“Maaike, Jesus said, ‘Give, and it will be given to you . . . pressed down, shaken together and running over.’ He’s teaching us to trust Him. I know how hard that lesson is, believe me. But as we were feeding those poor travelers tonight, I prayed that someone else was feeding your papa and Wim and Ans for us.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Yes, dear one. I think that’s how it works.”

More people came to Lena’s door in the weeks that followed, desperate people who had walked from Den Haag or Leiden or even from Amsterdam. They wore layers of clothes for warmth, rags and pieces of carpet tied around their feet. They were starving, begging for food, willing to trade anything they had for a piece of bread or a cup of milk or an egg. Some stood at a distance and sent their children to her door. “Hunger trippers” people called them, risking capture by the Nazis or being robbed by their fellow beggars for a bite of food. Lena was now cooking the sugar beets meant for the animals. “Give us this day our daily bread” became her fervent prayer.

At times, she felt as though she were feeding the world. But Lena couldn’t turn anyone away. For as long as the Lord provided, she would share what she had.

CHAPTER 57

FEBRUARY 1945

Ans sang the hymn that had been her grandmother’s favorite as she scrubbed the latrine floor. She sang for the women in the barracks who were too sick to report for work, and for the woman sitting on the toilet, too ill to keep the food she ate from running straight through her. Some of the invalids hummed along with Ans. “We look forward to your songs every morning,” many of them told her. Most of the guards looked the other way when Ans took time away from scrubbing to pray with someone. At Christmas, she had coaxed the women to sing carols. She and another woman fashioned a crèche from scraps of wood and cloth and retold the story of Christ’s birth. In saving others from despair, Ans realized that she also had saved herself.

She was in the middle of the second verse when a guard opened the outside door, bringing in a gust of wintry wind. “Which one of you is Bernandina Kamp?”

Ans sat upright on her knees. “I am.”

“Get your belongings and come with me.”

“What about my bucket and scrub brush?”

“Leave them.”

Ans quickly scooped up the rags she used to cushion her knees from the hard floor and stuffed them beneath her sweater. Someone else would snatch them up to pad their clothing for extra warmth if she left them behind. She hurried to her bunk and gathered the toothbrush and comb she’d received from the Red Cross, along with the other items she’d collected over the months. She had arrived at the prison with nothing.