O, Anna Sun.

I made it.

By myself, tired, starving half to death, dragging myself along, of course, but the fact remains that I made it. It felt like a dream, and indeed it could have been, but it wasn’t, and that was the best part. There weren’t any fighter plane sirens going off, nor were there any collapsing buildings around us. It was quiet. Buildings weren’t shaking and falling down around me, and soldiers weren’t marching down the street in chilling precision. It was all so peaceful that I wasn’t quite sure what I was meant to do, so I just say and stared at everything.

The only sounds were that of the car engine and the rain falling down on the metal roof.

I could have cried, it was so lovely.

I pulled my hat up a little, trying to see as much as I could despite the fact that it was pitch dark outside. Esther would have loved this, the rain and the quiet, whereas Elysa would have been pitching a fit and a half and crying for Elias. My quiet contemplation and reverie ended when Mr. Oakley cleared his throat as the car bumbled and slowed to a complete stop.

“Home sweet home,” he said, turning around with a small smile. I returned it half heartedly, trying to push away the feelings of nostalgia. I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to, but he kind of reminded me of the fact that I was in a foreign country, alone, while the only two people I had left in the world were stuck in some dinky basement in the middle of a city an entire sea away. I blinked away the tears as Mr. Oakley stepped out of the car with an umbrella, walking around to my side of the car to open the door for me.

I was probably going to catch a horrible cold, considering the fact that I was wearing a simple blouse and skirt, Ester’s old oxfords, a light sweater that used to belong to Elysa before she grew out of it, and my thin hat. I stepped out of the open car door and under the umbrella that really wasn’t built to cover two, trailing closely behind the middle aged man as he fetched my suitcases out of the trunk of the car. I tried taking them because I really didn’t want to be more of a burden that I already was, but it turns out that I actually couldn’t and he had to help me out anyway.

We end up getting pummeled by the late spring rain as we rush towards the front door of the large white home. At the door, he tells me that he has to go put the car “in the back,” and I assume that he means backyard or something like that. I don’t know. America seems rather strange to me, but I’m sure that when they came to Holland before the war, it was rather strange to them too.

I’m not even done getting myself together, nor have I pressed what I assume is the doorbell, when the door swings open and I’m embraced by a woman who smells like pastries and apples—someone more commonly known as Daphne Oakley.

“Anna! Oh, we missed you so much! And, heavens, how you’ve grown!” I smile as she lets go, nodding my head as I take my hat off, trying to think of what to say. I sigh quietly as she ushers me in, shutting the door. “You’re gonna catch a cold if you keep standing out there, you know.” She wipes her hands off her apron, walking to the base of the stairs. “Elias! Savannah! Athena! Y’all better come down here and greet our lovely guest, y’hear?!” Turning back to me, she asks me if I’d like some coffee. I’ve never had any coffee in my entire life.

“Thank—thank you, but I…no…want? I no want coffee,” I say assuredly, smiling a little because I’m under the impression that my English is just so wonderful and amazing. “I…just…want…sit. In chair.” I’m a genius, I think. Daphne laughs, pinching my thin cheek with her warm hand.

“Aw, aren’t you cute?”

I smile. I studied my sister’s old English workbooks and dictionaries before I left, and even snuck Elysa’s dictionary out in my suitcase and thought that while I couldn’t speak the language well (yet) at least I could get by.

The kitchen is the biggest I’ve ever seen, but I grew up in the Dutch countryside, so maybe my home was just small in comparison to the ones in America. I say was because I don’t know what’s become of our little home after my parents were sent to those “camps”. Esther calls them “death factories,” on account of how people are just picked up and never seen again when they go to one of those, and of course, Elysa, ever the fatalist, must insist that people are, in fact, dying.

I just think they might be working a lot. I can’t think of my parents in a place like that without going crazy. Elysa doesn’t talk about it and gets kind of mad whenever Ester and I do. But anyway, I’m getting off track.

After my parents were picked up, Elysa insisted we leave immediately. To this day, I don’t understand why they didn’t go to the back of the house, which was where my sisters and I were sleeping. I like to think of it as a miracle, but how could it be a miracle if our parents were taken away? Anyway, Elysa wailed for days and days on end about how it wasn’t safe for us anymore and how we had to leave right away. The problem was that we didn’t have anywhere to go to, unfortunately, which was why Esther and I were so reluctant to leave in the first place. Our mother hailed from northern France and our father came from Poland, and both those places were our last resort, seeing as how the war was raging on in both those countries. We had no family in Holland, no relatives, no distant cousins.

We had no one.

So, Elysa took off to the city for three days, searching. For what, Esther and I didn’t know, because she wouldn’t tell us. We heard nothing from her for three days and were worried sick. We were convinced that she had been picked up by some creepy officer or another or that she had been killed or hurt or something equally as awful, but were proven wrong when she came back late on the third evening, smiling, saying, “I’ve found the perfect place.” Her idea of the perfect place was the basement of a dentist’s office in the heart of Amsterdam. While she was there, she also ran into who she called “a lovely counterfeiter” and picked up some false identification papers for us. “It’ll be a brand new start,” she sighed, falling down on the big bed we shared. “What do you think?”

We couldn’t fight against her because we didn’t have anywhere better to go. It was risky and we knew that, but what else could we do? We stuffed our little meager belongings into satchels, bleached, dyed, and cut our hair to look like the pictures on the false papers, and began the day-long trek to Amsterdam. As far as anyone knew, we were the Gutten sisters and were visiting our great-aunt Frida for a few days. I don’t know how it worked. I think it was an honest miracle, but what do I know? I guess we really did pass for the average Dutch teenage girls.

“Anna?” I look at Daphne, blushing because I’m daydreaming and she’s probably just spent however long talking to me about something that I probably should have paid attention to but was too busy thinking to do so.

“I’m sorry. I-I must, uh…”

“Don’t worry about it. Do you still want to sit? Let me fix you up something to eat.”

“I…not…want…eat. Not hungry.” She frowns a little. “I…want…bed.”

“You want to go to bed?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve had a long day, honey. I’ll tell the girls to fix up your room, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Savannah Mae and Athena Mae! Junior! Do not make me come up there!” She sighs, leaning against the counter with a tired smile. “Oh, lord, it’s those darned radios.” I simply smile and try sitting up straight. I want to look presentable, after all.

I met the Oakley family right before the war started when they took to the Dutch countryside for a family vacation. They were staying at my parents’ inn and we ended up spending quite a bit of time together. It was kind of nice to have them around, and we were all kind of sad when they left. Elias and Elysa ended up becoming a little more than friends, and it wasn’t really a surprise to any of us when he came to Europe a month or so after the war started and they announced their engagement.

Then again, at that time, no one really thought that the war would last more than a couple of months, maybe (and that’s being generous) a year. Well, it’s obviously lasted longer, and the wedding had to be postponed until whenever the war ended—if it ended, that is. We really didn’t know what to do, and it wasn’t like we could hide out forever. Eventually, one of two things would happen—the dentist would rat us out (sometimes even the most wonderful people do the most awful things) or we would be found and all taken away. We couldn’t have that, and Elysa decided to write to everyone she knew in the States (the Oakley family) to see what they suggested.

It was risky and stupid, but I really think that all Elysa wanted was to write a really sappy letter to Elias and she’d probably forget what she was writing about to begin with. Ester and I protested adamantly against her writing, saying that if the SS figured out where it came from, who it came from especially, we’d all be screwed. Did she listen? No, because she was in love, and a side effect of that is only thinking about yourself and whoever you’re in love with.

She wrote to him anyway, explaining our predicament, namely, our hiding out in the basement of some shady dentist office in the heart of the city and that our parents had been, unfortunately, taken away to one of those awful “death camps”, to borrow Esther’s words. He wrote back quickly and told us to go out to the embassy’s office and file for what he called “political asylum.” It would take a few months, and I feared that we didn’t have that much time left before someone either found us or let word slip to the SS that the benevolent dentist was hiding three teenage Jewish girls in his basement. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t go over very well and like I said before, we just couldn’t have that.

After our appointment at the embassy, Esther and Elysa did everything short of running back to the dentist’s practice. I walked into the first travel agency I found and bought the cheapest ticket they had to the US. It was on a boat and would last roughly two weeks. I’d be all the way on the bottom level, but at least I’d be leaving.

When I told the girls, Esther wept and Elysa yelled at me, both of them begging me to go return my ticket and wait for our asylum papers to come through. I didn’t believe they were going to come in time (or at all, to be quite frank), so I refused to return my ticket and ignored their pleas for me to stay.

I thought they would come to their senses and come with me, but they obviously didn’t and are still waiting for liberation on paper that just doesn’t exist.

I’m still thinking about my sisters when Mr. Oakley comes in through the back door.

“I just cleaned this floor, Eli, and you’re trackin’ mud all over the place,” Daphne complained quietly, frowning as she poured him a cup of coffee.

“Where are the kids?”

As if on cue, Savannah and Athena rush into the kitchen, giggling. I hardly recognize them, but I’m pretty sure they don’t recognize me either. Time tends to do that to people. Savannah has cut all of her hair—if I remember correctly, it was long and silky, and she used to hate having it so long—and now had it styled in a sort of curly mess with a red Alice band. Athena was a little taller, hair longer, and looked…flushed. Savannah practically knocks me out of the chair, hugging me tightly and chattering in such quick English that she makes my head spin.

“Oh we missed you so much! And you got so pretty, oh my gosh! You dyed your hair, huh? You got so thin! Aren’t you eating? You’ve gotta eat, honey, you’re all skin and bones! And you’re all wet, and—oh—oh, my gosh!” She smiles as she holds me, looking at me properly.

“Nice to see you!” I say and she giggles, holding me close again.

“You’re funny.”

“Can you girls take her upstairs and get her settled, please?” Athena makes a face.

“Why is she all wet?”

“It’s raining outside, dummy,” Savannah says, grabbing my hand. “C’mon. I’ll take you to your room.”

The house is spacy, but maybe it just seemed like that because I had spent the better part of a year in a dusty, cramped basement. She leads me up the stairs and down the hallway. She points out the bathroom, her brother’s room, the room she shares with Athena, her parents’ room, and finally, mine. It’s across the hall from the bathroom.

It’s nice, I suppose. There are two windows on one side that are covered by curtains that sway with the wind outside. There’s a closet, a wardrobe, and a dresser. It’s a little much, but then I notice the three beds with identical frames, pillows, and sheets. The only difference is the color, but they’re all pastels. Blue, pink, and purple, respectively.

“We thought you were coming with your sisters,” Savannah explains. I sit on one of the beds with a soft sigh, looking down at the floor. “Do you like it?”

“It is lovely.”

“Ma picked the sheets out herself.” Mr. Oakley poked his head in the door and left my suitcases near the dresser and told me that dinner was almost ready. I’m not hungry. I drag one of my bigger suitcases—because I can’t lift it by myself—and Savannah takes it from me, setting it on the bed. I open it and sigh, because it smells like home and like my sisters.

I could cry.

Instead, I reach into one of my blouse pockets and pull out a folded envelope that’s tied with twine. There’s a kiss in red lipstick on the back. The lipstick is one of the few things that Elysa took with her when we left our little house.

I thumb the small envelope sadly for a minute, and then Elias walks in, Athena trailing not far behind. She sits down at the vanity counter with a compact and started fixing her make up. I guess she doesn’t really like me after all.

Oh, well.

“Hey!” he exclaims, hugging me tightly. “You made it! Where are—” I hand him Elysa’s letter and he flushes. Savannah giggles, nudging me with her shoulder as she wriggles her eyebrows. I give them a small smile, watching as he reads the letter. He folds it and puts in his pockets. “So she’s not going to be here for a while, huh?” I shake my head and he sighs. “Thought so. Do you want to come to the cinema with us tonight after dinner? Finn’s treating.” I shake my head again.

“I am tired. I would like sleep, please.”

“Aren’t you gonna eat?” I shake my head and wait for them all to leave, exchanging glances between each other. After they leave, I sit on the bed again, sighing heavily as I take off my shoes and start to undress. I pull a night shirt over my head and walk over to the light switch on the wall, flipping the switch up and down as I stare at the ceiling, watching the light turn on and off.

I could get used to this.