96 pages • 3 hours read
Girl in the Blue Coat
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Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Hanneke arrives home late for lunch, and her parents are concerned. She explains the reason she feels so much pressure to support her family with black market trade: Years before her birth, her father paralyzed the right side of his body vaulting an electric fence to court her mother. Formerly a translator, he is now unable to find work, as is her mother, who is a piano teacher. They believe she works as a receptionist for an undertaker, Mr. Kreuk, which is partially true—she works for him as a receptionist and assists his black-market trade.
As they sit down to lunch, Nazis arrive to arrest their neighbor, Mr. Bierman. Hanneke goes to her room to escape and looks through a scrapbook of love notes from Bas. She wonders whether he would encourage her to find Mirjam, noting, “Bas wouldn’t know anything about the kind of girl I am now” (37). Nonetheless, she finds herself determined to return to Mrs. Janssen’s.
Chapter 4 Summary
Hanneke returns to Mr. Kreuk’s office. She is distracted, but her boss lets it go in exchange for her visiting Mrs. de Vries, a particularly unpleasant client. On her way out, she sees graffiti in support of Hitler and notes that some citizens of Amsterdam—like Elsbeth—”think it’s smarter to support the invaders” (40). She cuts herself off mid-thought, writing “never mind,” clearly unwilling to think much more about Elsbeth. She returns first to Mrs. Janssen’s, where she gathers as much information as she can about Mirjam. All she finds in the abandoned room is the latest issue of Het Parool, a resistance paper. She tries to figure out how Mirjam left the house without Mrs. Janssen seeing her. Hanneke feels herself “getting sucked into this mystery” (45).
Chapter 5 Summary
Hanneke goes to bring Mrs. de Vries her packages. She is disgusted to hear Mrs. de Vries and her neighbor gleefully note that their Jewish neighbors, the Cohens, have disappeared. Next, she heads to the Jewish Lyceum to find a picture of Mirjam, even though she wonders if doing so while exhausted is the best plan.
The school is quiet, as most of its students have left or been taken. There, Hanneke is upset as old memories of Bas and Elsbeth are brought to mind. A secretary stops Hanneke, and she cannot come up with a good cover story, so she says she was looking for a photograph of Bas. The woman tries to interrogate her further, but knowing that a Jewish woman has little power to stop her, Hanneke simply walks out. She returns home; there, she finds Bas’s brother, Ollie.
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
In these chapters, Hanneke finds her old self coming into conflict with the girl she has become during the Nazi occupation, highlighting the theme of Personal Transformations During Wartime. The tough façade presented in the first three chapters cracks as she thinks back to happier days with Bas and her best friend, Elsbeth. In these pages, she introduces Bas as a gregarious, idealistic soul: a boy who always made others laugh and was always willing to come to others’ aid. She knows that when he was alive, she was much the same way: happy and optimistic. As she considers looking for Mirjam, she thinks about what Bas would have expected. Feeling that she has so little choice in her new life, she is attracted to the opportunity, which is at once a small act of rebellion, a way to save a young girl, and a chance to honor Bas’s memory. These pages emphasize her sympathy with her Jewish friends and neighbors and her wish to buck the Nazi occupation in whatever small ways are possible.
However, back at Mrs. Janssen’s and in the Lyceum, she is confronted with the difficulty of the task ahead. As a black-market trader, Hanneke is part of a very small cell; she only knows Mr. Kreuk and her customers and has no way of getting additional information. She has never met or seen Mirjam, and the narrative establishes Hanneke’s resourcefulness as she begins to develop a plan to seek her out. When she visits the Lyceum, she is also confronted with the emotional difficulty of the task at hand. Looking for a schoolgirl makes her think back to her own schoolgirl days and all that she has lost since then. She unexpectedly breaks down and fails to convince the secretary that her task is innocent. This marks an important moment of vulnerability and a step in Hanneke’s growth arc. Wartime challenges individuals to confront their mortality and the fragility of life, prompting introspection and personal growth. Hanneke, who has built up such a strong façade of cynicism, still has a child’s fears and feelings of loss that she must work through despite her desperate circumstances. Rather than distracting her from this emotional reality, the exigencies of war act as a crucible for her transformation, forging new strengths and revealing latent capacities she did not know—or want to know—that she had. Other characters in the novel face similar coming-of-age challenges. As the novel progresses, their journeys will reshape their identities and perspectives in lasting ways, particularly around the theme of The Necessity and Danger of Keeping Secrets.
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