“Everyone, please,” Pim suddenly pipes up with calm authority. “Enough about the unpleasant facts of daily life,” he must insist. “We are all well aware of them. But today is a day for festivities. Our younger daughter has turned fifteen,” he reminds the table, squeezing his wife’s hand. “And,” he announces with a wry smile as he draws a piece of paper from his vest pocket, “I have penned a humble poem in her honor.”
“Yes!” Anne breathes happily. Pleased that she can count on Pim to remind everyone that she, by rights, should be the center of attention this afternoon.
Rising, he unfolds the paper and slips on his reading spectacles. “I must first thank my elder daughter for her work as a translator on this project, since I must still compose in German but prefer to recite in Dutch. Thank you, Mutz,” he says to Margot with a bow of his head. “And now for the poem—and quite the work of art it is, if I do say so myself. Ahem!”
“She does her best to be gracious and kind,
Yet that doesn’t mean she won’t speak her mind.
It is not a habit that’s easy to keep
Without ruffling feathers whenever she speaks.”
General laughter there from all assembled. Anne only bats her eyes comically.
“Yet now that she’s growing to woman from girl,
I know it’s important her truths to unfurl.
And whenever her thoughts may be harsh or be fiery,
She keeps them secret in the pages of her diary.”
A dull moan of agreement at this. “Oh, yes,” Mrs. van Pels half snorts, “Little Miss Scribbler!”
“And even though her days are cramped by small accommodations,
And her actions often judged by grown-up observations,”
“Ha!” Anne tosses out.
“We know that her future will be a beautiful sight,
As her star ascends, burning strong, burning bright!”
The applause is led by Anne, but everyone joins in. It’s so obvious to her that the power of her father’s affection has returned a dependable balance to the room. Even old grumblebelly Pfeffer is nodding with appreciation. Margot blinks at her in a silly way, as if to say, There she is! My sister the star! But when Anne catches her mother’s eyes, there is such a glimpse of emptiness there. Not even sadness. Beyond that. Hopelessness.
Later, after she has set up her bed and changed into her nightclothes, after she has scrubbed her teeth with Margot at the washroom sink and pinned curlers into her hair, she goes to say good night to her parents. She feels the familiar scrub of a day’s stubble on Pim’s cheek as she kisses it. Feels the comfortable wrap of his arms, but when she turns to her mother, she feels suddenly shy. There is an urge to embrace her, but also a barrier. “Thank you for the lovely dinner, Mother,” she says.
Her mother smiles without joy, not at Anne but at a pillow she is stuffing into a pillowcase. “Oh, it wasn’t so much, really. Mr. Pfeffer is right. The quality of our food is worsening every day.” She fluffs the pillow with a flat spank and drops it at the top of Pim’s bed. “But it’s kind of you to pretend otherwise,” she says, now turning away to plump up the pillow on Margot’s cot with the same little spank. “Happy birthday, Anne,” she says.
“I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” Anne feels the need to blurt, just as her sister enters in her nightdress and slippers.
“Who will be here soon?” Margot asks.
“The English. I’m sure it won’t be much longer, Mummy, before they push the Germans out.”
Their mother shrugs. “We’ll hope so. Good night,” she says.
After the lights go out and Anne lies on her bed, too warm for a cover, listening to the heavy barge motor of Mr. Pfeffer’s snoring, she stares up into the darkness above her. It’s a deep thing, this darkness. Like a hole in the night.
“Anne, will you take the coffee service to the table?”
Anne blinks. Looks at Dassah. “Yes, I will,” is all she says.
Carrying the coffee service on a tray, Anne places it on the table draped in worn linen. “Pim, will you ever retrieve Mummy’s silverware?” she wonders aloud.
“Hmm?” Lighting up a cigarette, his forehead wrinkling.
“Mummy’s silver,” says Anne. “Didn’t you say it went to friends for safekeeping?”
“Yes,” Pim confirms.
“Did they turn out to be the kind of friends who are still keeping it safe, but now from you?”
“I’ve written a letter,” Pim tells her, expelling smoke. “We’ll get it back eventually. These things take time. Everyone was so badly displaced by the end of the war.”
“That’s your answer to everything,” Anne points out, but if Pim hears her, he pretends not to. Instead he consults his wristwatch. “Mr. Nussbaum should be arriving soon. He told me he is bringing a special guest.”
Anne is curious. “A special guest?”
“Haven’t the slightest who,” says Pim.
She tries not to show it, but Anne can’t deny a thrill of anticipation. A special guest? Could it be—could it possibly be none other than her idol, Cissy van Marxveldt? What an astonishing birthday gift that would be.
The door knocker sounds. Anne can hear Dassah exchanging greetings with Mr. Nussbaum from the front room and hurries over, but she finds the man standing alone, bearing a gift wrapped poorly in newsprint. “Not very glamorous, I’m afraid,” he confesses. “Just some jam and a bar of French army soap.”
“Very nice. Thank you, Mr. Nussbaum,” she tells him, trying to hide her disappointment by smelling the soap. But then she says, “You’re here by yourself?”
He keeps smiling, but he looks diminished, as if he is slowly being erased, until not much more than his smile and the brightness of his eyes remain. “Yes. Unfortunately, I am.”
“You know, I’m not sure why, but when I heard Pim say you were bringing a ‘special guest . . .’ You’ve talked so much about knowing Cissy van Marxveldt, I hoped it might be—”
“She couldn’t make it, Anne,” Mr. Nussbaum interrupts. “At the last minute. I’m sorry. I did want you to have the chance to meet her, but she lives in Bussum now, and I suppose she wasn’t feeling up to the trip.”
23
SACRIFICE
Performing charity and justice is preferred by God to a sacrifice.
—Proverbs 21:3
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
School ends for the term, and the summer holiday begins. Anne’s grades are terrible. Pim sits morosely at the breakfast table and examines her report as if it is a mournful thing indeed. He is quite disappointed by the low marks she received in classroom behavior. “It makes me sad to see you waste your education.”
But she is surprised when Dassah speaks up. “Perhaps, Otto, Anne is no longer suited for school,” she suggests. Sipping her coffee, she meets Anne’s eyes starkly. “Perhaps she’s ready for the world.”
That morning Anne arrives at the bookshop but finds Mr. Nussbaum staring in a kind of trance at the window, unaware, it seems, that his cigar has gone cold. Unaware of her, it seems, as well. The pages of a newspaper lie on the floor, abandoned.
“Mr. Nussbaum?”
Nothing.
“Mr. Nussbaum?” she repeats.
And then, without breaking his trance, he speaks in a voice that is floating. Untethered. “Anne . . . have you heard?”
A dull pulse in her belly. “Heard?” She’s seen him depressed before, yes, but this is the first time she’s really seen him in the grip of despair. The first time, she thinks, that she’s really seen his Auschwitz face.
“They’re killing Jews again in the east,” he announces.
Her heart tightens. Confusion strangles any response, but Mr. Nussbaum does not appear to notice.
“It’s in the newspaper,
” he says. Anne glares back down at the discarded paper’s headline. The word “Pogrom” stands out blackly. A favorite tool of the angel of death.
* * *
• • •
The blood libel. It’s an ancient excuse for a pogrom. A small town. A gentile boy claims to have been “kidnapped” by a Jew, and the old rumors start swirling—Jews abducting gentile children for ritual murder! Siphoning innocent blood to consecrate their unholy matzo bread. Nothing new there. In any case, the shooting starts when the police arrive, but soon the mob takes over the murdering and the looting. By the next day, at least forty Jews—men, women, and children—are dead. Stoned, stabbed, shot, beaten to death. Including a Jewish mother and her infant son, arrested in their own home, robbed, and then shot “while trying to escape.”
“That it still continues!” Anne laments.
Pim has finished his standard breakfast, toast and margarine with a powdered egg, and ignites his standard cigarette. He shakes his head heavily over the folded newspaper.
“Hideous,” he declares.
Anne blinks. “That’s all you have to say?”
Her father lifts his eyes to her, burdened pale things. “What else would you have me say, daughter?”
“Must I really teach you, Pim? Must I put the words in your mouth? You are a Jew who has suffered through Auschwitz. You should be outraged.”
“I am long past outrage, Anne,” he says with a sorrowful but maddening composure. “Such hateful violence. It’s horrific. But as we have learned, the world of men can be a horrific place. I cannot allow it to drag me down.”
“Really, Pim,” Anne says, burning. “This is your response? The world is bitter, but we must rise above it? That’s the type of thinking that sent Jews to the Kremas.”
Pim’s gaze grows deep. He surveys his daughter as if from a distance. “How can I help you, meisje?” he asks. “How can I help you?”
The question only makes Anne angrier. “You can help me, Pim—you can help me by waking up to reality!”
“Anne isn’t wrong,” her stepmother suddenly injects. Anne and Pim share the same surprise, turning their heads as Dassah enters the room with the coffeepot to refill Pim’s cup. “Perhaps she’s being overdramatic as usual. That’s Anne. But I must agree, it would be foolish to abandon our caution.”
Pim huffs, obviously feeling ambushed. “Hadas. Aren’t you the one who said that one should have faith in God’s intelligence?”
Pouring coffee into her own cup. “Of course. But that doesn’t mean we should go blind. We should trust in God to keep us vigilant, not to tend us like sheep. The wolves are still hungry, Otto. That hasn’t changed.”
Pim stubs out his cigarette. “No, I’m sorry, but I refuse,” he says, frowning. “I refuse to live in fear.” He taps his lips with his napkin and stands, his tone resolute. “Live a just life. Do good when you can. That’s the answer to the madness of such cruelties.” Slipping on his suit jacket, he asks, “Anne, are you coming to the office with me today?”
Anne looks at a spot on the white linen tablecloth before she meets Dassah’s cool eyes and says, “No, Pim. I promised Mr. Nussbaum.”
* * *
• • •
At the bookshop Mr. Nussbaum reaches down behind the sales desk and pulls out a large, flat magazine, slapping it on the counter. Drawing a breath, he declares, “This is for you.”
LIFE. It’s the name of an American magazine.
Anne has Mr. Lapjes in her arms, the old furry rug, purring in a bored fashion. She takes a step forward. Looks down at the photo on the cover. “I don’t understand.”
“I found it in a lot I picked up from the library sale,” he tells her. “And I’ve been saving it for you. For the right time.”
The magazine’s pages are so large, the size of America itself. She stares at it. On the cover is a jutting tower, piercing the cloud line with its steeple. The caption tells her it is the Empire State Building.
“So you see, Anne. What just happened in that village in the East? It made me realize the truth. We may pretend different, but Europe is dead. Dead for the Jews. Dead for you. America,” he tells her. “That’s where you belong.”
She looks back at him in silence.
“You should talk to your father. I know he prides himself on his faith in the future. It’s one of the things that I admire most about him. But even he must see the truth. You should talk to him. Tell him you need to emigrate.”
“Is that really what you think?”
“It’s what I believe, Anne,” Mr. Nussbaum tells her.
Anne shakes her head. “He’ll never agree.”
“He won’t want to give you up. Of course he won’t. He’ll resist mightily, I’m sure. But even Otto must recognize the truth underneath it all. Even he must recognize that America is where a girl with your intellect and perception should find her future.”
* * *
• • •
Biking home, she bumps over the uneven cobblestones, distracted by the images of America in her head. She has thought about it before in the abstract. She does have uncles there, her mother’s brothers near Boston. They could sponsor her. And her father has his university friend running a big department store in New York City.
But the idea of emigration is both terrifying and gripping. She tries to picture herself in a café, ordering coffee in English. She imagines taking a bite out of a hot dog, as she’s seen in the newsreels. She imagines herself exiting a crowded elevator, crossing the concourse of Grand Central Terminal, or at the top of a skyscraper, gazing out over the vigor of a vast and animated metropolis. In America there are no memories of the dead that must be pushed aside. There is only a spotless, uncorrupted future.
* * *
She uses cellophane tape on the oversize pictures she’s scissored from the magazine and lines them up on the wall of her room.
“And what is this display?” Pim asks, failing to keep the iron in his voice from dragging this question toward criticism.
Anne looks over from her last taping job. “New York City.”
“Yes, I recognize that fact. But where did it all come from, is what I’m asking.”
“From a magazine Mr. Nussbaum gave me,” she responds with innocence.
“I see,” says Pim with a kind of neutral suspicion.
“I thought I might improve my English by reading the articles. But really, Pim, look at these pictures. Can such a place exist?”
“Oh, it exists, all right,” her father replies, and his small frown confirms it. “Though, it’s a very problematic city, New York, especially for foreigners. It’s so large and really quite impersonal.”
“Really? If I remember correctly, Pim, you once called it the most astonishing city you’d ever seen.”
“Never mind,” Pim says, his tone turning parental. “Didn’t you agree to help your stepmother with the laundry?”
“I want to go there, Pim,” Anne announces suddenly, not realizing until she speaks the words how deeply true they are. “I want to go to America.”
What follows is a silence with many moving parts. She can see it rearranging Pim’s expression in minute calibrations. The tic of an eye, the laxity of his mouth as it droops into the ruts of a frown. The decline of his shoulders and the tilt of his head toward conflict. A measure of hard fortification barricading his eyes. “I beg your pardon?” is all he says.
“I want to go to America,” she repeats.
Pim releases a long breath and shakes his head. “These photographs. They may depict an exciting metropolis, but take my word for it, the place is so large it can easily swallow a person whole.”
“Maybe that’s precisely what I want, Pim,” Anne replies. “To be swallowed whole.”
“But how could that be so, Anne?” her father asks, obviously trying to calm his responses, obvious
ly intent on maintaining the gentlest of possible tones. “You’re young. Of course you have an urge to see the world. Perhaps we can think about a visit. Next year, maybe. I do understand the wanderlust of youth.”
“No, I think you don’t, Pim. I don’t want to visit New York. I want to live there. I want to emigrate.”
Pim shakes his head, glaring at his shoes. “Anne.” He speaks her name sternly. “I’m sorry,” he says, abandoning any softer tone. “But that is not in any way, shape, or form a realistic possibility.”
“Not realistic? My English is good. I hear the Canadian soldiers talk, and I can understand almost everything they say. Why is it not realistic?”
“How could it be? So you can speak some English? Do you think that’s all there is to it? Do you imagine that a person simply packs a bag and boards a boat? Show me your passport, Anne. Where have you been hiding it?”
“Passports aren’t the end of the world, Pim,” she tells him.
“So says the world traveler. Emigration is an extremely difficult process, Anne. Immensely complicated,” he says, “and expensive. So what about money? Where does the money come from for such an adventure? You think it can be pulled from a hat, do you, daughter? Even if the legalities were possible to sort through, where would the money for passage come from? You think that’s cheap, Anne? It’s not. Where would the money to live on come from? Thin air?”
“People get work, Pim,” she answers. “People get jobs.”
“Not seventeen-year-old girls. And that’s another thing. Who would protect you? Who would keep you safe? No. My answer to this nonsense is no. I will not be drawn into further discussion,” her father insists.
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