“Gusti [Huber] was the first actress in Austria to be cleared by the American military government.”
—Joseph Besch, formerly Captain Besch,
U.S. Army, husband of Gusti Huber,
quoted in the newspaper column “Broadway Discovers”
“Gusti Huber . . . portrays Mrs. Frank. . . . A top stage and screen star in war time nazi Germany, she appeared in numerous motion pictures. . . . In 1943, while the real Mrs. Frank remained in constant fear for the lives of her dear ones, Gusti Huber charmed the Germans in a movie entitled ‘Gabrielle Dambrone.’ . . . In 1944, when the Frank family was shipped off in sealed cars, Miss Huber amused the citizens of the Third Reich with her starring performance. . . . At the very same time Anne was murdered in Bergen-Belsen, Gusti was busy shooting a screen comedy. . . . I am wondering if she would have uttered the word ‘Sholom’ from the stage—had Hitler won the war.”
—Herbert G. Luft, American Jewish Ledger,
Newark, New Jersey, March 28, 1956
MADELEINE WAS SITTING AT the table when I came into the kitchen that evening, her tortoiseshell glasses on her nose, the old portable typewriter she had used in college in front of her. She often took the typewriter out of the back of the hall closet in behalf of the League of Women Voters, and the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, and a variety of other good causes. In the months before the Rosenbergs were executed, she had rarely put it away. These days it came out less often, but it was out tonight.
I said I was sorry I was late, and, still typing, she told me David was asleep, but she had just put the girls to bed, and I had time to say good night to them. Her fingers flew over the keys. She was an excellent typist, thanks to my father-in-law, who had insisted both his daughters have a marketable skill, in case fortune dealt them an unexpected blow and someday they had to earn their own living. I envied his definition of an unexpected blow.
I went upstairs to say goodnight to my daughters. Madeleine must have been so engrossed in whatever she was doing that she had lost track of time. They were already asleep. I stood in the doorway studying them in the dim glow that rose like a pink and blue mist from the butterfly-shaped nightlight plugged into a socket in the corner. Abigail slept neat and compact as a mummy, her arms at her side, her face a scrubbed moon drifting over the landscape of her flowered quilt. Betsy sprawled across her bed as if she had been dropped from a great height. Face down, arms and legs at sharp angles to her small body, she reminded me of something. It took me a moment to figure out what. She looked like a human swastika. I stepped into the room, bent to her bed, and straightened her arms and legs. Then I pulled the covers over her and went back downstairs.
Madeleine was still at the table. Her hands continued to fly over the keys. She was in a hurry to finish. My wife did not like to be otherwise engaged when I arrived home in the evening. McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and her mother warned that inattention was the first step on the downward path to wandering husbands and home-wrecking harpies hell-bent on becoming second wives. She did not believe the magazines or her mother, but she was not so secure in her convictions that she wanted to test the hypothesis.
I came up behind her, bent to kiss the top of her head, and reached under her moving arms to embrace her. She had stopped nursing, but her breasts were still swollen.
She shrugged her shoulders to shake me off. “I’ll be through in a minute.”
“What is it now? Starving children in Greece or Red-baiters in Washington?” I teased her about her causes, but I envied them, or at least her faith in them. How comforting to think that an irate letter could right wrongs, a densely signed petition save the world.
“Take a look at that.” She nodded toward a newspaper spread open on the table. Newark Star-Ledger ran across the top of the page. We did not get the Newark Star-Ledger. Either someone had given it to her or told her to go out and buy it. This was a campaign.
I picked up the paper. The headline of the column on the left caught my attention.
GUSTI HUBER’S ROLE
IN ANNE FRANK DIARY
I was surprised. Madeleine had not mentioned the play since the night I had yelled at her and the girls about wasting food. The fact that she was bringing it up now was an indication of how incensed she must be. She did not want to upset me, but she could not turn a blind eye to injustice, whatever it might be in this instance.
“This document, in book and play form, has touched the hearts of hundreds of thousands of persons,” I read.
I still could not understand why. Scores of people had gone into hiding. Millions had died. Nobody had cared. At least nobody had done anything to stop it. And no one wanted to hear about it now. Where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, it’s not going to endear you to people. It had been true ten years ago. It was even more true today. Except for Anne. The world could not get enough of Anne. Susan Strasberg stared up from the glossy pages of half a dozen magazines, including the cover of Life, her complexion creamy, her eyes luminous, her hair lustrous. Anne should have looked so good in those days. We all should have. Members of the cast attested to the powerful emotions they experienced six nights a week and twice a day on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Teenage girls clipped pictures of the young man who played Peter and hung them on their walls, as Anne had hung pictures of movie stars and royalty above her bed. If Abigail were a few years older, a photograph of a boy who was playing the boy who was supposed to be the boy I once was would hang over her bed. I was ready for crushes on actors, but I could not permit this other enthusiasm, this thrall to misery and suffering. It had to stop.
Madeleine, I would say.
Yes? she would answer without lifting her eyes from the keys.
About this play.
Mmm.
I am Peter.
Would her head snap up from the typewriter? Would she tell me to stop joking, because this was not a laughing matter? Would she believe me? And if she did, then what? Would she take me to her bosom? Would she shoulder my suffering? Would she slip the silvery key of her love, brightly polished like all the other silver in the house, into the lock of my past and twist it? That I could not allow.
I looked down at the newspaper again and skimmed the rest of the column. It was about Gusti Huber, the actress who played the mother of Anne Frank on Broadway, but it was about her career before she came to America. It told how she had refused to work with Jewish actors and directors in Vienna before the war and continued making movies for the Nazis until the end of the war. “At the very same time Anne was murdered in Bergen-Belsen, Gusti was busy shooting a screen comedy entitled ‘Wie ein Dieb in Der Nacht’—‘As a Thief in the Night.’ ”
That was another thing I loved about America. Here this was still news.
“You wrote a letter to the editor?”
Madeleine stood, placed the typewriter back in its case, and snapped the locks shut. “A bit more than that.” She picked up one of the letters and handed it to me.
Mr. Kermit Bloomgarden
1545 Broadway
New York 36, N.Y.
Bloomgarden was the producer of the play. That was another shard of information I had acquired without realizing it.
I skimmed the letter. My wife and hundreds of other women threatened to boycott the play if Gusti Huber was not replaced.
“You’ve already seen the play.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
I glanced down at the table. It was strewn with papers. “Who else are you writing to?”
“The director. The playwrights. The Drama Guild. Actors’ Equity.”
I looked across the table at my wife. Her cheeks were crimson, her eyes a little wild. She looked the way she did after we made love. I glanced down at the table again. I could see no harm in a handful of letters to people who would probably not even read them. The producer and director were famous. The two playwrights had made their fortune writing movies about drunk husband-and-wife detectives with a small terrier, and Jimmy Stewart deciding not to commit suicide on Christmas Eve. I had no idea where I had picked up all this useless information. The play was making money. None of them would give a damn if the actress playing Mrs. Frank had performed for Hitler himself.
“And Otto Frank.” The color on Madeleine’s cheeks flamed. The heat of probity flickered in her eyes.
“What?”
“It’s part of the campaign. There’s a list of people to write to. Anne Frank’s father is on it. I told you he’s still alive. He lives in Switzerland.”
“Switzerland,” I repeated. I had seen his name on the Red Cross lists of survivors. I had read of him in articles about the published diary. But those reports had been as insubstantial as rumors. Now he was in my kitchen. I could no longer pretend not to believe in him. You’re like a son to me, he used to say when I brought him food in the hospital at Auschwitz.
“Basel,” Madeleine said. She picked up a letter from the table and read from it. “Herbstgasse 11, Basel, Switzerland.”
I took the sheet of paper from her. “Dear Mr. Frank.” My eye ran down the page. The letter was polite, even deferential. She felt sure that Mr. Frank did not know. She was certain he would not permit this sacrilege to his daughter’s memory to continue. She assured him that his daughter’s diary occupied a place in her heart and conscience. I reached the bottom of the page.
Sincerely,
Madeleine van Pels
(Mrs. Peter)
My mother-in-law, the Emily Post of north-central New Jersey, had trained her daughters well. For all my wife’s strangled rebelliousness, she would no more sign a letter without the official Mrs. and my first name below her own than she would blow her nose in a dinner napkin or go to the theater without white gloves.
I could not permit it. When Otto had claimed me as his son, I had wanted a father. But I could not afford a father now, at least not one like Otto, who was in thrall to the past. If my own father had lived, it would have been different. I would never have turned my back on him. I swear it. You cannot judge a man by how he behaves on a station platform with dogs snapping at his legs and SS officers beating his head, or on a work detail in the crosshairs of a camp guard’s rifle. But Otto was not my father. I admired him. I pitied him. But I would not accompany him on his maudlin journey into the past. I declined to crawl up those stairs into a world of darkness. I refused to risk myself and my family for his memories.
“You don’t really intend to send this?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s cruel.”
“He ought to be told. I’m sure he’d want to know. I would in his place.”
There it was again, that reckless faith in the power of the vicarious.
“You think Otto Frank doesn’t know? You think the man who wrote this article knows, and the people who are organizing this letter-writing campaign know, and now you and I know, but the father of the girl who wrote the diary does not know?”
“I can’t believe he would permit it, if he did.”
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Otto did not know. Or perhaps he knew and still had not learned. When the man from the Green Police came to take us away and noticed the old footlocker from the First World War printed with Otto’s name and rank in the German army, he practically snapped to attention, and a look of relief crossed Otto’s face. This was more like it. This was the Germany he knew. Minutes later they pushed us down the stairs into the waiting van.
“Maybe it’s not up to him. These things are arranged by contract. People buy and sell rights, just as they do property. If I sell a house, I cannot prevent the new owner from painting it an ugly color or adding unsightly additions. If this man, what did you say his name was, Otto Frank, if he sold the rights to the play, he probably has no say over who acts in it.”
She stood looking at me. The color was draining from her cheeks. Her front teeth worried her lower lip. She is a softhearted woman, my wife.
“You think so?”
“I think that if he does not know, and he finds out and can do nothing about it, it will be torture. More torture. If others want to torment him, that’s up to them. But I don’t think you and I want to be part of it.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Now you do.” I tore the letter I was holding in two. She flinched at the sound, but she did not protest.
My wife did not send any of the letters she had so furiously typed, though she did not know that. She gave them to me to mail the following morning. I took the neatly addressed envelopes from her hands and put them beside me on the front seat of the car. A few minutes later, as I sat waiting for the attendant to fill the gas tank, I tore the envelopes in two, just as I had ripped Otto’s letter the night before. I threw half of them in the trash can in the gas station and tossed the other half in a big metal waste bin at the site. Mr. Bloomgarden and Mr. Kanin and the rest of them probably did not know that the people Anne called the van Daans were really the van Pels. But I did not want to take the chance.
THE PLAY ran for a year and a half. I got accustomed to seeing the ads, and hearing praise from people who were slower on the uptake than my wife and her sister, and, on the rare occasions when I let Madeleine drag me to another show, passing the photographs of actors in shabby clothes with suffering or frightened or laughing faces, staring out from the glassed-in panels in front of the Cort Theater. They had, as I said, nothing to do with me. Nonetheless, when I saw the article, only a paragraph really, in the paper, I could not resist. This was not for me. I was doing it for the children.
As I came through the door to the family room, my daughters looked away from the television, saw the carrying case in my hand, and were on their feet in a flash. They hurled themselves toward me. David followed, weaving on the balls of his feet like a small drunk. All three of them were hanging on me, and trying to peer into the case, and squealing and shrieking. Madeleine heard the noise and came down the stairs just in time to see the cat come strolling out of the case.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What does it look like?”
He did not hug the perimeters of the room as most cats would do on strange turf, but prowled straight across it. He was a fearless specimen, accustomed to bright lights and loud applause and strangers. He padded to the sofa, jumped up, strolled across the back, and leapt to the floor again. The children followed close on his tail.
“This is a surprise,” Madeleine said.
“We’ve been talking about a pet.”
“We have?”
“Sure, when the Wieners got their poodle.”
“That was more than a year ago.”
“If you don’t want it . . .” I began, and my daughters shrieked in protest, as I knew they would.
Madeleine looked at me and shook her head. “You think I’m going to ask my children to choose between me and a small furry animal? No, I like the idea, but how come you didn’t get a kitten?”
“This one needed a home.”
“Why?”
There was no reason not to tell her the truth. According to the paragraph in the paper, when The Diary of Anne Frank closed, neither the actors nor the stagehands nor anyone else connected with the production wanted to take the cat who had played Mouschi. There was nothing Madeleine would like better than having a cat with that pedigree. I could hear her telling the story now. And you’ll never guess where it came from.
“One of the workmen brought it to the site,” I said. “It turns out his wife is allergic.”
“Is it a girl or a boy?” Abigail asked.
“A tom. That means a boy.”
Betsy was trying to wrangle the cat into her lap. “Can we name him?”
“You can try, but he already has a name. He answers to Mouschi.”
At the sound, the cat streaked away from Betsy and bounded into my lap.