“Why did they do that?” a pretty Asian girl asked.
Before Anne could answer, the boy who’d been amazed about Dutch Nazis said, “Is that when they, like, tattooed numbers on the Jews’ arms?”
“Jordan…” From the way Mr. Hauser said the name, Anne gathered that Jordan had a habit of breaking in whenever he felt like it.
Not quite smiling, Anne explained, “They only tattooed numbers on you when you went into a camp. If you went in, you probably wouldn’t come out again. We knew that by 1942. Even that early, the BBC said Jews were being gassed. So that summer, when the SS sent my father a call-up notice, he didn’t go. We hid instead, in some rooms above and in back of the place where Father worked.”
“Your family, you mean?” the Asian girl asked. She must have decided she wouldn’t get a sensible answer about why the Nazis tormented the Jews. Anne knew she didn’t have one, not after all these years.
“My family, and a man my father worked with, Hermann van Pels, and his wife and son—Peter was almost sixteen when we went into hiding, about the same age as Margot. And a couple of months later we decided we could fit in one more person. Fritz Pfeffer was a dentist. We were all German Jews who’d gone to Holland and then found out that wasn’t far enough.”
“How big were these rooms?” the Asian girl wondered.
“Not big enough.” The heat with which Anne snapped out the words surprised even her. “Before Dr. Pfeffer moved in, Margot and I slept together in one room. After that, she moved in with Mother and Father, and I got to share that room with the dentist.”
“Eww!” The kids made gross-out noises. Some of them probably had dirty suspicions. They were a lot less naive about the facts of life than she’d been at the same age. Fritz Pfeffer hadn’t been that kind of nuisance, anyway. Plenty of other kinds, yes, God knows, but not that one.
As if plucking the thought from her mind, Mr. Hauser smiled with only one side of his mouth and said, “And you all got along like one big, happy family, right?”
“No!” Anne said, so sharply that everybody laughed—everybody but her. She went on, “By the time the war ended, I never wanted to see any of those people again as long as I lived. My own mother was a cold fish. Auguste van Pels—that was Hermann’s wife—was an airhead. A ditz.”
The students laughed again. Anne didn’t. She hadn’t had those words to describe Mrs. van Pels back then. She couldn’t find any that fit better, though.
And she was just getting started. “Dr. Pfeffer was in love with Dr. Pfeffer. He hoarded food. And he complained I made too much noise and shushed me all the time, even when I just rolled over in bed.”
“Why didn’t you, like, do something to him?” Yes, that was Jordan. Who else would it be?
“I wanted to,” Anne answered honestly. Some of the kids snapped her picture with smartphones. She went on, “I thought about the different things I could do. But I didn’t do any of them. We were stuck there with each other for as long as the war lasted. We couldn’t go anywhere, not unless we wanted to get caught. We had to try to get along.”
“You’ve said some hard things about the people who were in there with you—even about your own mom,” Mr. Hauser said. “What did they think of you?”
“They thought I was stuck-up. They thought I was snippy. They thought I was too smart for my own good,” Anne answered, not without pride.
“Were they right?” a kid asked.
“Of course they were. We were all right about each other. That’s what made getting along so hard,” Anne said.
“What did you do about food?” the pretty Asian girl asked. “Did you have piles and piles of canned things hidden with you, so you wouldn’t need to worry about it?”
She wasn’t just pretty, Anne Berkowitz realized—she was smart, too. She knew which questions to ask. She wasn’t altogether unlike Anne herself at the same age, in other words. “We had some things stored away like that,” the old woman said, “but we tried to save those for emergencies. We had money saved up, too. The people who were helping us used it to get ration books for us, and they used the coupons from them to buy us food. They bought food on the black market, too, for themselves and for us.”
“Can you explain that, please?” Mr. Hauser said.
“You couldn’t get much food with your ration coupons, and you couldn’t get any good food with them,” Anne said. “The Germans stole food from Holland. They stole it from all the places they took over. They wanted it for themselves, and especially for their soldiers. So the Dutch people held on to as much as they could. That was against the Nazis’ rules, and getting that black-market food cost a lot of money. But almost everyone did it. You couldn’t live without it.”
“What if the Nazis caught you doing it?” As usual, Jordan didn’t bother raising his hand. “What did they do to you?”
“They arrested you. Even if you weren’t Jewish, you didn’t want to wind up in a German jail, or in a camp.” Anne paused, remembering. “It would have been right at the start of spring in 1944 when the people we’d been buying things from got arrested. We had to get by on what we could use our ration books for—potatoes and kale.”
“What’s kale?” three kids asked at the same time.
“It’s more like cabbage than anything else,” Anne told them. “This was old, stale kale, and it smelled so bad I had to put a hanky splashed with cologne up to my nose when I ate it. The potatoes were like that, too. We used to try to figure out which ones had measles and which ones had smallpox and which ones had cancer. Those were the kinds of jokes we made.”
“Did things get better after that?” Mr. Hauser asked.
“A little bit, for a while,” Anne said. “But the last winter of the war, the winter of 1944–45, was terrible. Not just for us—for everybody in Holland. They still call that the Hunger Winter. Nobody had anything then. People starved. There was no wood for coffins to bury the dead. People ate tulip bulbs, even. The bread—when there was bread—was gray and disgusting. Everyone knew the Germans had lost. Even they knew. But Holland was off to the side of the way the Americans and English and Canadians were going, so Seyss-Inquart and the Nazis hung on and on.”
“Did you use up all your cans by the time the Hunger Winter was over?” the Asian girl asked.
“Long before then. We were so skinny when Amsterdam finally got liberated. I wondered if we’d live to see it.”
“Was being hungry all the time the worst thing about hiding out for so long?” Mr. Hauser asked.
Anne Berkowitz sent him a hooded look. That was the first dumb question he’d asked. Maybe he didn’t really understand after all. Or maybe he was asking for his students’ benefit. After a moment, she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. She shook her head. “No. Remember, we were cooped up with each other for almost three years. That was worse. And we never went outside in all that time. That was worse, too. When the Germans in Holland finally quit, we were as white as ghosts. Everyone knew we’d been in hiding till we got some sun. Oh, Lord, fresh air was wonderful!” She smiled, recalling how marvelous it had been.
“Anything else?” the teacher asked. Anne relaxed. The way he put the question showed he knew what he was doing, all right.
She gave it to him: “The worst thing, I think, the very worst thing, was being afraid all the time. So many ways to be afraid. English bombers came over Amsterdam at night. The Americans flew over in the daytime. Most of the time, they’d go on to Germany, but sometimes they’d drop bombs on us. The Germans in Amsterdam would shoot big antiaircraft guns at them, too, and sometimes knock them down. The noise was terrible. It scared all of us—Mrs. van Pels most of all.”