After eating and chatting for a little while with a couple of other residents who still had their marbles, she went over to the visitors’ center. Nothing there had sharp edges or corners. Most of the chairs were at a height convenient for old folks to use without too much bending.
Two big aquariums dominated the main room’s decor. One held freshwater fish; the other, more colorful saltwater. A woman with Alzheimer’s gaped at the saltwater tank. An attendant stood close by, waiting, watching. When the woman’s attention flagged, the attendant gently led her toward the dining hall.
Anne watched the fish herself for a little while. Then she sat down in one of those inviting chairs. No more than half a minute after she had, one of the Hebrew Home for the Aging’s community-outreach workers stuck her head into the visitors’ center and looked around.
“Here I am, Lucy.” Anne waved.
“Oh, good! Glad to see you, Mrs. Berkowitz.” Relief glowed on the outreach worker’s sharp features. She hurried over.
Dryly, Anne said, “I do try to hit my marks.” She knew the Hollywood patter. Movie stars had fascinated her even when she was a girl. And, like so many Angelenos, she’d taken a shot at scriptwriting back in the day. She’d never had one of her own produced, but she’d done uncredited doctoring on a couple that did get made.
“Sure, sure.” Lucy nodded. “And I want to tell you again how wonderful, how impactful, I think it is that you’ve agreed to do this. For today’s middle-school kids to get the chance to talk with a Holocaust survivor and hear what it was like from someone who went through it… That’s just marvelous!”
“I was lucky,” Anne Berkowitz said: nothing less than the truth. She tried not to show what she thought of impactful. Like many who’d learned English as a foreign language, she had a strong feel for when it was spoken well and when badly.
“They need to understand what people are capable of doing to other people when, when…” Lucy gestured vaguely.
“When everything goes off the rails,” Anne finished for her. She couldn’t blame this middle-aged woman who hadn’t gone through it for not getting why and how the Nazis could have done what they did. She had, and she didn’t get it, either. Which wouldn’t have stopped the Nazis, of course, or even slowed them down.
The community-outreach worker took her phone from her purse to check the time. “They’ll be here at half past eight—it’s a first-period class,” she said, and pointed over to a little meeting room where Anne could talk with the children. “Will you need anything special?”
“If you could get me a water bottle, that would be nice.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Lucy hurried back toward the dining hall.
Anne stood up and walked into the meeting room. She didn’t hurry—she didn’t think she could hurry any more—but she got there. The room held a chair like the one she’d just escaped and a couple of dozen ordinary folding chairs for the kids. Sitting on one of those for longer than a minute or two would have paralyzed Anne’s butt. The eighth-graders probably wouldn’t mind at all.
Lucy came back with the water bottle. She’d brought a big one, which was good. “You’re all ready,” she said.
“Almost,” Anne said. “Could you open it for me, please?” As with tying shoes, her hands weren’t what they had been once upon a time.
“Sure.” Lucy took care of it with ease. She was young enough and healthy enough to do such things without even thinking about them. Anne had been. She wasn’t any more.
A clamor outside said the schoolkids were here. “Keep it down, please!” their teacher said, amusement and despair warring in his voice. Mr. Hauser had taught history at Junipero Middle School since it was a junior high in the 1970s. He still wore his hair long, the way he must have back then, but it was gray now. Despite the hair, he had the unflustered calm of someone who’d dealt with middle-schoolers his whole adult life. He also knew his history. Anne had talked with him on the phone and in person setting this up.
Lucy hustled out of the meeting room to bring in the class. The kids wore uniforms: white or dark blue polo shirts, khakis, dark tartan skirts right to the knee. Mr. Hauser also wore khakis, and an old blue blazer to go with them. He came up and shook Anne’s hand. “Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us this morning, Mrs. Berkowitz,” he said, pitching his voice both to her and to the students.
“I’m glad to do it. It’s something different,” Anne replied. Most days were pills and oxygen and meals and TV and books. Days doing nothing, days waiting to die. The different days stood out, when there were any.
The students stared at her. They fidgeted on the chairs—not because the chairs were so uncomfortable, Anne judged, but because thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds couldn’t not fidget. There were about twenty of them: white, Hispanic, Asian, one plainly from India or Pakistan, one African American. Junipero was a Catholic school, but Anne would have bet a couple of the white kids were Jewish. A good education was where you found it.
Mr. Hauser turned and spoke to them: “We’ve been studying about World War Two. You remember how, in 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, and then conquered the Low Countries and France and seemed to be about to win the war. Well, when that happened, Mrs. Berkowitz was living in Amsterdam, the capital of Holland. How old were you then, Mrs. Berkowitz?”
“I was ten—it happened just before my eleventh birthday,” she said. “I wasn’t Mrs. Berkowitz then, of course. I wasn’t Missus anybody. I was only a girl named Anne.”
Some of the kids took notes. Some didn’t, but listened anyway. And some looked as if they wished they were running around in the sweet spring air outside. Well, that was about par for the course.
“You weren’t born in Amsterdam, though, were you?” Mr. Hauser asked.
She shook her head. “No. My father and mother and Margot—my older sister—moved to Holland from Germany in 1933. I stayed with my grandmother in Germany a little longer, and I went to Amsterdam in early 1934.”
“Why did your family move?” the teacher asked.
“Because my father could see how hard Hitler was making things for the Jews. He was a very smart man, my father,” Anne said. “He got a job at a company that made jam, and then at one that turned out spices. Some of my other relatives saw trouble coming, too. Two of my uncles came to America.”
“They got far enough away from the Nazis to be safe, didn’t they?” Mr. Hauser said. “But your family didn’t. What were things like for Jews after the Germans invaded Holland?”
“They were bad, and they kept getting worse and worse. The Germans and the Dutch Nazis made more and more laws and rules against us.”
“There were Dutch Nazis?” a boy exclaimed, his voice right on the edge of being a man’s.
Sadly, Anne nodded. “Yes, there were some. Most of the Dutch people hated Hitler and really hated Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian who ran Holland for him. Without help from people like that, my family never would have made it through the war. But there was a fat fool called Anton Mussert, who led the Dutch Nazi Party and helped the Germans rule Holland. Some people did follow him, either because they truly believed or because they thought that was the side their bread was buttered on.”
“What kind of laws did the Germans make?” Mr. Hauser tried to keep things simple.
“We had to wear yellow stars on our clothes, with Jood on them. That’s Jew in Dutch,” Anne said. “We couldn’t use trams. We had to give up our bicycles. We weren’t allowed to ride in cars. We had to shop late in the afternoon, when there was next to nothing left to buy. We couldn’t even visit Christians in their houses or apartments. We couldn’t go out at all from eight at night to six in the morning. We had to go to only Jewish schools and Jewish barbers and Jewish beauty parlors. We couldn’t use public swimming pools or tennis courts or sports fields or—well, anything.”