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“Gisela, I know you remember the story of Queen Esther. There’s a reason why God has placed you where you are.” I hoped he was right.
I stayed home and nursed Vati for a week and tried to cheer Mutti and Ruthie and give them hope. When my week was over, Sam took me back on his bicycle. We stood in the alley by the rear door of the nurses’ residence to say goodbye. I would remove my sweater with the telltale yellow star before going inside.
“Now that I’ll be living in the nurses’ residence, you can visit with me in the lobby anytime you want,” I told Sam. “Maybe I can even go home with you now and then. And I can give you all the money I’ve saved up.”
He looked into my eyes and traced his fingers down my jaw. “I love you, Gisela.” He sighed and held me close, and I sensed he was about to say things I didn’t want to hear. Now would be the time for him to say, “We’re another day closer...” but he didn’t. “Tomorrow comes with no guarantees,” he said instead. “For now, we need to hold any plans we make very lightly.”
“But we’ll see each other again, won’t we?”
He kissed me and said, “God willing.”
I spent the rest of June and July working in the hospital, doing what I had trained for two years to do, while waiting for my advanced nursing classes to begin in the fall. I loved my job, even the dull, messy parts of it, because it kept my mind occupied from thoughts of Sam and home. He showed up on his bicycle on a broiling day in late July to take me home for a brief visit, and I could tell that something had upset him. “We’ll talk about it when we’re all together,” he said as we sped through the streets. Every store we passed had long lines of people waiting out front. I noticed that Sam took a winding route home to avoid the area around the train station.
Sam hadn’t told my family I was coming and they were surprised and overjoyed to see me. “I would have cooked something special for you, if I had known,” Mutti fretted, but I assured her that I wasn’t hungry. Vati was sitting at a table in the living room when I arrived, teaching a mathematics lesson to Ruthie and Sam’s brothers. It was summer, and it seemed absurd for them to be doing schoolwork when we faced such an uncertain future. But what else could they do to provide a distraction?
After all of our greetings, Sam quickly grew serious. “We’ve all heard about the arrests and deportations of Jews in other Nazi-occupied countries, but now they’re starting to do the same thing here in Antwerp. The security police arrested a few hundred Jews at the Central Station as they arrived from Brussels. There was no reason and no recourse. There were more sudden arrests on nearby Pelikaanstraat.”
“Where are they taking all these people?” Vati asked.
“To a temporary transit camp, for now, in a former Army barracks in the town of Mechelin. The camp is near a rail hub, and according to my sources, the plan is to deport every Jew in Belgium to camps in Germany and the east, maybe as far as Poland.”
I saw my father shudder. “What should we do?” he asked.
“Everyone needs to go into hiding. We can’t wait for them to come for us. The people I know in the Resistance are going to help. They can supply fake ID cards that aren’t stamped ‘Jew.’ Gisela, I brought you home so we could all say our goodbyes—”
“No!” I cried out. “Please, no!” I was sitting beside Mutti and I clutched her arm, unwilling to be separated from her.
“You’re already in a very safe place, Gisela, working and hiding among the Christians.”
“But I don’t want to be separated from any of you! We can all go to the work camps together.”
“No, Sam is right,” Vati said. “It’s much better that we’re apart for a little while than that we end up in a camp like Buchenwald.”
Saying goodbye felt like tearing off both of my arms. But it had to be done quickly so Sam could take me back to my residence and return home before the curfew. I clung to him in despair in our private place behind the hospital, but he gently pried away my arms. “We don’t have to say goodbye just yet. I won’t go into hiding until I’ve found places for all of the others. I’ll come back to you in the meantime so you’ll know what’s happening.”
“Please don’t put yourself in danger, Sam!”
“We already are in danger. All of us. Give me your identity card, Gisela, so I can have it altered or a fake one made. As long as you don’t leave the nurses’ residence or the hospital grounds, you won’t be asked to show it.” I marveled at this strong, brave man who was working so hard to save all of us.
Three weeks later, in mid-August, I returned from my nursing shift to find Sam waiting for me in the residence lounge. In spite of the summer heat, he was wearing an ill-fitting suit and tie—and no yellow star. He had shaved his beard, and if he hadn’t spoken my name, I wouldn’t have recognized him. My heart raced as we moved to a corner of the lounge away from the door to talk. “I don’t have much time,” he said, “but I need your help.” My hands were trembling, and he took them in his.
“Nazi officers and the local police raided our neighborhood last night. They cordoned off several streets, dragged people from their homes, and loaded them onto military trucks. Thousands of us, Gisela. Not just men, but women and children, too.”
“Not our families! Please, Sam—tell me that our families are safe!”
“They are for now. But we don’t know when or where the next raid will be. I’ve been working with a Christian man in the Resistance named Lukas Wouters. He owns a hotel in central Antwerp called the Hotel Centraal. He arranged hiding places for my brothers on farms outside of Antwerp, and my mother is going to live with him and his wife, posing as their maid. Remember that name, Gisela—Hotel Centraal.”
“Yes, yes. And my family?” I couldn’t breathe, praying they were safe, too.
Sam gripped my hands tightly and said, “I need you to be strong, Gisela, and to listen to me. Promise?”
“Just tell me,” I whispered.
“Your father is dying. He knows it and your mother knows it. He is too weak and too ill to be moved, but he accepts this as the will of God.”
My tears spilled over and rolled down my cheeks. “No. Why would God will such a thing?”
“Your parents have decided to stay in the apartment until the end. I couldn’t convince them to change their minds. Your father said that as long as his two girls are safe, nothing else matters.”
