Hunger Journeys (8 page)

Where was Sarah right at that moment? Was she hungry? Was she in pain? Was she … dead?

“I have to help in the kitchen,” Lena said. She picked up her book and walked inside, leaving the door open behind her. Moments later, Piet came in and closed the door. He did not linger, though.

At the dinner table a few days later, Father announced that Jew-lovers were spreading lies about terrible concentration camps. “They’ll stop at nothing,” he said, his words soaked in distaste.

Piet’s fork had barely clattered to a stop on the table when the front door closed behind him. Lena sank down in her chair and concentrated on her food, willing her father to drop the subject.

“That boy is nothing but trouble,” he said, but that was all. She breathed her relief and took another bite of her supper.

Now, Lena shivered under the magnolia and thought about the layers of horror presented to her by her brother. First the concentration camps. Now all those men murdered, their bodies lined up along the road. She found it hard not to be very, very angry with her brother.

Numb from cold, bad news and dreadful memories, Lena picked up her book and went inside. Surely there was a sugar beet that needed peeling and grating; her knuckles had almost healed from the last one.

For two weeks after school stopped, Lena did not manage to see Sofie as much as she would have liked. Most of the time Mother would not let Sofie in, and she would not let Lena out. Lena’s fingers grew stained and raw from peeling and grating the sugar beets, which had to be boiled and boiled again to be edible.

But with gas a rare event, boiling required wood. Lena soon discovered this was her salvation. Wood. After running away from Piet that day, she went alone several times, most often to abandoned buildings that could be combed over, but the lonely journeys frightened her.

Then one day, Sofie showed up just as she was on her way, and nothing could have been more natural than for the two of them to go together.

They went straight to the park, which Lena had been avoiding on her own, and spent a glorious morning there, dismal though the place was since desperate foragers had reduced many more of the trees to stumps, including the tree they had leaned against so recently. When they parted outside Lena’s door, each had a respectable supply of wood secreted about her person.

After that, Lena looked forward to her hour or two out of doors. Sofie showed up like clockwork every morning at ten, hovering on the street until Lena joined her. They had to get wood every day, but so did the rest of the city, with everyone looking harder and harder as the precious stuff grew scarcer. They broke up furniture they found in abandoned homes, pulled boards off walls. The Germans still objected, so they hid the wood in bags or under coats, but they did not consider going out during curfew. Lena had not done that again since she and Piet were almost chased down back in September.

Sometimes in those days, when she was out with Sofie, Lena felt happy, truly happy—a rumbling belly, bleeding fingers and a world at war notwithstanding.

November arrived, cold and damp, and with the first of November came the last of the bread. Father decided that it was time for a hunger journey, and Margriet and Lena must be the ones to go. They had had no bread in over a week. The girls were to travel outside of Amsterdam to the country to beg for food.

In the last few weeks, more and more Amsterdammers had set off for the country in search of food for their starving families. Lena had seen some of her neighbours return, bicycles or carts laden. She had seen others arrive home on foot and
empty-handed, bicycles gone to the Germans. One had not returned at all.

No one had dreamed that the food supply could shrink down to so little, but in response to the ongoing railway strike, the Germans had placed an ever-tightening stranglehold on the western Netherlands. They took food out, but they would not let it come in. Lena had thought she knew what hunger was. It turned out she had not. Not until now.

Her belly ached. She could not get warm, no matter what she did. And where before she had sat reading books whenever she could because it was what she loved to do, now she sat with a book idle in her lap because she could not summon the energy to decode words on a page. She could almost feel her brain in her head, heavy and sticky, weighing her down.

And now Father wanted her to go on a hunger journey. He wouldn’t go. He could be taken to Germany as slave labour, or so he said. Piet couldn’t go for the same reason, even though he was really too young to be taken. You never knew what could happen. Of course Mother wouldn’t go. Of the family’s bicycles, only two remained, hidden away in the back of the shed. The rest had been confiscated at one time or another, until Father insisted they hide the two that were left against an emergency. Here it was: the emergency. They had two days to prepare.

Lena told Sofie about it the minute they were outside the next morning, in search of wood. And Sofie’s reaction stunned her.

“They’re making me go on a hunger journey,” Lena said, near tears.

“Oh, Lena, I’ll come. It will be such an adventure!” Sofie turned and walked backwards in front of her friend, her
excitement palpable. “I’d give anything to get out of this city, even for a day.”

Hope surged in Lena’s chest. With Sofie there, it might be all right. She was so strong and brave. Lena could just step into her shadow and go along for the ride.

Margriet, grown up and bossy though she was, was no leader. She cast only a sliver of a shadow, nowhere near enough for the protection of a sixteen-year-old girl.

But the hope went as fast as it came. Sofie had no bicycle, and Father would never consent to her going in Margriet’s place. No, Lena and Margriet would be off to the country on their own the next day.

Sofie saw the refusal in Lena’s face and fell back into step beside her.

“I’m getting out of this city one way or another,” she mumbled, eyes on the ground.

Lena was surprised by the speed with which she gave in, and by the abrupt shift in her mood. Sofie usually fought for what she wanted. They didn’t have much to say to each other on the rest of that morning’s foraging expedition.

In bed on the night before their departure, Lena lay wide awake next to her sleeping sister and wished with all her heart that Margriet could go alone to the country. Weaknesses aside, Margriet was grown up, after all. Nineteen. Lena’s sister shifted in the bed and let out a low moan. Margriet might be asleep, Lena thought ruefully, but she was not having peaceful dreams.

Their bicycles were ready for their departure, already laden. Mother had gone through the linen closet, pulled out every
sheet, every pillowcase, every tablecloth and napkin they owned and stacked them on the dining table. “You need things to trade,” she told them. “You’re not asking for something for nothing. Do you understand?”

And Margriet and Lena nodded as they packed the heavy linens into canvas bags and readied themselves to leave before dawn. It was not going to be fun riding such a long distance with wooden sections fitted around the bicycle rims in place of their long-ago worn-out tires.

Lena must have drifted off eventually, because Margriet shook her awake when the clock struck five. They hoped to arrive at the Hembrug, the only bridge over the Noordzeekanaal, close to seven o’clock, when curfew was lifted. That would give them the longest day possible in the country on the other side of the canal. They wheeled their bicycles onto the street in the pitch dark. The streets were silent. The darkness was deep, damp and cold, and dawn seemed far away.

Lena mounted her bicycle and followed Margriet north in the dark. The roads were treacherous places in broad daylight, and in the dark a wheel could get caught much more easily in one of the many potholes or snag on one of the hundreds of loose cobblestones, sending the rider toppling to the ground or straight into a canal. Lena rode slowly, hoping for the best. She heard Margriet some distance ahead of her, wooden tires loud on the stones, and pedalled a little faster to catch up. She shuddered at the thought of being alone on the streets at this hour, or even worse, being discovered. They rode straight north as far as they could on the Hoofdweg and then veered northwest. Eventually the sky began to lighten, but the bridge loomed into view before the sun did.

The two girls stopped and wheeled their bicycles into a narrow alley. The sun in the sky would signal the end of curfew,
and they had to wait longer still or the Germans would know they had broken the rules. Lena looked over her shoulder as she stepped into the building’s shadow. She could make out the concrete barrier, the dark blots of German soldiers and the larger blot of a tank. Fear made her gag, her slight breakfast trying to push itself back up her throat.

“We left too early,” she whispered a moment later.

Margriet just shrugged her shoulders. Lena stared at her. She could actually see her shaking.

The longer they waited, the harder it got to step back out into the road, into full view of the soldiers. Margriet’s teeth started to chatter, and Lena thought it was from terror rather than the frosty morning.

She pushed her own terror deep down inside herself. She knew that the Germans might take the bicycles and send the girls packing. The Germans had been confiscating bicycles for years now, taking them for their own use. And they could also deny passage out of the city if they wished. It all depended on the whims of the men ahead of them on that bridge.

At last, in full daylight, Lena mounted her bicycle. Show no fear, she thought. Smile at them and show no fear.

“We have to go,” she said, and Margriet nodded and pedalled off ahead of her. When they reached the foot of the bridge, Lena put her foot down on the brake and watched Margriet approach the soldiers. Margriet had stopped just ahead, so she had to push her heavy bicycle up the incline while the men watched. Lena had to push hers even farther. Tension built in Lena as she waited for someone, anyone, to speak.

Then came “Where are you going?” in German.

Father had coached Lena and Margriet on their response, but Margriet seemed frozen, lips pressed together, as Lena came
up beside her. When the pause had gone on far too long, Lena choked out, “We go for food,” in German as instructed, and Margriet managed to pull their papers from her pocket and hand them over.