Stolen Secrets

by L. B. Schulman

  “But neo-Nazis … in San Francisco?” I said. “I picture them hiding in the backwoods somewhere, not hanging out in the most liberal city in the United States.”

  “Even assholes take vacations,” Franklin D. said. I couldn’t tell from his solemn expression whether he was kidding or not.

  He tossed the rest of the newspaper into the fire. I was glad to see it burn. We moved to the couch, where Dan’s new notes waited, this time scrawled on the back of a junk mail envelope.

  “For seventy-five bucks, you’d think he’d at least spring for some notebook paper,” Franklin D. said. He rested his head against the unyielding cushion and shut his eyes.

  I took a moment to prepare myself before we read the next entry, dated February 1945. It seemed that “A” had found an old friend. This was the same entry Franklin D. had mentioned earlier—the one with Anne’s nickname for her father. She mentioned Pim when she told her friend about the deaths in the family

  I sagged back on the couch, dropping my elbows to my knees. Franklin D. laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “If only she’d known her father was alive,” I whispered. “She might have fought harder to survive.”

  I knew how naïve that sounded. Typhus was a powerful disease. Stronger than willpower. The fact was that thousands of people had died during the epidemic, despite thousands of reasons to live.

  Franklin D. was kind enough not to comment.

  From there, the notes touched on Margot’s illness. Dan had translated an entire sentence: If she dies, I will be all alone in the world.

  In several places, Dan had crossed out his first guess and written a different interpretation above it. I gathered that Anne had returned to meet her friend. The girl brought extra rations for Margot, but another prisoner snatched the package and ran off, leaving Anne empty-handed.

  I cringed. I could only imagine how desperate Anne had been to help her sister.

  I looked at Franklin D., glad to have finished the page, though I knew there was more to go. “I can’t stand reading this, knowing how it will end,” I said. Dan’s translation of the last entry wasn’t dated. “You read it.” I thrust it at him.

  Franklin D. began to interpret the skeletal outline. “I think this is the part where her sister dies,” he said. “She just fell out of the bunk, dead on the floor, and the ‘vultures’”—he looked up—“I’m guessing that refers to some prisoners. Anyway, they grabbed Margot’s shoes and a heel of bread under her pillow.” It took two roll calls that day before the head count matched the roster.

  I skipped ahead to some words Dan had written in quotes. “What does that say?” My eyes were too blurred to read it myself. Also, it seemed less frightening when sifted through Franklin D.’s voice.

  He took a deep breath. “It says, ‘I asked everyone, Have you seen my sister? I asked again and again, despite getting the same answer each time.’”

  I was silent as Franklin D. kept reading.

  “She’s not well,” he told me. “She says she wants to be remembered for more than the numbers on her arm.”

  I brushed my fingers up my own arm.

  “Wait a sec …,” he said, a spark of hope in his voice.

  “What?”

  “Hold on.” I watched his eyes skip back and forth over the same sentences. “She might get on a train. I think she has a new friend. Maybe from the infirmary, because she’s sick now. She’s telling the friend that the train is her last hope, only …”

  “Only what?”

  Franklin D. looked up at me, the hope stamped out. “Dan doesn’t say.”

  “Oh my God,” I gasped, flipping the paper over. “Where’s the rest? Where is it?” I searched Franklin D.’s eyes for the unanswerable.

  Unanswerable, because there wasn’t any more.

  This was all there was.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  AT NOON ON SUNDAY, FRANKLIN D. AND I MET AT THE park by his house. I knew he expected me to climb off the bus near the playground where we were supposed to meet, but I walked the three miles instead. I needed time to sort the chaotic thoughts competing in my head.

  I had to bring sense to an insensible theory.

  By the time I got there, I was ready.

  The park was empty except for a border collie that appeared on the hill behind us. The dog retrieved his ball from a flower bed and vanished into a row of bushes.

  I sat down on the swing, Franklin D. beside me. “Did you know that The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in at least sixty-seven languages?” I said.

  “Nope, can’t say that I did.”

  “In 1955, they made it into a play. It won the Pulitzer Prize.” I pushed off the ground, pumping my legs, rising higher. “Four years later, it became a movie. It won three Academy Awards, and Shelley Winters got an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, which she donated to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.”

  Franklin D. sat motionless, mulling it over, as I flew past him. Finally he said, “Are you aware that you rely on facts when you’re feeling emotional?”

  I dug my heels into the dirt, jerking to a stop. “So, what’s wrong with that? Facts tell the truth better than feelings.”

  “I disagree,” he said. “You need both.”

  He sounded like my mother. “I’m not talking about me here. I’m talking about a book that’s impacted millions of lives. A diary that symbolizes almost six million Jews who died during the Holocaust.”

  “Almost six million?” Franklin D. teased.

  “Technically, 5,860,000, but normal people round it up for ease.”

  “I hate that word.”

  Ironically I wanted to say something not so normal. What I was thinking was completely unfactual, irreverent, so outlandish as to be potentially disrespectful to Anne Frank’s memory.

  “There were thousands of people on the last three transports out of Bergen-Belsen,” I said. “Almost all of them were Dutch citizens. Prisoners of political consequence to use as barter for captured Germans. The thing was, Anne’s father was in charge of a successful company. She should have been on that train, but no one knew that. Her father wasn’t with her anymore. She was alone, with no one to help.”

  I slid my hand into my pocket for an article by Rabbi Joseph Polak. I handed it to Franklin D. I was impatient as he read and interrupted, “The first train—the one Anne mentioned in her pages—traveled for six days before it was liberated by the Americans.” I guess I was as ready as I was going to be. “But what if Anne got on the train somehow? What if she was so sick that when it finally stopped, she wandered off, and someone took her to a local home to recover?” I summed up the last paragraph for him. “Most of the passengers said the trip was a haze.”

  I shut up so he could read the article again in peace.

  “It doesn’t mention Anne Frank at all,” he said a minute later. “I don’t get why she’d be on that transport, anyway. I can see why she’d want to be on it, but she wasn’t from the barrack where most of the prisoners came from.”

  “Sternlager,” I offered, recognizing that I was straddling the line between knowledgeable and know-it-all. “It was where important Dutch citizens lived. If her dad had been at Bergen-Belsen, that’s where they would’ve stayed.”

  Franklin D. let out a whispered sigh. “The history books say Anne died in March. Maybe even February, a month or two before Bergen-Belsen was liberated. Didn’t some women in the barracks say they thought Anne had died a day after her sister?”

  “This magazine I read, Scientific American, says eyewitness accounts are highly unreliable. Especially under stressful circumstances.” A wet tennis ball skipped over my foot. I kicked it down the hill, and the collie bounded after it. “Look, there isn’t proof that it happened. But there isn’t proof that it didn’t, either. Like I said, facts tell the truth better than feelings.”

  “A barrack leader said she saw Anne in a coma.”

  “What if she was confused? What if she just thought it wa
s Anne?” I said. “People died all the time, every day. Even if it was her, someone might have taken her to the hospital. What if she got better?”

  “She had typhus, Liv. It’s a deadly disease, especially if a person’s not eating decently and living in dirty conditions. Anne’s sister died of it. They were both buried in a mass grave.”

  “But did anyone see their bodies?” I knew the answer because I’d researched it.

  “A lot of people were buried in those graves. Just because they weren’t identified doesn’t mean they didn’t die.” His voice was soft, as if he wanted to be respectful of my new way of thinking, even if he believed, deep down, that it was crap.

  The sun ducked behind the clouds. I tucked my hands under my armpits to keep warm. “I’m just saying … oh, never mind.”

  Franklin D. studied me for a moment. “No, wait. Let’s talk this out. If Anne had survived, wouldn’t she have run to her father as soon as she learned he was alive? She loved her dad more than anyone.”

  “People don’t look for relatives they think are dead. Not to mention, she was near death herself. It probably took her a while to recover.”

  “But she would have found out he was alive when her diary was published.”

  “Maybe she did go see him. What if they decided together that she should stay underground? I mean, by that time, the world had put her on a pedestal as a symbol for the Holocaust, right?”

  “Interesting,” he admitted. “As a Jew, I get that. It wouldn’t be easy for her to say, ‘Hey, everybody, look at me, I didn’t die after all.’”

  “The book, the play, the movies … Anne Frank was arguably the single most important connection that people had with the Holocaust,” I said. “If it were you, wouldn’t you have asked, What has more impact, my death or my life?”

  “Maybe,” Franklin D. conceded.

  This wasn’t the wildest part of my theory. Not even close. “Last night, I woke up at three in the morning. The word chatterbox was stuck in my head. I wondered if Oma had used it for a more logical reason than because she heard Anne Frank tell a story in the hospital.”

  Franklin D. saw where I was going with this, I could tell. He answered my question, but not in the way I expected. “The chatterbox story is in the attic diary. Anyone could have read it there.”

  Defending wacky theories was more his style than mine. Still, I had to see this through. “Oma once said something about a ‘last train out.’ I thought she meant the one my mother got on, which was the last time my mom came to San Francisco to visit her, but now I’m wondering if she meant something else.” My words filled the space around us, blocking out the street sounds.

  “What exactly are you saying, Liv?”

  Franklin D. was going to make me say it. He was going to make me claim a theory that no one else in the world shared. I couldn’t shake a fear that once it was out, it couldn’t be taken back.

  I did it, anyway. “I think my grandmother is Anne Frank.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  WE CREPT INTO THE HOUSE AND VEERED RIGHT. Franklin D. waited in my bedroom. I headed to the kitchen to pour the gallon of milk down the drain. Step one in my plan.

  I found Vickie in Oma’s room, tucking a sheet around my grandmother’s legs. Oma’s eyes were closed. She had the sweetest smile on her face, like she was dreaming wonderful things.

  Vickie noticed me standing by the door. She pressed a finger to her mouth. I waited for her to finish, then trailed behind her to the kitchen, where she snapped, “Yes?”

  “We’re out of milk.”

  “That’s not possible. I just bought some two days ago.”

  I shrugged. “Oma’s been drinking a lot of it lately.”

  She looked into the fridge and frowned. “You know I need milk for my coffee, Livvy. Didn’t I ask you to tell me if it’s running low?” She pulled a wad of cash out of her wallet, peeling off a ten-dollar bill. “Please bring me the receipt so I can expense it.”

  “I have homework. I’ll get it later.”

  She gave a dramatic huff. “Fine, I’ll go. But you’ll have to watch your grandma until I get back.”

  My smile was so warm, it could start a fire.

  After Vickie left, I darted down the hallway and flung open my bedroom door. Franklin D. followed me to Oma’s bedroom. She was in the same position Vickie had left her, flat on her back. A snore rumbled in her chest. Franklin D. and I nodded at the same time. I leaned over my grandmother and inched back the sleeve of her blouse, as gently as if I were removing a bandage from a burn wound. Oma didn’t move, didn’t stop snoring.

  When we were in the park, we’d used Franklin D.’s phone to look up Anne Frank’s tattoo number on the U.S. Holocaust site. The exact identification record hadn’t been preserved, but the site listed a range of possible numbers. Franklin D. started to write them down, but with me around, it was pointless. The facts lodged in my head, an endless reservoir for details that kept to themselves most of the time, but surfaced with random thoughts to remind me of their existence. For as long as I lived, I would never forget that Anne, Margot, and Edith Frank had been inked with numbers that fell between A-25060 to A-25271.

  Now, with Oma’s arm exposed, we saw the tattoo. Only it wasn’t what we expected. An inch-thick black line covered whatever numbers had once existed. The name HERBERT floated above it.

  With Vickie at the store, Franklin D. and I checked that the papers were still hidden in the library. The zipper was in the same position as I’d left it. As I closed the cushion back up, I twisted the tab until the teeth bent. Now it would take scissors to open it. Vickie was a snoop, but she wouldn’t destroy furniture to feed her curiosity.

  We searched in the kitchen for the memoir. My best guess was that my grandmother had shed her identity after the war, shutting out her child, and maybe even her husband. I was more determined than ever to find the answers that she wouldn’t give when she was younger and that she couldn’t give now.

  “I’m sure she put that tattoo over her camp numbers,” I told Franklin D. as I pushed a waffle iron to the side to search the cabinet. I had looked for the memoir there before, but I couldn’t rest until I double-checked every inch of the house.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Franklin D. climbed up on a chair to look on top of the fridge.

  I turned to face him. “What do you mean?”

  “Granted, it’s a compelling idea, but it goes against historical fact.”

  “You always said facts aren’t everything.”

  “I think it’s too early to jump to conclusions.” He stepped off the chair and crouched down, peering into the bottom cupboard.

  I kneeled beside him. “Anne was born in 1929, which would make her eighty-eight now. Remember when I suggested that Oma had been a kid, listening to Anne’s stories, and you said she looked too old now to have been that young? But she could be in her late eighties, right?”

  “Doesn’t your mom know how old she is?”

  “She said Oma pretended to be thirty for a really long time.”

  Franklin D. laughed. “Sounds like her.”

  “So?” I waited expectantly.

  “Do you think she looks like Anne Frank?” he asked.

  I shrugged. I still hadn’t found any of her photo albums, and it wasn’t easy seeing similarities between a teenager and an old lady. I told him this. “Don’t you think it’s possible that she might have done something to change her appearance anyway? If she was Anne, people would recognize her after the diary became a best seller.”

  “What do you mean, like plastic surgery?” Franklin D. asked. “Did they even do that back then?”

  “Actually, I read there was an increase after World War II.” I’d done my research, and I wanted Franklin D. to know every bit of it. “When the injured soldiers stopped coming in, the doctors targeted women to keep their practices going.” I saw the skepticism on his face. “What? You think this is crazy?”

  Franklin D.
shook his head. “Just playing devil’s advocate here.”

  Well, don’t, I thought.

  “If the average life expectancy of an inmate at Bergen-Belsen was only nine months,” he continued, “and in March, alone, 18,168 people died … it would take a miracle for a girl as sick as Anne Frank to have survived.”

  It was both sweet—and frustrating—that he’d memorized facts to persuade me.

  “Let’s keep looking for the memoir,” Franklin D. said when I didn’t respond. “Why don’t you check the pantry? Didn’t you say your mom found some stuff that Oma had put in there?”

  “Yeah, her purse,” I said.

  I looked behind the boxes of cereal. Most were open and long expired. I started to chuck them, but Franklin D. stopped me. “Vickie has to find things exactly the way she left them.”

  We moved into the living room next, even though we’d looked there many times before. I peered under the couch, hoping to find a manuscript obscured by dust. Franklin D. lifted the heavy drapes off the floor, searching for a hiding spot within the folds of velvet.

  “It’s not in this room,” I said. I crossed the floral rug to the porcelain Siamese cat, staring haughtily at us from the fireplace hearth. I gave a cursory glance behind it and froze. Franklin D. came to my side. A tiny green dot glowed on the baby monitor. I turned it off. How long had it been there? And why?

  We heard a click at the door. I barely had time to step back from the hearth when Vickie walked into the room, holding a gallon of milk. “I’m back. I’m going to go put this in the fridge.” Her eyes swung away from me, narrowing for a flash before her lips curved into a smile. “Hello, Franklin.”

  D. I thought to myself. Franklin D.

  “Hi, Vickie,” he said.

  “Listen, since I have you both here, I want to extend the olive branch. I know it’s been a stressful time since Gretchen left. For all of us. Livvy, I know you’ve gone through a lot since moving here. As for me, it’s been hard to make ends meet on a caregiver’s salary, but the job market’s horrible right now.”