“Yes. Mama seems worried too. Mrs. Huizenga grew up in Belgium, and she told me horrible stories about what happened to her country when the Kaiser’s armies invaded. She thinks it will happen here.”

He didn’t reply right away.

“Your mother and I both remember how the first war disrupted our lives, even though our country wasn’t involved. I was a young man —in love with your mother,” he added with a shy smile. “And I think this war is already disrupting our lives. All of the farmers are shorthanded, for one thing.”

“We feel the tension in the city, too. Professor Huizenga says so many students have gone off for military training that the university is half-empty.”

“Your mother worries about you, Ans. Maybe you could write to her a little more often so she knows you’re all right?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’ll try harder from now on. There isn’t a lot to say sometimes.”

He pulled her close in a one-armed hug. “I worry about you, too, my girl. It’s a father’s job to protect his daughter, no matter how old she is.”

Ans thought of the lengths Miriam’s father had gone to protect her and knew Papa would have done the same. “I know, Papa, and I love you for it.”

“You aren’t going to forget how to milk a cow while you’re away, are you?”

She laughed. “Not likely!”

“Well, if you need some practice while you’re home, let me know.”

When it was time for Ans to return to Leiden, Wim rode alongside her for a mile or two, chattering about the war and his best friend’s brother, who had gone away for training. “The Nazis have tanks that can roll over anything in their path and smash it flat,” he said. The wind ruffled his pale hair like wheat. “Nothing stops them! And they have so many planes that they fill the sky from one end to the other!”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“The radio,” he said, shrugging as if it were obvious. “But their tanks won’t get very far in our country. If they try to invade us, we’re going to open the dikes and flood the land and drown them all.”

“Did you learn that from the radio, too?”

“Papa makes me turn it off when they start talking about gruesome things, like what the Nazis did in Poland.”

“I should think so! You’re only twelve!”

“But my friend Hans listens to all of it, every night, and he tells me what I missed.”

Ans wanted to plead with Wim not to listen, to remain an innocent child for just a while longer. She understood what Papa meant when he’d said the war was disrupting their lives.

“Hey, you won’t tell Papa about all the stuff Hans tells me, will you?” Wim asked suddenly.