Her mother calls after her, “Anne! Anne, come back here and clean your plate.” But Anne has no intention of following orders.
“Let Mr. Pfeffer clean my plate for me,” she calls back over her shoulder. “He can always find room for another helping!”
Mr. Pfeffer looks up innocently from his plate in mid-chew and swallows. “Now, what did I say to provoke that?”
* * *
• • •
Up in the attic, Anne has taken refuge, forcefully cradling Peter’s cat, Mouschi. Mouschi is not a perfect angel like Anne’s cat, Moortje, the poor abandoned thing, but he’s still a warm beating heart. Outside, the branches of a lofty horse chestnut tree with a majestic crown of leaves brush the window glass. She has learned to find comfort in this tree. A tree that has stood for decades or more, still patiently allowing the breeze to rustle its branches. It calms her.
She wipes her eyes quickly when she hears someone climb the ladder and recognizes the voice.
“Anne?” Peter approaches her with a careful demeanor, as if she might detonate unexpectedly. She turns to Peter’s cat for comfort, pressing her lips against Mouschi’s soft, furry head. “Adults are impossible,” she declares in a wounded tone. Wounded, but perhaps willing to be mended by a few kind words.
Peter stops and leans against one of the wooden posts. At first he sounds boyish and wounded, too. “My paapje is sure a pain in the rump. No doubt. He’s always there to criticize.”
“And what about your mother? She’s not exactly blameless either,” Anne feels compelled to point out. Maybe she should have been pleased that Peter had risen to her defense against his parents, but really she was slightly irked, because coming out of his mouth her dreams did ring a bit ridiculous. And now she’s irritated that he sounds more like he’s complaining rather than trying to actually comfort her. Can boys really be so dense?
“Mum’s not so bad,” he says with a shrug. “She’s doesn’t try to be mean. It just comes out that way sometimes.”
Anne is not at all sure she wants to agree with this. She finds his optimism painful but keeps her mouth buttoned. Finally Peter manages to find a spot on the floor beside her. The attic is lit by a heavy white moon that silvers the branches of the chestnut tree. She feels the presence of his body beside her like a magnet, but he’s gone silent, so maybe it’s up to her to break through. “You know, Peter,” she says, “I’m very happy that you’re here.”
He seems surprised to hear this, but happily so. “You are?”
“Yes, of course. I really have no one else to talk to.”
“What about your sister? You have her.”
“That’s different. Margot’s my sister, yes, and of course that means something. But we’re so often poles apart. I can’t truly confide in her. I can’t truly confide in anyone.”
“Well . . .” he says, but seems to fumble around in his head for a path to finish that sentence.
Anne looks up at him directly and takes in those big, deep eyes and that shock of curls. “Well what?”
He looks at her, too, and shrugs, rubbing the cat’s head with his knuckles. “You can always confide in me,” he tells her. “If you want to.”
* * *
• • •
Three weeks later, in the middle of April, Anne feels her heart purring as she scribbles desperately into her diary, her hand trying to keep up with her heartbeat.
I can’t tell you, Kitty, the feeling that ran through me. I was too happy for words, and I think he was, too. At nine-thirty we stood up. Peter put on his tennis shoes so he wouldn’t make much noise on his nightly round of the building, and I was standing next to him. How I suddenly made the right movement, I don’t know, but before we went downstairs, he gave me a kiss, through my hair, half on my left cheek and half on my ear. I tore downstairs without looking back, and I long so much for today.
5
RADIO ORANGE
Dearest Kitty,
Mr. Bolkestein, the Cabinet Minister, speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London, said that after the war a collection would be made of diaries and letters dealing with the war. Of course, everyone pounced on my diary.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 29 March 1944
Jews are regularly killed by machine-gun fire, hand grenades—and even poison gas.
—BBC Home Service, 6:00 P.M. news, 9 July 1942
1944
The Achterhuis
Prinsengracht 263
Hidden Annex
OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS
The razzias continue. According to what Miep tells us, more Jews have been netted with every passing day, many of them family friends from the Merwedeplein. The Kaplans, the Levitskys, the Rosenblits. Eva Rosenblit was in the same class as Anne and always laughed at her jokes. Miep has even heard a rumor that Hanneli’s father was arrested, and maybe Hanneli with him. Anne tries to picture it. Lies being driven through the streets and packed into the rear of a German lorry, helpless. At the mercy of monsters. But it’s too terrible. She can’t allow such a thought to take root. She must believe that God is looking after Hanneli as closely as he is Anne Frank.
Peter has constructed a “moffen sleeve” for the radio. A loop aerial made of wooden slats and doorbell wire that can sift out the Hun’s jamming signals, so that the radio reception remains clear and unimpeded by mof interference. He gabs on and on about medium range and shortwave bands, which Anne finds both impressive and boring. Can that be? Anyway, according to the latest programs, there’s plenty of action on the Eastern Front. The Red Army has retaken Odessa and is ousting the mof from the Crimea, but on the Western Front there is still no invasion. Mr. van Pels is constantly griping about the English “slowpokes” with their tea and crumpets. Pim, on the other hand, points out that even with the Americans in the war, it cannot be an easy task to mass the kind of force necessary to penetrate Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall, much less prepare to transport it across the English Channel.
Anne tries not to listen too much. She does not feel brave enough to contemplate an unending occupation by the mof, but neither is she confident enough to live on hope for an Allied liberation anytime soon. Instead she wants to live in the moment, which is why it’s always so nice to have Bep for supper in their stuffy little hideout. She anchors them all, in a way. A real person from the real world outside this building. Mummy loves to cook for Bep, always praising her for her good appetite, no matter what’s dished onto her plate. The van Pelses quit their constant bickering around her and save their criticisms for another time. Bep takes it all in thoughtfully, as if Mr. van Pels may very well be right, even if it’s absolute rubbish he’s spouting. She offers Anne a secret wink as he announces how Bep is quite the intelligent young lady. Bravo, Bep! Even old Pfeffer has compliments for her, usually followed by a list of indispensables that Bep should do her very absolute best to obtain for him.
After supper, when the dishes are washed, Anne sometimes follows Bep down the steps as far as their side of the door, hidden by the swinging bookcase that is the line of demarcation between freedom and constraint. Between life in the actual world and this strange limited existence in hiding. They often confide in each other on this trip down the stairs, Anne and she, sitting on the lower steps, away from the listening ears. Anne tells her about the romance that has flowered with Peter. Shy but marvelous Peter van Pels, who as it turns out is not a blockhead after all but in fact the focus of her heart’s desire. She tells Bep of kisses she has received from the boy. About the fluttery dreaminess that dazzles her when they touch and the humid, salty feelings she can taste after their nightly kissing sessions have concluded. And as the months pass and the slow undertow of disappointment eventually drains Anne’s feelings for Peter, she tells Bep about that, too.
For her part, Bep confesses her fears for her boyfriend, Maurits, who went into hiding rather than report to the moffen as a labor conscri
pt. It’s been months and months, and their separation is taking a toll on them. They pass letters to each other, but there seems to be less and less to say in them. When she tells Anne this tonight, there are clear tears in Bep’s eyes behind her oval-framed glasses. Anne puts her arms around Bep, who begins to cry harder.
“Bep? Bep, what is it?”
But Bep only shakes her head, wiping at her tears by pushing her fingers under her glasses. “I just worry so much about you. About all of you. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be saying this. But you’ve become so dear to me, and I can’t help but fear for you. Out in the streets, the Germans have turned brutal. Even worse than before. Maybe they’re getting scared that they’re losing the war, I don’t know, but all I need to do is see those awful lorries packed with the soldiers and bristling with guns.” She swallows hard and shakes her head. “I’m terrified for you, for myself, for everyone. Even in the office, every time I hear a car squeak to a halt in the street, my heart practically jumps out the window.”
“Well, that would be something to see,” Anne offers, trying to cheer Bep out of her tears.
Bep hiccups a slim laugh and breathes in deeply, regaining herself as best she can. “And upstairs you’re all so welcoming. You’re living in danger daily, yet your mother makes me feel so at home at the table.”
“She can do that on occasion,” Anne is willing to admit. “But it’s not us, it’s you. You and Miep. Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler. When you come upstairs, it’s a breath of freedom for us all. Believe me, the minute you leave, we all revert back to our stifled, irritable old selves and the arguments and complaints are renewed with a vengeance.” Anne says this with a smile, for Bep’s sake, though she wishes it weren’t so absolutely true.
A foot scuffs a floorboard above. “Anne?” She hears her mother calling from the top of the stairs. She doesn’t sound cross, particularly, only fretful.
“Yes, Mummy?” she answers, knowing the fun’s now over.
“Let Bep go home. It’s time to come back up and get ready for bed.”
“Yes, Mummy,” Anne replies dutifully. She hugs Bep good-bye and glumly trudges up the steps. At the top her mother shuts the door and says, “I don’t like you sitting down there. It makes me anxious.”
What doesn’t? Anne wants to reply. But she stops herself. “Mummy, I’ve been down to Papa’s office a million times. Why should you worry about me sitting on the steps all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know, Anne,” her mother answers truthfully. “But I do. It’s just a feeling I’ve been having. A kind of ominous feeling. I can’t explain it. Your papa says it’s just nerves that we’re all undergoing because the end of the war could be close, and maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I only know that I feel what I feel. Do you think you can humor me?”
And for a moment Anne sees her mother without the sting of judgment. She sees the unfiltered candor in her mother’s face. “All right, Mummy,” she says. “If it makes you feel better. All right.”
* * *
In her diary Anne turns herself inside out and stares into all her inner recesses. Splashing ink on the paper, sometimes boisterously, sometimes angrily, often critically, perhaps even artfully. She has learned to depend on words to see herself more clearly. Her demands, her frustrations and furies, her unobtainable ideals, and her relentless desires, all a reflection of the lonely self she confesses only to the page, because if people aren’t patient, paper is. It is often a mess, filling line after line, until she runs out of room in her lovely red tartan daybook and has to resort to filling up whatever stray bits of paper Miep and Bep can scrounge. Then, at the end of March, they are all listening to Radio Oranje on a Wednesday evening down in the private office when the education minister from the exile government in London broadcasts a speech advising the Dutch people to keep their diaries as a record for after the war, and it strikes her: Perhaps her diary could be important to others as well. A record for the Dutch, a record for the Jews, a record for all who have felt imprisoned. The next day she begins to rewrite. Not as a child confiding her thoughts to imaginary friends but as a chronicler of wartime. A true writer. It gives her a vision of herself to broadcast. A vision of the woman she should become, molded by what she is already feeling in her heart: a terrible and ecstatic slavery to words. This is what she could never explain to anyone. Not Peter, not Margot, not Mummy. Not even Pim.
Now she finds that she zealously steals every minute she can from the daily routine of survival in order to reinvent her diary. To make it into something other than it started as, the unbosoming of a thirteen-year-old ugly duckling.
To make it a book.
By the end of the first week of revision after Mr. Bolkestein’s message, Anne has rewritten seventy-one pages by hand on loose-leaf sheets of flimsy wartime paper. She finds that the craft required in rewriting can numb her to the fear that still often seizes her, as if even the worst of the brutality swirling about them can be managed.
If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.
6
BURGLARS
“Police in building, up to bookcase . . .”
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 11 April 1944
1944
The Achterhuis
Prinsengracht 263
Hidden Annex
OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS
9 April
Anne is reading in the common area. At nine o’clock everyone begins drifting toward bedtime, when there’s a noise from belowstairs. Faces rise but then settle back into place. No one pays much attention, since everyone knows that Peter likes to take his bath in Pim’s office because he’s too shy to do it elsewhere, and he often makes a bit of noise lugging the big metal tub about. But then Peter appears, fully dressed, and knocks with quiet urgency on the door to the common room. Anne does her best to prepare a smile for him, even though his appearance simply doesn’t have the same impact on her as it did. Still, she doesn’t want to snub him or hurt his feelings. But then she’s surprised when the boy isn’t there for her at all but instead asks Pim to help him with a difficult assignment in his English translations. Pim sets down his book, his head tilts with a thought, and then immediately he’s up and out the door without a word, but not before Anne’s suspicions are put on alert. “That sounds very fishy to me,” she informs Margot. “Since when does Peter go out of his way to do his lessons?” And why did he so pointedly avoid eye contact with her? “This is obviously a ploy—they’re hiding something,” she says, but Mummy is on her feet, her face gone bloodless as Pim suddenly returns with a tight expression.
“Otto?”
“Not now, Edith, please,” he instructs tensely, and rounds up the other men with a sharp whisper. “Mr. van Pels, Mr. Pfeffer, if you please,” he says, and the next moment they’re hastening downstairs, feet thumping down the steps to the front building.
“Mummy? Mummy, what’s going on?” she asks, just as Mrs. van Pels skitters into the room dressed in her robe and old carpet slippers, obviously already scared stiff by the sudden commotion of the men’s exit. Her voice low but shrill: “What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“Burglars are breaking in,” Anne answers in a panicked hiss.
“We don’t know that,” Margot insists.
“Girls, come away from the door and stay quiet,” their mother commands, drawing them into a circle at the rear of the room, though they can’t stay quiet.
“What do you think is happening?” Margot whispers.
“I don’t know, but don’t worry,” Mummy says. “I’m sure it’s under control. Wouldn’t you think so, Mrs. van Pels? If things weren’t under control, we’d know by now.”
“I can’t hear a sound,” M
rs. van Pels tells them. “Why can’t we hear a sound?”
“Maybe they met the burglars head-on,” Anne proposes. “Do you think they could have, Mummy?”
“Anne.”
“Maybe they’re fighting them off right now.”
“We’d hear them if they were fighting,” Margot maintains, but with more hope than confidence. “Wouldn’t we, Mummy? Wouldn’t we hear them?”
“Girls, this doesn’t help. Scaring yourselves silly,” their mother declares. “I’m sure that no one is fighting with anyone.” But her tone is not exactly reassuring, and silence strikes them mute when a sharp bang sounds from downstairs, followed by the sound of Mr. van Pels shouting, “Police!”
No one says a word as the minutes pass, till finally they hear footsteps approaching from below. Pim appears first, his face tight with nerves. “Douse the lights,” he instructs hoarsely. “And everyone upstairs as quietly as possible. Burglars have forced out a panel of the warehouse door.”
Anne swallows hard. “Pim,” she gasps.
“They’re gone now, frightened off. But we expect to have the police in the building very soon.”
Up above where the van Pelses sleep beside the kitchen, Margot drapes a sweater over a bed lamp, providing a ghost light that pools on the floorboards. Waiting in the dark, no talking, only hearts drumming. No use of the toilet, too much noise, so Peter’s metal wastepaper basket is substituted for the commode, for those who can’t stand to hold it. The odor sours the air. But still no conversation, only dreadful whispers. Only breathing, one breath in, one breath out, anticipating the arrival of the police. The police!
When footsteps are heard coming up from below, time stops. A terrible racket ensues as someone rattles the bookcase, and Anne shivers brutally. For an instant she believes that they are about to die. “Now we’re finished,” she whispers to the air, to God, to nobody. One aggressive rattle and then another, bang, bang, bang!
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