“And what,” Anne presses forward, “has become of her husband?”
Blankness. “Become of him?”
“Yes. What has become of Mr. Zuckert? Is he alive? Is he dead?”
Kugler looks suddenly alarmed. “That’s really none of our business, Anne,” he tries to convince her.
“No? You think not, Mr. Kugler? Well, I think it is.” She takes a swallow of water and sets the glass down on the counter.
“Anne,” Kugler breathes, “if you have questions, you must ask your father.”
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me, but my father says nothing. Listen to them in there laughing, the two of them. Laughing,” she repeats, as if naming a crime.
Kugler hesitates. His expression looks crushed. Finally he clears his throat and speaks grayly to the wall. “From what I understand,” he begins, “her husband had been working in Germany before the Nazis. He was a Jew, but a Dutch-born Jew. So when they came to Amsterdam after Hitler, she sat for the test and became a Dutch citizen. The marriage didn’t work out.” A shrug. “I don’t know why. But they were divorced, and he left for Canada. Or maybe it was Cuba, I don’t recall.”
Anne says nothing. But in her silence, Kugler’s expression darkens, even in the sunlight from the kitchen’s window. He stands when the teakettle’s whistle stings the air, and he shuts off the burner flame. “You know, Anne, there’s something I have noticed about you,” he informs her. “I’m sorry, I hope you’ll forgive me, but I have to say this. I’ve noticed that you often use your brutalization at the hands of the Nazis as if it’s a weapon to wield. As if the pain and the awful sorrow you have borne have imbued you with a kind of unassailable righteousness,” he says. “Of course, the stories your father told us upon his return . . . well, they were horrific. And I don’t pretend to understand your anguish. But I must say that it wasn’t easy for any of us. The SS sent Kleiman and me to one prison after another. First Amstelveenseweg. Then Weteringschans, where they held us for days in a cell with men condemned to death. Then finally to that godforsaken spot in the Leusderheide,” he says despondently, as if he has stepped back behind the barbed wire in his mind. “Hard labor. Barely any food. Roll calls in the freezing rain. Kleiman would have died there, I’m sure of it, if it hadn’t been for the Red Cross.” He frowns, suddenly self-conscious, and shoots Anne a sliver of a glance. “Now, I know what you must be thinking,” he says with a kind of miserable tension. “‘Poor Kugler. He believes he’s such a victim, yet he knows nothing about true suffering.’ And maybe you’re right. Maybe I cannot begin to conceive of the barbarities to which your people were subjected. Maybe Amersfoort and its ilk were not the same hell as those places to which Jews were deported. But I can testify, Anne, that neither were they holiday spas. I watched men die in Amersfoort. Good men, who should have been home with their wives and children, and I simply watched them drop over dead with shovels still stuck in their hands. Or worse. Clubbed to death in front of my eyes. Yet to hear you talk, it’s as if you have utterly cornered the market on pain. It’s the reason Bep left.”
Anne stares at him in wordless response. And then, “No. No, you’re wrong.”
“Oh, there’s her father’s illness, yes, if that’s what you mean. But she has four other sisters, Anne. So if you want the real reason for Bep’s departure, the truth,” he says, “I’ll tell you.” He takes a breath and looks at her with blunt, deeply agitated eyes. “She could not face you any longer.”
“That’s not true,” Anne insists.
“I’m afraid it is.”
“No. No. I know the real reason Bep left—it’s because the police suspected her of betraying us.”
Kugler looks confused. Repulsed. “Bep?” And then he nearly laughs. “Don’t be silly, Anne.”
“I’m not. I know why those men were in the private office that day. I know that my father wants to keep me in the dark. He continues to tell me that it’s nothing. A private business matter, but how can I believe that?”
Kugler is incredulous. “The greater question is, Anne, how can you believe that Bep could possibly be a traitor? How could you even think such a thing of a loyal friend?”
A loyal friend? Anne blinks at the question, feeling a cold pulse in her blood. For all his squawking on the subject, one might have imagined that Amersfoort would have taught Mr. Kugler something, but obviously he has refused to learn it. He has refused to recognize the insidious patience of betrayal. How it can infect the human heart without the knowledge of its host, until suddenly, one impulse . . . one moment’s anger . . .
“It’s not what I think, Mr. Kugler. It’s what Bep thought,” she insists. “It’s the reason she left.”
“No, Anne.” Kugler shakes his head heavily. “No, Bep’s leavetaking had nothing to do with any such thing. She left, quite simply, because she wanted a new life. She couldn’t stand to confront the terrible past on a daily basis. She couldn’t stand to face you.”
Anne absorbs his words and feels a cold, weeping hole open in her chest.
“I’m sorry, Anne,” Kugler says. “I am. I wish it weren’t the truth. But it is.”
Miep walks into the kitchen. “Mr. Kugler, there’s a gentleman on the telephone for you,” she says, and mentions the name of the gentleman. A Mr. So-and-So spice distributor from Antwerp.
“Ah,” Kugler breathes, relieved. “I’ve been waiting for this call.” Then he frowns. “Excuse me, Anne,” he says, and quickly frees himself from the kitchen.
Miep waits for a moment, quietly examining Anne. “Is something wrong?”
But Anne has no words to speak.
* * *
• • •
In the attic of the Achterhuis, she sobs without hope, until quite suddenly the tears dry up as if the spigot has been twisted shut. She breathes until her chest quits heaving. Rubs her face, smearing away the tears. Dries her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater and ignites a cigarette, inhaling the acrid smoke. The branches of the chestnut tree nudge the window glass, touched by a whisper of wind.
Coming down the steps, she spots Pim by the door to his private office with Mrs. Zuckert. His hand is on her arm. And though Anne cannot discern what they are saying, she cannot miss the intimate tone of their murmur. She decides to make a noise. Scuffs a step loudly and watches how swiftly her father’s hand disconnects from the lady’s limb. His forehead prunes lightly as he calls upward, “Anne?”
“Yes, Pim. It’s me.”
“Your eyes are reddened. Are you all right, meisje?”
“I’m fine.”
“You were up in the rooms again?” This is how he refers to the Achterhuis now: up in the rooms.
“Only for a few minutes.”
“Anne, darling, I worry that you spend too much time up there.”
“And I worry that you don’t spend enough time, Pim.”
An edge of silence like a knife, but Mrs. Zuckert ignores it. “Thank you, Otto,” she says, her voice pleasantly relaxed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she smiles—“Good night, Anne”—but doesn’t stick around for Anne to reply.
“You know, I can take dictation, too,” she says to her father. “Don’t you recall the mail-order courses?” Line-height parts, quarter-height parts, half-height consonants, the System Groote. “Margot and I completed them. Don’t you remember?”
Another blink. Often the mere mention of Margot’s name dampens Pim’s expression. His poor Mutz, he always calls her.
“I could take dictation from you,” Anne says, plowing ahead. “It would be good practice for me,” she tells him with earnest intention. “So, really, you don’t always have to rely on your dear Mrs. Zuckert.”
For an instant Pim appears distressed. But then he quickly regains control and offers Anne his particular brand of pleasantly frowning agreement. “Hmm. Well,” he says, matching Anne’s earnest tone, “that soun
ds like a very compelling proposition.” But during the fraction of a heartbeat in which he meets his daughter’s eyes, she can spot the jolt of inflexible resolve behind the façade. The same resolve that must have enabled Otto Heinrich Frank to survive five months of KL Auschwitz.
* * *
• • •
Later, after the supper dishes are cleared and washed and Miep and Jan have gone out for their evening walk, Anne finds Pim sitting in a chair in the Jekerstraat flat with a book open. She watches him from the room’s threshold. His body reedy and his face thin, but with a touch of color returning to his cheeks. His eyes look gentle and unhurried as he gazes down at the page, lost in words. It’s Goethe he’s reading this time instead of Dickens. The smoke from his cigarette curls softly upward.
He raises his eyes suddenly when he realizes that his daughter is watching him. “Anne?”
“So you know she’s divorced?” Anne asks him.
His expression does not change, but the light recedes immediately from his eyes.
“Mrs. Zuckert,” Anne says thickly. “Your favorite—” She begins to say, Your favorite in the office, but Pim’s voice is level when he cuts her off.
“I know who you mean, Anne. And the answer is yes. I am aware that Mrs. Zuckert has been divorced. There is no need to stigmatize her over it. So she left a bad marriage. That does not make her a bad person.”
“This is not about her,” Anne lies, “it’s about you, Pim. Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what, daughter? I’m not doing anything.”
“Yes you are,” she insists. “Yes, you are. It’s obvious to everyone. She calls you by your given name, for God’s sake.”
And now her father expels a breath. He cheats a drag from his cigarette before tamping it out in Miep’s Bakelite ashtray, which he’s dirtied like a fireplace grate. “Anne,” he says. Her name as a preamble. The beginning of a lecture or a sermon: Anne, you have no idea what you’re saying. Anne, you have no business interfering with adults. Anne, you are still only a child. But what he says is, “Anne, I won’t deny that I may have certain feelings in regard to Mrs. Zuckert. And I won’t deny that she may, and I said may, harbor certain feelings for me.” He pauses. Allows these words to sink in. “Now, of course I can understand that you might find it difficult to accept such a . . .” Such a what? “A situation,” he decides to call it.
“You understand?” All at once the fury in her breaks free. “You understand, do you? No, Pim. No, I don’t think you understand a thing.”
Her father shifts uncomfortably in the chair and huffs a breath. “Really, it’s always this, isn’t it?” he says. “Always this anger. It’s all you offer me, Anneke.”
“Well, perhaps”—and her eyes are hot as she says it—“perhaps I’m angry because you’re betraying my mother’s memory.”
“No,” Pim replies adamantly.
“Yes. You are. How long has your wife been dead, Pim? Fourteen months? Fifteen? No time to waste. Better get a replacement in the works!”
“Stop it,” he demands, running his fingers over the vein suddenly popping at his temple. “Just stop it.”
“Kugler says she used to do bookkeeping for the company. Is that when you first noticed her, when Mummy wasn’t around?”
Her father leaps to his feet. “I will not have this!” he shouts, his face bleaching. “Don’t you dare say such a thing!”
“She bore you two children. She made a home for us all. Even in a cramped hideout above a dirty warehouse, she made a home for us, and this is how you repay her? This is how you keep her memory? By chasing another man’s wife?” Anne feels a surge of elation, as if provoking her father has proved that Pim is not so invulnerable to his own anger.
“Your mother and I,” he breathes, and then he must swallow a heavy rock, blinking at the sharp tears in his eyes. “Your mother and I had a long and very loving relationship. No matter what you think, Anne. No matter what you’ve so precociously surmised. I did everything I could to make her happy, and she did the same for me. In fact, if you recall, it wasn’t me who criticized her. It wasn’t me who always had a sharp tongue in his head for your mother. It was her younger daughter who so often left her crying,” he says. “It wasn’t me who complained so constantly and so vociferously about being so very misunderstood. It wasn’t me who sought no value in your mother’s solace—it was Annelies Marie Frank! How did you put it?” he demands suddenly of the air. “Let me see—it was something like, ‘She means nothing to me. I don’t have a mother! I must learn to mother myself!’”
Anne glares. A bright electric shock of realization has pulsed through her body at what Pim, in his anger, has just let slip. “How,” she asks, “do you know that?”
“How do I know what?” her father demands, still quivering with anger.
“How do you know,” she asks thickly, “how I put anything?”
And now a thin sliver of alarm inserts itself into her father’s jagged expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do,” Anne says.
“I think I’ve had enough. Enough accusations from my own daughter for one evening.”
“You read it,” Anne says with a heated mixture of indignity and mortification. “You read my diary. Otherwise how could you have known?”
Pim’s mouth closes and is drawn into a straight line.
“When?” she demands. “I put it in your briefcase. For safekeeping. You promised me that no one would dare touch it there. I remember! But what you meant to say was no one but you.”
Pim still has nothing to say. Only stares painfully.
And then an even more horrible thought strikes her. “Did you show it to Mummy, too?” she asks darkly. “Did she read it?”
“No.” Her father speaks the single word.
“No? Are you sure? Perhaps you passed it around? Passed it around to the van Pelses? To that old fart Pfeffer? God, they were all such snoops, weren’t they? Always prying. I bet they had such a good laugh at my expense. The tragic unbosoming of a know-it-all adolescent!”
“No, Anne,” Pim protests. “No one else read a word. I can assure you of that. No one else.”
“No one else but my father.”
Pim swallows. His hands are squeezed into fists. His eyes wet.
And then suddenly, “Anne,” he whispers desperately, but before he can say another word, the front door to the flat opens and in come Miep and Jan, home from their evening walk. They are chatting and smiling until they freeze at the threshold of their own home, gazing in at the expressions of father and daughter. Miep sums it up quickly. “We’re interrupting,” she declares apologetically. But Pim steps forward, suddenly relieved.
“No,” he corrects her. “No you’re not. Not at all. Excuse me,” he says, and yanks his fedora and raincoat from the rack. “I think I’m in need of some exercise.” And with that he bolts from the flat.
1945
Konzentrationslager (KL)
BERGEN-BELSEN
Kleines Frauenlager
The Lüneburg Heath
THE GERMAN REICH
Final months of the war
The women’s camp at Belsen is already packed to bursting by the time the wretched transport arrives from Birkenau. A tide of starving, freezing inmates is pouring into Belsen from camps all across the east, evacuated as the Red Army drums through Poland. No more room in the Belsen barracks, no more room in the sardine tins, so the Germans set up a Zeltlager. A tent city with perimeters drawn by ropes of barbed wire. It is November, and the tents billow in the bitter wind. This is where Anne and Margot huddle for warmth. But after four days the most vicious storm yet shreds the canvas and rips the tent wires from the ground. The screams of many hundreds of women are fused into a single shriek that is sucked from their bellies as the immense canvas roof collapses upon them like a sh
roud. How hard they fight to free themselves of it, Anne gripping Margot’s arm by the wrist, shouting her name over and over. But beyond the tent is only the storm, frigid rain driving down like nails, like a shower of needles. Quickly, Anne and Margot join the women who have just fought their way free and climb back under the shroud for shelter. Those women who don’t, die. Those who do, will die later. Those are the choices left at Bergen-Belsen.
The nights turn frigid. The living from the tent camp are condemned to the ramshackle wooden barracks of the Kleines Frauenlager, Anne and Margot among them. But they are billeted near the door, so that every time it opens, a punishing blast of icy wind bites into them. Close the door! they beg over and over. Please, close the door!
The latrines are overflowing with shit. The water is infected, and the dead are a swelling population. Bodies pile up. They freeze solid into grotesque sculptures.
By the time the snow comes, both Anne and Margot are boiling with fever. They pull apart old shoes in a work barracks. They suffer the unpredictable blows of the Kapos like everyone and stand for roll call until they can stand no longer and finally surrender to the sick block. But the Krankenlager at Belsen is not only putrid, it’s an icehouse. Anne shivers, a frozen little animal. “At least we will be left alone here,” she whispers to Margot, watching her breath frost. “We can be together and lie down in peace.” But peace is elusive. Typhus kills Germans, too, so the moffen are afraid to come near them and leave the inmates of the Krankenlager to rot. Corpses are dragged to the edge of the burial pits or, if nobody has the energy, simply abandoned outside the doors of the barracks.
A grayness overcomes everything. Anne finally finds sleep on a pallet, curled next to her sister on the fetid straw. Margot has moved beyond words. Instead she communicates with shivering groans, glottal intestinal grunts, and her ruthless cough. The cough, that vicious, goddamned beast. Anne tries to cover both of them with her horse blanket, but really she’s mad that Margot has shit on it again. Maybe it wasn’t really Margot’s fault—of course, no one can control their shitting in Belsen—but still she is mad, even while her exhaustion smothers her as she clings to Margot’s bony body.
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