“I’ve written a letter,” Pim tells her, expelling smoke. “We’ll get it back eventually. These things take time. Everyone was so badly displaced by the end of the war.”
“That’s your answer to everything,” Anne points out, but if Pim hears her, he pretends not to. Instead he consults his wristwatch. “Mr. Nussbaum should be arriving soon. He told me he is bringing a special guest.”
Anne is curious. “A special guest?”
“Haven’t the slightest who,” says Pim.
She tries not to show it, but Anne can’t deny a thrill of anticipation. A special guest? Could it be—could it possibly
The door knocker sounds. Anne can hear Dassah exchanging greetings with Mr. Nussbaum from the front room and hurries over, but she finds the man standing alone, bearing a gift wrapped poorly in newsprint. “Not very glamorous, I’m afraid,” he confesses. “Just some jam and a bar of French army soap.”
“Very nice. Thank you, Mr. Nussbaum,” she tells him, trying to hide her disappointment by smelling the soap. But then she says, “You’re here by yourself?”
He keeps smiling, but he looks diminished, as if he is slowly being erased, until not much more than his smile and the brightness of his eyes remain. “Yes. Unfortunately, I am.”
“You know, I’m not sure
“She couldn’t make it, Anne,” Mr. Nussbaum interrupts. “At the last minute. I’m sorry. I did want you to have the chance to meet her, but she lives in Bussum now, and I suppose she wasn’t feeling up to the trip.”
23 SACRIFICE
Performing charity and justice is preferred by God to a sacrifice.
—Proverbs 21:3
1946
Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
School ends for the term, and the summer holiday begins. Anne’s grades are terrible. Pim sits morosely at the breakfast table and examines her report as if it is a mournful thing indeed. He is quite disappointed by the low marks she received in classroom behavior. “It makes me sad to see you waste your education.”
But she is surprised when Dassah speaks up. “Perhaps, Otto, Anne is no longer suited for school,” she suggests. Sipping her coffee, she meets Anne’s eyes starkly. “Perhaps she’s ready for the world.”
That morning Anne arrives at the bookshop but finds Mr. Nussbaum staring in a kind of trance at the window, unaware, it seems, that his cigar has gone cold. Unaware of her, it seems, as well. The pages of a newspaper lie on the floor, abandoned.
“Mr. Nussbaum?”
Nothing.
“Mr. Nussbaum?” she repeats.
And then, without breaking his trance, he speaks in a voice that is floating. Untethered. “Anne . . . have you heard?”
A dull pulse in her belly. “Heard?” She’s seen him depressed before, yes, but this is the first time she’s really seen him in the grip of despair. The first time, she thinks, that she’s really seen his Auschwitz face.
“They’re killing Jews again in the east,” he announces.
Her heart tightens. Confusion strangles any response, but Mr. Nussbaum does not appear to notice.
“It’s in the newspaper,” he says. Anne glares back down at the discarded paper’s headline. The word “Pogrom” stands out blackly. A favorite tool of the angel of death.
• • •
The blood libel. It’s an ancient excuse for a pogrom. A small town. A gentile boy claims to have been “kidnapped” by a Jew, and the old rumors start swirling—Jews abducting gentile children for ritual murder! Siphoning innocent blood to consecrate their unholy matzo bread. Nothing new there. In any case, the shooting starts when the police arrive, but soon the mob takes over the murdering and the looting. By the next day, at least forty Jews—men, women, and children—are dead. Stoned, stabbed, shot, beaten to death. Including a Jewish mother and her infant son, arrested in their own home, robbed, and then shot “while trying to escape.”
“That it still continues!” Anne laments.
Pim has finished his standard breakfast, toast and margarine with a powdered egg, and ignites his standard cigarette. He shakes his head heavily over the folded newspaper.
“Hideous,” he declares.
Anne blinks. “That’s
Her father lifts his eyes to her, burdened pale things. “What else would you have me say, daughter?”
“Must I really
“I am long past outrage, Anne,” he says with a sorrowful but maddening composure. “Such hateful violence. It’s horrific. But as we have learned, the world of men can be a horrific place. I cannot allow it to drag me down.”
“Really, Pim,” Anne says, burning. “This is your response? The world is bitter, but we must rise above it? That’s the type of thinking that sent Jews to the Kremas.”