Inseparable: The Hess Twins' Holocaust Journey through Bergen-Belsen to America

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INSEPARABLE

"Inseparable is a really powerful and very timely personal account of the Holocaust. Even for those of us who have done a lot of Holocaust research, this book is essential and so moving and compelling. And it is especially important at a time of increasing antiSemitism and Holocaust denial. I highly recommend this book."

—Wolf Blitzer, Principal Anchor, CNN

"Inseparable documents the harrowing journey of the Hess family as they run from the Nazis, leaving their homeland of Germany and escaping to the Netherlands, only to find themselves once again victims of a relentless and merciless hunt simply for being Jewish. In the backdrop, Faris Cassell artfully describes the meteoric rise of Adolph Hitler and his savage Nazi party, showing just how easily they are able to overtake Europe with seeming impunity. This suspense-filled retelling of World War II is rendered with a compilation of detail that is breathtaking, making it all the more frightening when experienced through the lens of one intrepid family who did all they could under impossible odds to stay together. They endured, they coped, and ultimately they miraculously overcame the machinations of evil designed to crush and annihilate them. This is a Holocaust story of triumph."

—Silvia Foti, author of Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare

Faris Cassell narrates the compelling story of the Hesses, a family of four with two very young twin children, German Jews who sought refuge in the Netherlands only to face the German onslaught, and their struggle to survive in hiding before being deported to a concentration camp. In moving testimony, she takes us on their most difficult journey and how they remained inseparable time and again despite near impossible odds. Had this been a novel, one would have rejected it as implausible, perhaps even impossible, and yet it happened. In this case truth is stranger than fiction, and once again, Cassell is indefatigable in her quest for truth. Her narrative is as compelling as the story she tells.

—Michael Berenbaum, author, scholar, rabbi, and filmmaker, former Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University

"In Inseparable, Faris Cassell has made the Holocaust relatable to audiences who have little if any prior awareness of the genocide of European Jewry during World War II—without either desensitizing the reader with unfathomable statistics or turning the work into an elegy for the murdered. Beautifully written, the saga of the Hess family from happiness to persecution to daily confrontation with death in Nazi camps such as Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen to their eventual liberation on a train bound for nowhere is counterintuitively inspirational precisely because, as the book’s subtitle indicates, it is ultimately a story of resistance to oppression, understated heroism, and survival. We identify with the book’s protagonists, including the twins Marion and Stefan, who were robbed of their childhood; we are given a window into their suffering; and we are left with admiration for their courage, their inner strength, and, perhaps most important, their uncompromising decency, which allowed them to remain human despite decidedly inhuman conditions. This is a book that should be required reading, especially for high school and college students of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and faiths."

—Menachem Z. Rosensaft, Jewish and human rights activist, professor on the law of genocide, General Counsel and Associate Executive Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

"An unforgettable story of family, devotion, and strength during impossible times. Inseparable reminds us that behind Holocaust statistics there are parents and children who loved, resisted, and faced unfathomable circumstances. Faris Cassell conveys the horror of the Holocaust—but the Hess family’s love for one another shines through every page. You will remember this story for a long time."

—Rebecca Erbelding, author of the award-winning book Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe, and on-camera expert in the 2022 PBS television series, The U.S. and the Holocaust, directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein

"Inseparable manages the rare accomplishment of telling a tale of epic evil and suffering with genuine intimacy and personal compassion. This is a compelling and important book."

—Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, President of CLAL (the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership) and Co-Founder and Executive Editor of TheWisdomDaily.com

"Inseparable is an important story compellingly, masterfully, and sensitively told. Faris Cassell is not only a talented storyteller with a keen eye for detail and a talent for bringing characters to life. She is also a meticulous—and tenacious—researcher. The result is history that lives and breathes, a book with both intelligence and heart."

—Lauren Kessler, author of Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home and Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family, an Oregon Reads selection

In her compelling and suspenseful account of the miraculous survival of one Jewish family, Faris Cassell also unfolds the larger story of the Holocaust in Holland and beyond. Based on memoirs, interviews, and extensive research, she cogently recounts the extraordinary experiences of Ilse and Karl Hess and their twins, Marion and Stefan, in Amsterdam, Westerbork, and Bergen-Belsen, on the famous ‘Lost Train,’ and, finally, their bleak Netherlands home-coming. Her cogent writing vividly exposes a nightmare landscape in which love and resourcefulness continually struggled against a seemingly endless onslaught of inhumanity and betrayal.

—Judith R. Baskin, Philip H. Knight Professor of Humanities Emerita, University of Oregon

As the violence of World War II rages around them, one family finds the courage, endurance, and unshakeable love to fight and survive the horrors of Hitler’s extermination policies. Faris Cassell has written a haunting and unforgettable book; one I think very important for today.

—literary figure Faye Kesey McMurtry

"Inseparable is the inspiring survival story of young twins, Marion and Stefan Hess, their father, Karl, and their mother, Ilse. As if watching a movie, readers are riveted by their parents’ cleverness, desperation, and luck as they evade the Nazis, suffer capture, and fight for their survival. In an account made vivid and engaging through the father’s journals, the mother’s memories, and the twins’ interviews, award-winning journalist Faris Cassell shows her special talent for illuminating the struggles, triumphs, and special moments in one imprisoned—and liberated—Jewish family."

—Elizabeth Lyon, bestselling author and editor and recipient of the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award

"A father’s heroism, a mother’s protective love, the resilience of two toddlers, and, finally, blind luck are the ingredients for survival in Faris Cassell’s new book, Inseparable. As in her earlier work, The Unanswered Letter, on the fate of an extended Viennese Jewish family, Cassell skillfully weaves together a detailed and personal account of the Hesses’ journey through the murderous morass of the Holocaust with the history of a specific time and place, in this case, the lesser-known Dutch experience. At times heart-breaking, at others thrilling and dumbfounding, Inseparable is both an exciting and an important read."

—Barbara Corrado Pope, historian and author of The Blood of Lorraine, a novel of the Dreyfus era and Europe in turmoil

"Inseparable: The Hess Twins’ Holocaust Journey through Bergen-Belsen to America connects with my family story directly, as my relatives were also interned at Westerbork. When I was given an advance copy of the book, I eagerly read it over a single weekend. It’s terrific—thoughtful, empathetic, engaging. This is a really superb account."

—Daniel Rosenberg, Professor of History, University of Oregon, and co-author of Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline with Anthony Grafton and Histories of the Future with Susan Harding

"Inseparable affected me greatly. I find myself thinking about it—unexpectedly—at different times of the day and night. We cannot imagine survival under these circumstances, just as we dare not imagine the intimate details of daily life that such survival entailed. Yet Faris Cassell lays it out so directly that we must imagine it—all of it. Without sentimentality, the survival, intact, of a family of four unfolds: the testimonies and memories of parents and children against the deafening drumbeats of those who would wipe out their families, their people, and their history. These are voices that must be heard and an extraordinary story that must be told."

—Rabbi Shira Milgrom, Congregation Kol Ami, Westchester County, New York, board member of the Parents Circle of Bereaved Families and supporter of Combatants for Peace, the two organizations that sponsor the annual Joint Palestinian-Israeli Memorial Day ceremony

"With indefatigable research and a detective’s eagerness for one family’s truth, Faris Cassell has written an extraordinary book of survival, perseverance, and sheer willpower amid the horrors of the Hitler-triggered Holocaust. If her debut book, The Unanswered Letter, packed award-winning power, this, I believe, is even better. In the context of World War II, Inseparable is destined to be to Holocaust stories what Unbroken was to POW stories."

—Bob Welch, author of Saving My Enemy: How Two WWII Soldiers Fought Against Each Other and Later Forged a Friendship That Saved Their Lives

"I thought I knew every story of twins surviving the Holocaust—then I read Faris Cassell’s extraordinary telling of the Hess family, Karl and Ilse, and their young twins, Stefan (Steven) and Marion. Inseparable is an extraordinary tale of love and hate, fear and uncertainty, horror and heartache that spans the family’s carefree days in Germany, harrowing escape to Holland, terrifying transports to German concentration camps, and ultimate refuge in America. It is an unforgettable story that will stay with me for years to come."

—Nancy L. Segal, Professor of Psychology, California State University at Fullerton, and author of The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive, Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart, and Gay Fathers, Twin Sons: The Citizenship Case That Captured the World

"Inseparable: The Hess Twins’ Holocaust Journey through Bergen-Belsen to America, by Faris Cassell, is a riveting testament to a family’s sheer resilience and the strength of the human spirit in the face of unrelenting evil. Cassell takes the reader on a harrowing journey, following the trials of Ilse and Karl Hess as they fiercely protect their young twins through Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, imprisonment in concentration camps, and cruel displacement following the Second World War. It’s an incredible, impossible story of survival."

—Isabel Vincent, investigative reporter, New York Post, and author of Overture of Hope

To Sidney:

Wing to wing,

Oar to oar.

And to Sarah, Daniel, Jonathan, Mark, and Sam, who were always curious and encouraging.

They asked probing questions and offered bright smiles.

CONTENTS

Cast of Characters

Author’s Note

CHAPTER 1

In a Day

CHAPTER 2

It Was a Good Life

CHAPTER 3

Running

CHAPTER 4

At First Nothing Unusual Happened

CHAPTER 5

The Jewish Star

CHAPTER 6

The Jews Must Go

CHAPTER 7

Westerbork

CHAPTER 8

No Refuge

CHAPTER 9

On the Edge

CHAPTER 10

Bergen-Belsen

CHAPTER 11

Losing Ground

CHAPTER 12

Walking Dead

CHAPTER 13

To Survive

CHAPTER 14

Chaos

CHAPTER 15

In the Fog of War

CHAPTER 16

The Road Home

CHAPTER 17

Love, Hope, and Reality

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Consulted

Index

The truth is all we have that stands between us and tyranny.

—Jonathan Freedland

The whole world bled its blood…. Those kinds of things don’t happen No more, nowadays.

—Bob Dylan, Long Ago, Far Away

IN THESE PAGES, YOU WILL MEET…

KARL HESS—a dashing, successful, self-made German-Jewish businessman in his thirties. Karl was a manager and wholesale sales representative at Europe’s largest silk weaver, United Silk Corporation.

ILSE HESS—Karl’s wife, a happy, outgoing young mother in her twenties. Ilse was strong-willed and resourceful, surrounded by friends and relatives, and known for her beauty.

MARION AND STEFAN HESS—the Hesses’ bright and active toddler twins, born in Amsterdam in 1938. The trajectory of their young lives would be forever altered when they were caught up by crimes against humanity that they could not begin to fathom.

MARRETJE PASTERKAMP—Stefan and Marion’s loving Dutch nanny, Marry, who would do what she could for the children and their family as the Nazi persecution closed in on them.

ABRAHAM ASSCHER—copresident of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, he was the pre-war owner of one of the largest diamond-cutting businesses in Europe, an immediate target of the invading Germans. Germany’s weak economy depended on seizing properties of occupied countries.

ARTHUR SEYSS-INQUART—an Austrian Nazi and a virulent antisemite who served as Reichskommissar of the German-occupied Netherlands. He would order more than eight hundred executions in the last months of the war as the Allied victory seemed increasingly inevitable.

ABRAHAM PULS—loyal member of the Dutch Nazi Party (NSB), entrepreneur, and collaborator. Puls owned the notorious Abraham Puls & Sons moving company. He profited handsomely from the Holocaust, contracting with the Germans to clear out apartments of deported Jews, then turning over the spoils to the Germans’ appointed liquidator, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.

LEO FISCHER—a well-regarded German-Jewish photographer and a member of the Dutch Resistance who took pictures of the twins—and of other Jews in need of false identity documents. He would be arrested by the dreaded German Green Police, transported to a windswept North Sea beach with seventeen other prisoners, and shot dead.

J. L. LENTZ—a Dutch civil servant and head of the Population Registration Office in The Hague, Lentz’s infamous List of Family Names of Persons of Jewish Blood would prove critically important in rounding up Jews to be murdered.

LOLKE WILDERS—the seven-year-old was playing with other children in a Jewish neighborhood in Amsterdam when they were rounded up to be sent to Auschwitz; most were immediately gassed, but the blond and blue-eyed Lolke would survive Nazi medical experiments.

ERICH AUGUST PUTTKAMMER—a banking lawyer for the Eichmann-supervised Rotterdam Banking Association, he set up an office in Amsterdam where he sold his desperate Jewish customers passes purporting to exempt them from deportation to the East.

WALTER SÜSKIND—Karl’s close friend and fellow Jewish Council worker, Walter and Karl helped smuggle some eleven hundred imprisoned Jewish children and many adults out of the Jewish Schouwburg, a former Amsterdam theater the Germans converted to a stark collection and imprisonment site for Jews prior to their deportation.

ETTY HILLESUM—a Jewish diarist from Amsterdam and keen observer of her times, she was confined in the Westerbork transit camp during the same time as the Hess family.

LOUIS BANNET—a Dutch Jew widely considered Europe’s foremost jazz trumpeter and bandleader, he would perform at the bizarre Tuesday night concerts encouraged by Westerbork’s commandant to tamp down Jewish prisoners’ panic and terror after the weekly deportations to Sobibor, Auschwitz, and other camps.

ANNE FRANK AND HER SISTER, MARGOT—the beloved young diarist and her older sister would both die of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp that the Hesses survived.

KAZIMIERZ CEGIELSKI—he was one of the most feared Kapos at Bergen-Belsen.

JOSEF WEISS—to save fifty fellow Bergen-Belsen prisoners from group punishment for his bad job performance, Weiss—the camp’s Elder—accepted a penalty of four breadless days.

JAN KARSKI—a member of the Polish Underground and witness to the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto and deportation to Belzec extermination camp, he carried the first eyewitness report of Holocaust atrocities to President Roosevelt. A courageous, unsung hero of the Holocaust.

RAPHAEL LEMKIN—a Jewish lawyer who escaped from Poland to the United States, Lemkin would coin the term genocide.

KONSTANTY ROKICKI—this Polish diplomat, under constant threat of being betrayed, forged hundreds of Paraguayan passports that would be instrumental in the survival of Jews rounded up and deported by the Germans—including the Hesses.

…AND MORE…

AUTHOR’S NOTE

People have asked whether writing my first book about the Holocaust, The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family’s Desperate Plea for Help, made work on this second book about that time easier. It did not. Delving into the Holocaust is always an emotional experience, a journey into the landscape of good and evil that reverberates with urgency today. It is difficult to be immersed in that world.

Yet when I learned about the courageous Hess family—Karl and Ilse and their twin children, Marion and Stefan—I found their story powerfully compelling. Karl and Ilse’s lives began in Germany, where their families had thrived for generations before being shattered by the growing Nazi menace. They fought with all their resources to elude, endure, and escape Nazi horror. Theirs is a story of the human spirit. And so I did not hesitate to say, Yes!

Inseparable is the story of a young family’s struggle, against all odds, to stay together and survive. It could not have been written without the testimony of each member of the Hess family. Karl and Ilse have passed away, but shortly after they returned to the freedom of the Netherlands, Karl wrote a moving, detailed memoir of their life under the Nazis that has been key to this story. Quoted statements attributed to Karl Hess throughout the book were taken from his memoir. Later, Ilse gave testimony to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and interviews with the media, which offer her memories and perspective. Quoted statements attributed to Ilse Hess throughout the book were taken from that testimony and those interviews. (Please see the Works Consulted at the end of this book for details about these sources.)

In America, Karl would legally change his name to Charles, and Stefan would go by Steven. Central to this book has been the tireless, courageous support of the twins, Marion and Steven, who lived the story and rejected any instinct to put that history behind them and not look back. In spring 2021, over the span of two years, Marion and Steven began to tell me their story, a process that would continue over the course of two years. In narrating their story, I have used Steven when quoting his descriptions of the family’s past, and Stefan when he is in their story. With generosity, depth of feeling, and careful thought, they answered hundreds of my questions, shared family documents, and enlightened me about the Holocaust as they lived it. My extensive interviews with the twins have been key to making this a compelling, often first-person, story. Quoted statements attributed to Steven (Stefan) and Marion Hess throughout the book were derived from interviews I conducted with them. This book has been written in the time of COVID-19, making travel and in-person interviews that I would normally conduct impossible. Steven and Marion bridged that divide of distance with patience and determination, imparting this story of an ordinary, yet extraordinary, family faced with overwhelming cruelty.

The issue of memory is crucial when history depends on it. Recent research suggests that our memories are not fixed, but elastic and communal—that trauma, time, and other factors may distort them. During my year of interviews with the Hess twins, their thoughts about their experience, naturally, have some differences, but their memories, supported by their extensive collection of photos and documents, are remarkably consistent.

Because Bergen-Belsen SS staff destroyed all camp records before surrendering to the British, other survivor accounts, some written in the camp, take on great importance. Testimonies, diaries, and memoirs by a number of Holocaust survivors deepen and broaden this story. In order to allow an uninterrupted flow for the reader, the voluminous reference materials, research conducted, educational endeavors, informational activities, additional interviews, and other sources used to clarify, substantiate, and supply historical context for the Hesses’ story are listed in the Works Consulted at the end of this book.

As part of my research journey, I visited the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, on Germany’s southern Lüneburg. I drove the narrow road past the still-working military training base and Panzer camp. Long stretches of chain-link fence topped with barbed wire may not have changed over the decades. I parked in the expansive parking lot and spent an entire day touring the modern cement-and-glass memorial building and extensive grounds. Supported by the German and Lower Saxony governments, the memorial receives about 250,000 visitors per year. No reconstructed barracks, no old fences or guard stations mar the landscape that has lain as hallowed ground since the camp’s liberation. A forest has grown up where once there was only mud and dust. A large grass-covered field holds the remains of mass burial pits.

The quiet of the grounds was haunting, as if even our voices should remain low for fear of disturbing the resting places. Our tour was educational and moving. There was a lot to learn and try to comprehend. I found a moment to separate from our guide. I walked quietly at the edge of the path. Heavy rain was forecast and storm clouds billowed above. In the dirt beside me, a white object caught the dim light of the threatening sky. I bent down and scooped it up. In the palm of my hand lay a human tooth.

I wish I had pushed the tooth beneath the soil and said a few words, but instead I handed it to the guide, who met my eyes, took it, and put it in his pocket—to take back to the memorial building, I assumed. It was mine to ponder, not control. To whom had it belonged? What could this dirt, this young forest, or the remains of a barracks with trees growing through fallen, rotting boards tell me? I tried to listen, but heard only the wind.

In this book, I use the spelling antisemitism, which is now becoming standard. The previously common term, anti-Semitism, relied on the ignorant Nazi appropriation of the older word Semite, which, in correct use, describes people—including Jews and Arabs—who speak Semitic languages. Aryan is a relatively more recent term, also inaccurately employed by Nazis and neo-Nazis and now burdened with eugenic racism; in fact, Aryan accurately refers to people who lived some four millennia ago in northern India, spoke an Indo-European language, and brought Hindu religious thought to India. In Inseparable, I use Aryan only to reflect Nazi terminology.

Nazis weaponized language—and brutally enforced their ideological distortions of it—to mold popular perceptions, because they understood that words matter and can change the world. My intent is to use words accurately to tell this inspiring story of a family who fought through one of the most evil times of human history, and never lost hope.

CHAPTER 1

In a Day

MAY 10, 1940

As stars faded from a clear night sky over Amsterdam in the early hours of Friday, May 10, 1940, a sound like rolling thunder jolted twenty-six-year-old Ilse Hess from her troubled sleep. She had feared this moment, known it was coming. For weeks, hour after frightening hour, she and her husband, Karl, listened to the news on their wireless: Wehrmacht troops are massing at the border. German tanks and trucks are gathering. Dutch defenses throughout the Netherlands are prepared. The thin hope she held for her family’s safety from the Germans collapsed as the roar grew louder, shook the floor in their small apartment, rattled the dishes.

Karl! she whispered, awakening her husband. They hurried to check on their two-year-old twin toddlers, Marion and Stefan, amazingly, still sleeping peacefully. Karl and Ilse raced to the window, cautiously opened the blackout curtains mandated by the Dutch government, then stepped onto their balcony. They peered up in horror as formation after formation of German bombers flew toward them—the German military’s black cross on their wings and Nazi swastika on the tail fins seeming to glare down at the city. Some bombers turned inland from the sea, flying low and ominous, passed overhead, streaking toward towards Schiphol Airport, just six miles from the city. A phalanx of bombers swerved south toward Rotterdam. Sirens wailed. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky.

Four years before, the Jewish couple fled Germany, their home-land, for the presumed safety of the Netherlands, escaping Nazi cruelty and repression. They had said goodbye to their families. Karl had been able to transfer his well-paying position at the international German textile giant Vereinigte Seidenwebereien, the United Silk Corporation, to Amsterdam. The Hesses loved this beautiful, freedom-loving country. The twins were born here in 1938. Karl and Ilse took the children for long walks in the twin-size baby carriage, enjoyed admiring remarks from strangers, and drove with the children to the seaside. They visited with friends who, like themselves, had escaped the Nazis, and made new friends, Jewish and non-Jewish.

They thought they had found breathing room, a refuge from Nazi terror. But the terror had followed them, and now it was here, right outside their window.

Hurriedly they snapped on the wireless, their indispensable source of news, and waited as its radio tubes warmed up. Their favorite classical music station was off the air. Static buzzed. The children began to cry. News crackled across the airwaves. The Netherlands is under siege! This is not a test. This is war! Military reserves, report to your units! The frenzied announcer continued with a spate of government orders, some aimed at the thousands of German refugees in Amsterdam, many of them, like the Hesses, Jews fleeing Nazi terror. Stay inside your homes or face arrest, the broadcast commanded Karl and Ilse as they huddled together. The Hesses debated what to do. They had fled the Nazis once already. Should they go further? Should they follow orders—or run for their lives?

As dawn broke on May 10 and the Hesses listened with alarm, German Heinkel bombers dropped an estimated thirty bombs on Schiphol Airport. At 6:20 a.m., Amsterdam’s official radio announced, New and large formations of planes are arriving constantly. Smoke and red-tracer trails of Dutch antiaircraft fire streaked over the Hesses’ apartment as Dutch and German aircraft battled in dogfights over the city.

On May 11, a single German Junkers JU 88 bomber released four bombs on one of the most prominent canals in central Amsterdam, killing forty-four people and wounding seventy-nine. The Bethlehem Hospital, not far from the Hesses’ home, was badly damaged. Karl and Ilse tended and soothed the toddler twins as best they could during the fury of the attack. It was a horrible time. They had believed that their family was safe.

The massive invasion continued relentlessly, German para-troopers dropped to the ground like swooping birds of prey, landing at airfields and key sites across the country. Some wore camouflage, the grey-green uniforms of Dutch soldiers, or the darker uniforms of local police. Some had donned monks’ robes or normal street clothes, creating chaos as they swarmed through the countryside, firing on the Dutch military and civilians in their path. German troops, trucks, and artillery units sped across the border from the east, overwhelming Dutch defenses.

In an unpublished memoir written after the war for family and a few friends, Karl would describe, After we had spent a few happy years in Holland, the first days of May 1940 turned more and more grave and full of suspense…. We learned about military developments only from the radio. It was immediately announced that no Germans, which included us, were allowed to leave their houses. For three days we sat… in great suspense. A Jewish neighbor who lived opposite us left with his family… in the direction of the coast. Other vehicles followed….

Hitler’s aggression and his fanatical following and Germany’s military power had already created turmoil throughout Europe; this attack had taken neither the Hesses nor the Dutch nation completely by surprise. The previous year, Germany had invaded Poland, igniting a furor that set off World War II in Europe. Other nations, including the Netherlands, bolstered their defenses, fearing they could become Germany’s next target as it built its "Thousand Year Reich." Listening to the news, talking with friends, Karl and Ilse packed essential belongings into a rucksack, small enough to easily carry, which they set by their door for any emergency.

A few days earlier, on May 7, the United States diplomatic corps had warned President Franklin Roosevelt about a likely German invasion of the Low Countries—the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—and of France. The next day, breaking news from the Associated Press from an authoritative source alerted the Dutch that two columns of the Wehrmacht, units of the Sixth Army and the Eighteenth Army, were advancing toward its borders.

Even so, a German attack had felt avoidable to the Dutch, and there had been some denial, including by Karl and Ilse. After all, the Netherlands had maintained neutrality throughout World War I. The Dutch government and Queen Wilhelmina had gone to great lengths to assure Hitler that the Netherlands would remain neutral again. Furthermore, Germany was still securing its occupation of Denmark. Meanwhile, German bombs were reducing Norwegian towns to heaps of debris, and British forces in southern Norway were in full retreat in the first British-German confrontation of World War II, but Norwegians were still defending northern ports through heavy snowstorms. Germany’s invasion of those northern European nations had stunned the world as the Wehrmacht unleashed the first organized airborne warfare and the first wartime deployment of paratroopers—dramatic innovations in modern war. Surrender negotiations with Norway were underway. The Hesses, like others in the Netherlands, had reason to hold to the comforting belief that Germany’s resources were stretched thin, its gun sights aimed at more important targets than tiny neutral Netherlands.

German leaders had made efforts to conceal the timing of their invasion. On May 9, Hitler, Field Marshal Hermann Göring (the head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force), and numerous high-ranking German army officers were observed attending the theater in Berlin. Ordinary citizens flocked to the newly opened Kurfürstendamm Street Café to hear the latest hit, The Woodpecker’s Song. Foreign correspondents in Berlin, detecting no cause for alarm, left their teletypes and headed to bed. When the 1:00 a.m. curfew hour struck, Berlin was dark and still. The next morning, Hitler and his staff directed the invasion from Siegfried Line fortifications on the German-French border.

Germany’s mastery of subterfuge blinded virtually everyone. American war correspondents offered conflicting analyses of Germany’s three-pronged invasion: One new probability, and many new possibilities. The most likely outcome, posited one reporter, reflecting on World War I’s three and a half years of grinding trench warfare, was that the war raging in Europe was not likely to turn into a three-or-four-year endurance contest…. The war [is] more likely than not to end within a year. After all, Germany’s factories could not turn out aircraft as fast as they were being destroyed.

Journalist Walter Lippmann offered another, less buoyant perspective: "If the offensive which Hitler has now launched