Annelies

1944

The Achterhuis

Prinsengracht 263

Hidden Annex

OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS

The razzias continue. According to what Miep tells us, more Jews have been netted with every passing day, many of them family friends from the Merwedeplein. The Kaplans, the Levitskys, the Rosenblits. Eva Rosenblit was in the same class as Anne and always laughed at her jokes. Miep has even heard a rumor that Hanneli’s father was arrested, and maybe Hanneli with him. Anne tries to picture it. Lies being driven through the streets and packed into the rear of a German lorry, helpless. At the mercy of monsters. But it’s too terrible. She can’t allow such a thought to take root. She must believe that God is looking after Hanneli as closely as he is Anne Frank.

Peter has constructed a “moffen sleeve” for the radio. A loop aerial made of wooden slats and doorbell wire that can sift out the Hun’s jamming signals, so that the radio reception remains clear and unimpeded by mof interference. He gabs on and on about medium range and shortwave bands, which Anne finds both impressive and boring. Can that be? Anyway, according to the latest programs, there’s plenty of action on the Eastern Front. The Red Army has retaken Odessa and is ousting the mof from the Crimea, but on the Western Front there is still no invasion. Mr. van Pels is constantly griping about the English “slowpokes” with their tea and crumpets. Pim, on the other hand, points out that even with the Americans in the war, it cannot be an easy task to mass the kind of force necessary to penetrate Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall, much less prepare to transport it across the English Channel.

Anne tries not to listen too much. She does not feel brave enough to contemplate an unending occupation by the mof, but neither is she confident enough to live on hope for an Allied liberation anytime soon. Instead she wants to live in the moment, which is why it’s always so nice to have Bep for supper in their stuffy little hideout. She anchors them all, in a way. A real person from the real world outside this building. Mummy loves to cook for Bep, always praising her for her good appetite, no matter what’s dished onto her plate. The van Pelses quit their constant bickering around her and save their criticisms for another time. Bep takes it all in thoughtfully, as if Mr. van Pels may very well be right, even if it’s absolute rubbish he’s spouting. She offers Anne a secret wink as he announces how Bep is quite the intelligent young lady. Bravo, Bep! Even old Pfeffer has compliments for her, usually followed by a list of indispensables that Bep should do her very absolute best to obtain for him.

After supper, when the dishes are washed, Anne sometimes follows Bep down the steps as far as their side of the door, hidden by the swinging bookcase that is the line of demarcation between freedom and constraint. Between life in the actual world and this strange limited existence in hiding. They often confide in each other on this trip down the stairs, Anne and she, sitting on the lower steps, away from the listening ears. Anne tells her about the romance that has flowered with Peter. Shy but marvelous Peter van Pels, who as it turns out is not a blockhead after all but in fact the focus of her heart’s desire. She tells Bep of kisses she has received from the boy. About the fluttery dreaminess that dazzles her when they touch and the humid, salty feelings she can taste after their nightly kissing sessions have concluded. And as the months pass and the slow undertow of disappointment eventually drains Anne’s feelings for Peter, she tells Bep about that, too.

For her part, Bep confesses her fears for her boyfriend, Maurits, who went into hiding rather than report to the moffen as a labor conscript. It’s been months and months, and their separation is taking a toll on them. They pass letters to each other, but there seems to be less and less to say in them. When she tells Anne this tonight, there are clear tears in Bep’s eyes behind her oval-framed glasses. Anne puts her arms around Bep, who begins to cry harder.

“Bep? Bep, what is it?”

But Bep only shakes her head, wiping at her tears by pushing her fingers under her glasses. “I just worry so much about you. About all of you. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be saying this. But you’ve become so dear to me, and I can’t help but fear for you. Out in the streets, the Germans have turned brutal. Even worse than before. Maybe they’re getting scared that they’re losing the war, I don’t know, but all I need to do is see those awful lorries packed with the soldiers and bristling with guns.” She swallows hard and shakes her head. “I’m terrified for you, for myself, for everyone. Even in the office, every time I hear a car squeak to a halt in the street, my heart practically jumps out the window.”

“Well, that would be something to see,” Anne offers, trying to cheer Bep out of her tears.

Bep hiccups a slim laugh and breathes in deeply, regaining herself as best she can. “And upstairs you’re all so welcoming. You’re living in danger daily, yet your mother makes me feel so at home at the table.”

“She can do that on occasion,” Anne is willing to admit. “But it’s not us, it’s you. You and Miep. Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler. When you come upstairs, it’s a breath of freedom for us all. Believe me, the minute you leave, we all revert back to our stifled, irritable old selves and the arguments and complaints are renewed with a vengeance.” Anne says this with a smile, for Bep’s sake, though she wishes it weren’t so absolutely true.

A foot scuffs a floorboard above. “Anne?” She hears her mother calling from the top of the stairs. She doesn’t sound cross, particularly, only fretful.

“Yes, Mummy?” she answers, knowing the fun’s now over.

“Let Bep go home. It’s time to come back up and get ready for bed.”

“Yes, Mummy,” Anne replies dutifully. She hugs Bep good-bye and glumly trudges up the steps. At the top her mother shuts the door and says, “I don’t like you sitting down there. It makes me anxious.”

What doesn’t? Anne wants to reply. But she stops herself. “Mummy, I’ve been down to Papa’s office a million times. Why should you worry about me sitting on the steps all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, Anne,” her mother answers truthfully. “But I do. It’s just a feeling I’ve been having. A kind of ominous feeling. I can’t explain it. Your papa says it’s just nerves that we’re all undergoing because the end of the war could be close, and maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I only know that I feel what I feel. Do you think you can humor me?”

And for a moment Anne sees her mother without the sting of judgment. She sees the unfiltered candor in her mother’s face. “All right, Mummy,” she says. “If it makes you feel better. All right.”

In her diary Anne turns herself inside out and stares into all her inner recesses. Splashing ink on the paper, sometimes boisterously, sometimes angrily, often critically, perhaps even artfully. She has learned to depend on words to see herself more clearly. Her demands, her frustrations and furies, her unobtainable ideals, and her relentless desires, all a reflection of the lonely self she confesses only to the page, because if people aren’t patient, paper is. It is often a mess, filling line after line, until she runs out of room in her lovely red tartan daybook and has to resort to filling up whatever stray bits of paper Miep and Bep can scrounge. Then, at the end of March, they are all listening to Radio Oranje on a Wednesday evening down in the private office when the education minister from the exile government in London broadcasts a speech advising the Dutch people to keep their diaries as a record for after the war, and it strikes her: Perhaps her diary could be important to others as well. A record for the Dutch, a record for the Jews, a record for all who have felt imprisoned. The next day she begins to rewrite. Not as a child confiding her thoughts to imaginary friends but as a chronicler of wartime. A true writer. It gives her a vision of herself to broadcast. A vision of the woman she should become, molded by what she is already feeling in her heart: a terrible and ecstatic slavery to words. This is what she could never explain to anyone. Not Peter, not Margot, not Mummy. Not even Pim.

Now she finds that she zealously steals every minute she can from the daily routine of survival in order to reinvent her diary. To make it into something other than it started as, the unbosoming of a thirteen-year-old ugly duckling.

To make it a book.

By the end of the first week of revision after Mr. Bolkestein’s message, Anne has rewritten seventy-one pages by hand on loose-leaf sheets of flimsy wartime paper. She finds that the craft required in rewriting can numb her to the fear that still often seizes her, as if even the worst of the brutality swirling about them can be managed.

If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.