“It can be my birthday,” Leo says. “It really is next week, so it’s plausible.”
“As I was saying,” Ollie breaks in again. “The ration-card bottleneck. The forged ones aren’t being produced quickly enough. We’re taking care of sixteen more people, just since last month. It’s too time-consuming for one person to produce all those cards. We need to find another forger or come up with another solution.” I don’t like the way his eyes land on me when he says that last part.
“In Utrecht, they’ve got someone on the inside of the ration-card office,” Willem says. “They arranged a fake theft. The worker reported that the office had been broken into. Really, he’d stolen them himself and passed them on to resistance groups.”
The conversation moves around me while I try to keep up. Ration-card fraud. I’m a solo criminal who has walked into a den of them. But instead of using the ration cards to sell goods for profit, like I do, they pass the cards to the resistance. For what? Food and goods for resistance workers? People in hiding?
“Judith, do you think your uncle might know anybody?” Ollie asks. “With his Council connections?”
The Jewish Council. Judith’s willingness to be out at night and her boldness at the school make more sense knowing that her uncle is on the Council. As the Jewish leadership appointed to be liaisons with the Nazis, they communicate German orders and have a little more freedom than other Jews.
Judith shakes her head. “Even if he does, you know I can’t ask him. He’d disembowel me if he knew I came to these meetings.”
“I can see if Utrecht has any ideas,” Willem says. “Maybe their contact in the ration office knows somebody in our ration office.”
So these five in Amsterdam are part of a larger network, spread into the suburbs and maybe through the whole country. In spite of my fear at being here, I can’t help but feel professional curiosity. Their operation must be huge. How do they find enough merchants to work with them? How good is their forger? Are the soldiers stationed in Utrecht more or less lax than the ones here in Amsterdam?
My mind only snaps back to attention when I hear the end of one of Judith’s sentences: “…and then bring the cards to the Schouwburg.”
“To the theater?” I interrupt, wondering what I’ve missed of the conversation. “Why would the cards go there?”
“You don’t know about the Hollandsche Schouwburg?” It’s the first time Ollie has addressed me in the meeting, and he seems disappointed.
Of course I do. I’ve been there with him, even if he doesn’t remember it. The winter I was fifteen, the Van de Kamps invited me to go see the Christmas premiere with them at the Schouwburg, an old playhouse that Mama let me wear her pearls to visit. Their whole family went. I sat next to Ollie, actually, holding hands with Bas on the other side. Ollie had only just started university; he was wearing new spectacles, serious and important.
“It’s a theater,” I say. “Or was. It’s closed now, isn’t it?”
Ollie nods. “It was a theater. They’ve renamed it the Jewish Theater, and now it’s a deportation center. Jews are rounded up around the city and brought to the Schouwburg, kept for several days, and then transported—to Westerbork mostly, but sometimes other transit camps.”
The dignified theater with velvet curtains is now a massive holding cell for German prisoners. I have clients who live right in that neighborhood. It’s disgusting, the way the Germans take our lovely things and poison them.
“I didn’t know,” I say.
“Where did you think Jewish people were sent?” Judith asks.
“To work camps, or to be resettled in another country. I’m not ignorant,” I say. Work camps is what we’ve always been told. I just never thought about how, exactly, the Jewish prisoners would get to them.
“‘Work camps’?” Judith scoffs at my description. “You make it sound as if Jews are just going to a job. You have no idea, the sadistic things we’ve heard about those camps.”
Before I can ask her to explain more, Sanne jumps in, peacemaking. “It makes sense that you wouldn’t know more,” she tells me. “The Nazis try to hide everything they’re doing. At the Schouwburg, they make everyone stay inside until it’s time for their transport. The Council arranges food and blankets, and that’s about all they can do. Judith volunteers there a few times a week, and her cousin works in the crèche.”
“There’s a nursery?”
Judith makes a face. “Because the Nazis thought it would be too disorderly, to have the children in the theater with their parents. The toddlers and smaller children wait in the crèche until it’s time for their families to depart.”
I don’t know what to say to that, and I don’t have to. Ollie clears his throat again, to regain control of his meeting. “So Willem will talk to Utrecht,” Ollie says. “When do you think you can talk to them, Willem?”
“Wait,” I say.