Annelies

1945

Amsterdam

Stadsdeel Centrum

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

October

Five months since the entry of the First Canadian Infantry Division

Arriving at Centraal Station

Amsterdam might have been liberated, but peace looks no different from war. The city’s wartime face passes by the train compartment’s window, the grim façades of buildings on dull parade. Hulking carcasses of locomotives rust on abandoned rail spurs. The clouds are as thick as mud, all part of the drab landscape that stretches from one end of the continent to the other, as if color is now rationed along with milk and bread and coal. A fretful rain speckles the window glass as the train creaks along, following its fractured timetable toward Centraal Station.

She has organized a notebook. It is only two cardboard covers sandwiching the thinnest, flimsiest, poorest-quality paper in the history of thin, flimsy, poor-quality paper, but it should still hold ink. And she has organized a fountain pen, too. Organizing is much different from stealing, you see. To organize something is to obtain a vital item to fill a vital need, and need, she has learned, trumps all. The pen is lovely. A sleek red Montblanc with a nice thick nib. However, there’s a problem. It is being quite stubborn, this Montblanc, on one essential point: It refuses to form words. It refuses to even touch the page with its nice thick nib. The pen remains in her hand but suspended above the paper.

Once she believed she had a gift. To be a writer. She believed that God had a plan for her, and that plan centered on her diary. But all those words, all those pages, are gone. Lost, along with any belief in God’s Grand Plan. Stripped from her like her ambitions when, on a clammy August morning, the Thousand-Year Reich came pounding up the steps of their hiding place. Surely she must realize that she’s been so completely ruined since that day, that if she attempts to write a sentence, the pen will simply blot and smear the paper with a slur of ink.

The compartment is crowded, unheated, and it smells of the lack of soap. Bundled against the draft, passengers share the same blank stare, blind to the rain-speckled world passing by the windows. Battered luggage is jammed where it doesn’t fit. Heads nod off, lulled by the tedious rhythm of the rolling stock. Everyone’s ailing, it seems. Everyone’s depleted. All of Europe is sick. She keeps her cardboard suitcase, closed with a belt, on the floor of the carriage, sandwiched between her knees. It’s all she owns, though none of what’s inside is really hers. A hairbrush, a toothbrush. A few clothes. The UNRRA issued her a rubber-stamped identity card with her thumbprints and a small photograph stapled to it that permitted her to cross the Dutch border. But to her it is a false passport. She knows that she has no identity beyond the number imprinted on her arm.

Gazing into her transparent reflection in the window glass, she can see how much her hair has grown in. Her face is fuller. Her eyes are alert and darkly tense. Sometime during her convalescence, she turned sixteen, though the date passed weeks before she realized it. Calendars have meant nothing for so long.

The train’s chugging momentum slows, and she feels a hard pulse of anticipation in her body. However, it is not the joy of finally returning home but an interior drumbeat of terror. She no longer knows what home is now. Her family is dead. Without them how can such a thing as home exist?

She feels an odd sort of estrangement as the recognizable sights of Amsterdam roll into view. The roofs are missing tiles. The upper stories of squat Dutch buildings line a section of elevated rail with taped-over windows. The twin spires and baroque dome of the Sint Nicolaaskerk stand under a muddy sky. She is returning to a world she believed she would never again see, and it feels both familiar and horrifyingly alien.

Dropping her eyes, she glares at the clean, empty page of the notebook open in her lap. A tear wets her cheek, but she does not bother to wipe it away as she simply forces the pen’s nib down onto the paper’s surface, against its will, until a heavy blue dot appears like a blemish. She glares at the dot. And then, quite obediently, the pen begins to move.

Anne Frank was nothing but a Kazetnik, she writes. A creature of the camps. And if she is now a displaced person, it is not because her life has been displaced, it’s because her heart has been displaced. Her soul and all that once constituted Anne Frank have been displaced.

The conductor pushes through the crowded corridor calling out the stop in a harried voice: “Centraal Station Amsterdam.” Swallowing heavily, Anne joins the dreary bustle of passengers about to depart. Her heart is thrumming heavily in her breast. There were postcards printed in Belsen for the DPs. She wrote a note to Miep on one of them before piling into the rear of a British army lorry, but who knows if it was ever received? Words on paper, like people, are so easily erased. People are so insubstantial, too. Who knows what has become of Miep? Of Bep or Kugler or Kleiman? Who knows what has become of anyone?

• • •

The train lumbers past the carriage sheds and warehouses of the freight yard. Toward the tall, single-span glass canopy of the station. Then slots in between the concrete platforms and slows to a halt. The stink of the track grease and the coal smoke follows her down the steps of the platform and into the half dark of the drafty concourse as she grips the handle of her suitcase. The noise ringing in the station rafters is both overwhelming and comforting. People muddling about, lugging their bags. Porters pushing carts loaded with steamer trunks. Women with trailing children struggling to keep up. Off-duty Canadian soldiers, the Liberators of Holland, smoking their cigarettes and whistling after Dutch girls in their patched-up dresses.

Rows of tables are assembled in the booking hall, and glum lines of ragged people are assembled in front of them. Typewriters are clacking. It’s the Dutch Social Service Bureau trying to bring order to the chaos of returnees. Trying to manage the confusion of desperate stories by filling out forms.

A squat little clerk, seated behind his typewriter, glowers at an old man’s papers and issues a burdened sigh. “Ah, another Jew. Wonderful. And how did they forget to gas you, Uncle?” he inquires, to be polite, in an amplified voice just in case the old man is hard of hearing. Anne feels her heart shiver and fights a fierce craving to shove forward and rap the clerk across the face with her knuckles. And she may have done so, but for the fact that she is hearing her name. Someone is calling her with frantic excitement. “Anne, Anne! Anne Frank!”

Turning about, she stares, blinking, at the woman hurrying toward her. The woman with ginger hair swept back from her brow, with thinned cheeks, a heart-shaped chin, a hooded gaze. Anne forces her mouth to form around a name. “Miep,” she whispers. And feels something crack open inside of her.

“Jan, it’s Anne!” Miep exclaims in disbelief. Hearing her name shouted in public panics Anne, and she must resist the urge to run. “Jan! Jan, it’s Anne!” Miep exclaims again, as if it’s just too impossible to believe. “It’s Anne Frank!” she calls, and seizes Anne in an embrace. “Oh, Anne. To have you return. To have you return. What a miracle,” she whispers, like saying a prayer. It’s a frightening thing, Miep’s embrace. Anne has not been touched with affection for a very long time, and this embrace is so murderously joyful. Many prisoners of Belsen were killed after liberation, not by bullets but by the richness of the food the Tommies handed out. They died with their faces smeared with chocolate, Spam, and condensed milk. This is how Anne feels about the wrap of Miep’s arms. It’s so rich that it might kill her on the spot, so she forces herself free.

“Oh, my heavens, I cannot believe this.” Miep is still grinning as if the expression has been stamped onto her face permanently. “We’ve come to the station every day since your postcard arrived. And now, here you are. Jan!” she sings out again.

In answer to his wife’s call, a tall, gangly fellow with a high coxcomb of hair and glasses as round as a pair of ten-guilder queens comes trotting from the tables wearing a stunned expression. His white armband reads SOCIALE DIENST. “Anne?” he questions the air.

“Jan, can you believe it? It’s a miracle,” Miep declares again, and then she whispers with naked relief, “We thought we’d lost you.” But then she is turning away, raising her hand and waving. “She’s over here! Anne is here!” she is shouting.

At once Anne feels as if she is trying to contain an explosion. As if she is a bomb that will rip shingles from rooftops and blast bricks to powder if she is allowed to detonate. Her heart thunders at the sight of the tall, threadbare figure stepping into a stripe of sunlight from the concourse windows. With a thump the suitcase falls from her hand, and she is rushing toward him, calling out, “Pim!”

He’s so wretchedly thin, as thin as a shadow, and he appears confused, softly dazed, but then something fierce seizes his expression, and he cries out with perfect anguish, “My daughter!”

Clamping her arms around his bony body, Anne listens to the deep elation of her father’s voice as he chants her name again and again, “Anne, my Anne, my daughter, my dear, dear Annelies.”

It should be a moment of pure bliss. But even now, even as she absorbs the flutter of his heartbeats and sobs deeply in Pim’s arms, she feels something terrifying that comes unbidden and unwanted.

A bite of fury shocks her.