An English newsreel begins with a fanfare of trumpets. The narrator’s voice is a trumpet itself, as the images of the world flash past. Presenting the world to the world! Anne slouches deeply into her seat as crimes against humanity scorch across the screen and the camera pans across the piles and piles of corpses carpeting a scrubby expanse of mudflats. A bottomless hole opens under her. It makes her dizzy. She blinks. On the screen a few of the corpses are moving still, imitating the living as the narrator’s tone drops into a righteously grim timbre. “This,” he declares, “is Belsen,” and Anne feels her heart go rigid. “A city of the dead and the living dead.” A woman squats as she sips from a bowl in the midst of the ragged debris of bodies. Skeletons stumbling in their rags, aimless faces gaping into the camera without comprehension. “What is impossible for film to communicate is the stench,” the narrator insists, but Anne can smell it. That putrid perfume of animal rot. She watches the SS women, still in their feldgrau frocks, rounded up by Tommies. Scowling and sneering into the camera. “Members of Himmler’s female legion now required to bury the victims of their homicidal desires at the point of Royal Army bayonets.” The bodies of the dead, decaying, shrunken limbs, sacks of bones, are being dragged to the burial pits, where they are tossed in like rubbish. The corpses tumble down, limbs akimbo—one more onto the dung heap. When Anne was in the DP hospital, she’d been so deeply gratified to hear that the SS had been forced to handle disease-bloated corpses with their bare hands. But seeing it now—seeing their disregard for the humanity of their bundles, seeing the grim repulsion stamped on their faces as they grip each corpse by wrists and ankles and heave it into the pit with the flourish of trash removers—it enrages Anne. The obscenity of it. The despicable handling of these naked dead, stripped and decaying.
“Anne, do you want to go?” Miep whispers, “Do you want to leave?”
Suddenly she can see Margot’s face attached to every corpse. That one could be her. Or that one. Or that one sliding down the sandy bank into the massive open grave, that could be Margot.
She wants to scream. She wants to dive into the screen and shroud her sister’s shameful nakedness with a blanket. She wants to bellow at those SS hags: Get your hands off her, you filthy cunts! And maybe she does, because the next instant she finds herself standing, her body clenched, her hands trembling, as the echo of her own voice thunders inside her head.
Quickly, Miep is up out of her seat and guiding Anne into the aisle. “You’re safe now, you’re safe,” she’s murmuring. “Anne, it’s over, it’s over,” she tells her. But on the screen it isn’t over. On the screen there’s a soldier operating a bulldozer with a kerchief masking his face against the stench, the bodies twisting in the dirt as the broad blade digs in. “Let no one say,” the narrator commands, “that these crimes were never real.”
Tearing away from Miep, Anne runs, bursting from the cinema doors into the rain, desperate to outpace her panic. The bulldozer is behind her, plowing the corpses into the pit, its blade at her heels. She hears someone shout. A cyclist swerves on the slick cobbles; her body swivels out from under her. There’s an instant of wild tumble, nothing but the air clutching her, until she feels the impact as she penetrates the surface of the water. Her body plummets as the canal receives her. She can feel her breath swell up from her belly and into her chest in thick bubbles. Eyes clamped shut, limbs thrashing as the tortured images of Margot’s corpse are washed from her brain. If she doesn’t fight, she will sink, so can’t she just stop? Can’t she? Please, please can’t she just stop? The pressure of the depths grips her, trying to squeeze the final balloon of air from her breast as her feet flail against nothing. No floor to stop her, just a single plunge. The insistent downward draw to the bottom, where regrets end, where fear ends and pain dissolves. The panic of her body weakening. Her eyes flash open, her breath boiling from her lips. She knows the angel of death is waiting below. But before she can surrender, an intrusion. An intrusion! Margot is there, horning in, slinking down into the water, head shaved, her Kazetnik pullover ballooning around her arms, the Judenstern floating, her eyes wide and black. Not a single breath bubbles from her lips as she speaks. Anne, if you die, we die with you.
A jolt. A jolt to Anne’s heart.
If you die, we die with you.
All she has left is a breath.
If you die—
A single breath.
—we die with you.
A single choice.
