Lena managed a small smile. “My husband the burglar. That’s something I never imagined you would become when I married you. Are you nervous?” He’d been pacing from the stove, to the kitchen door, to the door that led into the barn —then back to the stove again, peering through the window into the ink-dark night each time he passed it.

He sighed and raked his fingers through his thick hair. “To be honest, I am nervous. But this has to be done. The underground needs those ration cards.”

“Everything is becoming more and more dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Ja. But we have no choice. We have to fight back. You know we do. For the same reasons that I had to train and fight in the army.”

“I know,” she said, her voice soft. She had accepted her husband’s role as an underground soldier, but she didn’t have to like it. She put down her mending for a moment. “Are we getting anywhere, Pieter? It seems like the Nazis are everywhere, and more of them than ever in the village. That’s why . . .” She didn’t want to finish.

“What, Lena?”

She hated telling Pieter how frightened she was, knowing that it wouldn’t change his mind, knowing he hated to hurt her. But Lena had no one else she could confide her fears to, and sharing them sometimes helped to lighten her load. “It was one thing for you and your little gang of knokploegen to steal a pig or two so the Nazis wouldn’t get them. But this . . . this is different.”

Last fall, Pieter had banded together with other farmers to steal pigs, one at a time, from their neighbors. Lena had worked all night with the other women to help butcher and clean them. The meat was distributed among several families, who would smoke it, cure it, or make sausage with it, along with their own butchered hogs. The aggrieved farmers, who were in on the thefts, would report them to the authorities, but of course the thieves would never be caught. It meant less meat would go to feed enemy soldiers.

“None of us like doing dangerous work,” Pieter said, “but we’ll need to get used to it. According to Wolf, we’re going to do even more in the months ahead.”

“Sabotage?”

Pieter nodded.

Within an hour, his fellow knokploegen had all arrived —some on foot, some by bicycle, and some traveling down the canals by boat. They were fellow farmers, men Pieter could trust with his life. The former Dutch officer slipped in from the barn to join them, and they sat around the kitchen table in the dim light of the kerosene lamp, talking quietly. Lena would have offered them tea or coffee if she’d had any. She sat with her mending, thinking how strange it seemed to have celebrated Bep’s birthday around this table only a few hours earlier.