“Good afternoon, young ladies! It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful city!”
I know this soldier. Not him in particular, but this type. This is the type of soldier who tries to learn Dutch and gives children pieces of candy. Who is kind, which is the most dangerous trait of all. The kind ones recognize, somewhere deep inside their starched uniforms, that there is something perverse about what they’re doing. First they try befriending us. Then the guilt creeps up on them, and they work twice as hard to convince themselves that we’re scum.
“Keep walking,” I mutter to Mina. He doesn’t know for sure that we’ve seen him; he might not even be talking to us.
“Ladies!” he calls out again. “Let me see the baby! I just learned that my wife had our daughter! Let me see what I’m getting myself into!”
He walks excitedly toward us. He can’t be allowed to see that there’s no baby in the carriage. He’ll ask to see our papers. He’ll take us both away. Mina will lead back to baby Regina. The whole crèche will be investigated. I usually have to worry only about myself, but when you work in a system, you are responsible for everyone’s safety.
Over to my left, Mina smoothly adjusts her scarf. It looks like she’s simply tightening it against the chill, but I can see she’s really shifting it so it covers the Star of David on her coat. I mentally piece together a story: The baby is sick, and the soldier mustn’t get too close or he’ll catch the illness. That’s what I’ll say. Something repugnant, something with vomit.
Beside me, Mina is, improbably, smiling. “Congratulations!” she calls in German as he approaches. She has to realize how disastrous it would be, to call attention to workers from the crèche pushing around empty baby carriages. But when the soldier approaches, she reaches in the carriage and begins to open the bag. What does she have in there? A gun? False papers? Why haven’t I run yet?
Instead, the bag is full of—I look twice to make sure I’m not imagining things—wood. Stubby tree branches, splintery scrap boards, even pieces of wadded-up paper that look like garbage.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a baby for you to hold,” Mina apologizes. “Only kindling. We didn’t have enough in rations; we’ve just come from scavenging. But congratulations.”
“Too bad.” He looks genuinely disappointed.
We both watch the soldier walk away, hearing the congratulations of other passersby who overheard the exchange. I don’t speak until I’m sure he’s out of earshot.
“I carried that bag the entire time,” I say to Mina.
“You did.”
“Do you know how heavy it was?”
“I’ve carried it myself, a dozen times. I’ve been carrying around the same kindling for months. But it works. If I’m ever stopped, I just look like any other Dutch citizen, collecting firewood. It’s not illegal to scavenge for wood scraps.”
“Why?”
“Why do we do it? So I have an excuse to be pushing around an empty buggy with no baby in it.”
“But then why bring the carriage at all?” I ask. “Why not just carry the baby to the station?”
“Because.”
“Because?”
Mina’s eyes flit down to the carriage and then immediately back up again, like she didn’t want me to notice the movement. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get back,” she says.
“Mina, is something else in that carriage?” I ask.
“No. Why would you think that?”
I don’t believe her. I keep thinking of how many times she stopped to adjust Regina’s blanket on the walk here. How much could the blanket have moved? Is that really what she was doing?
Before she can stop me, I lean into the carriage, feeling under the firewood bag with my hands. At the front, nestled along one of the sides, I feel something hard and rectangular beneath a patch of fabric. The patch seems to be some kind of pocket, but I can’t immediately figure out how to open it. I start to pull.
“Don’t!” Mina begs me. Her cheerfulness has finally disappeared.
“What is it?”
“Please don’t. I’ll tell you everything, but if you take it out here, you could get us killed.”
I stop. Get us killed? This, coming from a girl who just smuggled a Jewish baby through the occupied streets of Amsterdam? “What is ‘everything’? Tell me now. What’s inside the carriage? Weapons? Explosives?”
She looks miserable. “A camera.”
“A camera?”
Mina lowers her voice. “I read about some photographers in an underground paper. They take pictures of the occupation. They document it, so when the war is over, the Germans can’t lie about what they did here.”
“It’s a group? And you’re part of it?”
Mina blushes. “No, they’re all professionals. But a lot of the photographers are women. They can hide cameras in their handbags or grocery bags and take pictures without anyone realizing what they’re doing. That’s what gave me the idea.”