In the end, I don’t stay the night at Amalia’s aunt’s hotel. Mirjam doesn’t know me well enough for me to be a comfort to her, and after a while I realize I don’t know what to say. I tell her I’ll go back to Amsterdam, where she would have a home with Mrs. Janssen if she wanted it, but in truth it’s probably better for her to stay here until the war is over, tucked away in a guestless hotel with safe papers.
I walk back toward the railway station and pester the station agent until he gets me a spot on the next train back to Amsterdam. The woman in the seat next to me whispers that the Battle of Stalingrad is over and the Nazis lost—their first official surrender of the war.
“Thank God,” I say, which I soon realize is taking a chance: If she’s a collaborator, my response should have been neutral or despair. But she’s not, because she reaches down and furtively squeezes my hand, a shared gratefulness. And then we’re done talking, because neither of us knows who could be listening, and we keep to ourselves as the train heads home. I feel tired. More so than I would have expected, after so much resolution. Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.
When I get home, Mama and Papa will ask where I’ve been. I’ll go and have dinner with Ollie and Willem and Sanne and Leo. I’ll visit Mina when I can. My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it’s possible to be healed without feeling whole.
I found a girl who wasn’t the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.
The first time I realized I loved Bas: He was sixteen, I was fifteen. It wasn’t the afternoon in his house when we listened to the radio. That was when he realized he loved me. I actually realized it the week before. It was in the school yard. Someone was saying how they liked to read the last pages of books first, to make sure everyone turned out okay. Bas said that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. Bas ordered that the book in question be passed to him, and when it was, he flipped to the back page, took out a pencil and started writing on it. I thought he would write Everyone turned out okay, but when he passed the book back, he’d actually written, Everyone was mauled by a bear, it was very sad, let’s go get ice cream.
Then he grabbed my hand, pulled me up from where I’d been sitting, and said, “Maybe the bear didn’t maul you. He just scratched you a little bit.” Then I made a face, and then he kissed me, and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.
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A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY
Though the stories and characters in this book are all fictional, the locations and historical events mentioned were real places and occurrences in Holland during World War II. The Netherlands was invaded in May 1940. More than two thousand Dutch servicemen were killed in the Battle of the Netherlands, and German occupiers began to put into place a series of increasingly severe restrictions on the Jewish population.
Some one hundred thousand Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust—nearly three-quarters of the Jewish population, a much higher percentage than in nearby countries. There’s a lot of speculation as to why this happened: The Netherlands was a flat, developed country without many forests or natural places to hide. The countries that bordered it were also occupied, limiting escape routes. Resistance work was slow to be organized—the Netherlands had been neutral in World War I and so citizens didn’t have the infrastructure or knowledge for creating underground networks. The Dutch collaboration rate was comparatively high, and even those who disapproved of the occupation were lulled into a false sense of security by the gradual way that Nazi restrictions were enacted: The country was a frog in slowly boiling water.