The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  Each of them, forever in fear of being caught, forced into silence most of the time, looked at the same seven faces day after day, dreamt of freedom and fresh air, heard the drumming of boots on cobblestone streets. Anne lasted for six months after she was caught, far less time than she spent in the Secret Annex, which would otherwise have been the worst time of her life.

  Eight people had lived here for more than two years in secrecy and safety and deprivation until someone whose identity is still unknown betrayed them in a phone call that lasted thirty seconds.

  I wanted to shout, I know who betrayed them. I know who it was. It was my father.

  My heart pounded. Sweat trickled down my face.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, shook it off and turned about to see a long-bearded man wearing a yarmulke, his black hat pressed to the heart of his white shirt. He nodded, bowed slightly and smiled. “You are Jewish,” he said. A statement, not a question. I shook my head, feeling guilty for having somehow made him think I was a Jew, or perhaps for not being one. “A friend of the Jews, then,” he said. I managed to nod. He smiled, gently patted my shoulders and moved away.

  I examined the marks on the door jamb where Otto Frank recorded Anne’s and Margot’s heights every six months during their two years in the annex. The taller, Margot, had been several inches shorter than me. Anne was half a foot shorter. Perhaps she would have grown another inch or two.

  As Bethany suddenly appeared beside me, I thought of Anne and Margot dying from typhus, naked in the winter cold. My sisters and I were older than they ever were. Bethany had four times attempted suicide, which, some fools might have thought, should have made her feel ashamed in a place like this, where people had tried so hard to stay alive.

  Before I went into the hospital for the second time, I believed that Otto Frank had done to his daughters what Dad had done to us. I believed that, at night, in the cramped space of the Secret Annex, he visited his daughters’ beds, and that the others, the van Pels and Pfeffer, didn’t know or pretended not to. I believed that, just as Anne Frank’s father had survived Auschwitz, mine would survive no matter what and that nothing but my death would free me from him. I read Het Achterhuis as if it was a coded indictment of two fathers, Anne’s and mine, each of them the only man in a family of women.

  I thought of my father, not Pfeffer, lying on that bed so close to hers. He could have reached out and touched her while she slept without budging from his bed.

  WADE

  Hans had a part in this, I thought. He helped do this. Even though he wasn’t the one who made the phone call to the Gestapo, he helped do this. So many Jews had gone into hiding, in part because of men like him. Maybe he did what he did to his daughters because of what the Nazis made him do, if they made him do anything. I wasn’t sure which of the things he had said were true and which weren’t. There were plenty of willing collaborators, people who hated Jews, people who offered to help the Nazis because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Any one of them could have been inspired to make that anonymous call by nothing more than a lucky guess that there were Jews hiding out at 263 Prinsengracht.

  I wished I could be certain that he’d been driven crazy by the war. I wished I could be certain that he hadn’t been. I wanted to be certain of something. I wished I knew without a doubt that he wasn’t crazy before the war and that, after the war, he chose to do the things he did and wasn’t predisposed to do them by some combination of illness and circumstance. But I wasn’t sure that anyone chose to live the way he did. If he did not—as Rachel had speculated—it absolved him of blame. Similarly, the Nazis. Blameless, innocent Nazis, victimized by nature and happenstance, compelled by ineluctable forces to commit history’s worst crime—the notion seemed heretical. But Christianity offered absolution to the sincerely contrite without exception, and followed that absolution with the promise of an eternity of perfect happiness. Other religions did much the same. Row after row of contrite Nazis, forgiven by priests, by popes, by God, marching in formation past a welcoming St. Peter through the gates of heaven.

  While Anne and the others were in here, caged like animals, was Rachel’s father out there, posing as a freedom fighter, kneeling on the cobblestones to tie his laces, to leave the messages that led the Nazis to other girls in other hiding places, to intercept entire families just one step from escape and freedom?

  “Christ,” Fritz said, startling me by grabbing my arm, “Rachel is looking at that diary as if it’s the original Bible. You know, the truth about most people is in the fine print. No one knows what really went on in here. Nothing as noble and courageous as Rachel likes to think.”

  The diary lay open, under a glass case, on a gossip bench–like table. There was a queue of people waiting to examine it, getting longer and longer because Rachel just kept staring at the open book. “Please, miss, there are others who would like to view the diary,” a young staffer called from just inside the doorway to the annex. Rachel stepped aside, withdrew a copy of Het Achterhuis from her shoulder bag, opened it and held it in front of her. Head bowed, eyes fixed on the book, she completed a slow circuit of the room, her eyes and lips moving. Not looking up to see where she was going, she started to walk randomly throughout the annex, forcing people to get out of her way, sometimes bumping into them but seeming not to notice. Occasionally, she wiped a tear away.

  I went to her. “Maybe we should leave,” I whispered. “You seem to be getting more and more upset.” She moved away from me without a word and I followed her.

  “They lived here, forty years ago,” she said, as if reading the sentence from her book. “This is not King Tut’s tomb or Mount Calvary. Peter van Pels was young. Where is the statue of him in Amsterdam? Where is the statue of Margot Frank? Where are the statues of the millions of children who also died in the concentration camps? People have said that, after D-Day, June 6, 1944, the occupants of the Secret Annex were so certain that the liberation of Amsterdam by the Allies was imminent that they became careless, leaving windows open, talking loudly, shouting and dropping things. There’s nothing else to blame them for, so people blame them for being caught.”

  Rachel was sweating now. She put her hand over her mouth and mumbled something.

  “Do you need to leave, Rachel?” I whispered.

  She shook her head. “They were just girls,” she said. “This is the last place they were free, but it’s like a prison. Still, their parents loved them and other people risked their lives for them. In a way, they were lucky. For a while, they were. Whoever betrayed them was not the father of any of them. It wasn’t their mother. I keep wondering if, when Anne died, she still thought that, deep down, people are basically good. Everyone wonders that, don’t they? I hope she was right, even if, near the end, she changed her mind. I think she was—Wade, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure that everyone is good,” I said, “no matter how deep down you go.”

  RACHEL

  It was as if I had stepped inside the book, knowing what happened outside the book and with no way to warn them. All eight were gathered around me and it would soon be too late to escape. A young man who would go on to commit other crimes was about to commit his worst, and there was nothing I could do. A young man was calling the Gestapo even as the eight of them were milling around, planning their futures, for they knew how close the Allies were, how close freedom was. And there it was, the diary of which I had hundreds of copies, preserved under bulletproof glass, under seal as it was when she wrote it.

  I got back in line and waited until my turn came again, but I still couldn’t make out what was written on the pages to which it was open. I wished I could visit the house when it was empty. I wished I could spend the night here, have it all to myself and hear the outside world much as she had heard it. I fancied that, while alone in this empty house at night, I might be able to reconcile myself to the mystery of absolute betrayal.

  Ther
e, in front of me again, was the diary, hermetically sealed in glass as if it was meant to be a symbol of her—pent up, gaped at, suffocating.

  WADE

  She grabbed hold of the glass case and tried to lift it. It must have been fastened to the table, which must have been fastened to the floor, for neither budged. I grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms with mine. As she struggled, writhing and kicking, her head struck me hard in the mouth. I loosened my grip and she broke away from me. She made for the exit, fighting her way through the other visitors as if her life depended on it.

  By the time I got outside, she was kneeling on the cobblestones, doubled over and gasping for breath, surrounded by her sisters. There was no sign of Fritz. Bethany was rubbing her back in slow, soothing circles. “It’s okay, Raitch,” she said, looking nervously about. Some of the visitors had followed us outside and were watching from a distance.

  “A panic attack,” Gloria snapped at me as if she thought I had told Rachel the truth about their parents.

  Rachel sat upright, drew a deep breath and slowly let it out.

  “There you go,” Bethany said.

  “I bet he saluted the Germans in their tanks as they rolled into Amsterdam,” Rachel said. “Lots of people did. I’ve seen photographs.”

  “This is probably not the best place to talk about that,” Bethany said. “You need to get back to your flat and then you’ll be all right.”

  Rachel nodded in a way that, though it seemed to satisfy Bethany, did not convince me that she was back from wherever she had been. But she managed to stand.

  “Maybe we should take you to a doctor,” I said.

  “No,” Rachel said. She drew another deep breath and slowly let it out. “I should never have come here,” she said. “I lost my book and shoulder bag.”

  “I’ve got them,” Carmen said, handing them to her.

  “A lot has happened in the past month,” Bethany said. “You just need some time. We all do.”

  * * *

  —

  My arm around her, we walked in silence back to the flat, where Rachel pulled away from me and ran up the steps. When I reached the top of the stairs, the door was open and Rachel was on her hands and knees, rummaging for something in the closet. “Don’t say a word,” she said. “Just let me say what I have to say and then, if you still want to, we can talk.” She stood and turned away from the closet, holding in both hands the book she had shown me in Cape Town, the one she had taken to Bergen-Belsen, her first copy of Het Achterhuis, a bizarre-looking bundle of tape of various kinds. She set it down on the bed as gingerly as if it was a bomb. I sat in an armchair, my back to the window that overlooked the street.

  She pointed at the book. “The truth is in there and in all my other copies of Het Achterhuis. I wrote the truth right in front of you and many others. In this book. It’s indecipherable, even to me, but it’s in there. I’ll unwrap the book so that you can see it.” She went to the kitchen, came back with a pair of scissors, carefully cut one end of the package, reached in and withdrew a small stationery box with thick elastic bands around the middle, its two halves sealed with Scotch tape. “It’s been ten years since anyone but me has seen it.” She looked at it as if it was some ancient artifact. “I know it’s morbid of me to regard something that almost killed me with such reverence. But I still think of it as it was when Anne Wilansky first gave it to me. That book still exists in my mind. So does she, as innocent, sweet, funny, sad and, no doubt, petulant, gossipy and vindictive as Anne Frank. A typical teenager preserved inviolate in the desecrated heart of history’s worst century. That last phrase is from my uncompleted master’s thesis. Kneel down beside me.”

  “Rachel, you’re—”

  “Please, please just kneel down.”

  So I knelt with her at the foot of the bed as she gingerly tore off the strips of tape and removed the lid of the box. There was Anne Frank’s ever-smiling face on the cover, Anne Frank looking up, pen in hand, from something she was writing, perhaps a part of the diary itself.

  “Look,” Rachel said as she opened the cover with as much care as she had the box, holding it still with her index finger. There was an inscription that read: “This book was written by the heroic girl whom you are named after. Her father gave her the famous diary when she turned thirteen. May God give you her courage and her strength, and may he confer upon you many blessings all your life. Happy Birthday, Anne, from Mom and Dad, March 19, 1970.”

  “I wouldn’t have accepted it if she hadn’t insisted. She gave me the birthday present that her parents gave her. Such a strange thing to do.”

  “Who gave you this? Who is Anne Wilansky?”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The book seemed important when I was sick. Everything did. Not anymore. I mean, it’s strange to give away your own birthday present, right? She gave it to me. I was sick. Never mind. I can’t think. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  She got up and grabbed the book from the bed and strode about the flat as if she was searching for a way out of it. I tried, several times, to put my hands on her shoulders, but she flailed at me with the book, from which pages fell and fluttered to the floor. She grabbed them up, randomly replaced them, then went on darting about, changing direction every few steps as if someone only she could see was blocking her way, daring her again and again to try to get past. She stopped and stamped her foot with frustration.

  “When Anne gave me her book, there was almost no blank space left in it because she had made so many notes. So I wrote over her notes in Arellian until hers were illegible, as are mine, even to me. The truth is in this book. Anne Frank’s, mine, even hers. It’s in here somewhere.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  She dropped to her knees and gathered the pages together and put them back into the book, which she threw into the closet. I felt a great gulf opening between Rachel and me. Something had happened to her that I would never understand.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said. “I don’t. I’m just so tired and upset.”

  As she had done in front of the entrance to the annex after running down the stairs, she sat back on her heels and doubled over, her arms folded across her stomach as if someone had kicked her. I knelt beside her and rubbed her back as Bethany had done. She looked as if she was fighting to draw what might be her final breath. Finally, she fell against me, her forehead on my chest, gasping like someone who had surfaced from the dark just short of death.

  “If you’re going to leave me, you should do it now,” she said. “Don’t put it off. The longer you stay with me, the harder it will be for me to lose you. There may be no going back for you, now that I’ve dragged you into this. But it’s different when the innocent are pulled across a great divide, isn’t it? I hope it is. A few months ago, you knew nothing about me and the rest of the van Houts. I knew what I was dragging you into, but I did it anyway. I made you one of us. Maybe you can undo that. It might not be too late.”

  I pulled her to me with one arm. I kissed the side of her neck. “I will never leave you,” I said. “Never. Unless you send me packing with a sweater in my suitcase.”

  She managed a faint smile and turned her face to me. I kissed her lips.

  “We’ll go home,” I said.

  “Home?” she said. “Where is it? I don’t belong anywhere.”

  “With me.”

  “With you? Do you believe that I belong with you? Do you still believe it, after everything that has happened and everything I’ve done?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’ll be home when we’re together, no matter where we are.”

  “Yes.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “It will be.”

  “Let’s just fall asleep here,” she said, pulling me down beside her. “Here, on
the floor. Let’s just fall asleep. I hope we don’t wake up.”

  ST. JOHN’S

  RACHEL

  At the start of grade ten, I was informed by my school principal that I had been made a member of the junior high school ice hockey cheerleading squad at the request of my mother, who thought cheerleading would make me more outgoing. I went through the motions, blank-faced, a cheerleader who didn’t know the cheers, or the rules of ice hockey, rarely spoke to the others and never spoke to the players, not even the one who escorted me home after the first game because, he said, the principal had told him to.

  In mid-December, during the Christmas break, when it was dark by four thirty, my father was late picking me up after a game. I was the last person waiting at the rink. The players and cheerleaders and supporters of both teams had left. The concession hut was closed. I stood at the window of one of the doors, looking out at the empty parking lot. As he swept the floor between the rows of seats, the janitor, an old man in a parka, kept his eye on me.

  “Don’t go out unless you have a ride,” he said when he reached my end of the rink. “That wind will cut you in two.” I heard the wind and saw the occasional cloud of snow drift across the pavement. I was wearing nothing under my coat but my cheerleader outfit. I stamped my feet in a vain attempt to keep them warm. My legs, bare but for nylons, shook uncontrollably.

  Finally, Dad drove up. I could tell he hadn’t been in the car long because frost was still melting from the windows and I could see my breath when I closed the door. When I complained, he said, “If I had waited for it to warm up, you would still be in there.”

  There was almost no traffic. “No one wants to venture out in this,” Dad said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were in Cape Town? It’s summer there now. Summer. I picked a place where summer never comes.”