Codename Vengeance

  #

  Two miles away in the Jewish ghetto, Esther retreated to her bedroom and fought back the urge to break into tears. She opened her dresser drawers. The drawers used to be full, crammed to bursting with the latest fashions practically before they hit the stores in downtown Amsterdam. Now they were mostly empty save for a few odd pieces of clothing that the Dutch Christians had donated to their poor Jewish neighbors, with their sympathetic words and sad looks of pity.

  But she wasn’t looking for clothes.

  Deep in the back of the bottom drawer was a picture with a heavy wooden frame, a picture she’d hidden away three years ago, promising never to look at it again. She pulled it out. Her eyes filled immediately with tears, and all the floodgates in all of the Netherlands could not have held them back. He had returned. After three long years, Henrik had returned.

  How many nights had she lain down on her pathetic bed with its broken springs and cried herself to sleep, praying in vain for Henrik to return and save her. And God had finally answered her prayers. But why now? Where was he when the German army was massing at the border, or when they swept through the streets like a plague of locusts, with their tanks and Tommy guns? Where was Henrik when they expelled her from the university and kicked her sister out of school? Where was Henrik when they expropriated her father’s business, closed the synagogue and branded her home and clothes with yellow stars?

  And then one day he just comes waltzing through her front door in a general’s uniform as if no time had passed, and asks her to run away with him, to leave her sister, and her father, and her grandfather trapped like rats behind barbed wire. Esther felt the rage and bitterness boil up inside her like a volcano, and she threw the picture against the wall with all her might. She heard the glass shatter and the picture slide down the wall behind the dresser, out of sight. She put her face in her hands and sobbed uncontrollably.

  Downstairs in the Jacobs’ feeble kitchen, Eli Jacobs was just sitting down to a cold bowl of chicken broth when he heard the crash of Esther’s picture upstairs. Dire scenarios immediately entered his tortured mind. His family had seen so many horrible events over the past few years, endured so many hardships, that it was hard not to fear the worst at the slightest commotion. He sprang immediately up from the table and ascended the stairs two at a time. Sarah was already standing in front of Esther’s bedroom with a worried look on her face.

  “It’s Esther,” she said. “She broke something, I think. She won’t open the door.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eli’s father came out of the sitting room rubbing his eyes. “What’s the matter?” he called up the stairs. “Is everything all right? I heard a crash.”

  “Yes, father. Everything’s fine. Go back to bed.”

  “But what was that noise? Is something broken?” He said and then immediately began the long journey to the bedroom one stair at a time. Eli’s father slept in the sitting room because he was getting too old to navigate the stairs every morning and evening. Even before the war started Eli tried to move his father to a sanitarium in Switzerland for his health, but the old Rabbi refused. He wouldn’t leave his family.

  And now it was too late.

  Eli looked down at his father slowly climbing the stairs. He wanted to tell him to return to the sitting room, that he would handle it, but he knew it was pointless to argue with him. There would be no stopping the old Rabbi until he had dug to the very depths of this latest drama. So Eli turned his attention back to the closed bedroom door.

  “Esther,” he said, knocking softly. “Is everything all right?”

  There was no answer, but after a moment, the door opened. Esther’s eyes were red, but the tears were wiped away. “It was nothing. I was just getting my nightgown out from the drawer and I knocked a picture down behind my dresser. The glass broke. That’s all. It was nothing. Don’t worry so much.”

  Eli tried to see past those sad, red eyes into Esther’s heart, but her emotional armor was too thick. She had her grandfather’s soul. Gentle as lambs, they were, but wise as serpents.

  “Oh, that’s all.” He laughed unconvincingly. “How silly of me. I jump at the sound of rain these days. Here. Let me get it for you.” He took a step into the bedroom but Esther stopped him.

  “No!” she said forcefully, and then her tone softened. “It’ll keep until morning. Besides, I’m already dressed for bed. Goodnight, father.” She was not actually dressed for bed. She had just thrown her robe over her dress, but she wanted her father to leave. She craned her head around the doorframe to see where Sarah was hiding around the corner. “Goodnight, Sarah,” she called out a little louder so Sarah would hear.

  “Goodnight,” Sarah snapped back and then returned to her own bedroom reluctantly. By now Eli’s father had made it to the top of the stairs. He rested against the banister with a look of curious expectation on his wrinkled, ancient face.

  “Goodnight, Grandfather,” Esther said and then walked back into her bedroom and sat down on her bed.

  “Goodnight, my dear.” Grandfather looked at his son for an explanation, but Eli just shook his head.

  “She just dropped a picture,” he explained.

  “Dropped a picture? Oh, is that all?” he shrugged and turned around to begin the long journey back to his mattress in the sitting room. There was a time when the Jacobs family owned three houses—a summer chalet in the country, a five-bedroom home in Berlin, and a three-bedroom town home in Amsterdam that they reserved for guests and business. Now only the town home was there’s, and that only because it was smack-dab in the center of what became, after the German occupation, the Jewish ghetto.

  Eli watched his father descend the stairs and then walked into his daughter’s room. “Oh, Esther,” he said softly. “I heard you had a visitor today.”

  Esther was silent. It would have been rude not to answer her father completely so she half nodded, and then busied herself with pulling down her tattered bed covers and climbing into bed, her dress still on. “I’m really quite tired,” she lied.

  “I know, dear, but I have something important to tell you and it can’t wait. You know . . .” he faltered. “You know I love you, Esther.”

  Esther was surprised by this admission and looked up at her father. It wasn’t that Eli never told his daughters that he loved them. He had often when they were young, but just not for a very long time. Ever since his wife died, Eli found it painful to express his emotions, even to feel them. So he just shut them off, hid them away in some dark corner of his heart with the hope that one day, in better times, he would be able to visit them again. But to Esther, those words “I love you” were almost enough to fill her eyes with tears again . . . almost. She looked down at the tattered bed covers, willing herself not to cry.

  “I would be lying if I said I wanted you to go with Henrik. It’s not that he is not a good man. I believe, in his heart, he is. But I want you to stay with me and your sister and your grandfather. I want us to be together.”

  “Really, father?” Esther looked up with relief. She had expected a fight, a real battle. He would not yell, or even raise his voice. She knew that. But she had expected him to attack her with the weight of reason, argument upon argument, precept upon precept, line upon line. He would not cease his appeals until she was forced to yield to his way of thinking, as she had so many times in the past. She had steeled herself for this contest, determining beforehand not to give in, to be strong, even stubborn past the point of all reason. No matter what he said she would not leave her family.

  “Is that what you really think?” she asked again, hardly able to believe her own ears, and even as she said it, a cloud of doubt entered her mind. She thought of the broken picture behind the dresser. She thought of her broken dreams for the future. She thought of Henrik.

  “Yes, Esther. That is what I want.” He
did not look happy. His face was a blank page, impossible to read. “But that is not what will happen. Even now, Jews are being rounded up and taken in the night. It happened to the Abrams last week. It will happen to us soon. They will come and take us away to the work camps.”

  “No, father.”

  “Yes. It will happen. It is only a matter of time. And now it’s too late to run away. We are prisoners in our own city. They will come for us and then they will separate us.” Esther shook her head, but said nothing. “So I have to ask myself. Would I rather have Henrik take you from me, or Hitler?”

  “No, father.” Her voice was little more than a whimper, the cry of some small animal.

  “Pack a bag, Esther. Put your things in it, your clothes, your letters, and your memories.” He spoke calmly, without sadness or anger. “In the morning, your young man will come for you, and you will leave with him. God willing, we will see you again after this nightmare is all over. If not, then you will carry our spirits with you. You must survive, Esther. You must live on, for all of us. Above all else, you must live.”

  Esther wanted to say more, to argue with her father as an equal, but what else could she say? His words were the truth, clear as diamonds. Once again she had been defeated by his wisdom, and without so much as an intelligible word of protest. She lowered her head and quietly cursed her weakness.

  Little did she know that her father was not right. He had made a dire miscalculation. For outside the ghetto, as the last rays of sunlight were failing beneath the western horizon, an evil force was gathering. There would be no morning reprieve for Esther or any other Jew in Amsterdam. The Gestapo was already on its way.