“Otto?”
“Not now, Edith, please,” he instructs tensely, and rounds up the other men with a sharp whisper. “Mr. van Pels, Mr. Pfeffer, if you please,” he says, and the next moment they’re hastening downstairs, feet thumping down the steps to the front building.
“Mummy? Mummy, what’s going on?” she asks, just as Mrs. van Pels skitters into the room dressed in her robe and old carpet slippers, obviously already scared stiff by the sudden commotion of the men’s exit. Her voice low but shrilclass="underline" “What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“Burglars are breaking in,” Anne answers in a panicked hiss.
“We don’t know that,” Margot insists.
“Girls, come away from the door and stay quiet,” their mother commands, drawing them into a circle at the rear of the room, though they can’t stay quiet.
“What do you think is happening?” Margot whispers.
“I don’t know, but don’t worry,” Mummy says. “I’m sure it’s under control. Wouldn’t you think so, Mrs. van Pels? If things weren’t under control, we’d know by now.”
“I can’t hear a sound,” Mrs. van Pels tells them. “Why can’t we hear a sound?”
“Maybe they met the burglars head-on,” Anne proposes. “Do you think they could have, Mummy?”
“Anne.”
“Maybe they’re fighting them off right now.”
“We’d hear them if they were fighting,” Margot maintains, but with more hope than confidence. “Wouldn’t we, Mummy? Wouldn’t we hear them?”
“Girls, this doesn’t help. Scaring yourselves silly,” their mother declares. “I’m sure that no one is fighting with anyone.” But her tone is not exactly reassuring, and silence strikes them mute when a sharp bang sounds from downstairs, followed by the sound of Mr. van Pels shouting, “Police!”
No one says a word as the minutes pass, till finally they hear footsteps approaching from below. Pim appears first, his face tight with nerves. “Douse the lights,” he instructs hoarsely. “And everyone upstairs as quietly as possible. Burglars have forced out a panel of the warehouse door.”
Anne swallows hard. “Pim,” she gasps.
“They’re gone now, frightened off. But we expect to have the police in the building very soon.”
Up above where the van Pelses sleep beside the kitchen, Margot drapes a sweater over a bed lamp, providing a ghost light that pools on the floorboards. Waiting in the dark, no talking, only hearts drumming. No use of the toilet, too much noise, so Peter’s metal wastepaper basket is substituted for the commode, for those who can’t stand to hold it. The odor sours the air. But still no conversation, only dreadful whispers. Only breathing, one breath in, one breath out, anticipating the arrival of the police. The police!
When footsteps are heard coming up from below, time stops. A terrible racket ensues as someone rattles the bookcase, and Anne shivers brutally. For an instant she believes that they are about to die. “Now we’re finished,” she whispers to the air, to God, to nobody. One aggressive rattle and then another, bang, bang, bang!
But then nothing.
Nothing follows but the sound of footsteps descending, and then nothing but silence. A ripple of relief passes through the room.
But in the aftermath it’s suggested by the fainter hearts among them that if the police ever did advance beyond the bookcase, Anne’s diary would be a bombshell primed to explode. It would betray not only those in hiding but those who have risked all to help them. Anne is appalled when even Pim admits to the logic of this fear, which only encourages Mr. van P. to declare that, for the sake of all, it should be burned.
Burned.
Anne feels something plummet inside her, but at the same time she stands up. She hears a hardness in her voice that surprises even her. “If my diary goes,” she declares, “I go, too.”
Silence.
And then it’s Mummy who speaks. Mummy of all people. “Never mind about that. Right now we should simply thank God,” she instructs. “Thank God we have been saved.”
7 THE FREEDOM OF SUNLIGHT
No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death. . . . And all because they’re Jews.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 19 November 1942
“The Gestapo is here.”
—Victor Kugler, 4 August 1944
1944
The Achterhuis
Rear Annex of Prinsengracht 263
The Canal Ring
OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS
Twenty-five months in hiding
It is a Friday, the fourth of August. A warm and muggy day. The closed rooms smell of wood rot and stale air. Anne and Margot are working on an assignment from their mail-order shorthand course when the Grüne Polizei barge into their lives in the form of a mof sergeant and his gang of Dutch cohorts from the NSB. The Dutch detectives are dressed like civilians and carry their revolvers loose in their coat pockets, but the sergeant in charge is an Oberscharführer in the SS Sicherheitsdienst. He wears a uniform of hunter green with a leather peaked cap that sports a death’s-head. A Totenkopf. Anne keeps staring at it as he bellows his commands, the silvery skull over crossed bones. Is it staring back at her? Below the peak of his cap, the Oberscharführer has a sulky civil servant’s face with a pouty frown. But then, as it turns out, he is quite the generous spirit. He permits them a full hour to pack their pitiful onderduiker belongings instead of the regulation ten minutes, after he finds that Pim had been a reserve lieutenant in the previous war. “Good God, man. Why didn’t you come forward when you had the chance?” The Oberscharführer is mystified. It’s obvious that the small tin soldier inside him has come to attention in the presence of a superior officer. “They would have treated you well,” he insists. “You would have been sent to Theresienstadt with other Jews of worth.” The mof is bewildered. But Pim has no answer for him. How can he possibly?