This is the way I heard it.

As fundraisers go, this one lacked the star power of a celebrity telephone,

as well as the glamour of a Hollywood gala.

For starters, there were no cameras, no red carpet, and no a-listers on hand.

Just an unknown pianist, a 12-year-old aspiring ballerina named Eda.

The venue was also modest, a makeshift stage in the study of Dr. Vooder's home in the little

Dutch town of Velp. And the audience just a few dozen wealthy patriots who would come to watch

the recital. Of course, they weren't as wealthy as they had been six months earlier,

but they were still patriots, and they still had a few guilders to spare for a worthy cause.

And tonight, the cause was indeed a worthy one.

Eda took the tiny stage and smiled at the crowd. She composed herself and nodded to the pianist,

who quietly tapped out a selection from Beethoven's creature of Prometheus.

For these fundraisers, it was best to stick with Bach or Beethoven.

Minkus and Mendelssohn were wonderful, but a pianist caught with sheet music by a Jewish composer

would not be playing the piano for very long, not in Velp, anyway, not in 1941.

As always, the audience was enchanted. Eda moved with grace and beauty completely inconsistent

with a skinny 12-year-old. No one cared that her costume had been fashioned from an old curtain,

or that she danced and someone else's worn-out slippers. No one cared that, in her mind,

Eda was dancing a paddedu from Swan Lake at London's Albert Hall, quietly imagining the enthusiastic

applause from a much larger audience. Eda relished these flights of fancy because when the music stopped,

she knew she'd be back in Occupied Holland, where there was nothing to eat but bread,

made from tulips and grass.

...