Lena’s daughters drank some of the still-warm milk for breakfast. They looked thin and shadowlike too. Wim and Ans had been plump and rosy-cheeked at that age. Before the war. When life was gentle and good. When food was plentiful. “I think we’ll take the rest of the milk into town this morning,” she told the girls, “and trade it for something.”

Bep bounced with excitement at the prospect of a trip into the village. At four years old, she was full of life and energy. “May I wear a bow in my hair?” she asked.

“It isn’t Sunday,” Maaike replied.

“I know, but may I, Mama?”

“Yes, why not?” Lena brushed Bep’s long, dark hair after breakfast and tied a bright bow in it. It fell naturally into thick curls. “Do you want one, too?” she asked Maaike. She shook her head. At eleven years old she was no longer interested in girlish bows. Lena braided Maaike’s straw-blonde hair —the same color as her own —into a thick braid that fell nearly to her waist. When it was time to go, Lena fetched her broken-down bicycle from the barn. In peacetime her bicycle would be considered a piece of junk —and it was —but at least the Nazis would deem it not worth confiscating. She lifted Bep onto the handlebars, and Maaike climbed onto the board Pieter had attached to the rear fender. Lena tied the two containers of milk beneath her sweater and apron and set off on the three-mile trip into the village.

The pastures between her farm and the town looked tired and pale this morning, like an invalid who’d lain in bed too long. More fenceposts were missing, and several more trees had disappeared, chopped down for fuel this past winter. They were calling that long, endless season the Hunger Winter. With the railroad workers on strike, food had become so scarce in the cities that starving people had staggered out to Lena’s farm from Leiden and Den Haag to beg for food. Her little nation would have much rebuilding to do once the war finally ended. But Lena suspected that the hardest task would be repairing the discord and mistrust among neighbors and even within families. For the past five years, no one had known whom they could trust or who might sell their secrets to the Nazis to feed their starving children. She and Pieter knew when they agreed to hide Jews and onderduikers that if they were discovered, they’d be arrested and imprisoned.

Lena was nearly to town when she heard the glorious cacophony of church bells ringing in the distance. She slowed to a halt as joy leaped in her heart. “Listen, girls! Do you hear the bells?”

“But it isn’t Sunday, Mama,” Bep said.

“I know. It means the Netherlands is free! We’re free!” She’d spoken the words but could barely comprehend that they were true.