• • •
In the morning a clatter of bedpans wakes her. She breathes in deeply as she sits up on her cot and ever so gingerly slides her legs out from under the bedclothes. Her legs are little more than sticks, but she has feet that touch the wooden floorboards. She gazes down at herself. Her skin is pockmarked with scabs. The Red Cross nurse appears at her bedside and, clucking noisily, shifts her back under the covers. She is, of course, too weak to resist. She cannot conceive of resisting anything at all. But when the nurse exits the ward, she tries again. Slowly she grips the wooden headboard as firmly as she can manage. Her legs feel brittle, and her body burns as if her papery muscles might shred, but marshaling all her puny strength into the effort, she rises. At first it is too much. Twice she plops back down onto the hard mattress. The third time her arms shiver with the strain, but suddenly she feels a lightness fill her and she lifts herself from the bed, as if she is a balloon on a string floating upward. Her legs tremble as they take on even the negligible weight of her body, but they do not snap. A tingle of dizziness washes through her head, but then she feels the meek comfort of the warm floorboards on the soles of her feet.
She is standing.
12 SURVIVORS
There are many resistance groups, such as Free Netherlands, that forge identity cards, provide financial support to those in hiding, organize hiding places and find work for young Christians who go underground. It’s amazing how much these generous and unselfish people do, risking their own lives to help and save others.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 28 January 1944
The reemerging Jews can thank God for the help they received in that form, and feel humble. Much better people might have been lost because of it. . . . There can be no doubt that Jews, specifically, because of German persecution, were able to enjoy great sympathy from the Dutch people. Now it is appropriate for the Jews to restrain themselves and avoid excesses. . . .
—De Patriot, Dutch newspaper, 1945
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?