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.”