But the rabbi does not seem to be interested in asking anyone such a question. He removes a packet of cheap Dutch cigarettes from his jacket and lights one from the brass table lighter. “We knew each other, Werner and I,” he says. “In Auschwitz.”
Anne raises her eyes at the mention of the name.
The rabbi shrugs. “Four months I spent in that place.” The smoke he expels merges with Anne’s and hangs heavily above them. “We were on the same labor Kommando once, digging drainage ditches outside the wire. When I fell, it was Werner Nussbaum who stood me back on my feet. Saved me from the lash of the Kapo. Shared his bread with me. So I do know something about the man and the content of his heart.”
“I’m sorry,” Anne says, tasting shame. “I’m sorry, no one told me.”
“No need to apologize. It was a place of cruelty. I don’t have to explain that to you. But it was also a place of deep humanity.” He takes in smoke and then releases it. “May I ask you, Anne? Are you also angry with your father?”
Anne stiffens. Says nothing.
“I think you must be,” the rabbi tells her. “Suffering through such hell. Your father should have protected you, correct? I mean, isn’t that what fathers are for? So you blame him.”
“Not just him,” Anne answers tightly.
“Oh, yes.” He nods. “Yes, yes. Would you be surprised if I told you that I, too, know something about assigning blame?” the rabbi wonders. “I lost my wife and my two brothers, zekher kadosh livrakha. My brothers to Mauthausen. My wife to the gas straight off the train into Birkenau, because she was pregnant.”
Anne is sobered by this. The rabbi breathes out smoke.
“Yet you survived,” says Anne.
“I did,” the rabbi admits.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think it was God?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re a rabbi.”
“Many rabbis died. Most did.”
“Maybe God just overlooked you.”
“You think God was making the decisions at Auschwitz?”
“You think he wasn’t? Isn’t he the Master of the Universe?”
“I can’t blame the gas chambers on God,” he says. “It was men who built them. Men who operated them.”
“So you don’t think that there was a reason that you survived? When all those other rabbis didn’t? You don’t think it was because there was something important you had yet to do?”
“Perhaps it was to talk with you.”
Anne shakes her head. “That’s not funny.”
“It wasn’t meant as a joke, Anne. How should I know? I would like to think that God saved me. Me, in particular, Armin Souza, for an unseen purpose. It’s very flattering. But I have no proof that my survival wasn’t utterly random.”
“Do you know why I lived?” she asks.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No. I’m asking a question. What if it was a mistake? What if God picked the wrong Frank girl?”
“Again, I cannot explain his thinking. I cannot comprehend his purposes. It’s not for us to know. But what I can tell you is this: Now that you have survived, you have a duty.”
“To the dead,” she says.
“No. To the living. To yourself. To you. Your family dies, and you blame them for dying. You blame God, you blame your father, you blame yourself. I know. But you cannot keep it up. You cannot live on rage or grief. As much as you’d like to believe it’s possible, it is not. You cannot live with the joy draining out of every day that passes. You survived the camps? Thank God. Now you must survive the rest of your life. More than survive. You must learn happiness, Anne. You must learn forgiveness.”
Anne smokes, says nothing for a moment, until, “My sister,” she says. “Her name was Margot. She wanted to make aliyah. She wanted to become a maternity nurse and deliver babies in the promised land.”
“And you thought that was . . . what? Admirable? Ridiculous?”
“Both, maybe,” she says. “I don’t know. It’s just another reason that she should have been allowed to live.”
“Instead of you?”
Anne has no reply.
“I would have traded my life for that of my wife,” he says. “If I could have snapped my fingers or clapped my hands. I would have done it. How much simpler would it be to be dead. To be relieved of the responsibility of carrying on. But that’s not the way of the world, Anne. As you must know. Others die. We live. The best we can hope for is to make something of ourselves. To help others. To resist anger and fear and guilt and to move forward with the business of living.”
“But what . . .” Anne swallows. She stares into the smoke of her cigarette. “What if I can’t do that, Rabbi? Get on with the business of living? You make it sound like an easy choice.”
“Have I?” the rabbi asks. “Then I apologize. It is a choice,” he says. “But I never intended to make it sound easy.” He crushes out his cigarette. “When I think of the future, I do my best to compromise. It shall be as God wills and what we make of God’s will.” Rabbi Souza blinks slowly. “Are you familiar, Anne, with the notion of tikkun olam?”
Anne says nothing.
“Tikkun olam,” the rabbi repeats. “It’s something of a mystery. But I have come to define its meaning as ‘repairing the world.’”
Anne shakes her head. “How is such a thing possible?”
“Repairing the world is a Jewish obligation,” the rabbi says. “How? That’s the question we must all ask and answer for ourselves, Anne. This much, though, I can say: We must learn to conquer our anger. We must put our faith in the sheer beauty of God’s creation and practice repentance and forgiveness. Even if we don’t want to. Even if we don’t feel it in our hearts. Especially then. It is our duty to repair the damage we have done and therefore repair the damage done to us.”
Anne eyes her smoldering cigarette, the ember glowing red. Repairing the world? She is unwilling to reveal it, but the rabbi’s words have pierced her in an unexpected way. And some hidden part of her responds with a soupçon of hope.
* * *
• • •
That night she dreams of Belsen, and there Margot is waiting for her. They are spooned together on the filthy pallet, desiccated by typhus. Her sister coughing away the last moments of her life.
“Forgive me,” Anne whispers. “Please, forgive me,” she begs.
32
TRUTH
The truth is a heavy burden that few care to carry.
—Jewish proverb
1946
Prinsengracht 263
Offices of Opekta and Pectacon
Amsterdam-Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Anne dashes around to the landing and up the steps, unlatches the bookshelf, and pushes it aside to enter the Achterhuis. She is pulling off her shoes so the squeak of the floorboards won’t give her away. The anonymous men in dark suits have appeared once again and have been admitted into the private office. She can already hear the indistinct murmur of voices below her as she lies down and presses her ear to the floor so she can listen in. Margot appears beside her, her ear pressed to the floor as well. Her Kazetnik rags crawling with lice, she complains urgently, Anne, I can’t hear them. I can’t hear them. What are they saying?
Anne’s eyes have gone wet with the shock of rage that has gripped her by the heart. “They’re saying,” she whispers hotly, “that our father is a collaborator.”
* * *
• • •
For now the men in the dark suits have finished. But as Pim sees them off at the top of the stairs, Anne slips into the private office and fills one of the chairs, the cushion still warm. When Pim returns to find her there, he stops dead. His breath shortens. Maybe the soldier in him has just detected an ambush. “Anne?” He spe
aks guardedly. “Anne, what’s wrong?”
“I heard everything,” she tells him, staring blankly.
Pim pauses. “And what does that mean, exactly? You heard everything?”
“You know what it means,” she insists. “I heard the truth, Pim. I was upstairs with my ear to the floor, and I heard the truth. All this time you pretended that it was just a simple business matter. A bureaucratic problem.”
“And it always was.”
“I was afraid they were going to deport you because you were German, but that was never the reason they were here, was it, Pim? They were here because you were selling goods to the German Wehrmacht.”
Pim swallows. After quietly closing the office door, he sits in his padded chair with a careful creak of leather, as if he might be sitting on a land mine to keep it from exploding. His eyes dampen. “Anne . . .” he whispers. A plea.
“How could you, Pim?”
Her father draws a shallow breath and holds it as he repeats her name. “Anne, please. You must try to understand. It was wartime.”
“How can that be any kind of justification? You. A Jew. A Jew! Yet you profited by selling to the murderers of our people, Pim! The murderers of our neighbors. Of our family!”
“Anne, don’t say something you’ll be unable to take back,” Pim warns her bleakly. “The truth is that this sort of transaction was commonplace. The occupation authority was in control and had an army to supply. If they were interested in doing business with your company, then you simply accepted their price concessions and put your signature on the contracts. We were given no alternative. It was either supply them or be shut down. And we couldn’t afford that possibility,” he says thickly. “Business was terrible. Nonexistent. We needed the Wehrmacht’s money coming in—please, can’t you understand that? Maybe it was just a trickle, but it was enough to buy food to feed us in hiding.”
But Anne’s anger is not slackened. “You made us war profiteers, Pim. Criminals. Taking money from those who planned to slaughter us. And now the government’s going to put us on the list for deportation.”
“No, Anne.”
“They did Mr. Nussbaum. And he was innocent! Of any crime.”
“Werner Nussbaum made his own troubles,” Pim insists heatedly. “I warned him to simply pay the taxes, as abhorrent as they might be, and not to make unnecessary enemies. But he was stubborn. He was stubborn from the day I met him in the barracks block, and he wouldn’t listen.”
“At least he was true to his own convictions.”
“Did I make a mistake, Anne?” Pim bursts out, his ears pinking with anger. “Perhaps I did! But at that critical moment, I believed that what I was doing was best for us all. Selling the Wehrmacht pectin? A few hundred barrels of spices? I believed I was protecting us, Anne. And if I was wrong—if that was a sin—I cannot change that now. Our regrets may be strong in our hearts, but none of them are strong enough to alter the past.”
“And did Mummy know?” she asks sharply.
Her father stops. Stares before he answers simply, “I never kept secrets from your mother.”
A sharp knock at the door, and in steps Dassah, a scolding expression clamped onto her face, one that she seldom wears at work. “What is going on here? We can hear your voices raised all the way in the front office.”
“What about her?” Anne demands. “I don’t suppose you keep secrets from her either. Does she know all about your dealings with the mof assassins?”
For once Anne seems to have actually taken Dassah by surprise. Her stepmother blanches. Steps in and quickly secures the door behind her. “You told her this?” she asks Pim pointedly.
“Hadas, please. No need for you to tangle yourself up.”
“No? I think there’s every need,” says Dassah.
“Daughter,” Pim says, and Anne shouts back.
“Don’t call me that! I don’t want to be your daughter any longer. Don’t you understand that? I’m not your daughter any longer!”
If she had pulled out a dagger and plunged it into his heart, Pim could not look any more horrified. His face goes white.
“Get out,” Dassah tells her in a lethal tone. “Get out of here. You want to be free? Then go! Be free. But don’t you dare say another word.”
But before Anne can react, she hears a quick knock and the door pops open a crack, just wide enough for Miep to stick her head into the space. “I’m sorry for the interruption,” she says. “But, Anne, there’s a lady here to see you.”
“A lady?” Anne’s eyes are sharp.
“Yes. I think you should see her.”
* * *
• • •
With her heart still thumping, Anne abandons her father and follows Miep out into the front office. There, standing by the door, is a woman, tall and thin with a swanlike neck. Her hair is a dark bob, peppered with gray, and she is wearing a long beige raincoat, her right hand tucked into the pocket. Her eyes smile, though there is a weariness in them. “Ah. You must be Anne,” she decides, and steps forward. “I’m Setske Beek-de Haan,” she says. “Though I suppose you might know me better by my pen name. Cissy van Marxveldt.”
33
ATONEMENT
Rebuild the ancient ruins and lay the foundations for ages to come; you will be called the “repairer of the breach” and the “restorer of streets to dwell in.”
—Isaiah 58:12
1946
Café Wildschut
Roelof Hartplein
Amsterdam-Zuid
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Sunlight spreads across the square, gleaming down the length of the tram power lines suspended over the street. The rose-brick building forms an elegant L.
Is this God’s hand? Could it be that after such a horrendous row with Pim, God has decided to give her a way out? Why? Perhaps she’s simply worn him down. Perhaps the Master of the Universe is simply so sick of hearing her kvetch that he’s decided to step in by sending her this angel in the form of Cissy van Marxveldt. Could it be? Her heart is thumping.
“Mrs. Beek,” Anne starts to say.
“No—please—call me Cissy.”
“Cissy,” Anne says. “I don’t know what to say. Mr. Nussbaum said you were friends. But honestly. Honestly, I sometimes wondered if that was just a dream.”
Cissy breathes a sigh. “I’m so saddened by the loss of our friend Werner,” she tells Anne. “What a heartache that it should end for him so. I know that I missed his funeral. I intended to be there, but when the time came, I simply could not bring myself to . . .” Her words trail off. “He was a very kind man. There was a time before the war that Werner was quite encouraging to me. I often sent him drafts of my work, and he was always very gentle. Very candid in his assessments, mind you.” She smiles. “He didn’t suffer any laziness or half efforts. But he was always very gentle. I think he felt most useful to the world when he was working with writers. Writers like myself at times, who’d already experienced a modicum of success, but most especially with the young and talented variety who were just starting out.” Cissy says this and then looks into Anne’s face. “He thought you were quite the find, Anne.”
This takes Anne aback. Perhaps up until this moment only half of her believed that Mr. Nussbaum’s encouragements were real. Her other half suspected that they were born out of pity or out of his comradeship with Pim. But to have proof that he truly was discussing her with one of Anne’s literary heroines . . . well, it’s absolutely startling.
“He was always full of superlatives when it came to you. So much so that, to be perfectly truthful,” Cissy tells her, “I had my doubts. How could such a young girl possibly possess the necessary maturity to produce the level of work he was describing? I thought he must be exaggerating. Until I read your pages,” she says.
Anne tilts her head. “My pages?”
“Yes. From yo
ur diary.” Picking up her purse, Cissy opens it in her lap. Anne watches her withdraw a kraft paper envelope bearing an Amsterdam postmark, then watches her open it and remove the contents. Anne gazes with blank shock at the stack of neatly typed pages Cissy is holding. “This passage especially struck me: ‘In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.’” Cissy looks up and expels a small sigh. “Astonishing. Wonderful, and terrifying, and astonishing.”
“Where?” Anne practically gasps. “Where did you get this?”
“Where?” A half smile, mildly perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“Who gave you these pages?”
“Well, they came in the post. From your stepmother. Hadassah is her name, isn’t it?”
Anne can barely speak. “Yes,” is all she can manage.
“She wrote me a note explaining that Werner had given her my postal address and asked her to forward a sample for me to read.”
Anne says nothing more, though she can feel her pulse in her throat.
Cissy leans over and brushes the envelope with her fingertips. “Now I must ask you. The events you describe in these pages, they are all perfectly true?”
Anne blinks. “Yes,” she answers.
“This is your diary of life, as you recorded it. Nothing imaginary added.”
“Nothing,” she answers.
“Good.” Cissy takes a breath of satisfaction. “Good, because it must remain what it is and nothing more. The diary of a girl trapped by the darkest of circumstances. But also the diary of a girl who rises above the danger,” she says, “even as it overcomes her.”
Annelies Page 35