“What would you have done if a bomb hit the building where you were at?” irrepressible Jordan asked.
No doubt at all, though, that that was a dumb question. “We would have died,” Anne said bleakly. Jordan opened his mouth. Then he closed it again—the most sensible thing he could have done.
The Asian girl said, “You were most scared of getting caught, weren’t you?”
“Yes!” Anne’s head bobbed up and down. She’d feared none of the kids would have any idea what she was talking about. Who was she? Just an old lady they’d never met before. But the Asian girl got it, whether the others did or not.
Mr. Hauser saw the same thing. “Good question, Vicki,” he said, so Anne finally had a name for her. “While Mrs. Berkowitz was hiding in Amsterdam, Jean-Paul Sartre—who went through the German occupation in Paris—wrote ‘Hell is other people.’ Maybe he wasn’t talking about this, but maybe he was.”
Some of the kids, Vicki among them, nodded thoughtfully. So did Anne Berkowitz. She’d heard the line before—who hadn’t?—but she’d never applied it to her own predicament till now. She wondered why not. It fit only too well. To hide what she was feeling, she sipped from the water bottle.
“Can you tell us a little about that fear?” Mr. Hauser said.
She sipped again before she answered. “To start with, not everybody who worked at the spice plant knew we were hiding there. And the people who came in to buy things didn’t know, of course. So we had to stay as quiet as we could during business hours. We’d sit on beds and chairs and try not to move unless we had to. We couldn’t flush the toilet. Sometimes we couldn’t even use the toilet—an empty can or a bottle would be a chamber pot. So that was bad. And when we did have to walk around, we never knew whether the noise would give us away.”
“Wow,” one of the eighth-graders said, more to herself than to anyone else.
“That wasn’t all,” Anne said. “We had burglars—more than once. Spices had to do with food, and people got hungrier and hungrier. And I suppose they hoped the office downstairs had money in it, or things they could steal and use to get money or food. The longer the war went on, the more people in Amsterdam stole. It was the only way to get what you needed.”
“Did you hear them breaking in?” Mr. Hauser asked.
“Yes. We ran into them once or twice, too. We would go downstairs at night, when we were the only people there. Sometimes we would put spices into packets. Or we would listen to the BBC on the radio. It was the only way to get news that wasn’t full of German lies.”
“You could get in trouble for that, too, couldn’t you?” the teacher said.
“Oh, yes,” Anne agreed. “For us it was no worry—being a Jew in hiding was a worse crime than listening to the BBC. But people who weren’t Jews did it, too. When the burglars broke in, though… They must have been as scared as we were. Almost, anyhow. They weren’t looking for anybody, and we didn’t want to see anybody we didn’t know. We’d shiver for days afterwards.”
“How come?” a girl asked.
Holding her patience, Anne explained, “Because even a burglar could turn us in to the Nazis. He’d probably get a reward if he did. If he knew we were Jews, or if he just guessed…” Her voice trailed away. She drank more water.
“Were your rooms hidden well?” Mr. Hauser asked.
“You couldn’t tell they were there just by looking,” Anne answered. “There was a bookcase built in front of the doorway on the second-floor landing. It was attached with hooks. But it wouldn’t keep anybody out who really wanted to come in. That was what we were most afraid of—a fat SS sergeant or a bunch of Dutch Nazis who would have packed us off to Auschwitz.” Her mouth narrowed. “If that had happened, I wouldn’t be sitting here now talking to you.”
“But it didn’t,” Mr. Hauser said. “You all made it through till the Germans surrendered.”
“That’s right.” Anne Berkowitz looked across almost seventy years. “Those were strange times. The Germans in Holland started letting in food a few days before they gave up. They could see it was over. And then, after the surrender, they kept order and handed out the food for a little while, till the Canadians came in.”
“How did they get away with that?” Jordan demanded.
“They were there. They still had guns. They were organized, too, so the Allies used them,” Anne told him. “They even shot a couple of deserters the Canadians handed back to them—this was after the surrender. It kicked up a big stink, and they didn’t get any more deserters back after that.”
She looked across the years again. The Canadians marching into Amsterdam had been so ruddy, so fit, so splendid—so different from the shabby, scrawny, hangdog Dutchmen who’d gone through defeat and five years of occupation. They’d been delicious, was what they’d been. No wonder she lost her cherry that summer, and it wasn’t as if she were the only one: not even close.
Well, that was something the middle-schoolers didn’t need to hear.
She might have lost it to Peter van Pels while they hid together. She’d had a crush on him for a while. Margot had liked him, too, which made things… interesting in their cramped, smelly little refuge. But Peter’d stayed almost a perfect gentleman. No, people then hadn’t taken things that had to do with sex for granted. Was that better or worse than the way things worked these days? Anne didn’t know. It wasn’t the same. She knew that.
“What happened to the rest of the Jews in Holland?” Mr. Hauser asked. “How many of them were there?”
“There were about a hundred forty thousand Jews in Holland when the war started—a hundred ten thousand who’d lived there for a long time and the rest refugees like my family,” Anne Berkowitz answered. “Three-quarters of them died. We were lucky—very lucky.”
“I guess you were,” the teacher said. “How did you come to America? Can you talk a little bit about your life after you got here?”
“Sure. Like I told you, two of my uncles were already here. One of them was a citizen after the war. He helped arrange things so I could come. My father and mother moved to Switzerland. My sister stayed in Amsterdam and ended up marrying a Dutchman. We’d all seen too much of each other during the war. After it was over, we broke apart.”
“And you learned English. You learned it just about perfectly,” Mr. Hauser said.
“I was already studying it while we were hiding. I wasn’t very good, but I had a start. I soaked up Dutch like a sponge because I was so little when I went to Holland. I used to tease my parents—it came harder for them. And English came harder for me: I was older by then. I know people can still tell I wasn’t born here.”
“Lots of people who live here weren’t,” Mr. Hauser said. By the way three or four of his students nodded, they weren’t, either.
“True,” Anne said. “Anyway, I came here, and pretty soon I married Mr. Berkowitz. He’d been a gunner in a B-24 during the war. We wondered if I ever heard his plane flying over Amsterdam. I could have—who knows? He ran an advertising business. I helped him out with it here and there. Some of the songs and slogans people heard on radio and TV were mine, but we never said so. You didn’t always admit things like that in those days.”
“It’s different now. Women have more of a chance to be independent,” Mr. Hauser said.
“Oh, yes, and it’s good that they do. But they didn’t back when I was raising a family.” Anne held up a hand. “I’m not complaining. I’ve had a good life. Sheldon and I loved each other a lot as long as he lived. I watched my children grow up and do well, and my grandchildren, and now I’ve got a baby great-granddaughter.”