Annelies

1946

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

Amsterdam-Centrum

LIBERATED NETHERLANDS

“So I hear Bep is going to be married,” Anne says.

Miep turns to her from across her desk, where’s she’s sorting through the morning post. “Yes,” is all she says. “That’s right.”

“You’re probably wondering how I found out.”

“No, not really.”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything,” Anne lies. “But Mr. Kleiman isn’t very quiet on the telephone.”

“I see.”

“I mean, it’s not as if Bep actually writes to me. Did she tell you directly?”

“She sent a note,” Miep answers. “I’m sorry, Anne, perhaps I should have mentioned it to you. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want your feelings hurt.”

“Because I’m not invited to the wedding.”

A small shrug. “I don’t think they’re doing much. Just a magistrate,” Miep tells her mildly, with a certain insouciance, as if the matter really has no great weight outside an office chat. “She’s marrying a fellow named Niemen. An electrician, I think, from Maastricht. They’re having the ceremony there, so it’s not actually close. I doubt any of us will make it.”

Anne is silent, glaring at the stack of invoices she’s been charged with ordering. She wants to be happy for Bep. She wants to forgive her for being so distant when Anne returned from Belsen. She wants to think of Bep as a sister again, but the awful question still nags at her. “Do you think it’s possible, Miep?”

“Do I think what is possible, Anne?”

“Do you think it’s possible,” she repeats, “that Bep could have played a part in our betrayal?”

Miep does not react directly. She continues sorting the post.

“Miep?”

“Why would you ask this, Anne?” Miep wants to know. Her eyes have gone sharp. “Did someone put that into your head?”

“No.” How does she explain that if it was anybody, it was Bep herself who put the idea into Anne’s head when Bep was so panicked by the thought that the police had arrived to interrogate her. “No,” she repeats.

“Good. Because anyone saying such a thing would be telling a lie,” Miep informs her. “A grotesque lie. Bep,” she begins, but then shakes her head as if mentioning the name is suddenly painful. “Bep would never have done anything to hurt you or your family. You especially, Anne. Above all people, you. You must know that. Bep is a loyal person. Right down to the bone.”

“Mr. Kugler told me that it was my fault she left. That she couldn’t stand to be around me any longer.”

Miep huffs. Shakes her head. “I won’t blame him for saying that. Mr. Kugler has faced more than his share of suffering, but he doesn’t always know when to keep quiet.”

“Are you saying that he was wrong?”

“I’m saying, Anne,” Miep tells her, “I’m saying that he doesn’t know the full story, and neither do you. Bep, after the war, she had a kind of nervous collapse. And it wasn’t just because of what happened to you. It was because of what happened to everyone. To her. Her father’s illness. The end of her romance with Maurits. There were many troubles. She couldn’t hold up under it all. It was a tragedy,” says Miep. “One of many. But it was no one’s fault, Anne. No one’s.”

• • •

The fourth of August—Anne can feel the date looming like a ghost. It will mark two years since the day the Grüne Polizei entered the hiding place. Two years since they were arrested like criminals and force-marched toward the moffen slaughterhouses. The office at the Prinsengracht has grown silent. Miep barely speaks. Kleiman has gone home with a bleeding stomach. Kugler has started smoking in the kitchen. Abovestairs in the House Behind, the past waits like a dreadful ghost. Pim grows tense. Easily aggravated. He’s snappy on business calls, and for the first time Anne hears him argue with the new Mrs. Frank. Spats of temper over small things. Where has she put his shoes? His pipe tobacco? Why must she use so much starch in laundering his shirts? Tiny, petty accusations to exorcise his own guilt at marrying her? This is how Anne sees it.

At breakfast Pim announces that the best possible solution to the question of Anne’s future is to send her to a school in the Oosterparkbuurt for a teacher’s certificate.

“I don’t want to be a teacher,” is Anne’s response.

“You would make a wonderful teacher, Anne,” her father assures her briskly.

“No, you’re not listening.”

“I am listening. As a teacher you could make a life for yourself.” His coffee cup clinks against the saucer as he sets it down. “As a teacher you could have a real impact. That’s why you must study harder next term. Get better marks.”

“That was Margot’s fixation. Not mine.”

“Anne.” Pim glowers, his gaze bruised. You should speak more respectfully of the dead is the message in his eyes, but she knows he cannot bring himself to speak the words.

“School means nothing to me. It’s all pointless.”

“Pointless? That I should hear you say such a thing, Anne. It is not pointless. It is essential,” her father retorts, and ignites a cigarette with a small nervous tic of his chin. He’s started smoking day and night, she has noticed, blackening ashtrays wherever he goes. “Anne, you must understand,” he insists. It’s obvious that he’s cross, but he’s also simply perplexed by this unrecognizable Anne. What happened to the child he knew, the daughter who begged to be sent to school, who pined for it? “You must understand that I am still responsible for your future. You must trust me to make the correct decisions for you.”

Anne stares blankly at him. “I cannot pretend, Pim, to be the person you thought I was. I cannot be like you. I can’t sit behind a desk tidying papers into piles and pretend to myself that nothing has happened.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” he asks. “Pretending?”

“Aren’t you? This town is a haunted place. It might as well be a graveyard, and I simply can’t live in a graveyard. It’s too much, Pim. I don’t belong here any longer,” she insists. “Why can’t I go to America?”

Her father releases the breath he holds in reserve for every time he hears her say this. “Again with this,” he mutters. “Anne,” he tells her forcefully. “This is your home. This is where you belong. And in the fall you will return to your classes. It’s my responsibility to see to your education. It’s what your mother would expect.”

But Dassah suddenly offers a differing opinion: school isn’t necessary for girls. “If she doesn’t want to go, then let her get an actual job. By her age,” says Dassah, “I was on my own. Nobody paying my way but me.”

Anne is wary of this. Why is this woman coming to her aid? Not out of kindness, certainly. Perhaps only out of a desire to be rid of Anne, to be rid of the competition for Pim’s affection. But whatever the reason behind Dassah’s interjection, Pim has no desire to be trapped by this assault from both sides. He stands abruptly. “Excuse me. But I’m late for the office.”

• • •

Outside, Anne pedals through the daily heat. The air stinks of canal trash. But when she arrives at the bookshop, she finds Mr. Nussbaum morosely engaged in a telephone conversation. He glances dark-eyed at her but makes no gesture of greeting. His tie is crooked and his shirt sweat-stained. The shop is airless. It reeks of old rot, old cat piss, and old pain. She tries to find comfort in Lapjes, scooping up the bulky bag of bones.

But then Mr. Nussbaum rings off. At first he simply glares into an invisible pit, his hand resting on the receiver.

“Mr. Nussbaum?” she asks, hugging the cat against her. “Is something wrong?”

His eyes flick to her. His face is as pale as soap. “What has your father told you?”

A swallow. “Told me?”

“About what’s happening. Here. In our adopted country.” His tone is bitter. Barren. “What has he told you?”

“Practically nothing,” Anne answers. “He still pretends to be sheltering me from the ugly truths of the world.”

“But that’s not what you want any longer, is it? To be sheltered from the truth?”

“No,” Anne says. Though suddenly she’s not so sure that’s true. The desolation in Mr. Nussbaum’s face is frightening.

“Very well, then. You should know,” says Mr. Nussbaum. “The sooner you get out of this country, the better, Anne. The Dutch have started deporting Germans. Even if they’re German Jews.”

Prinsengracht 263

Offices of Opekta and Pectacon

The door to the private office bangs opens. Pim and Kleiman look up as if she is a hurricane just blown in. “Anne!”

Anne glares. “How can I trust you when you don’t tell me the truth?”

Silence strangles her father’s voice for a moment. Then he forces out a breath and turns tightly toward Mr. Kleiman, who looks at her in a sickly way. “Mr. Kleiman, would you mind excusing us for a moment?” he asks.

Kleiman doesn’t answer but stands with a dubious expression and slips past Anne.

“Close the door,” Pim instructs her. “There’s no use in the whole world hearing our business.”

Anne keeps up her glare but closes the door. “I know everything,” she says.

A terse swallow. The back of Pim’s neck has gone stiff as he straightens a pen on his blotter. “Everything? And what does that entail?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

A strong frown at the desktop before he pronounces her name. “Annelies . . .”

“Is that what the bureau men are investigating? When were you planning on telling me, when they’re at the door about to drag us away?”

An odd spark of confusion enters her father’s expression. He blinks, and his eyes narrow. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘drag us away’?”

“What do I mean? I mean when they come to stuff us into the cattle cars and deport us back to Germany.”

“Anne, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“And how can that be true, Pim? Mr. Nussbaum respects me enough to tell me what’s happening.” And she repeats what she was told in the bookshop. How the government has done something “clever,” as Mr. Nussbaum called it. In denouncing the Nuremberg racial laws, they have converted all German-born Jews back into German citizens—thereby branding them “enemy nationals.” Enemy nationals subject to deportation back to Germany. “Don’t pretend that this is a revelation to you, Pim,” she says.

And now, to his daughter’s deep chagrin, Pim leans back into his chair with a small laugh of relief. “Ah, Anne. Is that all this is about?”

The laugh, of course, incenses Anne further. Her hands are fists. “You think this is a joke, Pim? Those men who’ve come here to the office to interrogate you—how long will it be till they come with a lorry waiting outside to carry us away?”

“Anne,” he says, his voice having regained its standard tone of confident control, “you’re jumping to conclusions. This issue with the authorities. It’s about property. Property and money. No one is coming to deport us.”

“So you’re saying that Mr. Nussbaum lied to me?”

“From what I understand, a handful of German factory workers have been expelled from the borderlands, but these were men who came during the war. It’s only a bit of bureaucratic maneuvering on the government’s part. A matter of territory, of business. And like any other business matter, it can be dealt with. That’s all. We are safe, daughter. Let me repeat: No one is coming to deport us. That much I promise you.”

“Promise? Now that’s a funny word for you to use, Pim, isn’t it? Didn’t you also promise to keep us safe once before, and look how well that turned out.”

All the light leaves Pim’s face. “Anne . . .”

But she does not care if she has wounded him. That her words have cut him more deeply than anything she has done or said before. The risk is too great. “I will not be sent back to Germany, Pim,” she bursts out, and bangs the table with the flat of her hand. “I will die first.”

3 August

The next morning Anne tells her father that she has a sick stomach and should stay home. They have barely spoken since her outburst the day before, but Pim examines her with a hint of sympathy and nods. She waits until he and Dassah have both evacuated the flat, and then she fills up the tub and takes a bath. She washes her hair and puts on the best dress in her wardrobe, a robin’s-egg-blue frock with a white velveteen collar that Miep found for her. She puts on her only pair of cotton stockings without mended holes and her suede shoes with the tiny silver buckles, and then she inspects herself in the mirror. Her final preparation before she leaves the house is to powder over the number on the inside of her forearm.

She has looked up the address in the newspaper. It’s a hulking, redbrick merchant’s mansion on the corner of the Museumplein. During the occupation it was well known as the office of the Reichskommissar’s man in Amsterdam—a petty mof princeling named Böhmcker, most infamous for segregating the Jewish quarter from the rest of the city. His fiefdom was a fortified Sperrgebiet by the end of the war, but even if the air-raid bunkers remain fat earthen mounds, the hooked-cross banners are long gone, the trenches filled in, and the barbed wire pulled down. She expects there to be a guard at the door, or at least on the inside. A soldier with a rifle, but no. Instead there’s a bustle of people heading this way and that and a slim, middle-aged woman seated at a carefully polished desk that’s flanked by a flag. Red and white stripes, with stars on a field of blue.

“Good morning,” Anne tells the woman in English. “My name is Anne Frank, and my wish is to emigrate to America.”