Annelies полностью

•   •   •

At night she finds Margot sitting on the edge of her bed, but she does not scream or shout out for help. For an instant the smallest pinprick of hope stabs her. But there’s really no fooling herself. There is no life remaining in her sister’s gaze. Margot has simply followed her from the mass graves into the hospital block. Her hair is matted, her lips cracked. A purpled rash from the typhus colors her neck, and her eyes hang open like swallowing caves. The yellow star is pinned to the dirty brown pullover that she wears over striped Lager britches. Oddly, the apparition is comforting. Typhus had broiled Anne’s brain with fever and taunted her with such appalling hallucinations. The dead calling to her from the corpse pits. Grasping the air with their skeletal claws. Demanding food they could no longer consume. Demanding a future they could no longer comprehend. But now she gazes back at her sister’s face.

You can’t just lie here, Anne, Margot tells her. You have to get up.

Anne manages, carefully and very slowly, to prop herself onto her elbows.

They won’t send you back home till you can walk.

“And where,” Anne wonders dimly, “is home, exactly?”

Where? Don’t be silly.

“Amsterdam? I should consider Amsterdam my home still? Without you, without Mummy, without Pim?”

You cannot be sure about Pim, Margot tells her. There is still a chance.

“No. Pim is gone,” says Anne flatly.

You don’t know that for certain.

“I do. How could he have lived through Auschwitz? He was old, Margot. Fifty-five years old. How could he possibly have survived a selection?”

So you’re the authority on life and death?

“You know very well how things worked. The Germans made it perfectly clear—the only way out was ‘up the chimney.’ They probably gassed Pim on the very first night.”

You don’t know that for certain, her sister repeats more forcefully.

“And what do you know for certain, hmm?” Anne frowns. “You’re dead.”

I know this much: As long as you remain lying here in this bed like a lump of self-pity, you will remain a lump of self-pity. I know that you must stand up and walk. That’s what I know.

Anne looks into Margot’s face and feels a keen edge of loneliness saw into her. “Do you hate me, Margot?”

Hate you?

“For what I did.”

But she receives no answer from her sister. There’s a noise from down the corridor, a door slamming, and when Anne looks up, her sister has been reabsorbed by the dark of the room. A deep exhaustion creeps into Anne’s heart, and she lowers her head back onto the flat pillow. For a moment she drills a look through the darkness above her, but then her eyes sink closed, serenaded by the gaping snores and tormented groans of the surviving remnant as it slumbers.

•   •   •

In the morning a clatter of bedpans wakes her. She breathes in deeply as she sits up on her cot and ever so gingerly slides her legs out from under the bedclothes. Her legs are little more than sticks, but she has feet that touch the wooden floorboards. She gazes down at herself. Her skin is pockmarked with scabs. The Red Cross nurse appears at her bedside and, clucking noisily, shifts her back under the covers. She is, of course, too weak to resist. She cannot conceive of resisting anything at all. But when the nurse exits the ward, she tries again. Slowly she grips the wooden headboard as firmly as she can manage. Her legs feel brittle, and her body burns as if her papery muscles might shred, but marshaling all her puny strength into the effort, she rises. At first it is too much. Twice she plops back down onto the hard mattress. The third time her arms shiver with the strain, but suddenly she feels a lightness fill her and she lifts herself from the bed, as if she is a balloon on a string floating upward. Her legs tremble as they take on even the negligible weight of her body, but they do not snap. A tingle of dizziness washes through her head, but then she feels the meek comfort of the warm floorboards on the soles of her feet.

She is standing.

12 SURVIVORS

There are many resistance groups, such as Free Netherlands, that forge identity cards, provide financial support to those in hiding, organize hiding places and find work for young Christians who go underground. It’s amazing how much these generous and unselfish people do, risking their own lives to help and save others.

—Anne Frank, from her diary, 28 January 1944