Annelies

1945

Amsterdam

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

This much Anne has discovered by opening her ears: Most Amsterdammers think of themselves as the true survivors. They have survived five years of occupation by the moffen. They have survived the tyranny of the Nazi Grüne Polizei and the NSB collaborators. They have survived losing their bicycles, their radios, their businesses. They have survived losing their husbands and sons and brothers to prison camps and labor conscription. They have survived the Hunger Winter by scraping the scum from the bottoms of milk tureens or by swallowing a few spoonfuls of thin broth at a crowded emergency kitchen. And when the roads into the town were barricaded, when the moffen disconnected the propane lines and cut off all food supplies, when the bread and the beets ran out, they survived by boiling tulip bulbs for supper over wood fires. And when the tulip bulbs were gone, they survived losing their friends and their families and their babies to slow starvation. They are certainly in no mood to sympathize with a lot of bony Jews who babble on about cattle cars and gas chambers and God knows what kind of atrocities. Who could believe it all? Who would wish to believe it all?

She walks the streets still conscious of an invisible star sewn to her breast, even if it never shows up in a mirror. Many of the shops in town are boarded up, and those that aren’t have precious little actual merchandise to offer. Even in the Kalverstraat, the store windows advertise empty packages above the signs that read VOOR SLECHTS VERTONING. For Display Only. The Vondelpark is bereft of foliage, because the city’s trees were felled to their roots and chopped into pieces to warm the stoves of a freezing population. There’s no rubber for tires, no sugar to sweeten the feeble tea and tasteless coffee surrogates, no butter, no whole milk, not much of anything, really. But at least now there is an acute shortage of Germans as well. Few are disappointed since that particular commodity went missing.

On the Day of Liberation, Canadian armored columns rolled across the Berlagebrug in Amsterdam-Zuid. The same bridge over which the armored columns of the Wehrmacht rolled five years earlier. Anne spent Dutch Liberation Day in a hospital bed of DP Camp Belsen trying to comprehend her own liberation, but she has since watched the newsreels in the cinema of the lumbering Churchill tanks strewn with flowers. The giant, grinning Canadian boys, tall as oak trees in their fatigues, still grimy from combat, clutching joy-struck Dutch girls. She can only sit in hard silence when she watches the cheering, sobbing throngs of Amsterdammers on the screen, waving their tricolors and tossing streamers.

In the weeks since her return to the living, she has retrained herself to do small things, such as buying bread at a neighborhood bakery without gouging out a piece on the spot and stuffing it into her mouth. She has trained herself to resist dividing the crowd lined up for the streetcar into fives. Fünferreihen! Five in a row! As every Kazetnik knows, five in a row was the basic unit of measure of the KZ. It was one of the essential phrases of life and death.

Auschwitz-Birkenau distilled Anne’s German vocabulary down to fundamentals. And even now that she has returned to Amsterdam, hell’s lexicon is still fully entrenched in her mind. A camp is a Lager. Not a Konzentrationslager but a KZ—a Kazet. A Blockführerin is the female monster in SS uniform commanding a barracks block. The prisoner appointed to imitate the brutality of such a female monster is the Kapo. A Krema is one of the five crematoriums in Birkenau designed to incinerate huge populations of corpses after its gas chambers are emptied. The roll call for all prisoners, which lasts for hours upon hours in the drenching rain, the freezing sleet and snow, is the Appel. Appel! Appel! The Kapos still bellow in the darkness of her mind. Appel! Appel! Mach schnell!

Morning. The sun rises alone into a clear, cloudless sky. The window in her room faces a narrow cobblestone alley, which resembles a rubbish dump. Slag and wire and hunks of grimy machinery, a rusted stove, an old icebox, a broken toilet. She can hear voices from the kitchen, and then there’s a knock at the door. It’s Miep carrying a steaming cup of tea for her. Good Miep. Trustworthy Miep, dressed for the workday in a lavender dress and low heels, no jewelry, and only a touch of lipstick. “Your papa is at his breakfast, and I’ve left your plate warming in the oven,” she explains to Anne. Then, with only a hint of caution, “I understand that you’ll be joining us today,” she says, “at the office.”

“Pim thinks I should keep my mind occupied while he finds a school for me to attend.”

“Probably a very good idea, don’t you think?” Miep prompts, but Anne answers with silence, forcing Miep to fill in the empty space between them. “Well, I should be going,” she reminds herself. But she lingers. “I’m sorry that this room is so small.” She frowns lightly as she surveys the cramped space. “Perhaps you should put up pictures of film stars, like you used to,” she suggests. “To liven it up.”

But Anne can only gaze at the walls and absorb their blankness. “Yes. What a good idea,” she replies without the barest drop of conviction.

When she peers into the kitchen, she finds Pim’s beanpole figure alone at the table, his fork frozen in his hand as he sits under the spell of some heavy tome open beside his plate. A wrinkle of concentration crinkles the skin at the top of his head. In hiding, Pim would read his beloved Dickens aloud to her in the language of its author, along with the aid of his well-thumbed English-to-Dutch dictionary.

In Auschwitz the Germans marched men of his age straight to the ovens, didn’t they? She was so sure he couldn’t possibly have survived. But something in her father had carried him through to liberation. Was it really love and hope, as Pim insists, or was it the invisible survival instinct of Otto Frank? She gazes at her father quietly. Then steps out of the kitchen without alerting him to her presence.

• • •

Their mother had told them to find one beautiful thing.

Margot and Anne, that is. Find one beautiful thing. It was a day when the rain had churned the Women’s Camp in Birkenau into a quagmire. Soaking wet, they’d been lugging chunks of broken cement on a work detail, and when Anne fell, the Kapo had slashed her viciously with a hard rubber truncheon. Every day find one beautiful thing, her mother told them. Margot approached it like a lesson to learn. Assignment: Find one beautiful thing. But Anne tied her last knot of hope around her mother’s words. And that night in the barracks, she gazed at her skin, purpling from the Kapo’s blows, and found beauty in the colors, like a bouquet of violets.

Find one beautiful thing every day, and they would survive even Birkenau.

Except they didn’t survive. Only Anne is alive.

Her hair is growing back so thickly; it already hangs down onto her neck. In the mirror she can see that she is dressed not in lice-ridden camp rags but as a human being. The red cloth coat only slightly frayed at the hem. A skirt, a blouse. Even undergarments beneath. Actual undergarments. A shadow passes across the mirror’s glass. Margot is peering over her shoulder in the reflection. Even after her death, her sister’s cough is deep and corrupting. She gazes out from the glass, dressed as she was the last time Pim photographed them in hiding, wearing her ivory knit sweater with the short sleeves that Bep had given her and the green porcelain barrette she received from Mummy on her birthday clipped in her hair.

You have a spot on the collar of your blouse, her sister is compelled to comment.

Anne frowns. Absently rubs her thumb over the pale stain on the material. “It doesn’t matter,” she says.

So you don’t mind looking like a ragamuffin?

“It’s a spot. It doesn’t matter.”

No? You don’t think so? You don’t recall that the Nazis said Jews were slovenly?

“So now my spot is a mark against the Jews? It’s a bleach stain.”

I’m simply saying that as they judge one, they judge all.

“That’s Mummy talking,” Anne points out, and then glares deeply into her sister’s reflection. “Maybe it should have been you,” she whispers.

Margot gazes back from the thinness of the mirrored glass.

“I see the way people look at me,” Anne breathes. “Those glances over my shoulder to the empty spot where you should be standing. You wanted to be a nurse, Margot. You wanted to deliver babies in Palestine. What am I doing with a future?” she asks, but no answer is forthcoming. Margot has vanished from the mirror’s surface as their father knocks politely on the door.

“Anne? May I?”

“Yes, Pim,” she answers, and gazes at her father’s reflection that has replaced Margot’s. He’s wearing his wide-brimmed fedora raked at an angle, the brim shadowing his eyes. After his liberation from Auschwitz, her father resembles a poor artifact of himself. He wears a putty-colored raincoat that hangs like a sack. His mustache and the fringe of hair around his ears are well barbered but have lost most of their color. He stares into the mirror’s reflection, catching Anne’s eye until she turns away from him, feeling oddly embarrassed.

“So,” he begins with a vigorous note inserted into his voice. “Are we ready to go to work?” Work. Over the gate to Auschwitz, there was a legend wrought in iron: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work Will Make You Free. But this is not bloodied-knuckle slave labor she is headed for. Not digging trenches in the muck or hauling backbreaking stones. It’s freedom through office work. Pecking out words on Miep’s typewriter. Sorting index cards. Shifting papers into files at the Prinsengracht office, and all the while the upper floors of the annex, which housed them in secret for so long, concealed them from the moffen enemy for more than two years, sit vacant. Their hiding place, once the nave of their existence, now just empty space. She thinks of the lumpy cot where she slept, the wobbly table where she wrote. Her picture collection plastered across the walls—Shirley Temple, Joyce Vanderveen, Ginger Rogers—all part of their secret fortress above the spice warehouse. It often felt like a prison while she was in it, a young girl in love with glamour and talk. With boys and biking, swimming and skating. With freedom and sunlight.

“I’ve lost everything, Pim. Everything there is to lose.”

An airless beat separates them.

“Anneke.” Her father pronounces her name as if it’s a lead weight, his gaze thinning as he shakes his head. For a moment he breathes unevenly. His carefully crafted expression crumbling. “I can only imagine,” he says, “how you and your sister suffered.” His eyes drop, no longer part of his reflection. “Alone. Without your mother. Without me.” And now he turns his face away to wipe his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes for the tears. Then stretches a lifeless smile across his face as he shakes his head at the mirror. “You are so strong, Anne. I must learn from you.”

Anne stares. She feels herself go quietly rigid.

“What I want to say,” her father tells her tremulously, “what I think is important to say, is . . .” He damply clears his throat. “Grief.” The word cracks as he speaks, but he clamps down on it with a frown. “Grief,” he says, “is natural. But we cannot allow ourselves to be crushed by it. God has given us life, Anne. For reasons that only he can understand.”

Anne stands motionless, but she feels a rising boil inside. “You think,” she asks with a biting precision, “it was God?”

Her father blinks.

“You think,” she repeats, “it was God who has given us life?”

“Anne.” Her father tries to interrupt, but she won’t allow it.

“If it was God who has given us life, Pim, then where was he at Birkenau?” she demands. “Where was God at Bergen-Belsen?”

Her father raises his palm as if to deflect her words. “Anneke.”

“The only thing God has given us, Pim, is death.” She feels the horror erupting inside her. “God has given us the gas chambers. God has given us the crematoria. Those are God’s gifts to us, Pim. And this,” she declares, exposing her forearm to the mirror’s reflection. This is his mark.” The indelible blue defilement stains her forearm. A-25063. The number that replaced her name. Sometimes she still feels the sting of the tattoo needle that etched it into her flesh. Sometimes she can still feel the ink burn under her skin. It was so obscene. A woman in stripes with a green triangle wielding the needle. So impossible to believe in what was actually happening to her. “God has taken our lives away, Pim. He’s stolen them like a thief.”

And now her father is only nodding rhythmically, eyes shut tight. When he opens them, he takes a gulp of air as if he has just escaped drowning. His face in the mirror pales with loss and fear. “Yes, Annelies,” he says, “it is impossible to believe that God has chosen life for us. Chosen you and me among so many others who died. It’s utterly impossible to comprehend, yet that is precisely what we must believe,” he tells her, “if we are to survive.”

Silence is all Anne can offer him.

• • •

The morning is bright and sharp as glass as they travel to the office. Her father keeps up a brisk pace as they walk to the tram. He is carrying a leatherette portfolio under his arm, a gift from Miep and her husband, Jan, as a replacement for the one stolen by the SS Grüne Polizei. They walk quickly and silently up the Waalstraat to the broad lanes of what had been the Zuider Amstellaan but is now the Rooseveltlaan, the new name painted across a large wooden signboard. People swarm the sidewalks with the quick pace standard to the Dutch, but many of them have their heads bent downward.

Pim’s companies survived the war through a bit of a bureaucratic shell game, so now, after returning from Auschwitz barely more than a bag of bones, he can still sell pectin to housewives to make jam and spices to butchers for making sausages. Sales have plummeted, but Pim is not pessimistic. Oh, no, not Pim. Housewives may not yet have fresh fruits to preserve, but there’s always a market for spices, and in any case it’s only a question of time before the economy picks up. A year. Maybe two. “We can survive a year or two, don’t you think?” he asks Anne, but does not appear to expect her to answer. “A year or two is not so bad.”

There’s a crowd of people waiting on a traffic median in the center of the Rooseveltlaan. Some of the town’s trams are actually up and running again. The new GVB has managed to scrape up enough functioning cars to run limited service, in the mornings and afternoons, though the carriages are appallingly overcrowded and slow. Tramlijn 13 grumbles to a halt in front of the solemn crowd that’s gathered. Anne and her father must elbow their way aboard, but shoving is a lesson learned at the camps by young and old, and she finds some eerie comfort in the jam of people. All those tram riders crammed together. Her body is used to that kind of human packing from the cattle cars and barracks blocks and accepts it, going loose, boneless. Offering the crush of bodies no resistance. Her mind hangs blankly in her head like a stone. No thought as she inhales the smells of human grime and routine exhaustion.

Pim has begun a miniature lecture on the subject of food. How expensive it has become. “Miep and Jan have been very generous with us. But food is still quite overpriced. Just look at the cost of beans, simple beans. I will contribute, of course, when Mr. Kleiman agrees that the business is strong enough for me to take a salary again. But until that time we must be careful not to consume more than our fair share, Anne.”

Anne says nothing. She glares at the buildings as they pass in a flat conveyor belt of tall brick façades and ornate masonry. Terra-cotta red striped with ocher or white ermine like the sleeves of royalty.

Maybe it’s her body that remembers. The rumble under her feet of wheels on a track. The mob of humanity compressed. She is suddenly reliving the transport that carried Margot and her to the heathland of Bergen-Belsen without their mother. She can smell the septic odor of boxcar transport, feel the cold sickness in her belly. Margot’s face was sticky with tears as they clutched each other. They had been separated from the men on the ramp in Birkenau, and the women were on their own now, utterly. But instead of their mother collapsing in despair, all of her fragilities had simply fallen away. She became a lioness, protecting and caring for her girls, even as starvation and exhaustion racked her body. Anne was shocked at the pride she felt for her mother. And the love. But now Mummy had become so sick that she’d been taken to the Women’s Infirmary Barracks, so that when the selection was made by the SS doctors, Anne and Margot had been herded without her into the boxcars to be transported deep into Germany.

We’ll see her again, Anne kept repeating to her sister. After this is over, we’ll see her again.

But even as she spoke the words, she could not believe them. Somewhere in the car, a woman was chanting the kaddish in a croaking voice. A prayer of affirmation and a prayer for the dead. The cadence of the woman’s voice merged with the clunking rhythm of the train wheels, and Anne knew that they had seen their mother for the very last time.

Leaving the tramlijn, she trails her father’s pencil-thin shadow. They follow the path of the canal that flows between the tall, narrow brick faces of the old merchant houses. The street is lined with the skinny iron bollards bearing the trio of St. Andrew’s crosses. Little Ones from Amsterdam, they’re called. Amsterdammertje. When they were small, she and Margot would play a game, chasing each other through the rows, pretending that they were dodging a mouthful of teeth owned by some great dragon about to chew them up. She thinks of this as if she is remembering a fairy tale she once read, instead of a piece of her life.

Pim natters on about the length of the walk, tapping the dial of his wristwatch. She has noticed that on those occasions when they’re alone, her father drums up some sort of efficient chatter about the schedule of street trams, the scarcity of spices, or the price of substitute ingredients. Anne tastes something foul at the back of her mouth.

“I can’t do this, Pim,” she says.

“Anneke, please. It’s all right. It’s only a building. Just an old building. You’ll be fine once you get inside.”

But Anne is shaking her head. “No. No, I won’t be.”

“Anne.” Her father speaks to her softly. “Think of our friends. Our friends who cared for us so well while we were in hiding. Think of Bep and Mr. Kugler, not to mention Miep. They’re all there waiting for you, Anne. They’re all so excited to have you back with them. You don’t want to disappoint them, do you?”

Anne stares darkly, as if their disappointment might be something to see hanging in the air. The truth is, she fears that they will all smell death on her the moment she steps into the office.

“Shall we go on, then?” her father wonders.

Tightly, she nods her acquiescence.

“That’s my girl,” Pim tells her. “That’s my Annelies.”

It rained the night before. A drenching downpour, drumming against the window glass and the roof tiles. But the sky is clear this morning and crisp. Sunlight lifts the faces of the old Grachtengordel canal houses into sharp, clean relief against the blue, rain-scrubbed sky. Those neat façades of pastel brick take the sunlight like paint. Anne gazes at them as she walks. Their scrolls and flourishes still stolidly thrifty in their adornments after three hundred years.

Closer. They’re getting closer to the last home she’d known. Crossing the bridge arching the Leliegracht, Anne feels her stomach lurch, and a passing cyclist scolds her when she vomits greenish bile into the gutter. Pim hurries back with a handkerchief for her to wipe her mouth. “Only a little way farther. A few more minutes,” he tells her. “Breathe deeply,” he instructs, and she does. “Are you ready to keep going?”

Anne swallows. But she nods again, though she knows quite well that she is not ready. A few minutes pass until her father slows and removes a key from his coat pocket. Anne steps to the edge of the pedestrian walk and stops. Facing the set of battered and dingy wooden doors, her feet stick to the brick pavement. There is nothing extraordinary about the face of Prinsengracht 263. It is modest, unembellished. The address placard is still in place. The names of the businesses are stenciled on one of the warehouse doors in block letters. A board has been tacked over the hole that was kicked in by burglars while they were still in hiding.

The restored carillon of the Westertoren chimes clearly. The same clang that punctuated their days in hiding. She had come to rely on them for their continuity, until the Germans removed the bells and melted them down for their bronze. On the sunny morning of their arrest, the belfry was silent as they were loaded into the rear of a dark green police lorry. No clarion chime as eight fugitive onderduikers were hauled away. The Gestapo had placed a bounty on Jews in hiding. Seven and a half guilders a head, half a week’s pay for most Dutch workers, though Miep says that by the war’s end the bounty had risen to as high as forty a head, paid to anyone willing to repeat a rumor or betray a secret. Anne wonders, rather distantly, about who betrayed them. How much they were paid? Was it someone they knew? Before this moment their betrayal had felt fated to her, part of an inescapable outcome. This is the first time she has wondered about a person with motives. But then her mind jumps, as it often does now, as her father has opened the door to the high office stairwell and is peering with concern in her direction. “Anneken?”

Anne stares at the impossibly steep steps leading upward from the open door and then asks a question that feels both terrible and matter-of-fact. “When you thought I was dead, Pim, were you relieved?”

Her father flinches as if she has struck him in the face. “Anne,” he manages to say. She is pleased to have hurt him, as if inflicting this wound can in a small way compensate for all the wounds she herself has suffered.

“I think you must have been a little relieved. I know I was never easy. Wouldn’t it have been simpler if Margot had lived instead?”

Her father continues to stare at her with blank alarm. “Anne, that you could say such a thing.”

But Margot, too, seems to be interested in an answer to Anne’s question, for she has appeared beside the open door, dressed in the pastel blue shift that she so often wore during their years in the hiding place. Mummy had taken it in so that Margot could fit into it, which made Anne jealous, because everyone knew that particular shade of pastel blue looked much better on her than on her sister. She tries to forgive Margot for wearing it now. “Isn’t it true, Pim?” she asks.

Her father advances on her. For a moment he glowers, gripping his briefcase, and then his finger pokes the air sharply. “Never say this,” he commands, his eyes flooded by a terrified fury. “You must never ask such a question again. Do you understand me, Anne? Never.”

Anne gazes back at him. She feels empty. Her father’s anger sags, and his eyes are awash with pity. He grips her tightly enough to squeeze the air from her, and slowly she returns the embrace. He smells of a dab of cologne. She can feel the light stubble on his cheek, after he’d shaved with a dull razor blade. She can feel his bones through his coat. Margot maintains her questioning gaze, asking Anne when she will tell him the truth.

• • •

Prinsengracht 263 has suffered through a long war, too. Its paint is peeling in shreds. The sleek layered finish on the doors has been scoured away by five years of Dutch weather and five years of German occupation without paint or varnish for repair. She waits for her father to step into the building first. “They’re all so thrilled to have you here. Really quite thrilled,” he assures her as they climb the leg-breaking Dutch stairs, her father having assumed the role of the Unblinking Optimist. He opens the door, its frosted window stenciled with the word KANTOOR. Anne hears the chairs scrape and the voices rise happily in the light and airy space. Mr. Kugler lopes in from his office on the other side of the alcove. He is a tall man, Mr. Kugler, with sloping shoulders, a jar-shaped head, and valiantly melancholy eyes. He clasps Anne’s hand in both of his and kisses her like an uncle on the cheek. “So wonderful,” he tells her in a heavily heartfelt voice. “So wonderful.” Anne feels oppressed. But then she sees Bep. Bep—Anne’s darling Bep. She is thinner, her face sharper. She offers Anne a short, timid hug and a smile weighted by trepidation, eyes widened by the pair of rounded eyeglasses she still wears. Anne is confused. Is she now so frightful that her friend cringes at the sight of her? Miep’s earnest embrace, on the other hand, is still too dangerous, still too alarmingly maternal, so Anne quickly breaks it off. A dusty light is filtering through the high, unwashed window marked with adhesive patterns from the tape used as protection against flying glass after a bomb blast. The room smells of the cast-iron coal stove in the corner, which, starved of coal, only whispers a rumor of heat.

Throughout this scene Pim has been standing aside clutching his briefcase, his wide-sweep fedora on his head, his baggy raincoat hanging on him as if he were a scarecrow, gently beaming with approval. But he takes his first opportunity to retreat, withdrawing to his private office down the corridor past the coal bin. A moment of awkwardness ensues as Miep sets Anne down at a desk with instructions about how to evaluate piles of papers. Office work after Auschwitz. The dry little details. Anne must struggle to focus. Really, she’d rather be breaking up greasy batteries, sticky with silver oxide. Really, she’d rather be hauling the barracks shit bucket. This is too clean. She repeats the details of her instructions back to Miep, who nods. “Yes. Absolutely correct,” Miep tells her with obvious satisfaction.

Anne catches Bep’s gaze for an instant, but Bep’s eyes quickly drop.

• • •

Throughout the afternoon Anne crinkles papers. She wonders if the person who denounced them worked for the company, or even works there still, the name of the betrayer printed on one of these sheets she’s pushing around the desk, secretly mocking her. Mr. So-and-So the wholesale spice trader or Mr. Such-and-Such the freight master. Maybe him, maybe not. She sorts invoices this way and that way and makes a stack here and another one there. But then she gets lost in the blunted light streaking the dirty windowpanes. Unlike the Germans, the Dutch do not believe in shutters. They believe in open windows that speak to the world. Honest citizens have nothing to hide and have no need to shutter their windows. But the grime of occupation has made Dutch windows opaque.

Don’t rush so, you’ll make mistakes, Margot tells her.

Anne ignores her.

I’m sure those invoice copies are not in the proper order.

She hears a long, plaintive mew and looks down at a scrawny black tomcat. “Mouschi!” she exclaims in utter amazement, and scoops up the slinky little thing in her arms with a desperate pulse of need. Peter’s cat alive, alive. “Mouschi,” she purrs against the soft peak of the cat’s ear. “Mouschi, little Mouschi, you sweet, sweet boy . . .”

“For a while one of the salesmen took him home for his wife,” Miep says, and gives the skinny tom a playful rub on his bony cat noggin. “But she sent him back because he wouldn’t stop scratching the upholstery, the little devil.”

“Of course he was scratching the upholstery. He knew that it wasn’t really his home.” Anne squeezes Mouschi against her breast and rests her cheek on his head, but she must be squeezing him too tightly, because the cat suddenly squirms free and pounces to the floor, padding away, leaving Anne with a sickly feeling of loss. Anne thinks of her own little Moortje, her beloved tabby, to whom she was so devoted. But Pim had insisted that she leave Moortje behind when they went into hiding. Anne had sobbed but had done as she was told. And then Anne was so livid when she found that Peter had been permitted to bring his cat to the hiding place that she absolutely hated the boy. But now here is Mouschi again. At least God has deigned to spare a sooty black little mouser.

• • •

She leaves her desk to find Monsieur Mouschi a saucer of milk in the kitchen to coax him back to her, but instead she finds an unusual sight. Bep with a lit cigarette in her hand. “Bep?”

Bep reacts as if she’s been caught in mid-crime, and there’s a dash to extinguish the cigarette by tossing it into the sink and twisting open the tap.

“Bep, I’m sorry,” says Anne. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. Really, you don’t have to hide a cigarette.”

“Mr. Kugler doesn’t like smoking in the kitchen. And I really have no taste for tobacco. It’s just that sometimes it calms my nerves.” She clears her throat. Once Bep’s hair was a stylishly fluffy affair, which required extensive treatment by a hairdresser on the Keizersgracht. But now her hair is flat and lackluster. Her complexion is like clay. But more than her appearance has been altered. Where once there was warmth, there is now only this cold distance between them.

Anne says nothing at first, wondering what has changed. She can summon up only one possibility. “Bep,” she asks, “do you hate me now?”

Bep responds as if she has been singed by a spark from the stove. “Hate you? Of course not, Anne. How could you think . . .” she starts to say, “how could you possibly think . . .” But her words fray to nothing.

“It’s only that you’ve barely spoken to me all morning. Hardly a word.”

Bep shivers. Shakes her head at the air. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I seem distant,” she whispers. “But the truth is, it’s all too much. I simply can’t bear any more. I prayed to God for such a long time to make things right, but look what happened. Look what you went through in those terrible places,” she says. “Your mother and sister. The van Pelses. Mr. Pfeffer. All gone. I have such horrible nightmares about it. It’s too much, Anne. I know that sounds cowardly and unfeeling. But it’s just all too much.”

“It’s not cowardly,” Anne tells her, grateful for a glimpse of the old intimacy between them. “I can’t bear it either. I try to tell myself to accept it. That I’m nothing special. That so many people lost everyone. Lost everything. Yet . . . I can’t think . . .” She shakes her head. “I don’t know how to proceed. The sun comes up, and I fill the day, but it means nothing to me, and I want so desperately for that to change,” she hears herself saying. “I want so desperately to have a purpose. A real purpose.”

She swallows. When she thinks of purpose, she can’t help but think of her diary. Even if it was nothing but embarrassingly adolescent scribblings, it gave her purpose. It was the last innocent purpose that Anne had. “When we were in hiding, you remember, I had my diary,” she says. “I know everybody thought it was a silly thing. Just childish doodling. But to me it was so important. It was all I had that was truly mine.” And it’s true. When she thinks of her diary now, she still feels the loss of it physically. As if a limb is missing. An arm or a leg. “But it’s gone now, too.” All that work. All those words. She blinks at that reality and drags her fingers through her hair. “At times I feel so guilty. My mother is dead. My sister is dead. So many dead, and yet I mourn a pile of papers. What does that say about me, Bep?” she wants to know. “What does that make me?” And for an instant she is truly hoping for an answer. But all at once the gate is closed. Anne has bared too much of herself. Bep has a very odd expression patched onto her face. Her mouth is closed by a frown, but her eyes are hiding something electric.

“What?” Anne asks her. “What is it, Bep?”

Bep only shakes her head tightly. “I must get back to my filing,” she declares, and abandons the room.

Alone in the kitchen, Anne feels a thunderous wave of loss crash over her. She feels a greasy charge of nausea in her stomach and retches roughly into the sink, spitting bile over the remains of Bep’s cigarette. Anne has lost her ability to be among people. She must learn to protect herself from them better. To protect them from her. Opening the drain, she washes the mess away.

If you’re ill, you should tell Pim, Margot insists.

“Shut up,” Anne replies. “Can’t you just . . . shut up?”

Out in the corridor, Anne hears the low mumble of her father’s voice on the telephone. Mr. Kugler opens the office door and then blinks dully at the sight of her. “Anne?” is all he says, but she is on the move and does not respond. Where are you going? Margot dogs her. Anne, where are you going? Miep is depending on you to finish your work, she complains, but Anne slips past the inner office’s doors. She hears Mouschi on the stairs ahead of her. Anne, you have work to complete, her sister calls out. Mouschi glances back and then hops forward, shooting up the steep steps to a dust-shrouded landing above, where the windows are still plastered with opaque cellophane. Anne follows.

And then the bookcase confronts her.

Just a battered old thing, hammered together from scrap by Bep’s papa. A three-shelf construction jammed into the corner near the window, loaded down with sun-bleached ledgers, their labels peeling, leaving crusty glue stains. Above it an old map hangs, tacked to the floral-print wallpaper.

But what remain hidden are the latch and the iron hinge. What’s hidden is the wooden door behind it. All one need do is tug the concealed cord that lifts the latch and the bookcase will swing open, because it’s not a bookcase. It’s a gateway.

Mouschi curls around her ankle with a quiet purr as her hand reaches out. Her fingertips brush the rough wood. She stares at the shelf as if she can see through it, but then a voice startles her and her hand snaps back.

“Anne?”

It isn’t Margot, it’s Pim. Her father is frozen halfway up the steps, gazing at her with quiet concern. Kugler must have alerted him that his daughter had strayed from the office area. She glares wildly as he approaches her on the landing. “Anne,” he says again, but then stops. Something in him takes a step back, she can see it. “You know,” he tells her with a gentle distance in his voice, “there’s nothing up there any longer. The Germans stole everything. Miep says they pulled a moving van up to the door and cleaned everything out. Completely. Not a tack remains.”

Anne stares at the bookshelf, then back at her father. “Have you gone up there?” she asks.

His eyes empty. “Yes.”

Mouschi meows drowsily in front of the bookshelf. “I want to go up, too,” she says.

“No, Anne. Are you sure?”

Her jaw clenches as she steps forward. The hinge behind the bookcase still works. She hears the drab clank of the latch as she tugs the cord. Then the case swings forward as if it’s floating, and she stares at the door hidden behind it. Slate-green paint. Her hand is on the doorknob, and as the door opens, Mouschi peeks in but then shoots away, retreating down the stairs, leaving Anne alone to peer into the short hallway. She bends quickly to snatch a small bean from a crack in the floorboards, clutching it in her fist. It was always Peter’s job to haul the heavy sacks of dried beans they stored here up to the kitchen, and she’d been pestering him about something, just for fun, as he huffed away, when the seam split on a forty-five-kilo sack. It sounded like thunder as a tidal storm of brown beans came roaring down the steps, scattering into every crevice. Anne was standing at the bottom of the stairs, up to her ankle socks in dry beans, blinking back at the shock stamped on Peter’s long, boyish face. Then suddenly he erupted into a gale of pure, unsullied laughter. It became a house sport afterward to find one or two slippery beans left behind after the cleanup.

Stepping into the hallway, she approaches the room to the left of the stairs. Hand on the doorknob, she shuts her eyes as she opens it. With her eyes closed, she can see it as it was. The mash-up of furnishings. The patchwork curtains that Pim and she had sewn by hand. The worn throw rug. This was the communal living room during the day and the bedroom for Mummy and Pim at night. For Margot, too, after the great tooth yanker Pfeffer arrived to steal her sister’s bed and force her to sleep on a folding cot. On one side stood their mother’s bed with the pale cream crocheted throw under the heavy walnut shelving. Mummy always kept her shoes under the bed, and Anne would have to crawl under to fetch one when it was accidentally kicked back too far. After Mummy’s bed came the black stovepipe, followed by the table near the window with the embroidered cloth and mismatched chairs. And then came the wobbly old bed where Pim slept, its brass reddened with tarnish. When the English bombers arrived, Anne would run to Pim’s bed in terror, a child in search of sanctuary. Never to Mummy’s bed. She can see Mummy now in her mind’s eye, arranging the bedclothes in the morning, her pine-green cardigan threadbare at the elbows, her hair dulled by wisps of gray pinned into a bun at the back of her head. Anne feels a surge of joy at the memory, but a joy contaminated by loss and guilt. How blind she was to her mother’s true courage and love. How foolish she was to have wasted so much time arguing. She had written such terrible, critical things in her diary in anger but had never thought to ask for Mummy’s forgiveness, not even in Birkenau. In Birkenau it was hard for her to think of forgiveness, only survival. If only she had the chance now to open her eyes and find Mummy looking back at her.

But when Anne’s eyes open, no one is there. There is nothing left. Only unswept floorboards, peeling paint on the window frames. She can hear the mice skittering away from her intrusion. Gloom drapes the room. The rags she and Pim had patched together those first days in hiding still shroud the windows. With a sweep she pulls them down, permitting the daylight to penetrate the room for the first time in years. She lets them fall to the floor and brushes off her hands.

The door to the next room stands open. This was her room. The room she shared with the eighth member of their household of onderduikers: le grand dentiste Pfeffer. Two lumpy beds, a meter apart, hers extended by a chair so her feet wouldn’t stick out. A hook on the back of the door for her robe and nightclothes. A chair and a narrow wooden desk, and oh, how she had battled with that stuffy old bag Pfeffer for the privilege of that desk. It was one of the ongoing wars of the household. A battle so frustrating that she cannot seem to spare sympathy for Mr. Pfeffer’s shadow in the crowd of dead memories that trail her. She thinks of the smirk of disapproval on the old fart’s face and wants only to smack it away. When he wasn’t shushing her or criticizing her, he was commandeering her precious desk space for his so very essential “work,” the study of the Spanish language. Anne can still see him, his trousers yanked up to his chest, wearing a red dressing jacket and black patent-leather slippers, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose as he frowned, hunched over his orange-and-white-striped Spanish grammar, Actividades Comerciales, in the shrunken pool of light from her desk lamp. His lips moving in a whisper as he conjugated verbs. Me gusta el libro. Te gusta el libro. Nos gusta el libro.

It’s your arrogance, Margot tells her. Her willfulness. She cannot forget. She cannot forgive.

But stepping into the narrow oblong space, she feels tears chilling her cheeks. The wallpaper is brown with water stains, and dust floats in the light that penetrates the filmy windows. In hiding she had pasted her postcard collection on the wall alongside the pictures of film stars she’d scissored out from issues of Cinema & Theatre. Deanna Durbin and Charles Boyer. Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. She had adored movie idols and the European royal families. A young girl’s infatuation with glamour. Incredibly, they have survived, these pictures. Some torn. Some ruined by splotching from roof leaks, but still here. She had traded with her friend Jacqueline for a postcard of the young princess of England. A pretty little girl smiling over the legend H.R.H. THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH OF YORK.

Once these pictures afforded Anne comfort, but now they mean nothing. She turns to the empty spot where her writing desk once stood. A rickety wooden table with a shelf and a gooseneck lamp. She recalls the sound of the chair scuffing the floor as she tucked her knees under the desk. Recalls the hard grain of the wood beneath her paper. Recalls how the desk wobbled slightly as she leaned her elbow on it. But mostly she recalls the deeply nurturing satisfaction she felt as she wrote, netted by the yellow lamp glow. The scratching of the nib of her fountain pen. The scrambling release to spill herself onto the paper.

A floorboard creaks, and she’s back in her empty present. It’s Pim. He steps up beside her, and his arm encompasses her shoulder. For a moment she permits this false comfort.

“Anneke,” he says, as if he’s about to speak some difficult words, some disclosure of memory. “There’s something. Something I should tell you,” he begins, but whatever it is, she doesn’t want to hear it. The weight of his arm is confining, and she breaks away. Wipes her eyes. The next door leads to the washroom and the delft-blue commode in the WC. The porcelain sink with its brass taps still shiny from use. The large mirror hangs above it. She avoids its dark reflection and climbs the tall steps to the next floor, listening to the sound of her heels on the wooden steps, and enters the kitchen. There’s a deep sink with a battered copper bottom and a goose-neck faucet. A long countertop below a few tiers of shelving.

When her father appears on the threshold, she blinks wildly at him, then turns away. “Do you remember the strawberries, Pim?” she asks, her voice strained by a manic joy over the memory.

“Yes,” he replies quietly.

“Bushels of strawberries.” How they all crowded the dining-room table, laughing as they cleaned piles of vivid red fruit, popping the fresh sweetness into their mouths. “I can almost smell them,” she says, and feels herself smile. But then the smile simply floats away from her.

At night this room was where the van Pelses slept. Peter’s parents, Hermann and Auguste. Putti and Kerli. He was a businessman, Mr. van P., but there was something rough about him, like unvarnished wood. He had a talent, though. He could name any spice, no matter how exotic, blindfolded, with only a whiff. And what can be said about Auguste van Pels? She liked to flirt and argue, both. Always ready to praise Pim’s gentlemanly behavior and to go at it with Mummy about whose linen was being stained or china chipped. In hiding, she had begged so pitifully to keep her furs when her husband gave them to Miep to sell for food and cigarettes.

A short breeze clatters past the windowpanes. “We found Mrs. van Pels at Belsen,” Anne says, staring at the empty room. “Margot and I.” And for a moment she can see the woman, emaciated, all the happy conniving and farcical self-pity starved out of her. “She did her best to look after us.”

“Well.” Pim nods, his voice dropping into a pit. “For that I am grateful to her.”

“She vanished, though. It was easy to do at Belsen. Do you know what happened to her?” Anne is aware that Pim has written letters, visited many offices. Obtained copies of camp records through the International Red Cross. She knows that he has become the repository for obituaries, but she hasn’t asked for a single detail until now.

“She died,” he tells her, “probably on a forced march to a camp in Bohemia.”

Anne turns her ear to Pim, but not her eyes. “And her husband?”

She hears her father exhale.

“I was with Hermann van Pels in Auschwitz up until his death,” he says dimly. “I tried hard to keep his spirits up, but it was no good. He injured his thumb on a labor Kommando and made the foolish mistake of requesting lighter duty, but really he had already given up by then. The next day a selection claimed him. All I could do was watch as he was marched away toward the Krematorien.”

Anne nods. People who simply gave up. Her fist clenches around the dried bean in her hand. She passes through the next door to the cramped enclave where Peter van Pels made his bed. She is halted for an instant by the emptiness of the spot but then moves toward the ladder leading up to the attic. She can hear the concern in her father’s voice as he calls after her, but she does not care if the floor is unsafe or the ladder too rickety. In the attic there is nothing but dust and rot and debris to greet her. A rusty set of bedsprings, a few forgotten tins of UNOX pea soup, a pile of moldering barrel slats. Then through the dirty window she sees it. The horse chestnut tree. Its broad old branches, as tough as history, listing calmly in the breeze. A heartbeat swells in her breast. She feels, perhaps, that the tree can recognize her. That its leaves are whispering their grief, too.

The noise of Pim’s ascension intrudes behind her. “Anne,” she hears him call, but she simply gazes at the tree’s rustling branches.

“And Peter?” she asks him with a lifeless voice. “What became of Peter?” For a moment she remembers the two of them curled up together on the divan here in the attic. She remembers the athletic beat of the boy’s heart as she rested her head against his chest, his arm hooked around her shoulder as the leaves of the horse chestnut tree gently trembled.

Mauthausen-Gusen. According to Pim that is the name of the camp in Germany where Peter died after the mof evacuated Auschwitz. “I begged him to stay with me,” Pim says. “Begged him to stick it out in the infirmary barracks until the Red Army came. The Russians were so close. We could hear the boom of their artillery.” But Peter was headstrong. Even Auschwitz hadn’t cured him of that. He wouldn’t stay. “Of course, it was very easy to believe that the SS would simply murder everyone they didn’t evacuate.” Pim shrugs dimly. “Very easy to believe. Just as it was very easy to believe that compared to where we were, anything was preferable.”

Anne stares. “He never liked to sit still for too long in one place,” she says.

Pim nods. “I’m sorry, Anneke.”

“Sorry?”

“I know that you had feelings for the boy in a special way,” he says.

But Anne only shakes her head dully. “I thought for a while that I loved him,” she says. “But that’s a feeling that’s hard for me to imagine now, Pim.”

Her father leans against a wooden post, tall and lanky. The daylight is as soft as ashes, a spongy light that absorbs all brightness. Vast, full-bellied clouds scud across the sky. “Your mother was so worried,” he says, “that something improper would happen between you and Peter up here. Unsupervised.”

Anne narrows her eyes. “Nothing did happen. Not really.” She wipes tears from her cheek thoughtlessly. “It’s so strange, Pim. I think that’s why I—” she starts to say but then shakes her head. “It’s hard to explain. I think that’s why I feel such grief over the loss of my diary.”

“Grief?” Pim’s posture stiffens at the shoulders, and his eyes narrow with a quizzical distress. “You feel grief?”

Anne shrugs, embarrassed. “It may sound ridiculous. It was scribbling on paper. I know that, and I know it sounds terribly absurd, and perhaps even terribly selfish. But ‘grief’ is still the word for what I feel. Maybe it’s because if my diary had not been destroyed, they would all still be alive to me in some way. Not just in my memory but on the page.”

Pim does not interrupt his gaze but expels a heavy breath. “Anne. There’s something I must tell you,” he says. “But I don’t know how to begin. So I suppose the only way forward is to simply say it.”

But before he can speak another word, there are footsteps below. Mr. Kugler calling Pim’s name with an urgent tone. Pim crosses over and peers down the attic’s ladder. “Mr. Kugler?”

“My apologies for interrupting, but . . . but there’s a gentleman for you on the telephone.”

“A gentleman?” Pim sounds puzzled and a bit irritated.

“Concerning the issue we were just discussing. I’m afraid it’s rather essential that you speak with him.”

Pim’s sigh ends with a frown. “Ah. Yes. Yes, you’re correct. Thank you, Mr. Kugler.” Returning to Anne, he says, “I’m sorry. I must take this call.”

“But what were you about to say, Pim? What were you about to tell me?”

Pim’s expression turns circumspect. “We’ll talk about it later, Anne,” he assures her, his voice now gaining a velvety disinclination to say more. “I’m sorry, but I must go.” He pauses. “Please, don’t stay up here too long. The dust,” he insists. “It’s not healthy.”

Jan is working late again, past supper. The demands of the Social Service Bureau in a chaotic time, Miep explains, so it’s just them—Miep, Pim, and Anne—as Miep serves a tureen of thick beet soup. Pim is holding forth on an article he’s run across in newspapers. As the First Canadian Army liberated the western Netherlands, young women would try to communicate with friends and relatives in towns still under occupation by chalking messages on the sides of Canadian tanks. Pim finds this not only ingenious but very heartening, apparently. “That these girls should have such faith in the future,” he says with satisfaction. Anne doesn’t seem to notice the bowl of beet soup in front of her; instead she stares at Pim. Her father’s desire to leave behind the horrors they suffered is overwhelming. He is bent on returning to what he likes to call “ordinary life” and has no time to “belabor” the past. Anne finds this maddening.

“Anne, you’re not eating,” Miep observes.

Anne blinks. Stares down at the soup and then finishes it with steady strokes of her spoon. When she has sopped up the last traces of it with her bit of bread, she expels a breath. “So, Pim, who do you think betrayed us?” she asks, finally giving voice to the question that has been sparking about in her brain. Her tone is pointedly casual, but it’s a question designed to force the past into the present. Pim’s face goes blank. He rests his spoon on the edge of the bowl and enters a deep, momentary silence.

“I have no idea, Anne,” he says finally, and gives his head a single shake. “I really have no idea.” Only now does he meet her eyes, now that he has erected the wall of his response.

“You don’t think it was one of our warehousemen?”

“Possibly,” her father replies, now starting to stir his soup again with his spoon, signaling that he is finished with this topic.

“Mr. Kugler thinks it was the man who replaced Bep’s father as foreman.”

“He was troublesome, yes.” Pim nods without commitment. “Especially after he’d found the wallet Mr. van Pels had dropped in the storeroom. But we have no proof that he is the culprit.” He returns to his soup.

“Then what about the cleaning woman?”

Tapping the excess from his spoon against the rim of the bowl. “Who?”

“The cleaning woman told Bep that she knew there were Jews hiding in the building.”

“Anne,” says Miep.

“And how do you know about that?” her father inquires dubiously. “Did Bep tell you?”

“She told Miep,” Anne answers. “I overheard them in the kitchen.”

Miep frowns. “Anne, that was a private conversation.”

“A private conversation,” Anne repeats. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think there should be anything private about this, Miep. Not about this particular subject. Do you think that Bep was telling the truth?”

“Of course,” Miep replies, her voice stiffening. “You know that Bep would never fabricate. Not about something so serious. How could you even consider?”

“How should I know what to consider? She’s stopped talking to me.”

“Yes, well, she’s having a very difficult time,” Miep says in Bep’s defense. “Please, you shouldn’t take it personally.”

“No? Hmm,” Anne says. “That’s an interesting point of view. I live through three concentration camps, but I shouldn’t take anything personally.”

“Anne,” Pim jumps in, but Miep stops him.

“It’s fine, Otto,” Miep assures him.

Pim disagrees. “No, it’s not, Miep.”

“Thank you,” Miep says, “but honestly, you needn’t trouble yourself. It’s true that I have no idea how Anne feels. I have no idea how either of you feel. After what you’ve suffered, I can only imagine.”

“Only you can’t imagine,” Anne points out. “So what do you believe happened, Miep? Do you believe it was the cleaning woman who telephoned the Gestapo?”

“Enough,” Pim finally decides. “Enough, Anne. Just because a charwoman who occasionally ran a vacuum over the office carpet had suspicions that she voiced to Bep, that doesn’t mean she was guilty of a crime. People gossip. Unfortunate things happened. The building was burglarized, for heaven’s sake—how many times?”

“Three,” Miep reports.

“Three times. Also, we made mistakes. Plenty of them, I’m sure. Windows were left open when they should have been closed. The front door was left bolted when it should have been unbolted. Curtains were peeked through in the middle of the day,” he reminds her adamantly. “After two years I have no doubt that there were many people who harbored suspicions. But we don’t have a shred of proof to indict any single one of them.” Her father raises his spoon to his lips and slurps efficiently. Anne knows he is trying to close the discussion. In one way this doesn’t surprise her. Pim is an expert at closing down conflict. But in another way it shocks her. How can he be so complacent? His wife died. His daughter died. His friends died. How can he simply sit there and slurp his soup?

“Why don’t you want to know, Pim?” she whispers, her voice a thin knife blade.

“Anne,” Miep breaks in again, but Pim raises his hand. He swallows and stares sharply into the hollow air.

“It will do no one any good,” he says finally. “Vengeance? Reprisal?” His eyes lift to Anne’s. They are heavy and darkly magnetic. “They only cause pain, Annelies. More pain.”

“So the guilty deserve no punishment? The dead deserve no justice?” Anne asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying that I will not devote a single moment of the life I have remaining to retribution. And as for the dead? We live well, we love each other, and we keep them alive in our hearts. That is the justice they deserve, in my opinion.”

Anne stares.

Margot is standing behind Pim, wearing her glasses, ready for bed, her hair brushed, dressed in a white, freshly laundered nightgown, just as their father must remember her.

That night Anne takes the Montblanc she had organized into her hand and touches the nib to the blank paper, producing a small dot of ink. But then the dot becomes a word, and the word becomes a sentence.

She once believed that being a writer would make her famous and that she would travel to the capitals of the world and be adored. Now she knows that this future is nothing but a fantasy. She will never be famous. She will never be adored. Her story is too badly poisoned by pain and death. Who could stand to read it?