Chapter One Amsterdam, April 1940 Aletta
Chapter One
Aletta
Aletta tipped her head to Cecilia’s shoulder while they walked, sighing contentedly as the sun brushed her skin. When her friend passed her the still-warm cinnamon roll again, she eagerly took another bite before passing it back to her, stifling a groan as the sugar touched her tongue.
‘I’ve never tasted anything so delicious in all my life,’ Aletta said with another sigh, licking the sugar and cinnamon from her fingers. ‘I could eat these every day for the rest of my life and never get sick of them.’
‘There’s a reason my father can barely fit through a door these days,’ Cecilia teased. ‘He can’t stop eating what he makes!’
They both laughed, heads bent close together as they slowly strolled, taking turns to have little bites of the sweet roll.
They’d called in to see Cecilia’s father at his bakery on their way home, and he’d been delighted to see them, insisting they take one of his famous Zeeuwse bolussen with them for the short walk home.
He’d started making it for his Jewish customers, but she didn’t know anyone who didn’t love it, Jewish or not.
‘Do you ever just wish you could get married?’ Cecilia asked. ‘Imagine how nice it would be strolling like this, but with a baby in a pram in the sunshine.’
Aletta felt her eyebrows shoot up. ‘Get married? What about teaching?’ She couldn’t imagine that having a baby was all sunshine walks and smiles either. From what she’d seen, being a mother looked like the hardest job of all, and it certainly wasn’t one she was rushing to have.
Cecilia sighed. ‘I didn’t much like school, and now I’m studying to become a teacher. It doesn’t seem right.’
‘You’ll make a great teacher,’ Aletta insisted, gently bumping her shoulder.
‘The children will love you, and you’ve been doing so well with your studies.
I’ve loved this first year of having my own class, and it’ll be you next year.
Besides, there might be no young men around to get married to for a while. ’
That made them both sigh, their walk slowing the closer they got to home.
It was always Aletta’s favourite part of the day, strolling back with her best friend, arms linked, chatting about the day.
They were so different – Aletta wanted nothing more than to work and earn her own money, enjoying her independence for the first time in her life, but then again, she’d loved school and enjoyed learning.
Cecilia had always insisted that she’d only gone to school to see her friends – if college wasn’t so social, Aletta might have found it impossible to get Cecilia to join her on the same career path.
As it was, it had taken Cecilia a year of working odd jobs for her father before following Aletta to teachers’ college, which meant her friend would graduate a year after Aletta.
‘Do you think we’ll join the war?’ Cecilia asked. ‘I keep thinking about all the young men who might end up fighting if we do.’
‘It’s seeming less and less likely that we won’t become part of it, don’t you think?’ Most of the time Aletta tried hard not to think about the war, or the young men they’d gone to school with who’d left to serve, but lately it seemed to be all anyone was talking about.
‘I keep thinking of what it must be like for them, how much they must miss home, and they haven’t even left the country yet.’
Aletta linked her arm tightly with Cecilia’s. ‘You’re worried about Peter.’
Her friend nodded. ‘I wish I’d told him how I felt before he went. I just—’ Aletta knew her friend was trying hard not to cry. ‘I just hope I get the chance to. I hope they all come home, all our boys. I hope they don’t get sent away.’
Aletta knew what Cecilia meant. She didn’t have a sweetheart herself, but she couldn’t stop thinking about all the families she knew who were missing someone, or more than one someone, at their dinner table each night.
And all those men were still relatively safe; the Netherlands hadn’t joined the war yet, but their troops were mobilised.
They were ready and waiting, and she knew that it would only be so long before they were thrust into the war like some of their European neighbours.
Even the young children she taught were whispering about the brewing conflict, repeating what they had likely heard at home around the dinner table.
‘My parents want me to take my brothers and move to my aunt’s place, in the country,’ Cecilia said. ‘They don’t think it’s safe here for them.’
‘When will they want you to go?’ Aletta asked, thinking how boring it would be if she didn’t have Cecilia. They barely ever went a day without seeing each other, except for the summer holidays if one of them went away with their family.
‘I don’t know, but I think it might be soon. I found my father with his head in his hands last night,’ Cecilia said. ‘I’ve never seen him like that before.’
They always tried hard not to talk about the war on their walks, but often it was impossible not to.
Every part of their lives was being touched by it; that feeling that every day they were edging closer and closer to being part of the conflict.
But Aletta had never truly imagined they might be parted, not after so many years of friendship.
They’d met as six-year-olds, linking arms then just as they still did, their long pigtails and ribbons tossed over their shoulders as they marched around the playground and refused to let the boys tell them they couldn’t climb trees.
Nothing much had changed, except for the fact that their walks were now strolls home, the talk was more about the boys they liked than the ones they didn’t, and they were more interested in sunbathing and listening to music than risking their necks by climbing trees.
‘Do you think they’ll make you, or is it just them worrying?’ Aletta asked. ‘Surely they wouldn’t actually send you away?’
Cecilia shrugged when Aletta glanced at her.
‘Honestly? I don’t know. My mother is beside herself; she’s wringing her hands so often I think she’s going to give herself an injury, and I’ve tried to tell them that I’d be best to take my brothers there and then return myself.
I don’t want to be stuck in the country. ’
Aletta didn’t want her friend to be stuck in the countryside either, but she didn’t say anything – the last thing she wanted was to make her feel worse than she already did.
‘My father is worse than my mother,’ Aletta said.
‘My mother is quiet and resolute, as if she thinks her one job in life is to make our house one of calm, but my father is looking older by the day. He has dark lines beneath his eyes now and I keep hearing him in the night, restless and walking around the kitchen like he just can’t sleep anymore. ’
They kept walking, lost in their thoughts, until they rounded a corner and found a young boy flapping his arms selling newspapers, with people beginning to cluster around him.
‘What do you think that’s all about?’ Aletta asked, reaching into her pocket to see if she had a coin. Whatever paper he was selling must be hot off the press to draw such a crowd.
They edged closer, and when the crowd dispersed, with people darting away as if their house were on fire, Aletta gave her coin to the young boy as he thrust a paper at her. She froze, understanding now why so many people had stood and stared at the newsprint in their hands.
Cecilia’s little gasp and her fingers digging tightly into Aletta’s arm told her that her eyes weren’t deceiving her, that what she was reading was real.
A heaviness settled over Aletta’s heart as she let her eyes trace the five words emblazoned across the front in bold black type. The five words that had the people before her running for home.
Martial Law Declared in the Netherlands
‘What does this even mean?’ Cecilia whispered as they were jostled out of the way by people rushing over to the boy on the corner.
They exchanged worried glances as passers-by began to shout around them, as more and more men and women read the news.
‘It means that it’s happened,’ Aletta said. ‘The war has finally reached us.’ She gave Cecilia a quick hug, holding her tight. ‘We need to go home, but shall we meet tonight? After dinner? If it’s safe to do so?’
She didn’t have to say where; they always met at the little park near their apartments.
Cecilia nodded, and they hurried off in opposite directions. Aletta’s heart began to pound and by the time she saw her apartment block ahead of her, it was thundering so loudly she feared it might beat straight out of her chest.
If martial law has been declared . . . Aletta swallowed a hard lump in her throat. It meant that the boots of Nazi soldiers would soon be heard on the pavements of Amsterdam.
It had only taken Aletta minutes to reach home, and she fumbled with the door handle as she hurried inside, her heart still racing, finding her mother standing in the kitchen.
‘Have you heard the news?’ she asked, breathless as she held out the paper to her mother, thrusting it into her hands. ‘Look at this!’
Her mother’s mouth fell open, as if she’d been about to say something but the words had frozen in her mouth.
And then the newspaper fluttered to the ground between them, slipping from her mother’s hand as a news presenter began speaking, the wireless crackling as Aletta reached over to adjust it, meeting her mother’s shocked stare.
She was usually pink-cheeked and busy as she prepared dinner at this time of day, but today she stood so still it scared Aletta, her skin so pale it appeared ashen white, as if all the colour had been leached from her.
‘The news has been confirmed,’ came a steady, loud voice through the radio. ‘Martial law has been declared by the Dutch government.’
Aletta didn’t even try to reassure her mother, because neither of them were fools – there were no words that could sugarcoat what they’d just heard broadcast for all to hear.
They’d all known this moment might come, had prayed and hoped that it wouldn’t, but Europe was at war, and it had only been a matter of time before their country was impacted.
Aletta had felt as if some of their neighbours’ homes were on fire, and theirs was one of the last standing, miraculously spared as the fire continued to rage around them.
‘What do we do?’ Aletta asked, knowing as she said the words that her mother would have no great solution for her. ‘What are any of us expected to do now?’
‘We wait until your father comes home,’ her mother said, her wide eyes meeting Aletta’s. ‘He’ll know more. He’ll be able to tell us what’s happening. He’ll know what to do.’
Aletta nodded, bending to pick up the newspaper from the floor and setting it on the kitchen table.
But her mother immediately leaned forward and turned the paper over, clearly not wanting to see the headlines blaring at them from their own table, her hand lingering as if she wanted to ball it up.
Aletta would have preferred if she’d screamed and thrown it across the room compared to this still, silent version of her mother that she didn’t recognise.
Because the news could only mean one thing: war was about to reach them, whether they were ready for it or not.