Winter in Wartime Quotes

″‘A bit of a fright, eh?’ It’ll toughen you up,′ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s true. It’s gone eight. If a German comes along, he’ll shoot you dead as a threat to the German Reich. Heil Hitler!‘”

″‘A good resistance fighter is lonely,’ he’d once heard his father say. ‘He’s alone with his tasks and his secrets.‘”

“They were so tense and miserable that such simple jokes were all it took to fill the room with laughter.”

“Everyone had a story about a family member who’d had to go in to hiding, or a friend who’d been dragged off to a concentration camp, or a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. Then they moved on to rumours about the war- about Patton, the American general who was making such good progress on the Western Front...”

“Michiel, though, had secretly decided that war was a very exciting business, and he hoped it would go on for a long time. He changed his mind soon enough. In fact, his first doubts came after only five days.”

“He knew where some Jewish people were hiding. He was fairly certain who had an illegal wireless. He knew Dirk was a member of the secret underground forces. But Michiel kept all this dangerous information to himself.”

″‘That’s going to cost the lives of yet more thousands of ordinary civilians,’ said Mrs. Van Beusekom, with a sigh... ‘It’s their own fault,’ said the mayor. ‘They were the first to drop bombs on cities- Warsaw and Rotterdam. What goes around comes around.’ ‘No. It’s absolutely nothing to do with that little girl in Bremen who just got a piece of shrapnel in her leg,’ said Mrs. Van Beusekom. ‘War is a terrible thing.‘”

“All the visitors came from the west of the country, the famine having driven them to the east and the north. It was early winter 1944-45, and there was a war on. That meant there was barely anything left to eat in the big cities.”

“Even though his stomach was in a knot, he suddenly felt perfectly calm. Alright, so now he had a British pilot to take care of. That kind of thing could earn you the death penalty.”

″‘She must be really good,’ thought Michiel proudly. He didn’t realize that a man doesn’t like to complain in the presence of a pretty girl- and it had certainly never occurred to him that Erica might be a pretty girl.”