I dried my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket. “Thank you,” I whispered.
While we were being honest, I knew there was something I had to say. I began in chronological order, from the day she left for rehab to this moment, leaving nothing out. I even told her about Franklin D., though I blushed through the details. When I got to the part about the robbers looking for Anne Frank’s concentration camp diary, Mom’s hand flew to her mouth, but she kept listening. “I found out the truth when the safe was broken into. There were pictures inside, and a memoir she wrote. Oma wasn’t a prisoner, Mom. She was a Nazi.”
I watched her face carefully. Her eyes drifted to the Cliff House restaurant, perched on the edge of the bluff beside us. “Yes, she was,” she said finally.
Although I’d suspected that she’d known, the hurt, anger, and betrayal dropped like a boulder in my stomach. “How could you keep something like that a secret, especially from me?”
“That’s not a simple question to answer.” She looked down at the paper that listed her mistakes. It wasn’t going to help her with this one. I figured she’d sidestep the question, but she didn’t. “You deserve the truth, Livvy. I told you I didn’t have an easy time with my mother, but she wasn’t as bad as I let on. I exaggerated, because I didn’t want you to get to know her.”
Mom looked up from the paper, meeting my eyes. Then she folded her notes in half and tucked them into her purse. “When I was in college, I visited her. That’s when I found that book she wrote. The memoir. I read half of it, and it made me so sick, I couldn’t read another word. My mother was a monster! I told her what I thought, but she didn’t care. She kept talking about some big publisher, as if that would fix everything. I was furious. My mother was going to tell everyone that she was a Nazi? It was appalling, what she’d done. All the outrageous lies she told us. She let my dad and me think that she was Jewish. I knew if the truth came out, her life wouldn’t be the only one ruined.” Mom scooped up a handful of sand and let it sift through her fingers. “The last time I saw her, we got into an ugly fight, she dropped me off at the train station, and, well, you know the rest.”
“And so you told me that my grandmother was dead.” It stung that my mother had transferred her dishonest up-bringing to her own daughter.
“I didn’t want you to end up hating her as much as I did. It poisoned my life.”
I thought about what Franklin D. had said about my grandmother having to carry her own burdens. “If you’d told me, life might’ve been easier for you. Maybe you wouldn’t have an alcohol problem,” I said. “Did you talk about this with anyone at Evergreen?”
She shook her head. “Because Tom’s my sponsor, they let him help me, privately. I needed someone I really trusted. He’s been great, Liv. He helped me see that I was using alcohol as an anesthetic. I realized it was my mother’s deal, not mine. It was fair for me to walk away, because she’d hurt me so deeply with her lies and secrets, all her stolen identities.”
“It seems like you’ve figured it all out,” I said.
She smiled, taking it as a compliment. Maybe it was, but I couldn’t shake the knot in my chest. “I could have handled the truth,” I insisted.
She sighed. “I know.”
We watched the waves break over a rock, erupting into frothy spray. After a moment, she said, “The lies took on a life of their own. First, between my mother and me, and without my even knowing it, my relationship with you.”
“Mom—,” I started.
She cut me off. “Please, hear me out. I don’t want you to say anything. I need to tell you how sorry I am. I really messed up, Livvy.”
I nodded, already understanding why she’d made the choices she had, even though I didn’t agree with them. The sun, breaking through the ceiling of fog, seemed to melt the ice around my heart.
“This isn’t part of the ninth step, Liv, but I just want to thank you for all you’ve done for my mother. Knowing you were in charge gave me permission to focus on myself.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Then I thought of something. “Mom, have you made amends to Oma?”
“I tried, but she probably couldn’t hear me. I told her what I did wrong, but when it comes to forgiving her, I’m not sure I can. I’m not sure I even want to.”
I got that. I mean, it would be a nice world if we could all forgive and forget, but I knew that wasn’t always realistic. “I have her memoir if you ever want to read the rest of it,” I said.
“Maybe one day,” she said. “Not now.”
Her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and told me it was the hospital. She listened for a moment to the voice at the other end, then said, “Okay. We’ll be over soon.”
I tensed as she turned toward me. “Oma’s had a slight change. The doctor says she groaned in response to stimuli. She’s had some eye movement, too. They say she’s in a ‘light coma’ now. They don’t know how long it will last, and it could be fleeting. Do you want to go back to the hospital?”
I nodded. Mom typed in a quick text to Tom, asking him to pick us up.
As we walked to the curb, she said, “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel so fragile.”
I smiled. “That’s something. I’ll take that.”
I felt different, too. I’d become the kind of person who spoon-fed an old woman. I had a best friend who spoke four languages: English, JavaScript, C++, and Perl. I’d discovered that I was attracted to a brand-new type—the typeless type. And I could forgive my mother for messing up my life, because in some ways, it had forced me to make a better one.
Yeah, life was funny that way.
There was this prayer Mom said at the end of her AA meetings: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.
My grandmother was a criminal. I could judge her for her part in crimes against countless innocent people. I could turn my back on her, like Mom had. Or I could see Oma as she had been: a girl around my age, who’d sold her soul to believe in a world of Hitler’s creation—one that promised jobs, solutions to economic problems, and a shiny new nation. A girl who’d ruined many lives, including her own.
I remember thinking that Franklin D. wouldn’t have hidden who he was, even in the face of persecution. His reaction would be highly personal, tied to his life experiences. Without knowing where people came from, it was difficult to judge, or even understand, other people.
So in the end I decided to accept Oma solely for who she was to me—my grandmother. I was her last hope for absolution, the only person who could forgive her when she couldn’t even forgive herself.
I looked at the closed hospital door one last time, then went inside. Oma lay on her back, still as a block of wood. The disease had whittled her down, robbing her of memory and agility. The stroke had stolen everything else. I cleared strands of hair from her forehead. Her skin was as soft as suede.
Who was this woman? Not Adelle Friedman, the name she’d taken on through imagination and marriage. Without hearing her truth, the sum of her parts, the essence of her being was lost forever.
I sat down on the edge of her bed and took the last page of the memoir out of my purse. I read it out loud.
“I knew it was treason to help a prisoner of war. During those last months at Bergen-Belsen, I felt more like a traitor to my own people than a good-hearted person. Over time, though, I realized I had done too little, too late. I was, as it turned out, a traitor to my own God.”
I placed the page back in my bag and looked at Oma. She showed no signs of having heard. She was a sliver of the powerful, but overwhelming, woman she’d once been.
I weighed the facts one last time. My grandmother had made some horrific choices. But the reality was, I loved her in spite of it. Lifting her papery hand in mine, I bent down and kissed her cheek.
“I know what you did, Oma, and I forgive you.”
She didn’t nod, or blink, or raise a finger. The room was silent ex
cept for the occasional grunt of equipment that worked to keep her alive. Even so, I chose to think she heard me.
That evening, at 7:46 p.m., my grandmother, Lillian Johanna Pfeiffer, passed away.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Dear Dad,
Remember about a month ago when you asked me to tell you when would be a good time for a visit? I’ve changed my mind. I think summer would be great. It will be nice to see you, Maggie, and the twins, so let me know the best time for you, okay?
—Liv
I sent the e-mail and headed out to meet Franklin D. at the Union Square tree lighting. He was going to show me his cardboard holographic glasses that transformed Christmas lights into a thousand Stars of David.
As I passed by the mirror that Tom had hung on the back of my bedroom door in our new Noe Valley apartment, I checked to make sure that I didn’t have lip gloss on my teeth. I adjusted my Statistics Is the Art of Never Having to Say You’re Wrong T-shirt, pulling it down over my hips, and made a face at myself.
Ready or not, I thought, here I am.
The day after New Year’s, I got a call from Officer Nidra. He told me that I’d been right about the password. Mostly. The social security number belonged to a caregiver with a different name: Laura Pratt. Vickie—or Laura, as it turned out—had made quite a business out of stealing from elderly clients. When they died, she moved to a different state and became a new person.
“The bills,” I gasped. “Vickie paid a lot of Oma’s bills. She had the checkbook.”
“These people always find a way to ‘help’ with financial business. Laura Pratt embezzled over five thousand dollars from your grandmother’s bank account.”
My feelings about Vickie had been vague and uncomfortable. Why hadn’t I gone to Mr. Laramie? Deep down, I knew why. I hadn’t had the facts to back my gut. I remembered the Faulkner quote that Oma had shared with me the first day I met her: Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other. Maybe Faulkner hadn’t meant that facts were meaningless. Maybe what he’d been saying all along was that truth demanded more than facts.
“Unfortunately we didn’t find your grandmother’s pearl necklace in Ms. Pratt’s apartment,” Officer Nidra said. “But I have the Star of David one, and a silver ring with a few rubies that you can see if you recognize. I’ll bring them to your home tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” Mom had mentioned a missing ring. Probably fell down the sink, she’d said.
“Laura Pratt has a long rap sheet. In fact, she’s been legally prohibited from caregiving. Stolen jewelry, money, an undue-influence charge regarding an estate, and in two cases, elder abuse.”
I cringed, thinking about all the times she’d been alone with Oma. If something had happened, my grandmother wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone.
“I do have some good news to report,” Officer Nidra said. “We accessed the e-mail you mentioned, and Ryan Johnson did make an airline reservation for December 28 on Hawaiian Airlines for himself and Laura Pratt. When they arrived in Kauai, we had a greeting committee waiting. They were taken in for questioning and booked for robbery. They didn’t even get to see the beach, I hear.”
“That’s great,” I said, relieved for my own reasons, but also because I didn’t want them to hurt anyone else. “What about the other charges?”
“That’s going to take us a little longer. We’re being careful so it’s a solid case. We believe a few of them belong to a group of neo-Nazis we’ve been after for some time. Laura Pratt’s boyfriend seems eager to cut a deal with us, so we think he’ll turn in the leader.”
“The guy with the deep voice?”
“Yes,” he said, surprised. “How did you know that?”
“Just a gut feeling.”
“Well, your gut’s impressive.”
I smiled. “Happy New Year, Officer Nidra.”
“Happy New Year, Ms. Newman.”
EPILOGUE
Mom and I had to wait for forty-five minutes to get into the Anne Frank House and Museum. To keep myself busy, I studied the people around us. Was there a Holocaust survivor in the group? It dawned on me that in another decade or two, there wouldn’t be any left on the planet.
The line of tourists curved around the corner, even though it was early in the morning. Americans, Australians, Germans, Italians—more races and ethnicities than I could count. We were almost at the entrance when an Asian man held the door open for the elderly black woman behind him. She nodded and walked inside.
Mom and I were here for our own reasons, though we would follow the crowd through the narrow rooms where the family and their friends lived until the Gestapo stormed their hiding place. At the entrance, we paused at the moveable bookcase that hid the secret stairwell. Mom moved behind me, blocking the view of the visitors in line, while I tucked the four original entries in between two books.
We smiled at each other and mounted the steep stairs. Like millions of people before us, we watched the video clips about concentration camps. We listened to speculation about Anne Frank’s time in Westerbork, Auschwitz, and finally Bergen-Belsen. We even saw the original diary encased in a plastic box.
We finished the tour at eleven in the morning, with a brilliant, sunny day in Holland laid out before us. Our plan was to rent purple bikes and trail along the canals of the Jordaan. Maybe later, we’d stop at a café to have a cappuccino and share some apple pie. At five minutes before closing, someone would call up Prinsengracht 267 and leave an anonymous tip.
And then one of Anne’s final wishes would come true.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Despite heroic attempts to save it, Anne Frank’s beloved horse chestnut tree, noted three times in her annex diary, fell over in a windstorm on my birthday in 2010. I had no idea that years later, I would receive an invitation to an event at a nearby university from Professor Elaine Leeder, Dean of the School of Sciences at Sonoma State University. After an arduous application process, the university had been selected as one of only eleven sites in the United States to receive a rare sapling propagated from the majestic original. For three years, the university had nurtured the quarantined tree. Now, at last, it was ready to be moved to the Erna and Arthur Salm Holocaust & Genocide Memorial Grove. Attendees passed shovels around, tossing dirt onto its blossoming roots. (My daughter enjoyed that part very much and returned home a muddy mess.) Four years later, I’m happy to report that the tree thrives, and this symbol of freedom lives on.
The idea for Stolen Secrets took root long before, in 1996, when I was eight months pregnant with my first child. As I researched Anne Frank’s journey by train to a concentration camp, I stumbled upon her full name on a roster: Annelies Marie Frank. Instant chills. I knew at that moment that I was going to name my newborn after the teenage heroine who hid from the Nazis for two years before being discovered and sent to a concentration camp. Two decades later, my editor-at-home, Annalise, has been made to read every word in this book at least four times. (Ah, the perils of being the offspring of an author.)
Admittedly, twenty years is a long time to cling to an idea. I hesitated about writing it because I knew I didn’t have my writer “sea legs” yet. The subject was too big, too important, to do what I felt would be an amateur job. It wasn’t until I finished three unrelated manuscripts that I felt ready to tackle the storyline.
At first, I felt uncomfortable altering a story belonging to a sacred, historical figure. I knew it could be challenging and, in some cases, destructive to fictionalize nonfiction. For years, I was the parent who wouldn’t let my children watch such films as Walt Disney Pictures’ Pocahontas, because I’d learned that parts of the plot were historically inaccurate. What if young minds absorbed invented plot points as fact? Parents and teachers should insist that children know the real story. Yet sometimes it’s important for authors to fill in the blanks when specific information is unavailable, as long as these fictional details are judiciously evaluated. It’s my belief that authors should do
their best to honor the authentic character and experiences of any real person. Invention should be duly noted so that it’s not mistaken as truth.
It took me some time to figure out how to write Stolen Secrets in a way that didn’t invent a “new” Anne Frank. I made myself some promises: First, I would do my best to verify the accuracy of all historical information appearing in this book. (See the Acknowledgments page for a list of experts who helped in this regard); and second, I would avoid falsifying Anne or what she might have experienced. As it turned out, I was unable to do this entirely within the context of fiction. In Stolen Secrets, I imagined what happened to Anne in the concentration camps and invented the possibility of a Bergen-Belsen diary. No one truly knows the horrors that the annex residents experienced.
Now that I had come to terms with how to handle the material, I was left with several intriguing questions, such as, What if Anne Frank hadn’t died? What if she had concluded that she would have a more meaningful role in Jewish history as a victim instead of a survivor? My experience with my stepfather’s Alzheimer’s made me realize that this heart-wrenching disease that whittles down memory and confuses facts could be the right vehicle for exploring how guilt might rise to the surface after decades of justification and intentional deception. Intertwining these concepts was simultaneously fun, difficult, and heartbreaking.
A note about Anne Frank’s annex diary: Most adults remember reading this classic in middle school. While writing Stolen Secrets, I learned that this vivid firsthand account of Jewish life during World War II is no longer offered on many school reading lists. As Livvy explains to Franklin D., Anne Frank’s story has inspired poems, short stories, novels, operas, ballets, plays, movies, and other art forms. I fear that, without context, art that explores history could grow obsolete. Middle-school teachers, if you are not already doing so, please consider introducing Anne Frank’s diary to your students.
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