Annelies

by David R. Gillham

  Miep only shrugs again. “What else would you have him do, Anne?”

  “What would I have him do?” Anne frowns, her eyes rounding. “I would have him shout, I would have him pound his fist, I would have him rattle the windows till they shatter. I would have him, Miep, demonstrate his outrage.”

  Miep exhales a breath. “Well,” she says, “outrage. You know, Anne, that has never been your father’s way.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Anne’s eyes fly open. “Margot!” she calls aloud, her heart thumping against her ribs and her flesh chilled. Blinking at the silver of morning, she shakes her head back into the present. She must have fallen asleep on Miep’s sofa. Her clothes feel rough against her skin. A blanket, which has been draped over her, sags onto the floor. Pim is slumped in a chair a few steps away, dozing, his head lolling with a rhythmic snore. For an instant he stirs, and his expression contracts as if he’s been pinched. His face is paled by the daylight glazing the windows. Only the ruddy patches under his eyes retain color. He is dressed in overlaundered pajamas with faded blue and white stripes and a too-large flannel robe, his feet hooked into a pair of worn leather slippers. She blinks again. Around her the flat is as hushed as an empty room. “Pim,” she says with more intention, and watches him shudder into consciousness, blinking back at her with a hint of the same brand of empty panic she feels in her chest.

  “Ah.” He whisks a breath into his lungs. “So you’re awake.”

  Anne sits up further, plants her feet on the floor, and sifts her fingers through her hair. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? The doctor,” she says.

  “The doctor said rest, so I’m resting. But really there’s no need to worry. I’m fine. Just a bit of excess excitement, that’s all.”

  Anne looks at him, and he takes this opportunity to beam back at her in a fractured sort of way. “Ah, my Annelein. How wonderful it is simply to gaze upon your face. Thank God that you have been returned.”

  But Anne shakes her head. Lets her hair fall back across her face. “Miep said you just showed up at her door one day after the liberation.”

  Pim nods at this as if it is only too true. “I did. It was a long journey back from Poland. The Russians liberated Auschwitz in winter, but it wasn’t till May that I could begin the journey home. I had to travel to Odessa and then board a boat for Marseille. And there was the matter of the French documents required. A Repatriation Card and other such nonsense,” he says, and bats away the memory with his hand. “All in all, I didn’t return to Amsterdam till June. Of course, others had long since occupied our flat in the Merwedeplein, and even if they hadn’t, I could never have gone back there. Not to live. So what choice did I have but to show up like a beggar at Miep’s door? She and Jan have been very kind to take me in. We owe them quite a lot, Anne.”

  “How did you do it, Pim?” she asks. “How did you manage to . . .” But the words won’t form. Her father, however, can sense the question.

  “How did I manage to stay alive in Auschwitz?” His expression drifts into a hollow spot. “How? It’s a question I’ve asked myself again and again. And again and again, I come to the same answer,” he says, and his eyebrows lift. “It was love.”

  Anne glares.

  “Love and hope. Love of my family and hope that I would see them all again. That’s what kept me alive, I believe.” A shrug. “That is my only explanation.”

  “I was told,” Anne says, and though speaking the next words is worse than dragging thorns through her throat, she forces out a clenched, almost shameful whisper. “I was told. I was told in Bergen-Belsen, by a woman who knew her, that Mummy died in the Birkenau infirmary. Of starvation.”

  A bleak nod of her father’s head. “Yes. That is what I was told also.”

  “She was hoarding her bread for Margot and me.”

  “She was devoted to her girls,” Pim concludes. But something in his voice betrays a reluctance to continue down this road. A small fidget runs through his body, and his hands tap restlessly against his knees. “Now come,” he says, pushing up from the chair. “Let’s have a cup of tea, the both of us.” And as he advances on the kitchen, he tells her, “Tonight you will move into the sewing room. A young lady, I think, needs her privacy.”

  “But I’ll be taking your bed, Pim. Where will you sleep?”

  “Me? Oh, don’t worry about the old man. There’s a closet bed in the wall, which will be quite adequate for this old sack of bones.”

  And so it goes. That night Anne moves her suitcase into the sewing room. It’s small, really just a closet with barely enough space to yawn between the four walls, yet to her it seems quite cavernous. Anne has never in her life had a room to herself. When the door is shut, the privacy feels soothing in a way, a spot where she can breathe. But also it’s deep water. When she is alone, who knows where her displaced heart will lead her? She opens her suitcase and removes her contraband. A cardboard notebook of the world’s cheapest and flimsiest paper and a fountain pen that has learned how to cooperate.

  * * *

  She wonders if she might not drown in her own privacy. In hiding she would run to Pim’s bed when the English bombers came or when she was terrorized by her own dreams. But that’s impossible now. Now when she feels the loneliness overcome her, she can only sink into it.

  That’s when I think of my diary, she writes on the page of her journal.

  It is lost, of course. She remembers the pages scattered on the floor on the day of their arrest, but at the time she could not make sense of what she was seeing. Nothing seemed to matter in that instant. The Gestapo had breached their hiding place, and they were doomed. The shock was so horrific that even Anne’s precious diary meant nothing to her. All her years of work were no more than scratches on paper, and she barely gave it a look. It wasn’t until they reached Kamp Westerbork in Drenthe that she began to feel its loss. She remembers it now, she writes, as she might remember the closest of friends whom she has lost for good. But isn’t it folly for her to mourn the loss of a possession? She should be spending her tears on the memory of her mother, of Margot. She should be weeping over the loss of Peter, and of his parents, and even that stuffy old mug Mr. Pfeffer.

  But her eyes remain dry at the thought of them. What does that say about her, this Anne Frank, whose tears are for herself and no one else?

  On the page she writes, Please do not answer that question.

  1945

  Amsterdam

  LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

  This much Anne has discovered by opening her ears: Most Amsterdammers think of themselves as the true survivors. They have survived five years of occupation by the moffen. They have survived the tyranny of the Nazi Grüne Polizei and the NSB collaborators. They have survived losing their bicycles, their radios, their businesses. They have survived losing their husbands and sons and brothers to prison camps and labor conscription. They have survived the Hunger Winter by scraping the scum from the bottoms of milk tureens or by swallowing a few spoonfuls of thin broth at a crowded emergency kitchen. And when the roads into the town were barricaded, when the moffen disconnected the propane lines and cut off all food supplies, when the bread and the beets ran out, they survived by boiling tulip bulbs for supper over wood fires. And when the tulip bulbs were gone, they survived losing their friends and their families and their babies to slow starvation. They are certainly in no mood to sympathize with a lot of bony Jews who babble on about cattle cars and gas chambers and God knows what kind of atrocities. Who could believe it all? Who would wish to believe it all?

  She walks the streets still conscious of an invisible star sewn to her breast, even if it never shows up in a mirror. Many of the shops in town are boarded up, and those that aren’t have precious little actual merchandise to offer. Even in the Kalverstraat, the store windows advertise empty packages above the signs that read VOOR SLECHTS VERTONING. For Display Only. T
he Vondelpark is bereft of foliage, because the city’s trees were felled to their roots and chopped into pieces to warm the stoves of a freezing population. There’s no rubber for tires, no sugar to sweeten the feeble tea and tasteless coffee surrogates, no butter, no whole milk, not much of anything, really. But at least now there is an acute shortage of Germans as well. Few are disappointed since that particular commodity went missing.

  On the Day of Liberation, Canadian armored columns rolled across the Berlagebrug in Amsterdam-Zuid. The same bridge over which the armored columns of the Wehrmacht rolled five years earlier. Anne spent Dutch Liberation Day in a hospital bed of DP Camp Belsen trying to comprehend her own liberation, but she has since watched the newsreels in the cinema of the lumbering Churchill tanks strewn with flowers. The giant, grinning Canadian boys, tall as oak trees in their fatigues, still grimy from combat, clutching joy-struck Dutch girls. She can only sit in hard silence when she watches the cheering, sobbing throngs of Amsterdammers on the screen, waving their tricolors and tossing streamers.

  In the weeks since her return to the living, she has retrained herself to do small things, such as buying bread at a neighborhood bakery without gouging out a piece on the spot and stuffing it into her mouth. She has trained herself to resist dividing the crowd lined up for the streetcar into fives. Fünferreihen! Five in a row! As every Kazetnik knows, five in a row was the basic unit of measure of the KZ. It was one of the essential phrases of life and death.

  Auschwitz-Birkenau distilled Anne’s German vocabulary down to fundamentals. And even now that she has returned to Amsterdam, hell’s lexicon is still fully entrenched in her mind. A camp is a Lager. Not a Konzentrationslager but a KZ—a Kazet. A Blockführerin is the female monster in SS uniform commanding a barracks block. The prisoner appointed to imitate the brutality of such a female monster is the Kapo. A Krema is one of the five crematoriums in Birkenau designed to incinerate huge populations of corpses after its gas chambers are emptied. The roll call for all prisoners, which lasts for hours upon hours in the drenching rain, the freezing sleet and snow, is the Appel. Appel! Appel! The Kapos still bellow in the darkness of her mind. Appel! Appel! Mach schnell!

  Morning. The sun rises alone into a clear, cloudless sky. The window in her room faces a narrow cobblestone alley, which resembles a rubbish dump. Slag and wire and hunks of grimy machinery, a rusted stove, an old icebox, a broken toilet. She can hear voices from the kitchen, and then there’s a knock at the door. It’s Miep carrying a steaming cup of tea for her. Good Miep. Trustworthy Miep, dressed for the workday in a lavender dress and low heels, no jewelry, and only a touch of lipstick. “Your papa is at his breakfast, and I’ve left your plate warming in the oven,” she explains to Anne. Then, with only a hint of caution, “I understand that you’ll be joining us today,” she says, “at the office.”

  “Pim thinks I should keep my mind occupied while he finds a school for me to attend.”

  “Probably a very good idea, don’t you think?” Miep prompts, but Anne answers with silence, forcing Miep to fill in the empty space between them. “Well, I should be going,” she reminds herself. But she lingers. “I’m sorry that this room is so small.” She frowns lightly as she surveys the cramped space. “Perhaps you should put up pictures of film stars, like you used to,” she suggests. “To liven it up.”

  But Anne can only gaze at the walls and absorb their blankness. “Yes. What a good idea,” she replies without the barest drop of conviction.

  When she peers into the kitchen, she finds Pim’s beanpole figure alone at the table, his fork frozen in his hand as he sits under the spell of some heavy tome open beside his plate. A wrinkle of concentration crinkles the skin at the top of his head. In hiding, Pim would read his beloved Dickens aloud to her in the language of its author, along with the aid of his well-thumbed English-to-Dutch dictionary.

  In Auschwitz the Germans marched men of his age straight to the ovens, didn’t they? She was so sure he couldn’t possibly have survived. But something in her father had carried him through to liberation. Was it really love and hope, as Pim insists, or was it the invisible survival instinct of Otto Frank? She gazes at her father quietly. Then steps out of the kitchen without alerting him to her presence.

  * * *

  • • •

  Their mother had told them to find one beautiful thing.

  Margot and Anne, that is. Find one beautiful thing. It was a day when the rain had churned the Women’s Camp in Birkenau into a quagmire. Soaking wet, they’d been lugging chunks of broken cement on a work detail, and when Anne fell, the Kapo had slashed her viciously with a hard rubber truncheon. Every day find one beautiful thing, her mother told them. Margot approached it like a lesson to learn. Assignment: Find one beautiful thing. But Anne tied her last knot of hope around her mother’s words. And that night in the barracks, she gazed at her skin, purpling from the Kapo’s blows, and found beauty in the colors, like a bouquet of violets.

  Find one beautiful thing every day, and they would survive even Birkenau.

  Except they didn’t survive. Only Anne is alive.

  Her hair is growing back so thickly; it already hangs down onto her neck. In the mirror she can see that she is dressed not in lice-ridden camp rags but as a human being. The red cloth coat only slightly frayed at the hem. A skirt, a blouse. Even undergarments beneath. Actual undergarments. A shadow passes across the mirror’s glass. Margot is peering over her shoulder in the reflection. Even after her death, her sister’s cough is deep and corrupting. She gazes out from the glass, dressed as she was the last time Pim photographed them in hiding, wearing her ivory knit sweater with the short sleeves that Bep had given her and the green porcelain barrette she received from Mummy on her birthday clipped in her hair.

  You have a spot on the collar of your blouse, her sister is compelled to comment.

  Anne frowns. Absently rubs her thumb over the pale stain on the material. “It doesn’t matter,” she says.

  So you don’t mind looking like a ragamuffin?

  “It’s a spot. It doesn’t matter.”

  No? You don’t think so? You don’t recall that the Nazis said Jews were slovenly?

  “So now my spot is a mark against the Jews? It’s a bleach stain.”

  I’m simply saying that as they judge one, they judge all.

  “That’s Mummy talking,” Anne points out, and then glares deeply into her sister’s reflection. “Maybe it should have been you,” she whispers.

  Margot gazes back from the thinness of the mirrored glass.

  “I see the way people look at me,” Anne breathes. “Those glances over my shoulder to the empty spot where you should be standing. You wanted to be a nurse, Margot. You wanted to deliver babies in Palestine. What am I doing with a future?” she asks, but no answer is forthcoming. Margot has vanished from the mirror’s surface as their father knocks politely on the door.

  “Anne? May I?”

  “Yes, Pim,” she answers, and gazes at her father’s reflection that has replaced Margot’s. He’s wearing his wide-brimmed fedora raked at an angle, the brim shadowing his eyes. After his liberation from Auschwitz, her father resembles a poor artifact of himself. He wears a putty-colored raincoat that hangs like a sack. His mustache and the fringe of hair around his ears are well barbered but have lost most of their color. He stares into the mirror’s reflection, catching Anne’s eye until she turns away from him, feeling oddly embarrassed.

  “So,” he begins with a vigorous note inserted into his voice. “Are we ready to go to work?” Work. Over the gate to Auschwitz, there was a legend wrought in iron: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work Will Make You Free. But this is not bloodied-knuckle slave labor she is headed for. Not digging trenches in the muck or hauling backbreaking stones. It’s freedom through office work. Pecking out words on Miep’s typewriter. Sorting index cards. Shifting papers into files at the Prinsengracht office, and all the while the u
pper floors of the annex, which housed them in secret for so long, concealed them from the moffen enemy for more than two years, sit vacant. Their hiding place, once the nave of their existence, now just empty space. She thinks of the lumpy cot where she slept, the wobbly table where she wrote. Her picture collection plastered across the walls—Shirley Temple, Joyce Vanderveen, Ginger Rogers—all part of their secret fortress above the spice warehouse. It often felt like a prison while she was in it, a young girl in love with glamour and talk. With boys and biking, swimming and skating. With freedom and sunlight.

  “I’ve lost everything, Pim. Everything there is to lose.”

  An airless beat separates them.

  “Anneke.” Her father pronounces her name as if it’s a lead weight, his gaze thinning as he shakes his head. For a moment he breathes unevenly. His carefully crafted expression crumbling. “I can only imagine,” he says, “how you and your sister suffered.” His eyes drop, no longer part of his reflection. “Alone. Without your mother. Without me.” And now he turns his face away to wipe his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes for the tears. Then stretches a lifeless smile across his face as he shakes his head at the mirror. “You are so strong, Anne. I must learn from you.”

  Anne stares. She feels herself go quietly rigid.

  “What I want to say,” her father tells her tremulously, “what I think is important to say, is . . .” He damply clears his throat. “Grief.” The word cracks as he speaks, but he clamps down on it with a frown. “Grief,” he says, “is natural. But we cannot allow ourselves to be crushed by it. God has given us life, Anne. For reasons that only he can understand.”

  Anne stands motionless, but she feels a rising boil inside. “You think,” she asks with a biting precision, “it was God?”

  Her father blinks.

  “You think,” she repeats, “it was God who has given us life?”