“Has Dassah read it, Pim?” She feels a rush of humiliation, imagining her stepmother’s eyes on the pages of her diary. Imagining Dassah reading all the judgmental complaints Anne had penned about Mummy, and Anne helpless to edit out a single painful memory, a single ugly thought.
“No one else but me has ever read a single sentence. I can assure you of that. Please. You must believe,” Pim tells her, “that no one disrespected your privacy. You must see that Miep’s intentions were always to keep your writings safe for your return. She didn’t even tell me what she had. Until”—he shakes his head—“until we thought you were lost to us. And then afterward it wasn’t Miep’s or Bep’s decision to keep it a secret from you.” Her father scowls miserably. “It was my request that they keep silent. It was my request that they were honoring,” he says. “Quite definitely against her better judgment, in Miep’s case especially. She thought that I was doing you a great wrong.”
“And weren’t you?”
Pim’s eyes widen. He sucks in breath and shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he answers. “Honestly, I never meant to keep it secret from you. Not really. Perhaps you’re too angry to believe that right now, but it’s true,” he says. “There were many times, many times,” he repeats, “that I intended to tell you. But I simply . . . I simply couldn’t bring myself.” Pim pauses. Puts his hand to the side of his head and runs his fingers gently over his hair. “I suppose in a manner of speaking I was frightened. Frightened that if I handed over your diary, I would be losing you all over again.”
She stares at him.
“It still does frighten me,” he assures her.
“Where is it?” is all she can ask.
Her father gazes at her face, then expels a breath.
* * *
• • •
In the private office, he shuts the door behind them. Sitting down at his desk, he produces a brass key from the pocket of his waistcoat and uses it to unlock the large drawer on the bottom left. She hears the scrape of the drawer as it slides open.
“So here, my dear, dear Annelies,” her father says soberly as he plants the drawer’s contents firmly on his blotter, “is your diary.”
Silence blocks out any words.
They both stare at the stack of notebooks, one atop the other, the multicolored diary pages, loose-leaf. White, gray, salmon. Cheap wartime pulp, whatever kind of paper Miep and Bep could scrounge.
And then the red tartan plaid daybook from Blankevoorts. Anne feels a stillness enter her heart. How small it looks now. How light it feels when she picks it up.
“I hope,” says Pim, “that you will be able to forgive an old man for his many mistakes.” This is her father’s prayer. But Anne cannot yet answer it. Gingerly unclasping the lock, she lifts the cover, and her eyes land on the snapshot of a dark-eyed child attached to the page of inky script. The girl she once was. The Anne who was once her. A horrific intimacy floods her breast as she reads the first line: I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never done in anyone else before.
Her legs weaken, and she drops into the chair opposite Pim’s desk, clutching the daybook. The tears are warm on her cheeks. “You were wrong, Pim,” she whispers. “It was never yours. It was always only mine.”
And as if he is struck by lightning, Pim bursts into a sob. He shakes his head, fumbling for his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Anneke. I’m sorry,” he says, wadding the handkerchief into his eyes. “I’m so sorry.” Gently, he tries to mop himself up, saying, “I have made so many foolish choices. So many. There are times that I think there’s been a terrible mistake. That God . . .” he says, and blows his nose into his handkerchief, “that God never intended that I should leave Auschwitz alive.”
Anne gazes at him, still hugging her diary.
“I remember my poor Mutz, and I can’t help but think,” he says, “that it’s your sister’s spot I’ve taken. It seems to me that God would much prefer the children to have survived than an old man of limited worth.” He sniffs, blots his eyes again, and refolds his handkerchief, clearing his throat with a thick rumble up from his chest. “But now. Now I must think not of myself but of my daughter, Anne. Her diary has been returned to its rightful owner, and I hope it will remind her of the girl I so adored. The girl she once was. The girl who she could become again. That,” he tells Anne, “is my greatest prayer.”
27
THE PAGES OF HER LIFE
I don’t want to jot down the facts in this diary the way most people would do, but I want the diary to be my friend, and I’m going to call this friend Kitty.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 20 June 1942
It’s funny, but I can sometimes see myself as others see me. I take a leisurely look at the person called “Anne Frank” and browse through the pages of her life as though she were a stranger.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 12 January 1944
1946
Amsterdam
Closed up in the private office. Sifting through her past. The notebook with the cardboard cover of malachite green. The sandy brown book of “Stories and Events of the Achterhuis.” The long, stony gray “Book of Nice Sentences.” Sorting the pile of multicolored pages. All of it swept up from the floor in fear of the Gestapo and then stuffed into a drawer—it’s such a mess. But she reads.
When I think back to my life in 1942, it all seems so unreal. The Anne Frank who enjoyed that heavenly existence was completely different from the one who has grown wise within these walls.
* * *
Do you think Father and Mother would approve of a girl my age sitting on a divan and kissing a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old boy?
* * *
We were up at six yesterday morning, because the whole family heard the sounds of a break-in again.
There are photographs, too, pinned to the pages. Photographs of Anne and Margot.
Do you remember that day at the beach at Zandvoort? Margot wonders. She is sitting on the bed wearing the green sweater that Miep found for her in hiding. Her eyes are large and warm behind her glasses.
“Of course I do. Look at you in that bathing suit. Already so well equipped, while I was still just a twig.”
The air tasted salty, Margot says. That’s what I remember.
“I remember rolling down the dunes. It was so much fun.”
Last night Margot and I were lying side by side in my bed. It was incredibly cramped, but that’s what made it fun.
The conversation turned to the future, and I asked what she wanted to be when she was older. But she wouldn’t say and was quite mysterious about it. I gathered it had something to do with teaching; of course, I’m not absolutely sure, but I suspect it’s something along those lines. I really shouldn’t be so nosy.
Reading, she finds the ghosts of her dead still living on the page. All of them caricatured in ink. Dissected by her pen. Sometimes she can hear their voices in what she has written so clearly. It warms her and terrifies her, raising the dead.
Mrs. van Pels was so upset her face turned bright red. . . . The nonflushed mother, who now wanted to have the matter over and done with as quickly as possible, paused for a moment to think before she replied. . . .
Mother: “I didn’t say you were pushy, but no one would describe you as having a retiring disposition.”
Mrs. van Pels: “I’d like to know in what way I’m pushy! If I didn’t look out for myself here, no one else would, and I’d soon starve, but that doesn’t mean I’m not as modest and retiring as your husband.”
* * *
This morning I lay on Peter’s bed after first having chased him off it. He was furious, but I didn’t care. He might consider being a little more friendly to me from time to time.
Night. Propped up by a folded pillow on her bed. No covers and sleeping in a rayon slip. The room is hot even with the window open. She reads in secret by candl
elight so no one can see the gleam of a lamp under her door. In her hands is a stack of the cheap wartime loose-leaf she has shuffled together. Sometimes she thinks the pages are properly assembled, only to have an errant page confuse her until she picks it out and adds it to the pile beside her on the mattress. This entry in particular is a long one, July 1944, and she’s had to deal with several pages gone truant from the proper order. She rubs the tension from her eyes. Ignites a cigarette and inhales smoke.
In everything I do, I can watch myself as if I were a stranger. I can stand across from the everyday Anne and, without being biased or making excuses, watch what she’s doing, both the good and the bad. This self-awareness never leaves me. . . .
And then there is another page out of order. She frowns as she starts to remove it, but then a string of words catches her eye.
It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical.
She feels something narrow within her. A tightness behind her eyes.
Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
If she had just been stabbed in the chest with a knife blade, she could not have suffered a sharper pain. There were those at Birkenau who would seize the electrified fence as a final escape. She often wondered how that freedom would feel. The high voltage ripping through your body. It’s what she feels now in her small, flattened soul. The flash of electrical tremor as the pages fall from her hands, and she contracts into a keening knot.
28
THE CANAL
Amsterdam abounds in water, and even in the new quarters, we have not been able to suppress our hobby of canals.
—All About Amsterdam, official guide published for the Canadian Army Leave Centre HQ, 1945
1946
Amsterdam
It’s a dreary, muddy-sky day. She has been compelled to go shopping with Dassah, since Anne is outgrowing what she has in her dresser drawers. Mostly underclothes. Much of the trip is a tersely mannered affair, but at a shop on the Kalverstraat, when Anne tries on a pastel green dress with a subtle floral embroidery, she shocks herself in the mirror. Her hair is past her collar now, thick and dark in a wave, and the dress, rather than hanging on her like a sack, fits her neatly. The reflection the mirror throws back at her is womanly. Even Dassah sounds surprised. “Lovely,” her stepmother has to admit, and an oddly intimate expression touches her face. Her lips part as if she is about to speak again to Anne, but instead she turns to the shopgirl. “Wrap it up. We’ll take it, please.”
As they make their way down the sidewalk, Anne carrying the packaged dress against her breast, Dassah says, “You’re not a child any longer, Anne.”
And then they both stop dead in their tracks.
Anne grips the package tightly, her pulse beating in her belly. Sweat prickles on the back of her neck. The sight is painful. These people. Their clothes are rumpled and their faces grim and exhausted. They lug their valises or clutch bundles. Men, women, children in their mothers’ arms or groping for their parents’ hands, marched down the street by a squad of Dutch gendarmerie in khaki uniforms, rifles slung over their shoulders.
Some onlookers try to ignore the spectacle, stealing a glance before bustling onward with intentional blindness, but many stop and stare with heavy, blank expressions. A few decide it’s funny and laugh, and a few more pitch insults. “Moffen animals!” they shout. “Back to your filthy burrow!”
A stooped, middle-aged man in a dusty coat shouts back in desperation from the guarded column. “We are Netherlanders! We are Amsterdammers!” But his words are met with boos and more insults.
Anne turns frantically to a stubby little fellow beside her wearing a ragged cloth cap. “What’s happening? Who are those people?”
The little man gives her only the briefest of assessments before he replies, “Dirty krauts.” He scowls. “And God willing they’re being packed off to their rotten scumhole of a country.” He cups his hand around his mouth and hollers, “Germans out! Netherlands for the Netherlanders!”
Suddenly Anne feels Dassah take her arm. “We should go,” her stepmother whispers tautly. “We should go.”
* * *
• • •
In the Herengracht, Anne wastes no time. They find Pim just home from the office, in his shirtsleeves, with his necktie loosened. “And how was the shopping expedition?” he’s happy to inquire—and then his expression dulls.
“Pim, it’s begun,” Anne announces immediately.
“What? What’s begun?” He looks to Dassah for an explanation, but Anne is pointing toward the window, as if it’s all happening on the street outside their flat.
“The deportations, Pim. We saw them. People marched down the middle of the street under guard by soldiers with bayonets!”
“It’s true, Otto,” the new Mrs. Frank confirms. “We did see them. A dozen or so, not many. But it’s true.”
“Germans?” Pim asks.
“So it seemed,” Dassah answers. “Of course, there was no way of knowing if any of them were Jews.”
“Well, none of them were wearing the yellow star, if that’s what you mean,” Anne snaps. “At least not yet.”
“Anne, please.” Pim swallows heavily. “Don’t overreact,” he commands her.
But Anne will not be silenced. “We must go, Pim. We must all go.”
“No, I am done,” Pim replies, his expression stiffening. “I am done running, meisje. Amsterdam is our home, and here we will stay.”
In desperation Anne turns to Dassah. “Surely you must see the danger,” she breathes. “Surely you must.”
But Dassah just gazes at her, silent and inscrutable, so Anne turns back to Pim, desperate. “Send me, then, Pim. Alone. If you must stay here, then at least let me go to America.”
Pim breathes a sigh. “Anne . . .”
“I told you—I will not suffer through this. I will not be shipped like a beast back to Germany.”
Pim regards her with a mixture of shock and pity. “Anne. It alarms me. It alarms me,” he says, “to hear you say such things. That you could really feel so alone and frightened that you would have me send you off to a foreign country.”
“Better America than the land of our executioners.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, daughter,” Pim says, shaking his head. “I simply cannot conceive of losing you again. And I promise—regardless of what you may have seen today in the street—I promise you that we are in no danger.”
“No danger,” Anne repeats blackly.
“Whatever comes, we are better off together rather than apart.”
Anne turns her glare on him. “I can only remind you, Pim, that you said the same thing before the war. Mother told us. She felt so guilty, but she told us there had been a chance to send Margot and me to safety in England. You prevented it,” she says. “You prevented it because you were so convinced—so intractably convinced—that we were all better off together.”
The light in her father’s eyes flickers out, and his expression shrinks tightly against his face. “I admit it, if that’s what you wish me to do, Anne,” he tells her. “I admit that I’ve made many mistakes in this life. Mistakes that have harmed the people whom I’ve lived for. And I understand how it may be hard for even my own daughter to trust me. To trust any adult, since we’ve made such a hash of things. But nonetheless that’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.”
“No, Pim. You don’t understand. You don’t understand me.”
Pim stares at her heavily, as if from a distance. “That I don’t understand you? It may be true. Regardless of how close we have been in the past, Anneke, perhaps it’s true that I have never really known you at all.”
There’s a d
estructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!
* * *
Prinsengracht 263
Amsterdam-Centrum
The night goes, the day comes. In the Prinsengracht, Anne finds herself in the Achterhuis kitchen, where Auguste van Pels has her hair up in pins, drying the dishes that Mummy has just washed. Anne asks them if she can help, but Mummy tells her no. She says Anne is too much of a butterfingers and that soon they’ll have no dishes left. Anne thinks she should be mad at this little jab on Mummy’s part, but she’s not. The two ladies are smiling at her from the sink, and Anne is smiling, too. The patchwork of curtains dulls the light in the room. She should just sit down, Mummy advises her. She must be tired. Isn’t she tired? Mummy wonders. So Anne sits. She tries to tell them what’s happened in the time that’s passed since their arrest, since this place was their home, but neither of the women seems to understand her. They observe her with a comprehensive puzzlement. And then it’s Mr. van Pels appearing in filthy Kazetnik garments. Two yellow triangles forming the Judenstern on his corpse’s tunic. The teeth in the yawning hole of his mouth are rotting. “Anne, you be quiet,” he warns. “Do you want those people down in the warehouse to hear us?”
And then she is suddenly terrified that she has given them away.
She hears a voice call her name from far off, but she doesn’t answer because she must be quiet.
“Quiet? Ha!” Peter enters, his body emaciated in dirty KZ stripes, and laughs out loud at the very idea. “Anne Frank can never be quiet!” he says with a grin. But no one shushes him at all.
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