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.”
25 PITY
Isn’t there some old saying about love being akin to pity?
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 16 March 1944
1946
Museumplein 19
Consulate General of the United States
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
The fireplace in the landing hall is quite majestic. An imposing wooden mantelpiece is mounted above the hearth on stone pillars that are decorated with painted roundels, delft-blue tiles sporting windmills, canals, boats, and the like. The room itself is as spacious as a ballroom, richly appointed in the old mercantile fashion and paneled in elegant hardwood from the East Indies. It’s a princely setting, but now packed with a herd of shabbily clad Dutch volk, all here for the same reason as Mam’selle Anne Frank, no doubt. She has written down her name, her address, the telephone number in the Herengracht for the lady at the desk before being shuffled into this room. No chairs left, so she finds a seat on the floor by the stone hearth. The room has taken on a very distinctively stuffy postwar odor of soap rationing and bad tobacco. Hours pass. She dozes off at some point and wakes in sweaty surprise when she hears her name called. Scrambling to her feet, she is greeted by a silver-haired gentleman wearing wire-rimmed glasses who introduces himself in lightly accented Dutch as Vice-Consul Aylesworth. “And you are Miss Frank?” He wears a fatigued expression as he offers his hand.
Anne shakes it with a damp palm. “I speak English,” she is quick to mention.
“Do you? How nice,” he continues in Dutch. “This way, please.”
The room into which she follows Vice-Consul Aylesworth is quite a bit smaller. Just as elegantly paneled and papered, but the atmosphere is that of a harried functionary’s office. Ashtrays are dirty with pipe litter. An electric fan oscillates gravely in front of an open window, teasing the edges of the papers stacked on the man’s desk. “So,” he begins. “You are here, as I understand it, because you wish to emigrate to the United States.”
“Yes,” says Anne.
“And you have a valid Dutch passport, Miss Frank?”
A swallow. “No.”
“You have a valid passport of any nationality?”
“No. My papers . . .” she tells the man, “my papers were lost.”
“Well, isn’t that a common story,” the vice-consul points out.
He thinks you’re lying, Margot whispers in her ear, filling the empty chair bedside Anne with her Kazetnik’s corpse.
“It’s true,” Anne protests. “It’s really true. All I have is this,” she says, and pokes forward the UNRRA pass from the DP camp. Her photo and thumbprint.
He glances at it but makes no effort to take it from her hand. Instead he frowns as she shifts in her chair, and then he turns the frown on her. “How old are you, Miss Frank? If I may ask?”
Anne swallows. “Seventeen.”
“Seventeen. And are your parents aware of your visit here?”
“My mother is dead,” she answers bluntly.
“Condolences. And your father?”
“He is alive.”
“No, I mean he is aware of your plans?”
Tell the truth, Margot instructs.
“He’s aware, yes.”
“Then where is he?”
Anne struggles for an instant, deciding between a lie and the truth. “He himself has no plans to emigrate. Not yet,” is what she says.
“So in the meantime you’re here alone? Without him?”
Finally she decides on a stunted version of the truth. “He does not approve,” she admits.