Annexed (25 page)

Have you seen the dead lying upon the earth and drying—like r oots pulled? Anonymous—like teeth.

I hear them whispering to me—the dead—I can see them.

"
Boy! Open your lips. Here's water!
"

The drops are sweet on my lips. Like a kiss.

"
We're saved!
"

But it is not the saved I see. It is the drowned. The dead. The nameless millions who already haunt me. I am sorry. I am sorry I pushed you down, I held my elbows out, I took the smallest rock so that you must pick up the heaviest. Where are the words for the nameless dead—for those who have already gone before me, and are calling me?

I am ready.

I am coming.

I am standing at the top of the stairs, reaching out my arms to my mother. I feel her name on my lips.

"Mutti?"

"
He's going. They've had it once they call for their mothers.
"

I smile.

"
He's smiling!
"

"
Well, he's going to a better place, isn't he?
"

"
So are we, mate, once we're out of here!
"

She lifts her arms up for me
...

"
You are close, so close now," Anne whispers. "All stories must have an ending.
"

Pictures fill me.

Merwedeplein in the snow ... white blossoms shining against the evening sky in summer ... a line of geese ... a square patch of sky filled with stars.

And Anne, words falling from her lips like leaves.

"
Peter?" she says. "They cannot blow our words away.
"

The leaves of her diary lie scattered across the Annex floor.

I am as light as a leaf now.

As ready.

"
We are all dying," I hear Father say. "Its just a matter of timing.
"

If there is a heaven, then it is crowded with us. I take a breath and, with my last thought, blow the leaves of her diary up from the Annex floor. I watch them as they fly—up through the attic window, past the tree, past the birds and the chimes of the church clock. Beyond Anne, beyond me and Mutti and Papi and Otto and Margot and Edith. Up and up and up into the air, to where the hands of our enemies can no longer catch them.

Her words are written.

My story is told.

I am dying.

But others will survive.

Above us the words of millions hang waiting in the war-torn air like the last shreds of a burnt-out fire. Floating like pieces of ash. Soon they will settle. Some words will return with the living and never be spoken, but others will rise up in flames and cover the earth.

"
Now do you believe in words?" Anne whispers.

Yes. I do.

I am so close now I can hear their voices.

"
Peter!
"

Joyfully, I lift my arms up higher. I raise my eyes, and see them: Mutti is barefoot and war-torn, her arms outstretched. Papi stands beside her, his glasses are twisted and broken but his mouth is still smiling. In his hands he holds a piece of worn pink silk. Anne and Margot cling to each other as their mother wraps her arms around them. Liese stands behind them, her head still shaved, waiting for me.

I search for Mr. Frank, but he is not with them. He is still among the living.

I let my breath go.

"
Jump, Peter!" they shout together.

And I leap, up into their waiting arms.

***

Yes, I am dead now, but if you listen you can still hear me.

Wystawach.

Wake up.

Are you still there?

Are you listening?

After being in hiding for two years and one month, Peter van Pels was taken to a holding camp called Westerbork. From there he survived a three-day journey on the very last train from Holland into Auschwitz.

The experiences Peter has in the camps section of this novel are not documented, and are not, in that sense, real. They are reconstructed using other documented accounts. We do know that for a time Peter had a job in the postal department and that this would have meant he had extra rations, which he shared with Otto Frank.

For me, in this section Peter exists as an "everyman." He helps me to explain how the camps functioned, how they made a cold and systematic attempt to strip prisoners of their very sense of self, abandoning them to a world where even the most basic survival required that they learn to steal and cheat as they struggled to survive the attempts of the Nazi regime to eliminate them entirely.

Peter van Pels
somehow managed to withstand seven months in Auschwitz and the loss of his father. Debilitated and starving, he was then forced on a death march through Poland and Austria to Mauthausen—a camp infamous for the inventiveness of its cruelty to Jewish inmates. Some historians think he may have died on the death march itself. Other records suggest he finally died in Mauthausen, sometime between being admitted to the sick bay on April 11, 1945, and the liberation of the camp on May 5. He was exceptional in that he survived so long.

He was eighteen years old.

Auguste van Pels
was with the female members of the Frank family in Auschwitz and was transported to Bergen-Belsen with them. She was moved again in February 1945 to a slave-labor camp called Raguhn. Raguhn was shut down on April 8, 1945. Auguste was forced on a death march toward Theresienstadt. She died either on the way or shortly after arrival. It is possible that Auguste and Peter died within days of each other.

She was forty-four years old.

Hermann van Pels
died during the Auschwitz October selections of 1944. He was gassed to death. His wife and son survived him by six months.

He was forty-six years old.

Edith Frank
was with Margot and Anne and Auguste van Pels in Auschwitz until November 26, 1944, when Anne, Margot, and Auguste were separated from Edith and transported to Bergen-Belsen.

Edith Frank fiercely supported her daughters in Auschwitz, at one point digging a hole into the sick bay, where Anne was being treated, to pass her food. She died on January 6, 1945, probably from exhaustion, starvation, and grief.

She was forty-four years old.

Conditions in Bergen-Belsen for Anne and Margot Frank were beyond belief. The camp system had broken down: there was no food, hygiene, or fresh water, and infection and illness were rife. The sisters stayed together and tried hard to look after each other. They slept in the same bunk, by the door, "the worst position, because of the cold," and there is a short account of the conditions they lived in by Janny and Lien Brilleslijper. Margot died of typhus. It is likely her body was simply added to a pile outside the door.

She was nineteen years old.

Anne Frank
died alone in Bergen-Belsen, days after Margot. It is hard to imagine the depths of desolation she suffered at losing her sister, the last of her family. Hanneli Goslar believes Anne died of despair and loneliness as well as typhus. "There is no one left," she said across a fence in Bergen-Belsen. She died just days before Bergen-Belsen was liberated.

She was fifteen years old.

Otto Frank
survived seven months in Auschwitz and the ten days after the Nazis deserted the camp and left the survivors to fend for themselves in appalling and dangerous conditions. He eventually returned to Holland, where, after final confirmation that his children were dead, Miep Gies gave him Anne's carefully kept diary.

He made the decision to edit and publish it. The rest is history. Anne finally achieved her dream of "world-class" recognition. She had already, unbeknownst to her, written something "life-changing."

Her work and beliefs are protected and continued by the Anne Frank House and Foundation, which researches all forms of racism and genocide, including the recent rise of Islamophobia in Holland. They continue to encourage new generations to understand the nature and meaning of the Holocaust.

Otto Frank died in August 1980. He was eighty-one years old.

Fritz Pfeffer
survived the October selections in Auschwitz and was transported to Neungamme camp, where he died alone, of enterocolitis, on December 20, 1944.

He was fifty-five years old. Charlotte married Dr. Pfeffer posthumously in 1953.

Liese, Peter's first "girlfriend," is a complete fiction. She exists as a way of representing the disappeared and disappearing Jewish citizens during the years of Peter's hiding.

Writing historical fiction for the first time has proved a challenging task. Life within the Annex has been brilliantly portrayed by Anne; in Part One of my novel, her diary was my principal guide. Sometimes, in the interest of continuity of narrative, an event may have been moved. I hope avid diary readers will forgive me. I have tried to remain true to the spirit of the diary and the events that took place within the Annex.

The job of recording what may have happened to the occupants of the Annex once they arrived in the camps has been more difficult to unravel. In attempting to write about survival in Auschwitz and Mauthausen, I have at all times been guided by the testimony and evidence of camp survivors. I've read many books, but was especially moved by Primo Levi, whose clear-eyed testimony portrays without sentiment the reality of day-to-day life in Auschwitz.

My thanks to both Buddy Elias and Carol Anne Lee for reading the manuscript and making some invaluable suggestions.

BOOKS

Anne Frank,
The Diary of a Young Girl
(Bantam, 1993)

Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold,
Anne Frank Remembered
(Simon and Schuster, 2009)

Elie Wiesel,
Night
(Hill and Wang, 2006)

Markus Zusak,
The Book Thief
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Anne Holm,
I Am David
(Harcourt, 2004)

Primo Levi,
If This Is a Man
and
The Truce
(Abacus, 1991)

Art Spiegelman,
The Complete Maus
(Pantheon, 1996)

Peter Duffy,
The Bielski Brothers
(Harper, 2004)

Israel Gutman,
Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
(Houghton Mifflin, 1998)

Olga Lengal,
Five Chimneys:
A
Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz
(Academy Chicago Publications, 1995)

DVDS

Anne Frank Remembered
(2010) Documentary. Includes a few seconds of the only film footage of Anne Frank.

WEBSITES

www.yadvashem.org

www.annefrank.org

MY THANKS TO:

Charlie Sheppard, my editor. Klaus Flugge and Sarah Pakenham at Andersen. Barry Cunningham at Chicken House. Margaret Raymo and Karen Walsh at Houghton Mifflin. Barbara Bradshaw, Paula Barry, Steve, Charlie, and Felix Bishop, Kate Dando, the Fiddes family, Danny Lee, Suzy Paul, and Rosemary Turan for their support and friendship. Andy Kelly, Gertjaen Brock, Bruce and Tess Blenkinsop for their help with information. Joy Court. Jem. Xa, Ella, and Alastair White for living with me as I lived through writing this...