Chapter Two Aletta
Chapter Two
Aletta
When Aletta’s father walked through the door, it was obvious that he wasn’t bringing any good news.
The shadows beneath his eyes seemed to have become even darker, his shoulders slightly stooped.
Only a year earlier, he’d still seemed youthful, with a bounce in his step, but the threat of war had taken its toll.
Now, with the conflict at their doorstep, she couldn’t imagine the worries resting upon his shoulders.
‘You’ve heard the news?’ he asked, dropping his leather briefcase to the floor and coming towards them.
Aletta nodded, rising to pour her father a glass of wine.
Her mother was still fussing over the cutlery drawer – something she’d been doing for the past hour as they’d waited for him to arrive home – even though Aletta had pressed a glass into her hands to try to get her to relax.
They usually only opened a bottle of wine for special occasions, but she’d felt they might all need it tonight.
And she’d rather that than it be left for Nazis to loot when they arrived in Amsterdam.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Aletta turned her head slightly rather than acknowledge the tremor in her father’s hands. That was new; she’d never seen her father shake before. He was usually unflappable.
‘What are we to do?’ her mother asked, as if she’d suddenly realised her husband was home and had woken from her trance.
Aletta watched as he set his glass down on the table and rubbed at his eyes before sitting heavily in his usual chair. It struck her that perhaps he didn’t actually know what they should do.
‘All we can do is eat dinner and carry on as normal tonight. We can worry about tomorrow when it comes.’
Her mother nodded and reached out to her husband. She squeezed his hand and pressed a kiss to the top of his head before turning and putting her apron back on. It was as if she’d been waiting for someone to tell her what to do, as if she was now ready to resume her usual duties.
‘Father, what will happen though?’ Aletta asked as her mother busied herself with dinner preparations. She leaned closer to him across the table. ‘What will happen to your clients?’ She didn’t need to specify – they both knew that she was referring to his Jewish clients.
His frown furrowed deep lines between his eyebrows and around his mouth, and he sighed and took a sip of wine before answering her.
‘I’ve been fielding appointments and walk-ins from clients all afternoon,’ he said.
‘They’re worried, some more than others, but they’re right to be.
The threat they face, it’s like nothing I’ve ever imagined in my lifetime before, the news more horrific by the day, what’s being said about them, what’s being done, all over Europe. ’
Aletta nodded. Her father was a lawyer and many of his clients were Jewish businessmen and families – it was what kept him awake at night, she was certain, worrying about their fate if Hitler’s army ever crept close to them.
And now that worry was more than a threat; it was reality.
It also meant she had her own personal worries to contend with, as she thought of the handful of Jewish children in her class.
It made her sick to the stomach to think of those beautiful children and the challenges their families were certain to face now.
‘What will they do?’ she asked, softly. ‘Is there anywhere they can go?’
He rubbed his hand over his jaw as he spoke.
‘Yes and no. The ones I helped leave when all of this was just a threat, they went to America or England, with much of their wealth intact, but now . . .’ Her father sighed.
‘There is so little any of us can do, other than sympathise and offer help in any little way we can, but I fear they might lose everything. If they haven’t left yet . . .’
Aletta nodded, understanding why her father couldn’t finish his sentence as her mother placed potatoes in the middle of the table. If someone was watching them and hadn’t heard their conversation, they would have mistaken it for a regular family dinner.
‘Cecilia’s father has talked of sending their younger children away to the country,’ Aletta said, watching as her father took another long, slow sip of wine. She was pleased to see that the shake in his hand had disappeared. ‘He thinks it will be safer for them there.’
‘Perhaps. At least they will be away from the worst of it, and bombings will likely target the city areas.’
It was Aletta who began to shake then. Bombings?
She hadn’t even thought about the possibility of that, about how their safety could be compromised not just from enemy troops on the ground but from air strikes too.
And it wasn’t just herself she was worried about.
She immediately thought of the children in her class; all the families that would be affected.
If the city was bombed, what would happen to the school?
‘What’s happening to them elsewhere throughout Europe,’ her mother said, placing one final dish on the table, ‘do you think it will happen here?’
Her father’s expression was sombre, and Aletta suspected that if he could hide the truth from his family, he would.
‘I fear that there is no Jew in Europe safe from Hitler,’ he said.
‘The persecution they face . . .’ He took a breath and looked between them.
‘It’s like nothing the world has ever witnessed before. ’
Aletta reached out to touch her father’s arm, holding her hand there as she sensed the weight of his pain.
‘We just have to keep doing whatever we can to help,’ he said. ‘Even when it feels as if all hope is lost, we have to keep trying.’
Aletta’s mother joined them, sitting down beside her husband. And she did something that they hadn’t done for many years at their family table, not since Aletta’s grandmother had passed away and was no longer there to demand it of them.
‘Emma?’ Aletta’s father said, his eyebrows raised as her mother reached out to each of them.
‘If there has ever been a time to pray, Jan, it is now,’ she said. ‘Please, take my hand.’
Aletta took her mother’s hand on one side and her father’s on the other, but she didn’t close her eyes, and she noticed that her father didn’t, either. Instead, their eyes met, and he gave her a small smile as her mother spoke.
‘We thank you Lord for the food on our table, and pray for the safety of all those around us. Protect us from those who want to harm us and others, and give us strength as we face the evil of our enemy.’
When her mother opened her eyes and finally let go of the hold she had on Aletta’s fingers, she could see that something had changed within her. It was almost as if she’d wallowed in her worries all afternoon, and had re-awoken with a steely determination in her gaze.
‘We will survive this,’ her mother said. ‘I refuse to believe that anything could divide our family, and we will do anything we can for your Jewish clients and for our neighbours and friends, too.’
Aletta found herself nodding, and she knew that her father agreed, despite his stillness – it was what he’d been fighting for since the whispers of war had begun the year prior, to do anything he could to help those who needed him.
‘I walked home with Cecilia today and we ate the best cinnamon bun I’ve ever tasted,’ Aletta said, as she hovered her fork over a carrot. ‘I think her father’s tinkered with his recipe.’
Her father laughed then, and her mother’s lips turned up at the corners, and Aletta grinned straight back. Soon they were all laughing, and her father reached over and placed his hand on hers.
‘Cinnamon buns,’ her mother said, her cheeks still creased with her smile. ‘I’ve never heard of a more perfect topic to distract us from war.’
‘Our Aletta, huh?’ her father said. ‘Always finds a way to make us smile. I bet those children in your class thank their lucky stars they have you as their teacher.’
‘Well, they’d think they were a lot luckier if I arrived at class with cinnamon buns.’
They all grinned, eating their dinner and sipping their wine, and Aletta couldn’t help but think that they might not have many more nights like this: just the three of them, with the street quiet outside and the low hum of the wireless in the kitchen.
She wouldn’t trade quiet nights with her parents for anything in the world, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do or say to make them smile.
An hour later, Aletta was in the kitchen doing the dishes, trying to be as still as possible so she could listen to her parents speak.
They were talking in low voices and she didn’t want to miss a word, even though they weren’t saying anything she didn’t already know.
They were worried, as she was – it was the worry of the unknown that was churning her stomach – and she only wished that they wouldn’t try to shield her from anything.
Whatever concerns they had, she wanted to understand them.
‘Should we be sending Aletta away?’ she heard her mother ask.
‘She’s twenty years old, Emma,’ her father said. ‘She’s a teacher with her own duties and obligations now.’
Aletta bit down on her lip, grateful that her father saw her as the young woman she was, instead of a child, although she knew that her mother was only wanting to protect her.
‘If things become worse for your Jewish clients, for their families, we must act, Jan,’ her mother said. ‘If we can find safe places to send them, if they can be sent to safer homes in the countryside—’
‘We will, we’ll do everything we can, but there will come a time when people in the Netherlands must choose whether to keep their own family safe, or take in a Jew,’ he said. ‘The Nazis don’t tolerate those who stand against them.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that we have to decide as a family how far we’re prepared to go to help others, if it means putting our own lives at risk.’