Eloise and the professor went to the train station the next day to meet their new relatives from Scheveningen. Ans stayed home to cook dinner so it would be ready when they arrived. She’d been doing all the cooking with only a little help from Eloise and was getting tired of it. The Huizengas were probably getting tired of her farm-style soups and stews too. She hoped the new cook that Havik sent really did know how to cook.

“My cousin Max is going to need a place to do his work,” Professor Huizenga told them over dinner. “He was a skilled draftsman before the Nazis fired him for being Jewish, and his skills are now being put to use altering identification cards. He tells me he’s very good at signatures.”

“Especially Nazi ones,” Max said. He and the professor exchanged smiles. Ina and Max were in their late sixties and seemed devoted to each other. Their only son and his family had fled to England before the war, and it had been nearly two years since they’d heard from them.

“Won’t Max’s work need to be hidden?” Eloise asked. Ans thought she seemed distant from the couple as they ate dinner together, almost as if she was reluctant to get to know them and grow fond of them.

“Naturally,” her husband replied. “We’ll take a tour of the house after dinner and see about finding a secure place where he can work.”

In the end, Max decided to set up his work space in the attic. The buzzer to warn of a Gestapo raid was still in place. The dormer window offered light, and the wooden crate would hide his forgery tools and serve as a desk. Ans taught him how to walk on the narrow rafters as Miriam and Avi had done. As displaced relatives of Professor Huizenga, Max and Ina could settle into one of the third-floor bedrooms, hiding in plain sight. The town house curtains could be opened during the day again.

Ans brought blank identity cards to Max, stolen by the Resistance from various government offices. She traveled by bicycle or train to deliver the newly forged cards to her underground contacts in Amsterdam and Den Haag.

Not long after Max and Ina moved in, the town house’s new cook and housekeeper arrived. Sientje and Meta were Jewish sisters-in-law in their early fifties from Amsterdam. Their husbands, who were brothers, had been partners in a small accounting firm and had paid to safely smuggle all of their adult children across the border into Switzerland. The women had gone into hiding just before the first roundups began in Amsterdam and now hoped that their husbands had also found safe refuge. Sientje and Meta gladly agreed to share the servants’ quarters behind the town house’s kitchen and to take over the cooking and cleaning duties. All of the newcomers seemed to settle in very well.