In early 1943 we too were relocated to the same suburb as Oma and Uncle Herman had been moved to before they had to go into hiding, to a tiny unit on the ground floor of a big apartment building.
We heard from Aunty Greet from time to time but never saw her until she turned up again at our front door one day.
'They were betrayed,' she cried. 'Their hiding place was betrayed.'
'Did they escape?' asked Mum. 'The Germans didn't get them, did they?'
'No, but they did get the old lady, the bastards.'
Dad didn't say anything, nothing at all.
Slowly now Aunty Greet told us what had happened. Big Oma and Uncle Herman had been hiding upstairs above the chemist shop of their friend, the elderly lady in her wheelchair. When the Germans burst into the shop the lady shouted at them to get out. They all shouted so loud at each other that Oma and Uncle Herman heard them in time to escape over the roof. They knew an emergency contact address of the resistance movement, and that's where Oma went that night after dark. It seemed that that address was still safe. The man there said he might be able to find somewhere for Oma to hide.
'He wouldn't say any more,' said Aunty Greet. 'But they took the old chemist lady. Those bastards took the old lady.'
We just looked at each other, without talking, without moving even.
I wondered if the Germans had allowed the old lady to keep her wheelchair when they took her away in their cattle truck.
From that day onwards we never mentioned Big Oma anymore. Never.
The war went on.
I had my tenth birthday. At times I too had to go into hiding.
I had my eleventh birthday. The war was still going on, but the Germans were pulling back in Russia. We had stuck large maps on the wall and with pins and orange thread, we tried to keep track of the progress. That summer the Tommies, as we called the English, and the Yankees landed in France. We put up new maps on the wall, with more pins and orange wool. But only part of Holland was liberated. We were isolated, with only very limited food supplies left, without gas or electricity.
The Hunger Winter began.
One morning very early, straight after curfew, Uncle Herman knocked on our door.
'I brought my own breakfast,' were his first words, pointing at a rather scrawny stray cat that followed him in.
'What were you doing out on the street? That's far too dangerous,' worried Dad. 'What if the Germans had seen you?'
'Danger be damned,' laughed Uncle Herman. 'I've got word from Mother.'
'From Mother? Is she alive? Is she safe?'
''She was a month or so ago. Here, she sent you this card,' and he gave me a picture postcard. 'From your grandmother for her oldest grandson.'
'From Oma? From Big Oma?'
'How - - -' started Dad.
'The man who gets me my counterfeit ration coupons brought it. He couldn't tell me much, only that she was safe and healthy. And that she's in hiding in a small village somewhere in the East. But she's all right and she sends her love.'
Over and over again we looked at her card. On the back, it said 'Aunty Ann' - not her real name of course, which was Selma, but it was her handwriting. Nothing else, not my name either, but it was enough. On the front a picture of a framed Bible text: 'Peace be yours, and your family be Peace, and your home be Peace'
We had nothing much to eat that morning, only a piece of sugar beet and a few tulip bulbs, but Uncle Herman had said: 'I brought my own breakfast.' So, Dad went around the back and broke away another plank from the massive but empty coal bin. One plank to build a little cooking fire. There wasn't much meat on the cat, and it didn't taste very nice, but we hardly noticed, Big Oma was still alive.
The Hunger Winter went on.
My twelfth birthday came and went.
Very little changed. We waited for the end of the war, we searched for food, we paid less attention to dangers, and saw Uncle Herman at times. People starved. Sometimes there was no drinking water, so we always kept a supply in buckets and in a galvanized tub. We also kept a bowl full of Lysol next to the kitchen to try and keep our dysentery under control.
Rumours kept going around: next week the war will be over, no, the Germans are leaving Friday week, no, the day after tomorrow.
On the fourth of May, it was no longer a rumour, the German army in Holland would capitulate the following morning. That evening Trudi and I took to the street with flags long ago sewn from sheets, dyed red, white, and blue. People followed us, and more flags appeared. A group of very angry Germans started shooting at us. We all, hundreds of people, hid in an empty shop, jammed together. Too happy to be scared.
Four days later it really was all behind us. It was actually the Canadians who came into Amsterdam, sitting on top of their tanks, on top of their cannon and armoured cars. And it was the Canadians who first gave us cabin biscuits and milk powder and army chocolate.
All the same, it was a long time before people in Holland began to find each other again. A very long time. So many had lost contact or were lost altogether.
We did hear from Oma after a few months. She was safe and well, but would not be able to get back to Amsterdam for the time being, she wrote. She would come as soon as she could find transport.
Oma had changed. She would not sing for us anymore. She told us stories though. True stories like the one I'm telling you now.
She told us how she had been hidden for a few days by people she did not know and never met again, after the hiding place with the chemist lady had been betrayed. There a man from the resistance movement gave her false papers and told her to take off her Star and get on the train to a small village called Nijverdaal. A family in that village would hide her for the rest of the war, he said.
It had been a long, slow train ride. A German officer had taken a seat facing her during the first half of the trip. And, so Oma told me more than once - still amazed at her own cheek - how, when she had to get off the train in the middle of nowhere because of an air raid, she got him to help her climb down.
She often talked about her stay in Nijverdaal, about the couple who had looked after her and fed her all those years, without ever asking anything in return.
But she mentioned the lady of the chemist shop just once.
'If she had not yelled so loud and angry at those German soldiers, I would not have been alive today,' Oma said. 'That was the only way she could warn us. That was the very last thing she could still do to save us.'
The lady of the chemist shop never came back.
And again I wondered if those Germans had let her take her wheelchair in that cattle truck of theirs.
POSTSCRIPT.
Miep Gies, the lady who looked after Anne Frank and her family when they were in hiding, had lived just around the corner from us. She once wrote to me: 'We don't see ourselves as heroes, we only did what was our duty as human beings: helping people who were in danger. The real Heroes were the people in hiding. Waiting every day in fear: will we survive?'
I cannot agree with Miep Gies, she was too modest. As Jews, we had no true choice. At times it was hide, or die. Miep Gies and all those other people like her could choose. They could look away and remain safe, or help and risk death. The people who willingly risked and often gave their lives to save Jews, to save my grandmother, to save me, those people like the Lady in her Wheelchair, they were the true Heroes.