuff everything into a big bag and I don’t care I will run all the way back to Amsterdam I don’t care I’ll do it.
April 30, 1961
Out of money & behind on rent. Took out a loan with little Daantje like I’ve always been told not to. I told Louis my friend wants me out of her apartment and he said I can come live with him. So easy! Come live with me! Should’ve seen these people in ’42. The first address we hid at, Mum and Pap and I, the people asked for ?1000 for the month and we stayed in a stinky small attic room with straw so we wouldn’t make any sound and Mum would have these whispered conversations with Pap saying, We can’t afford this for much longer and Pap said, How much longer can it go on? We’ll be back home in a month.
But then they couldn’t afford the next address for all three of us and just sent me ahead. ?300 a month for a 12-year-old, what a bargain! A cot in a pantry up in Groningen. A mother with a bird face and a dad who worked at a mill and was missing two fingers. They told everyone I was a cousin from the west. Their son told me I smelled like poop. Six months I was there, and then one day soldiers came by and then ?300 wasn’t enough and they sent me away and I—I thought, if Mum and Pap will come find me they’ll come here, and if I’m not there they’ll never find me. I screamed! I screamed the whole way! It didn’t help. Into the back of some farmer’s truck. Friesland, a cold winter. ?500 up front. That was the last of the money. Drenthe, nice people, two weeks, they had some dogs, and the dogs didn’t like me. Too much sound. I left that place on my own. Got my first period in a shed somewhere, God, hay rolled up in a ripped hem from my skirt—stuffed into my underwear, had no idea what I was doing, how long was I supposed to bleed? A day, two days, weeks? I didn’t know a thing. I wanted Mum. I slept under a meat hook for that whole summer. A grandma at the next farm knew I was stealing from her kitchen and pretended she didn’t see me. Bless her, the single good person left on this earth.