Anne feels something plummet inside her, but at the same time she stands up. She hears a hardness in her voice that surprises even her. “If my diary goes,” she declares, “I go, too.”
Silence.
And then it’s Mummy who speaks. Mummy of all people. “Never mind about that. Right now we should simply thank God,” she instructs. “Thank God we have been saved.”
7 THE FREEDOM OF SUNLIGHT
No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death. . . . And all because they’re Jews.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 19 November 1942
“The Gestapo is here.”
—Victor Kugler, 4 August 1944
1944
The Achterhuis
Rear Annex of Prinsengracht 263
The Canal Ring
OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS
Twenty-five months in hiding
It is a Friday, the fourth of August. A warm and muggy day. The closed rooms smell of wood rot and stale air. Anne and Margot are working on an assignment from their mail-order shorthand course when the Grüne Polizei barge into their lives in the form of a mof sergeant and his gang of Dutch cohorts from the NSB. The Dutch detectives are dressed like civilians and carry their revolvers loose in their coat pockets, but the sergeant in charge is an Oberscharführer in the SS Sicherheitsdienst. He wears a uniform of hunter green with a leather peaked cap that sports a death’s-head. A Totenkopf. Anne keeps staring at it as he bellows his commands, the silvery skull over crossed bones. Is it staring back at her? Below the peak of his cap, the Oberscharführer has a sulky civil servant’s face with a pouty frown. But
• • •
In Anne’s memory the day will be broken into shards. Folding clothes into her backpack. Wrapping her toothbrush in a handkerchief with a sliver of soap. Picking up her curling iron, then putting it back down. Folding the brassiere that Margot had given her, tucking it modestly under a pair of woolen stockings. Helping pack a bit of food into a bag while silent tears glisten on her mother’s cheeks. The dreadful disbelief stamped on everyone’s face.
But then there is the sunshine. Walking out from two years in hiding into the summer brightness. It was such a surprise to feel warmth on her face so directly. For an instant she had simply enjoyed the freedom of sunlight before being loaded into the rear of a dark lorry.
8 BOULEVARD DES MISÈRES
Ten thousand have passed through this place, the clothed and the naked, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy—and I am left to live and work and stay cheerful.
—Etty Hillesum, letters written from Kamp Westerbork, 10 July 1943
One is certain only of death.
—Jewish proverb
1944
Polizeiliches Judendurchgangslager
KAMP WESTERBORK
Drenthe Province
130 kilometers north of Amsterdam
OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS
Former Jewish refugee camp now under the control of the SS Security Police and SD
After their arrest on that hot day in the first week of August, they are confined in the cellar of the SD headquarters in the Euterpestraat, before being transported to the House of Detention I in the Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen. There they spend two terrible nights suffering from the stench of a polluted canal before being taken to Centraal Station under a Dutch police guard and boarded onto a scruffy passenger train with the shades closed and the windows nailed shut. The train bumps down the tracks of the Staatslijn C with the carloads of other captive Jews, branching off at Hooghalen to the final leg of track leading to the so-called Polizeiliches Judendurchgangslager: the Jewish Transit Camp isolated in the mosquito-infested moorland of Drenthe Province.
This is Kamp Westerbork, a barbed-wire enclosure of more than a hundred barracks. Once it had been a refugee camp for young, unmarried German Jews pouring over the border to escape their Fatherland. But when the Nazi occupation began, the SS were delighted to find that such a facility had so conveniently been established for them in the Dutch lowlands, and with only a few alterations in the amenities, such as the electrification of the fencing, they transformed the camp from a refuge into a prison.