The Doll and the Doll Maker
In the summer of 1940, the Germans invaded the British Isle of Jersey. I worked and lived as a doll-maker with my beautiful wife, a third-generation seamstress, both of us natives. When the Nazis broke our storefront windows, mistakenly believing we were Jewish, I held Diane as the glass fell around us.
“Calm now, calm, my darling. Please don’t cry. These are just windows that I can replace tomorrow after I repair the shelving and framework around them. Let’s try to get some rest as the sun is setting.”
Startled in the middle of the night, Diane quietly shook me awake. “There’s a commotion downstairs.”
We crept down, dread thick in the air. The scene was grim: some of my life-size dolls lay broken. One was a young boy with short brown hair, and the other was a girl—their unnatural appearance chilled me.
“Frank, oh Frank, I’m so sorry,” Diane’s voice trembled. “Those were some of your finest pieces of work.”
I knelt to examine the damage. Something moved. Under faded blue fabric, a small, delicate hand shifted. It was Samantha, the doll I’d made last month, inspired by the girl with the missing tooth and infectious grin.
“Don’t be silly,” Diane’s voice was laced with disbelief. “Dolls don’t move unless you move them.”
But she was wrong. Samantha’s hand rose, then her face tilted slightly—her expression forming a familiar, subtle smile. “Hello…” she whispered in a soft voice.
My jaw dropped. The entire room, the shop, everything felt somehow altered. Diane, her face pale, took my hand, her grip tight. I looked down at Samantha, whose unnervingly lifelike eyes regarded me with a growing curiosity.
“Could this be the Jewish girl for whom I designed the doll?” I wondered aloud, my voice rusty. I looked at her with a gentle smile spreading across my face. I asked, “Are you only a handful of years old?”—remembering how she introduced herself when her parents first brought her into the store. She grinned, a missing tooth prominent.
The war continued to cast its shadow over us. Each day, Diane worried constantly, her breath held tight with every passing Nazi patrol. We lived in a state of perpetual fear. Yet throughout that troubled time, our little business, mostly unscathed, felt like a sanctuary thanks to Samantha. She was a bundle of joy among our creations—a small, vibrant secret. As months turned into years, with the occupation dragging on, there was still no news of the girl’s parents.
Then, when the war had finally ended and Jersey settled, he appeared: a man whose age seemed eternal, with eyes that carried the weight of untold stories. He entered the shop, carrying a well-worn suitcase and something wrapped in a large sheet under his arm. He spoke, then pointed to the dolls with a wrinkled gaze and said, “There was this madwoman in the camp. Nutty as she was, she spun a wildly marvelous story about a doll maker here who brought clay dolls to life.” As my wife and I listened, he pulled out one of my dolls from beneath the fabric—it was our Samantha doll. “Amusing as the woman was, the Nazis still murdered her at the war’s end.”
Just then, Samantha entered the room, and the man grew as pale as a ghost. He reached over and handed her the doll, Samson, gently ruffling her hair. Looking back at Diane and me with a rough, broken smile, tears welled up in his eyes. He left our store that day as if he knew our family’s secret.
We held her tightly that day, but many years passed before we told her about her mother and the recent news of her father’s earlier death. Time moved forward: after a semester of college, she married John, a young Christian watchmaker—the first Jewish member of his family to turn to Jesus. Shortly after their wedding, I hired John to make ticking hearts for all my dolls. He and Samantha had one child, and he was a welcome addition to our small family. We’re so thankful for the profound losses and sadness in our community, because God has given us some precious memories that will last a lifetime.
Years later, when she was a young woman visiting the store, she asked, “Father, do you ever wonder about Samson? About the old man who brought my doll back?”
I looked over at her, “Yes, sometimes…” I said in a gentle voice, “I also wonder if God isn’t sometimes found in the most unexpected places—in a broken doll, in a forgotten story, in the silence of a past war.”
The End.
