“I believe that the worldwide acclaim given her story cannot be explained unless we recognize in it our wish to forget the gas chambers and our effort to do so by glorifying the ability to react into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world, and there to cling as much as possible to what have been one’s usual daily attitudes and activities, although surrounded by a maelstrom apt to engulf one at any moment.”
—“The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,”
by Bruno Bettelheim, in Anne Frank:
Reflections on Her Life and Legacy, edited
by Hyman A. Enzer and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer
I WISH I COULD SAY that I took his advice; that I went home and told Madeleine who I was and where I had been; that I took my children on my lap and asked them what went click ninety-nine times and clack once, and when they gave up and I answered a centipede with a club foot, I explained how my father had made me laugh with that joke when I was their age. I wish I had told them that my father had a temper, but he was a good man and not a thief; that sometimes I was ashamed of my mother, what boy is not, but I loved her and would give anything not to have fought with her the night before the Green Police came; that sometimes I still blamed my father for not getting us out in time, and hated myself for getting out finally. Maybe my children would have been better off if I had told them the truth. Maybe Madeleine would have stopped threatening divorce. Or maybe it would have made no difference. Millions would still be dead, and I would still be alive. My father would still have been directed to the wrong side in the selection, or marched off months later with that group of men. I still would not be certain which it was. I still would have done nothing to stop it. But I did not tell them, and Madeleine did not leave me, and the children grew up not much happier or unhappier than other young people, as far as I could see.
We put a swimming pool in behind the house the red-haired man had taunted me about, added a sunroom to it, then sold it and moved to a bigger place that had been built before the war, with the kind of solid materials and good workmanship you couldn’t get anymore. Abigail got herself arrested in an anti-war march; and Betsy walked away from the wreck of Madeleine’s brand-new Volvo with nothing worse than a broken finger, thank god; and, after four years of straight A’s, David almost did not graduate from the private day school he attended, because he and two friends ran through commencement exercises naked. Streaking, it was called. Compared to what happened to some of the children in the neighborhood—drugs, cults, a drunk driving accident that left two young people dead—I was lucky. Madeleine went back to school to get her master’s degree in literature, took a job in the school from which David had almost been expelled, and began filling the house that was now empty of our own children with adoring, giggling girls who called themselves Ms. van Pels’s gells. I think my wife was happy.
The war was ancient history, so ancient that some people were saying the Holocaust, as it was called these days, had never happened. And if the Holocaust had not happened, Anne had not written her diary. It was a hoax, the deniers insisted. Anne and Peter were not Jewish names. The paper and ink were not available in the 1940s. The writing was too good to have come from the pen of a teenage girl, the insights too perceptive, the emotions too profound. The diary was the cunning work of a Jewish-American writer named Meyer Levin, they argued. Poor Levin always had claimed he spoke in the true voice of Anne. Still I said nothing. More important people than I spoke out. Otto sued some of these new Nazis, and won, but that did not stop them. The Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation published what they called a critical edition of the diary, complete with testimony from handwriting experts and historians and scholars, but the attacks continued. What good would come from the protest of an ordinary American businessman whose name just happened by coincidence to be the same as that of a boy who had been dead for decades?
ON THE morning of August 21, 1980, I came down to find coffee perking, bread toasting, and the newspaper beside my place at the table, as usual. I sat and unfolded the Times. Madeleine poured my coffee. I had eaten my toast and was finishing a second cup of coffee, when I reached the obituaries.
OTTO FRANK,
FATHER OF ANNE,
DEAD AT 91
I put down my mug and sat staring at the headline beside the photo of the familiar face, gnarled now as an old tree trunk. I could not help doing the calculations. My father had died at forty-six. Younger than I was now. Given another year, Otto would have lived exactly twice my father’s life. He had lived six times as long as Anne. But he had kept her memory alive. He had burnished it until it shone like a beacon, or, some were beginning to say, a klieg light blinding people to the bloodier truths of the past. Whatever he had done to my father, and Pfeffer, and the others, he had not let Anne down. I had to give him that.
I INVITED Madeleine to go with me to Amsterdam. I did want her along, no matter what she thought. But if she refused to take time off from school, which did not, after all, pay the bills, how could she expect me to drop everything at our busiest time? So I went to Amsterdam alone.
I was curious to see how the city had changed, though I had no intention of returning to 263 Prinsengracht. That was the only reason I was not sorry Madeleine had declined to come with me. She would have insisted on going to the Anne Frank Huis. That was what the building was called now. It was the city’s main tourist attraction. Madeleine would not have missed it for the world.
It must have been the jet lag. I never would have got lost if I were not bleary-eyed and disoriented. True, I no longer knew the city, but I have an excellent sense of direction. Over the years, in my travels with Madeleine, I have navigated around strange cities and over unmarked country roads without losing my bearings. But I lost them that afternoon and ended up on the Prinsengracht right across from number 263.
I sat on a bench to study the small map the concierge had given me when I left the hotel. The canals lay like neat blue ribbons over the flesh-colored city. Small numbers indicated the restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs full of scantily clad women, which advertised around the margins of the map. Various symbols signified points of interest. What looked like a small Greek temple designated the Anne Frank Huis. I looked up from the map to the building across the canal. Otto’s institute had done a good job of restoring it, too good. The shiny black door was freshly painted. The frames of the long windows we had not been permitted to go near for fear someone on the outside would see us were no longer rotting. Behind the house, the bare black branches of the chestnut tree knifed the winter-white sky. In my day, the tree had not shown above the house, or maybe I had simply never had the chance to see it from this vantage point. I put the map back in my pocket, stood, and made my way across the canal. I was not lost, of course. I had passed half a dozen signs pointing the way.
How can I describe walking through the house? My past was everywhere, and nowhere. It stuck like grit between the floorboards, worn smooth by how many millions of feet. It glared down at me from the map where we had followed the progress of the Allies, who arrived too late for my mother and father and Anne and Margot and Mrs. Frank and Pfeffer. It winked at me from the gauzy curtains painted with faint figures to make it look as if the Green Police were marching Jews to their death on the street beneath the windows. Clever touch, that. It crouched upstairs where I had flung my mother around in a jitterbug of love and fury that had thrown us both off balance. It seethed in the suffocating coffin of a bedroom where I had lain, my stomach flexing its hunger like a muscle, my mind racing with plots of revenge against the man who had sent me to bed without supper, who had let us end up like this. It was all there, but smaller, of course, seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It was all accurate, the pictures of movie stars and royalty over the place where Anne’s bed had stood, the kettle on the stove, the dish towel hanging beside the sink. Otto had had plenty of time to see to everything before he died. And it was all wrong. It was wrong the way my memories all these years, even when I misremembered, had been right. In place of the silence we had observed was the shuffle of shoes made in a dozen different countries, and the murmurs of excuse me and thank you in several different languages, and the respectful whispers of awe and dismay. But these people did not know what a whisper was, because they could not conceive the damage an inadvertent sound could do. Instead of the rank stench of human fear, there was the insipid smell of human sweat. Evil was no more than a sleight of hand etched on a window shade. Everything was cleverly planned and expertly wrought, but nothing was true. Nothing was as bad as it was inside my head.
I came out of the house and stood for a moment with my back to it, getting my bearings. An ash gray dusk was falling on the city. I had forgotten how early darkness comes to Amsterdam in the winter. A cold wind skimmed across the greasy black canal. The last tourists streamed past me, their masks of solemnity cracking in the fresh air, their voices rising in giddy relief at their escape.
I turned left and started back along the Prinsengracht. As I came around the corner in front of the Westerkerk, the bells began to chime. In the annex, the sound had been deafening, until they melted down the bells, and the silence had been worse, but here on the street, the reverberation barely troubled the air. The herring seller was closing up his stand, but the flower vendor and the newspaper and tobacco kiosk were still doing a lively business. Bicyclists pedaled home with briefcases and groceries and children stuffed into wooden crates fastened to the handlebars or strapped above the rear wheel. The army of cyclists was better dressed than I remembered, and there were more women among them. In the old days, the women would have been home preparing supper.
I must have been ten or eleven. Ten, I think, because it is an early summer evening, and I will turn eleven in the fall. My father and I are on our way back to the flat where my mother is still unpacking the few possessions we managed to bring with us from Osnabrück. My father is full of optimism. He has left at the border the fear and indecision that made him snap at me on the train. He is Dutch by birth; this is a homecoming. We have left Germany and its insane new order behind. The Germans will come to their senses someday. In the meantime, we will be better off in Amsterdam. We will be safe in Amsterdam.In the last war, the Netherlands remained neutral.
As my father and I stand waiting for the light to change, he pats first one pocket, then the next, looking for his cigarettes. “One minute,” he tells me as he starts for the stand. I follow him, hoping for candy, knowing the impossibility of the hope. We are on our way home to supper.
Standing in front of the stall, my father takes the pack of cigarettes from the vendor, tears it open, puts one between his lips, and holds a match to it. Only then does he take his change from the small metal tray. He is about to drop the coins in his pocket, when he seems to think better of it and draws his hand, still holding the coins, out again. My hopes soar. He moves on to the flower stall.
“What do you think, Peter, lilies or tulips?” He does not suggest carnations. Those are for my mother’s birthday, year after year. This occasion is unique. He does not mention roses either. They are beyond our pocketbook. Though things will be all right as soon as he gets on his feet again, wriggling out of the hands of the Nazis was not cheap. But who needs roses, with lilies gleaming in the twilight and tulips burning like flames?
When we start to walk on, his chin is higher and his back straighter. He reaches up and readjusts his hat at a jaunty angle. He is a man again, the man I have not seen for some time. I can barely keep pace with his long swaggering stride. I have forgotten the candy. I am forgetting the boys in the schoolyard who called me Christ-killer. I am trying to keep up with my father, who is hurrying through the rosy Amsterdam evening toward my mother, who will open the door of the freshly scrubbed, supper-smelling flat to find her husband and son standing there, a bunch of scarlet tulips burning between them.
A man collided into my back, excused himself, and moved on, but I was suddenly aware of other passersby. They looked at me, then quickly away, embarrassed but not surprised. We are a stone’s throw from the Anne Frank House. Weeping tourists are not a rarity. But I was not crying for anything in that house. I was crying for the innocence of that father walking home through the blushing Amsterdam evening, for the hope of that woman scrubbing a new flat for a new life, for the boy who thought he was safe. I was crying for a world that saw a war coming, that feared the worst, but had no inkling how bad the worst could be. I was crying for a world that, for all its misery, had not heard of concentration camps, or mass showers that spray death, or chimneys that spew human ashes, or medical experiments on men who happen to have red hair or children who happen to be twins. I was crying for a paradise I had tried to recreate for my wife and children, and myself, and for my failure. As the silent tears gave way to sobs, and people turned to stare, because this was more than they were accustomed to, I cried for the second murder of my parents, the one I had committed by silence.
IT IS a funny thing, the various ways in which people react to being fooled. Some take it personally, though my wife, the only one, other than my children, who had a right to, did not. She knew the lies had nothing to do with her. Her reaction was relief. She had always suspected something. It was reassuring, she said, to know that what I was hiding was not worse. I did not ask her what she meant by that. I had a better idea than she of the crimes I could have committed.
My children did not blame me either. Unlike their mother, however, they could not imagine why I had kept silent all these years. Perhaps I had not failed to protect them after all.
The children took to their new past with a vengeance. Abigail had her first child, my first grandchild, that spring, and named him Herman, spelled with one n and shortened to Hank. Two years after that, she called her daughter Augusta, after my mother. I was surprised, and pleased. Four later, Betsy named her first son Peter. She had not changed her name when she married—I could not understand that, but she pointed out that her medical degree was in the name of van Pels, and since her husband did not complain, it was not my place to—so the boy was Peter van Pels-Gallagher. It was, as the customs officer had said so many years ago, a good American name.
My partner, Harry, was delighted. He had never been able to understand how we got on so well. My being Jewish restored his faith in an orderly universe.
Others’ reactions were more muted. I do not mean to imply that I went around making announcements to the world, but somehow word traveled. Or perhaps I only imagined it did. Perhaps I saw a difference in people’s eyes and detected it in their manner because I expected to. This habit of dividing the world into two camps does not die easily. Certainly, George Johnson continued to treat me with the same bluff professional friendliness.
The one who took the news hardest was my sister-in-law Susannah. She could not forgive my cosmic sin. As I had learned years ago, she might not be able to love a gentile, but she could only hate a Jew who tried to pass, or, as her husband, who was equally critical though not so vocal, put it, “buy white.” She accused me of being a self-hating Jew. She charged me with being a secret anti-Semite. She sounded like Meyer Levin ranting at Otto Frank, though it occurs to me now that Otto had been more comfortable in his lightweight Jewish clothing than poor Levin ever was in his thin Jewish skin.
Madeleine defended me to her sister. The quarrel was so dire they did not telephone each other for ten days, which in that family was a record. Madeleine insisted that Susannah was just angry because if I had told the truth thirty-three years earlier, she, rather than Madeleine, would be married to me. The argument was flattering, but unconvincing. Susannah was happy with Norman. And she must have known there were times when her sister had been miserable with me. But perhaps my wife is on to something. Is the notion that Susannah might be carrying a torch for me any more ludicrous than that she found God in six million shrouds? Is the likelihood of her bearing a grudge against me any more far-fetched than that of her shouldering suffering she never experienced by people she had felt no connection to until they were gone? I do not resent her espousal of the faith, only her vicarious wearing of the yellow star. But I did not say any of that to her. She was Madeleine’s sister, and unlike the rest of my wife’s family who quarrel and reconcile so cavalierly, I know there is not always enough time to make amends.