When it was light enough to see, Lena helped them crawl back into their hiding place behind the piano in her front room. Pieter had boarded up the door to a closet on the other side of the wall as if it had never been there, then built a secret door in the lower panel of their upright piano. The bass keys no longer worked, but the rest of the keys did. Few people knew about the secret place, not even Lena’s two younger daughters, or that Max and Ina had lived there for more than a year.

After she’d dressed, Lena put the rest of the baked potatoes and a rind of bread she’d been saving in a basket and carried it through the door that led from the kitchen into the barn. She never knew how many shadows were hiding in her barn or how long they would stay. More hid at the very top of the old windmill that pumped water for their fields. The Resistance would position the windmill blades to signal when it was safe for the shadow people to hide on her farm. Again, it was better for Lena not to know too much. She simply cooked whatever food she had and brought it to them, asking the Lord to multiply it like the loaves and fishes.

Several men of various ages crept out of their hiding places in the barn as Lena sang the hymn that served as a signal. She read Wolf’s newspaper to them as they ate. Four of the shadows were in their late teens —her son Wim’s age. Others looked like onderduikers, ordinary husbands and fathers who’d been forced to “dive under” to avoid being sent to German slave-labor camps. Or they might be railroad workers who’d been ordered by the exiled Dutch government to go on strike to hinder the Nazis. The slender young man with wire-rimmed glasses and ebony hair was undoubtedly Jewish.

“What’s the first thing you want to do once the Allies arrive and Holland is free?” she asked.

“Go home” was their unanimous reply. The shadow men talked about things they missed and the food they were hungry for as they finished their bread and potatoes. “I heard that the Allies give out cigarettes,” one of them said. “I’d give anything for a smoke.”

At dawn, one of the shadows offered to milk Lena’s cows for her. “I grew up on a farm in Friesland,” he said. “Milking reminds me of home.” He stroked the cow’s shoulder as if greeting an old friend before straddling the milking stool. “Shall I let them out to graze when I’m finished?” he asked.

“No, they have to stay inside the barn again today. Shrapnel from a stray Nazi rocket killed three cows in a neighboring village.”

“Someone might steal them for food too,” another shadow said.

“Yes, there is that.”