The ghost assassins don’t have much time before daybreak—the guards and Jews will soon be adding to the noise.
Smoke billows from the yellow stack. When the wind gusts, the assassins can see the sparks, frenzied swarms of red mosquitoes that go out as they are carried east toward von Snout.
He can smell the smoke—three times, tonight, one of the children came to his room, coughing so hard he thought they’d choke.
How She can sleep, God only knows. He started out with such high hopes—how can it all have come to this?
The ghost assassins need no weapons. They think a thing and then it’s done. There’ll be no noise; they won’t be caught. The small von Snouts, asleep downstairs, will hear the death word in their heads. She’ll have to tell them Papa’s gone: a peaceful end; he felt nothing. Auschwitz won’t see his like again.
Arellia is overcast.
The commandant’s asleep at last;
we think the worst of it has passed.
The House Within, the House Without
hold out no hope for Claws von Snout.
Glore, Carm, Bethany and I
think Snout has had it for the night,
but soon his sighs say otherwise:
“Just one night’s sleep before I die.
To sleep and never dream again,
to die in peace like other men…”
He complains about his ulcers, growls about the snores he hears from Her side of the bed.
“I should have built a second house, one for the girls and me. The seven of you must sing tonight, though seven hundred would not drown out the noise of Mrs. Claws von Snout.”
The four of us, we think he means, four voices chanting in the gloom, but three more meet us in the room as if he summoned them.
The commandant will soon be dead:
the seven girls surround his bed—
we think the song, no words are sung—
a song I learned when I was young.
We sing for him, all seven do,
we sing because he told us to,
the van Hout girls, the other three,
seven singing beautifully,
the siren sisters of the night,
the night song of the commandant.
He makes a cross upon his chest,
preparing for his final rest,
the last dreams of his lonely life.
We sing the nocturne while, Without,
the factory that never sleeps
ignores the watch the sirens keep.
We sing him to his final rest,
the monster of insomnia,
the Master of Arellia.
We sing till he gives up the ghost—
the seven sirens, voices lost,
see him give it up at last,
or should I say it gives him up?
It leaves him when his body stops,
the ghost, the soul of Claws von Snout,
floats in the air above the bed
and drops the ashes of the dead
upon the body and the head
of Claws von Snout, the commandant
of Auschwitz and of Birkenau.
Who were the three who joined us there?
The three unsummoned sirens were
the one in black, my Shadow She,
the Frank sisters, who, passing by,
heard him when he chose to die.
We sang to him his final song,
“The Mystery of Right and Wrong.”
WADE
On our fourth morning in Amsterdam, I asked Rachel if we were ever going to the Secret Annex.
“I still don’t think I’m ready,” she said.
“You know, you don’t ever have to go if you don’t want to,” I said. I hoped she wouldn’t. “We could just go home.”
“I’ve been thinking I want to see another place first,” she said. “The one where Anne Frank died—Bergen-Belsen. I want to go there. I want to see it. It’s only six hours by train from Amsterdam. I’m going. We’re going, right?”
“The place where she died? Is that such a good idea?”
“You and the others don’t have to come. I know I can’t undo anything by putting flowers on a grave. But not being able to fix everything is no excuse for fixing nothing, is it?”
“What are you trying to fix?”
“Maybe that’s the wrong word.”
“Your father didn’t inform on the Franks. Even if he did, nothing you could do could change it, but he didn’t.”
“This is not about that. Look. I’m going whether you come with me or not. I just want to see the place.”
I couldn’t let her go without me.
* * *
—
We met up with the others for breakfast at a café, where the seven of us sat at a large table near the front window. “I’ve already eaten,” Bethany said. “Toast and jam. Gloria saw me.”
Gloria was staring at Rachel, who’d just announced her plan. “Going to Bergen-Belsen might be one step too far, and I know you know what I mean, Rachel,” she said.
“She’s right,” Bethany said. “God, I just said that Gloria was right. Someone note the date and time.”
“I’ll understand if you don’t come,” Rachel said, but tears began to run down her face.
“Your sisters might be right,” I said, taking her hand. “You’re already so upset.”
“Has she had a wink of sleep since we got here?” Bethany said to me. “She doesn’t look like it. Raitch, those dark circles under your eyes will soon be down to your chin, and the blue ink is halfway up your arm.”
Rachel looked beseechingly at me. “Maybe, if I go there, I won’t have to go to her house?” She drew a deep breath and let it out, shakily.
“Forget breakfast. Let’s go outside,” Gloria said, glancing around at the people at the other tables, who were staring at us.
“Fifty thousand people died at Bergen-Belsen,” Rachel said loudly, as if she was trying desperately to convince us of the truth. “There were no gas chambers there. The camp was so overcrowded, people had to sleep with their knees drawn up to their chins. There was no sanitation, only night pots like Elsie and Nora had to use.”
“Calm down, sweetie,” Gloria said, turning for help to Max, who was looking mortified by the scene that Rachel was causing.
“Let’s go outside and get some air,” I said. I grabbed Rachel by the arm and all but dragged her to the door.
“I’m not spending my short time at home reliving the war at a concentration camp in Germany,” Max said. He wrapped his scarf around his neck. “I have people to visit. Ones that are still alive.” He left without a glance at Gloria.
“I have business associates waiting for me,” Fritz said. “So count me out.”
“Well, she’s not going there alone,” Bethany said. “And no one can keep her from going, so I’m willing.”
“I’m going too,” I said. Gloria and Carmen agreed to come as well, and the five of us headed on foot to the train station.
* * *
—
I had the window seat. I tried to focus on the passing countryside, but Rachel was speaking non-stop to Bethany, who was sitting across the aisle from her. “Bergen-Belsen was liberated April 15, 1945. By the British. Too late for Anne and Margot. A couple of months too late, that’s all. It’s not like Auschwitz or Birkenau. The British bulldozed everything, even the bodies, and there were thousands of them—they bulldozed it to keep typhus from spreading to nearby villages. That’s what Anne and Margot died of, typhus.”
“Shhhh,” Bethany said.
“Most days,” Rachel went on, her voice no lower than before, “the only thing the prisoners were given t
o eat was a square inch of bread and a few ounces of rancid turnip soup. They were sent to Westerbork first, a transit camp where the conditions were not so bad. If they had been allowed to stay there, they would have survived. But they were sent on to Auschwitz, and then Margot and Anne were sent down to Bergen-Belsen without their mother. I’ve seen pictures of Bergen-Belsen as it is now. If you didn’t know what happened there, you would walk straight past it.”
“That’s what I’d like to do,” Bethany said.
“Dad had to have a reason for saying that he’s the one who informed on the Franks to the Gestapo,” Rachel said.
“You’re not going to repeat that to the authorities, whoever they are, are you?” Bethany said. “You’re going to go on being the sanest of the van Hout sisters. You have a lot to lose. You have a reputation to uphold and a boyfriend that you’re closer to scaring away than you might think.”
Rachel took my hand but continued to talk to Bethany, staring straight ahead. “It’s just as likely that Dad turned them in as it is that any one of thousands of others did. He’s the only one who has claimed credit for it, as far as I know.”
“Didn’t you tell me once that there were about a dozen people who were worth investigating, people who worked at night in the warehouse below the Secret Annex?” Bethany said.
“I told you that before Dad confessed—”
“He didn’t confess,” I interrupted. “He was only taunting you. He knew that you worshipped Anne Frank. There’s no mystery here.”
“I don’t worship her. She’s not my patron saint. I’m not trying to model myself after her. Dad wasn’t with the Resistance. He didn’t do anything to help the Jews. We all know who he sided with.”
“All I know for certain is what he did to me,” Bethany said. “I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that, for years, he told everyone he almost saved Anne Frank. He said he warned his contacts in the Resistance that there would soon be a raid on 263 Prinsengracht but, for some reason, nothing was done.”
“He betrayed them; he tried to save them,” I said. “What next? What else? It’s ridiculous.”
“You have no idea,” Bethany said. “ ‘The man who almost saved Anne Frank / was mocked by men of lesser rank.’ ”
“We just don’t know the truth,” Rachel said. “Most people don’t.”
“I wish I knew why we’re on a train headed for Bergen-Belsen,” Bethany said. “I wish you knew.”
“I do know,” Rachel said. She looked past me out the window.
“It never stops,” Bethany said. “The two of them are gone and they’re still setting the four of us against each other. We could never stand to be around each other, but the two of them got along just fine. I don’t think they ever argued.”
Rachel did not respond. In the row behind us, Gloria and Carmen said nothing. I looked back between the seats. Carmen, eyes closed, may have been asleep, or she may have been signalling that she had heard all that she could stand to hear from Bethany and Rachel. Gloria looked aloof, wearily reflective, as if she was pondering something altogether unrelated to our destination, Anne Frank, the Holocaust, her sisters and even the deaths of her parents.
RACHEL
The latest volume of my diary was in my shoulder bag. I had convinced myself that I wouldn’t write in it, that I was taking it with me as a talisman to protect me from what I might see or hear. But I longed to take it out. I could go to the bathroom and write there, pretend not to hear when someone tried the door. Or I could write in front of Wade and my sisters, defiantly unconcerned with what they thought. But I did neither. Instead, I took out Het Achterhuis and read it, indulged in my familiar, allowable obsession, what Carmen had once called my maintenance dose. I stared at the pages, not so much reading as silently reciting.
The Franks, in windowless freight cars, saw nothing of the lush green countryside we passed on the way to Bergen-Belsen. The only prisoners to survive the concentration camps were those who arrived at them not long before they were liberated. But even most of those did not survive. Some died a month, a week, a day or even just hours before the Allies happened upon them. The average survival time of a girl of Anne Frank’s age who was in good health when she arrived at Bergen-Belsen was six weeks.
In the diary, Anne writes everything in such detail—but then, abruptly, the writing stops, and by the time it does, you have been fooled into expecting it to go on forever. How could this voice go silent when so much is still to happen? How could this journey be abandoned when you haven’t even guessed its destination?
* * *
—
We took a bus from the train station to the camp. The road was unpaved, a wide swath of graded gravel that wound its way through a forest of white birch. A light drizzle had begun to fall.
Bergen-Belsen. It looked like any other long-abandoned place, grown over with trees, bushes, high grass and wildflowers. The ruins of structures built for some forgotten purpose showed through here and there, the shells of concrete basements dripping in the rain. The sites of the mass graves, the deep, wide pits into which the bodies of the Frank sisters were thrown, along with thousands of others, were now berms of bright green grass.
Winding among the mass graves were roped-off paths that you were not allowed to stray from lest you step on someone’s grave. There were tokens of remembrance, marble stones and tilting wooden crosses scattered randomly across the fields.
Many of the visitors, Jews and non-Jews, were dressed in black. No one objected out loud, but some looked askance at us or faintly shook their heads when they saw our anoraks of various colours, and blue jeans and sneaker boots and sandals.
Everyone had come to visit Anne Frank’s grave but hadn’t reckoned on the grim enormity of Bergen-Belsen. The camp was hushed, the visitors muted by the many who had died here, not just Anne.
I tried to imagine what went through the mind of a soldier stationed here for the war. “This is what we’re doing instead of all the other things we could be doing. We do this from day to day with an end in mind that makes sense to us. This is pre-eminent and purposeful. This is rational and sensible, and best done as efficiently and conscientiously as possible. Each day is like the one before and the one to come. We know what to expect. We are orderly people, orderly performing orderly, uncomplicated tasks. We go to sleep in the evening and wake up in the morning knowing what the day will bring. This is what we do because this is what we have been doing. We are borne along by the impetus of habit and routine.”
Gloria bought flowers in the Documentation Centre and gave some to each of us. Following the map given to us by one of the guides, we made our way to Anne Frank’s stone. There was a long line of visitors waiting to pay their respects, some holding flowers, others votive candles or photographs of Anne. One woman held a teddy bear, others merely cameras, while many carried stones they planned to leave behind.
“I’m freaking freezing,” Carmen said, teeth chattering, arms folded, eyes blurred with tears. The white birch trees bowed and creaked with every gust of wind. We were soaked with mist so fine that I could barely see it.
The marble headstone of Margot and Anne Frank was surrounded by wreaths and bouquets of flowers, as well as photographs of Anne on which people had written messages, tributes and condolences in many languages. The obelisk and memorial wall raised by the British liberators lay directly behind the headstone, half a mile away. Almost immediately behind the stone was a grassy berm that had grown over the mass grave in which, it was believed, Margot and Anne were buried. The headstone had been installed and unveiled in 1977. “Thirty-two years after 1945,” I said. “For thirty-two years, she and her sister lay here in an unmarked mass grave with fifty thousand others.”
No one stood in line to visit the other stones and crosses. “It doesn’t seem right,” Bethany said. “They look so lonely.” She left the queue and followed the network of pathways to the other
stones, flowers bunched in one hand. A few other people followed her lead.
By the time Bethany came back and took her place in line with us, I knew I couldn’t bear to stand eye to eye with Anne and Margot. The closer I got to their stone, to the mass grave in which they lay among the other dead, I realized that I would die if I let go of Anne, or she let go of me.
We were perhaps ten minutes from taking our turn at the stone when I said, “I’ll wait for you at the end of the line. The rest of you keep going if you like.” Before Wade could ask me why, Gloria grabbed my arm and said, “What are you doing, Rachel? You’re the reason we’re here. You asked us to come with you. Carmen is freezing and Bethany has been putting flowers on the graves of strangers just to pass the time, and Wade is completely—”
“Not graves,” I said. “Memorial stones. She should be putting flowers on those grass-covered mounds of earth. We all should.”
“Hold it together, okay?” Gloria whispered, arching her eyebrows as if to add: not just for your sake.
An elderly woman in front of Carmen, her head covered in a black shawl, turned around and said, “No one is allowed to set foot on the mass graves. It is strictly forbidden.”
“Mind your own business,” Carmen said.
“You women should at least cover your heads. This is not an amusement park.”
Carmen all but poked her in the face with her index finger. “Listen—” she began, but Gloria took her by the arm and turned her around the other way. The woman faced the stone again.
“I’ll wait for you at the end of the line,” I said again, but the four of them broke free and followed me as we again took up our places at the end of the line.
“What are you doing, Rachel?” Wade said, his voice quavering.
“I don’t want to stand face to face with that memorial stone,” I said. “I’ve seen photographs of it before today, and I thought that I should come here and see it for myself and pay my respects in person, but I can’t do it. The rest of you can stay in line if you like, but I can’t. The Hebrew inscription on the stone means ‘The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.’ Does anyone really feel that in this awful place? The inscription on the wall built by the British liberators of the camp reads, ‘Earth conceal not the blood shed on thee.’ But that is exactly what the earth is doing. No number of memorial stones and memorial walls can make people remember what happened. The testimonies of survivors are merely sad stories to everyone but fellow survivors. People read them or watch them on TV, and they cry and think about them for a while. And then they forget and move on unchanged. The world has carried on unchanged since 1945, just as the van Hout sisters never change. We are not survivors, but the walking wounded whose wounds will never heal. And, as Bethany said, the four of us have so much in common, but we can’t even get along with one another.”
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