Girl in the Blue Coat

“I stop because the soldier’s uniform is green. That’s the only reason I stop. Because his uniform is green, and that means I have no choice at all.”

After providing several possible reasons for stopping when the German soldier asks her to, Hanneke tells the truth. This introduces her as an unreliable narrator, but one who will eventually arrive at honesty. Here, we see that for all her desire to convince herself that she has a choice, she knows her reality is that she must obey any soldier’s order.

“Most people would say I trade in the black market, the illicit underground exchange of goods. I prefer to think of myself as a finder. I find things. I find extra potatoes, meat, and lard. In the beginning, I could find chocolate and sugar, but those things have been harder recently, and I can only get them sometimes.”

Hanneke continues to explain the ways in which she reframes events to herself to make them more tolerable. Here, she chooses to think of her illicit trade as simple, straightforward, and even innocent. She also boasts of her own skill.

“It’s too dangerous. Survival first. That’s my war motto. After Bas, it might be my life motto. Survival first, survival only […] Finding a missing girl does nothing for me at all.”

Hanneke contemplates Mrs. Janssen’s request to find Mirjam. She expresses uncertainty as to whether the motto “survival first” will persist beyond the war. However, she also leaves open the possibility that she would find the missing girl if it served some benefit to her.

“Bas wouldn’t know anything about the kind of girl I am now […] Finding this girl is not who I am anymore. That action is soft; I am practical. That action is hopeful; I am not.”

Hanneke continues to consider finding Mirjam and thinks now of what Bas would have expected her to do. She realizes that she has changed and that Bas might no longer recognize who she has become, nor her motivations for saying no.

“I don’t have a resistance network. My profiteering shopkeepers will be useless for this task. I don’t have anything, really, except for an imaginary picture of a girl I’ve never seen…”

Hanneke explains that her safety as a black-market trader comes from her isolation from a greater network and additional information. However, this safety and lack of access make it difficult for her to locate the resources that would help her find Mirjam.

“I can feel myself getting sucked into this mystery […] maybe because, in a country that has come to make no sense, in a world I cannot solve, this is a small piece that I can.”

Hanneke begins to see how finding Mirjam might benefit her. She has been presented with a real choice, and choosing to say yes may allow her to assert her will and fight back in some small way.

“The neighbor is vile. They both are, with their oily, refined support of the Nazis. But also rich. I don’t think Mr. Kreuk considers morals when he chooses who to sell to.”

Hanneke expresses her disgust for the wealthy Mrs. de Vries and her seeming disregard for her Jewish neighbors, the Cohens. The assumptions she makes here prove to be incorrect, and connect to the theme of the difficulty of interpretation.

“‘Is the NSB the side you’re on?’ The smart answer would be to tell him yes. Because then he would leave me alone. He’d ask no more questions, and I’d never have to see him again. But my pride gets in the way of agreeing to such a grotesque lie.”

Ollie asks Hanneke if she is on the side of Dutch fascists, and she considers telling him yes in order to preserve her own safety. However, she finds that in this case, “survival first” is not her motto. She would rather be honest than let her deceased boyfriend’s brother believe the worst of her.

“I wasn’t lying. The photos were destroyed in a fire. I lit it myself.” 

Judith tells Hanneke that she destroyed all records of students at the Jewish Lyceum to try and keep them from the Nazis. This is one of the many examples of bravery on the part of young Dutch Jews.

“I’m an Aryan poster girl, remember, Ollie? I don’t help the resistance, I find black market cheese.”

When Ollie asks Hanneke to aid the resistance, she diminishes her own capacities and presents herself as a naïve blonde girl whose only role is to find groceries. Her true hesitations have nothing to do with her appearance, but she does doubt her moral capacity to do good.

“Did you ever think that maybe you’re better than you believe you are, Hanneke?” 

Ollie rejects Hanneke’s description of herself. Having heard her decry Hitler at age 14, he is confident that she cares enough to resist the German occupation. He attempts to persuade her of this.

“Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out. My grief over Bas is the darkness […] But if you could turn the lights back on, you would see there are a lot of other things still wrong in the room […] Elsbeth is my rug askew. Elsbeth is my messy room. Elsbeth is the grief I would allow myself to feel, if my emotions weren’t so covered in darkness.”

Hanneke fully reveals her feelings toward Elsbeth. She is still grieving Bas’s death. However, she knows that her feelings toward Elsbeth are unresolved as well. She cannot even allow herself to feel that grief, so potent is the loss of Bas.

“The kind ones recognize, somewhere deep inside their starched uniforms, that there is something perverse about what they’re doing. First they try befriending us. Then the guilt creeps up on them, and they work twice as hard to convince themselves that we’re scum.”

As Hanneke and Mina walk with an empty baby carriage, she fears the approach of a kind-looking soldier who wants to see the baby he assumes it contains. Hanneke speaks to one of the horrors of Nazism: rather than cope with the knowledge that their actions and their country are wrong, “good” Nazis work even harder to hate the people they oppress.

“Bas wouldn’t have joined if he didn’t think it would make me happy. And it did make me happy. Until it made me sad.”

Hanneke expresses the true reasons why she feels at fault for Bas’s death. She is convinced that he only joined the navy because she thought it would be patriotic.

“It seems strange, to think of Mirjam talking about a boy while she was in hiding, mourning her family and fearing for her life. But I suppose love doesn’t stop, even in wars.”

After discovering Mirjam’s note to Amalia about “T,” Hanneke is sure that Mirjam left the house in pursuit of her crush. This interpretation is colored by own her continuing fixation on Bas.

“Mrs. de Vries acted as though she was pleased the Cohens had disappeared. But then, what else could she do?”

Hanneke discovers that the neighbors Mrs. de Vries had talked about so callously were in fact in her apartment at the very time she pretended to be pleased at their disappearance. She realizes that some of the meanness she sees in the world is simply an act that serves to protect her.

“When I look at black-and-white photos, it feels like I’m looking at something historical. But it’s not historical. It’s happening right now. Mina’s work makes sense to me now. Each image is her own small rebellion.”

Mina’s photographs are developed, and as the girls look at the images of the occupation together, Hanneke gets a fuller picture of the Schouwburg Theater and the scope of Nazi atrocities. She also sees why the task of documenting is so important to Mina.

“We’ve all been hoping you would help us with the resistance, with things that actually matter not just for one person, but for hundreds of people. And now here you are, telling me I have to risk the lives of all my other friends to help you?’”

Ollie is livid that Hanneke wants his friends to help her retrieve Mirjam. Throughout their interactions, he has been trying to persuade her to work for the greater good. He perceives her fixation on Mirjam as selfish and unproductive in the face of the larger occupation and resistance.

“I can’t forgive you for loving the side that killed Bas.”

Hanneke relates her final words to Elsbeth upon receiving an invitation to her wedding. For Hanneke, love has sides: loving someone on the wrong side makes you a collaborator.

“I’m not your child…I bring the money into the house. I buy the groceries…I’m the one who takes care of you.”

When Hanneke’s mother forbids her from leaving the house again after a night out, Hanneke puts her foot down. Although she still does not reveal her true reasons for leaving, she gives up the pretense that she is a dutiful daughter whose actions are dictated by her parents. 

“I’ve spent two years wanting nobody to trust me, wanting not to be depended on. But now that I have seen a transport, and I have seen a deportation center, and I have seen the hopeful handwriting of a frightened girl, and I have seen brave people forced to hide, and mean people become secretly brave, so when I open my mouth, I say to Willem, ‘You can [trust me].”

Willem is unsure whether to trust Hanneke. However, she realizes that she no longer holds the motto “survival only.” After confronting the reality of life for Dutch Jews, as well as seeing her countrymen’s acts of bravery, she wants to be trusted again. Moreover, she believes herself to be worthy of trust.

“Tell Hanneke I love her. And to move on. Not too fast. Maybe after two or three months.”

Ollie shows his note from Bas to Hanneke. She sees firsthand that the last lines of his letter convey his love, as well as his signature playfulness. She realizes that blaming herself for his death is the opposite of what he would have wanted.

“All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.”

Hanneke tries to make sense of the deaths of the Roodveldt family. There are so many deaths for no good reason. She learns that the bad reason behind the death of Mr. Janssen and the Roodveldt family is Amalia’s teenage jealousy over her friend’s boyfriend.