Odd how such a small thing, such an insignificant item from her girlhood, has such an effect. “I would wear this over my shoulders every night. And I remember how sometimes Margot would brush my hair for me,” she says. “We could be arguing all day, but that special moment would overcome all of it. It made me feel so close to her that it was impossible to feel anything except love. More than love,” Anne says. “I felt as if we had something magical that only sisters could share.” She looks past Bep, to the spot where Margot should be standing, yet it’s nothing save empty light now.
“Anne—” Bep starts to say, but Anne breaks in, the words coming unbidden, unplanned.
“I killed her,” she announces. A thin shiver passes through her body.
Bep squints at her, confused. “You . . . you what?”
“I killed her. I killed her, Bep. I killed my sister at Bergen-Belsen.”
Bep opens her mouth. “I don’t . . .” she begins, but then she shakes her head as if to shake the words away. “Anne . . .” she whispers.
“It’s not my guilt speaking,” Anne says. “That is, my guilt at surviving when she did not. I do feel a terrible guilt over that. Survival? That is its own kind of crime. But my crime is something different.” Rolling tears begin to ice her cheek, but she does not wipe them away. “We were . . .” Anne tries to continue, but her words die in her mouth, and she must start again. “We were in Barracks Block 1 in Belsen, Margot and I. Both of us had been brought into Germany from Birkenau. The weather was freezing. The camp was overflowing with disease. Typhus, dysentery, scurvy,” she recites the list. “Both of us were dreadfully, dreadfully sick. And I had been suffering from these . . . these horrible visions—rats the size of dinner platters crawling over us. Blinded cats, their eyes gouged out, shivering and mewing in agony, but when I tried to pick them up, they would spit at me and bite my fingers until I was bleeding. I suppose it was the fever. I felt like my eyes were slowly boiling inside my skull, and I was so, so horribly exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep. To fall into the deepest sleep ever conceived and never, ever wake up. But the barracks block was noisy. And Margot was coughing so loudly. We were lying close beside each other on the same pallet. There were lice in the straw. Lice in our ears and under our arms. Lice everywhere. In every crevice and pit of our bodies. I couldn’t sleep no matter how exhausted I felt, because everything itched so badly, my whole body. I just wanted to tear my skin off. And Margot was still coughing. I remember how I shouted at her, ‘Be quiet! Can’t you be quiet?’ But she just kept coughing. I only wanted to sleep,” she tries to explain as the tears flood her eyes and cling to her lashes. “I only wanted to sleep.”
She sees it all again. The disease-rotted barracks. The pallet on which she lay beside Margot. She can smell the stench of the filthy, lice-infested straw. The stink of bodies. The noise of Margot’s cough. She feels the impulse to shut her up. To heave her away. A beat. She swallows something hard and heavy. “So I shoved her,” she confesses. “She was lying with her back to me, and I shoved her from behind. I only wanted her to stop. Just stop coughing so loudly, so I could sleep. I didn’t mean to shove her . . . to shove her so hard.” Her voice diminishes. “So hard that she would roll off the pallet. But I did. I must have. And when she fell, it was too much for her. She was so weak. We were both so weak. The impact was too great a shock for her body.” The slowest beat. “She was dead,” Anne whispers. And then her sister is on the ground. Limbs akimbo. Her body motionless. Eyes open but her gaze stolen. Anne can feel the scream clog her throat, but she is too weak to release it as those around her begin to strip the corpse of its value. The dead have no need for socks on their feet. They do not require a woolen pullover.
Bep stares, her eyes raw. And then slowly she says, “Anne. Anne, I want you to listen to me, please.” She wipes her eyes, but a strange calm has transformed the woman’s face. “Will you? Will you listen to me? What you just told me—what you just told me you think happened,” she corrects. “You should consider it nothing more than a nightmare. Do you hear me, Anne? You were so ill. So fevered. It was simply—I’m sure of it—simply another hallucination.”
Anne gazes at Bep heavily. “Hallucination,” she repeats.
“You were so young,” Bep tells her. “Just a helpless child. You must believe me when I tell you that you have no right to take on the guilt of your sister’s death. The blame for that lands squarely on the men who perpetrated these crimes. Not on you, do you understand that?”
Anne is shaking her head, swiping at the tears on her face. “I know what I know.”
