“She bore you two children. She made a home for us all. Even in a cramped hideout above a dirty warehouse, she made a home for us, and this is how you repay her? This is how you keep her memory? By chasing another man’s wife?” Anne feels a surge of elation, as if provoking her father has proved that Pim is not so invulnerable to his own anger.
“Your mother and I,” he breathes, and then he must swallow a heavy rock, blinking at the sharp tears in his eyes. “Your mother and I had a long and very loving relationship. No matter what you think, Anne. No matter what you’ve so precociously surmised. I did everything I could to make her happy, and she did the same for me. In fact, if you recall, it wasn’t me who criticized her. It wasn’t me who always had a sharp tongue in his head for your mother. It was her younger daughter who so often left her crying,” he says. “It wasn’t me who complained so constantly and so vociferously about being so very misunderstood. It wasn’t me who sought no value in your mother’s solace—it was Annelies Marie Frank! How did you put it?” he demands suddenly of the air. “Let me see—it was something like, ‘She means nothing to me. I don’t have a mother! I must learn to mother myself!’”
Anne glares. A bright electric shock of realization has pulsed through her body at what Pim, in his anger, has just let slip. “How,” she asks, “do you know that?”
“How do I know what?” her father demands, still quivering with anger.
“How do you know,” she asks thickly, “how I put anything?”
And now a thin sliver of alarm inserts itself into her father’s jagged expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do,” Anne says.
“I think I’ve had enough. Enough accusations from my own daughter for one evening.”
“You read it,” Anne says with a heated mixture of indignity and mortification. “You read my diary. Otherwise how could you have known?”
Pim’s mouth closes and is drawn into a straight line.
“When?” she demands. “I put it in your briefcase. For safekeeping. You promised me that no one would dare touch it there. I remember! But what you meant to say was no one but you.”
Pim still has nothing to say. Only stares painfully.
And then an even more horrible thought strikes her. “Did you show it to Mummy, too?” she asks darkly. “Did she read it?”
“No.” Her father speaks the single word.
“No? Are you sure? Perhaps you passed it around? Passed it around to the van Pelses? To that old fart Pfeffer? God, they were all such snoops, weren’t they? Always prying. I bet they had such a good laugh at my expense. The tragic unbosoming of a know-it-all adolescent!”
“No, Anne,” Pim protests. “No one else read a word. I can assure you of that. No one else.”
“No one else but my father.”
Pim swallows. His hands are squeezed into fists. His eyes wet.
And then suddenly, “Anne,” he whispers desperately, but before he can say another word, the front door to the flat opens and in come Miep and Jan, home from their evening walk. They are chatting and smiling until they freeze at the threshold of their own home, gazing in at the expressions of father and daughter. Miep sums it up quickly. “We’re interrupting,” she declares apologetically. But Pim steps forward, suddenly relieved.
“No,” he corrects her. “No you’re not. Not at all. Excuse me,” he says, and yanks his fedora and raincoat from the rack. “I think I’m in need of some exercise.” And with that he bolts from the flat.
1945
Konzentrationslager (KL)
BERGEN-BELSEN
Kleines Frauenlager
The Lüneburg Heath
THE GERMAN REICH
Final months of the war
The women’s camp at Belsen is already packed to bursting by the time the wretched transport arrives from Birkenau. A tide of starving, freezing inmates is pouring into Belsen from camps all across the east, evacuated as the Red Army drums through Poland. No more room in the Belsen barracks, no more room in the sardine tins, so the Germans set up a Zeltlager. A tent city with perimeters drawn by ropes of barbed wire. It is November, and the tents billow in the bitter wind. This is where Anne and Margot huddle for warmth. But after four days the most vicious storm yet shreds the canvas and rips the tent wires from the ground. The screams of many hundreds of women are fused into a single shriek that is sucked from their bellies as the immense canvas roof collapses upon them like a shroud. How hard they fight to free themselves of it, Anne gripping Margot’s arm by the wrist, shouting her name over and over. But beyond the tent is only the storm, frigid rain driving down like nails, like a shower of needles. Quickly, Anne and Margot join the women who have just fought their way free and climb back under the shroud for shelter. Those women who don’t, die. Those who do, will die later. Those are the choices left at Bergen-Belsen.
The nights turn frigid. The living from the tent camp are condemned to the ramshackle wooden barracks of the Kleines Frauenlager, Anne and Margot among them. But they are billeted near the door, so that every time it opens, a punishing blast of icy wind bites into them. Close the door! they beg over and over. Please, close the door!
The latrines are overflowing with shit. The water is infected, and the dead are a swelling population. Bodies pile up. They freeze solid into grotesque sculptures.
By the time the snow comes, both Anne and Margot are boiling with fever. They pull apart old shoes in a work barracks. They suffer the unpredictable blows of the Kapos like everyone and stand for roll call until they can stand no longer and finally surrender to the sick block. But the Krankenlager at Belsen is not only putrid, it’s an icehouse. Anne shivers, a frozen little animal. “At least we will be left alone here,” she whispers to Margot, watching her breath frost. “We can be together and lie down in peace.” But peace is elusive. Typhus kills Germans, too, so the moffen are afraid to come near them and leave the inmates of the Krankenlager to rot. Corpses are dragged to the edge of the burial pits or, if nobody has the energy, simply abandoned outside the doors of the barracks.
A grayness overcomes everything. Anne finally finds sleep on a pallet, curled next to her sister on the fetid straw. Margot has moved beyond words. Instead she communicates with shivering groans, glottal intestinal grunts, and her ruthless cough. The cough, that vicious, goddamned beast. Anne tries to cover both of them with her horse blanket, but really she’s mad that Margot has shit on it again. Maybe it wasn’t really Margot’s fault—of course, no one can control their shitting in Belsen—but still she is mad, even while her exhaustion smothers her as she clings to Margot’s bony body.
And then comes her dream.
A wonderful dream. Wonderful and dreadful. She is back in the hiding place and following Peter. They are running. Laughing. He has challenged her to a race up the stairs to the kitchen, and now he is threatening to eat all the strawberries before she gets there. She is sure she is going to beat him, though, sure of it. Until the stairs elongate and there are more and more of them, and soon Peter is far ahead of her. So far ahead that she can’t see him at all. So far ahead that she can only hear his voice calling to her. Come on, slowpoke! Come on!