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 then, as it turns out, he is quite the generous spirit. He permits them a full hour to pack their pitiful onderduiker belongings instead of the regulation ten minutes, after he finds that Pim had been a reserve lieutenant in the previous war. “Good God, man. Why didn’t you come forward when you had the chance?” The Oberscharführer is mystified. It’s obvious that the small tin soldier inside him has come to attention in the presence of a superior officer. “They would have treated you well,” he insists. “You would have been sent to Theresienstadt with other Jews of worth.” The mof is bewildered. But Pim has no answer for him. How can he possibly?
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.