Free The Heart Has Reasons by Mark Klempner Page B

practicality, but a different side came out when she recounted the fun she and her husband used to have with their secret guests after the day was done. And something extraordinarily different emerged when she began to speak about her religious beliefs, and how these came to bear on her rescue activities.
    As I was leaving the house, she showed me a book by Clara AsscherPinkof, a widely read Dutch author who survived the Holocaust and later wrote about her experiences. This book, Star Children , is about the Jewish children of Amsterdam, most of whom did not live to see the liberation. Heiltje opened the thin volume to an epigram: “If you trust deeply in God, you can draw to yourself a miracle.” Below, the author had written, “Wopke and Heiltje have brought a miracle close at hand.” In the story that follows, Heiltje reveals something of the contours of that miracle.

    As soon as the Germans occupied our country, my husband began resisting. He was from the province of Friesland, and the Frisians are legendary for standing up against tyranny. They’ve always been resisting—whether it was the Spaniards, or the Saxons, or all the way back to the Roman invasion by Julius Caesar. True to his roots, he refused to submit, and he held very strong convictions about how people should be treated.
    He actually started a resistance movement here. He recruited people by scrawling messages on the sidewalk. I didn’t know everything that he was doing—it was better for me not to—but when the Nazis started rounding up the Jews, the caretaker of the local synagogue gave him some addresses of Jewish children and adults who needed to dive under. After that, he went out into the farmlands and tried to locate households where these people could go and hide.
    One night he came home downhearted, and said, “No matter how much I talk, they always ask if I have taken in any Jewish people. And when I tell them no, I don’t get anywhere.” I said, “Maybe we should try it ourselves—that would convince them.” He agreed, and that’s the way it started.
    We decided to take in a friend of some friends: a diamond cutter from Amsterdam. Our friends couldn’t take him themselves because they lived in the back of a store, and there were too many people coming in and out. Still, our house was not ideal: we shared a wall with our neighbors, and everyone knew everyone on this street. But we said we would be glad to meet him. Immediately, it sort of clicked. It has to click somehow; otherwise you’ll never be able to get along with someone in the long run.
    After we had taken in this Jewish man, my husband had more success finding safe addresses for the other people on the list. Then, a few months later, a doctor who lived in a nearby village told us about acertain couple who were roaming around in the countryside with their belongings on their backs. Could we help them? We told him he could give them our address, and they eventually made their way to us. They looked very tired and they smelled of manure from having hidden in a pasture for a couple of days. Their clothes were rumpled, and they still had pieces of straw in their hair from having slept in a haystack. We had only expected two, but they had a daughter also—a thin girl with watery blue eyes, and a wan face.
    Now that we had four onderduikers in the house, we became very vigilant. It was always, “What was that sound?” “Who’s at the door?” We constantly had to consider how things looked from the outside. Across the street was a butcher, and he had customers all day long—anything suspicious would surely have been noticed.
    Sometimes, when the onderduikers needed to come out of their rooms to take a break, we would put a sign on the front door that said DIPTHERIA. This was because the Germans were very afraid to enter any house where someone had an infectious disease. Then we took the girl, who was very frail and pale, and sat her by the front window. She was our