WEDNESDAY, 4 AUGUST 1943
Dearest Kitty,
Now that we’ve been in hiding for a little over a year, you
know a great deal about our lives. Still, I can’t possibly tell you everything,
since it’s all so different compared with ordinary times and ordinary people.
Nevertheless, to give you a closer look into our lives, from time to time I’ll
describe part of an ordinary day. I’ll start with the evening and night.
Nine in the evening. Bedtime always begins in the Annexe
with an enormous hustle and bustle. Chairs are shifted, beds pulled out,
blankets unfolded – nothing stays where it is during the daytime. I sleep on a
small divan, which is only five feet long, so we have to add a few chairs to
make it longer. Eiderdown, sheets, pillows, blankets: everything needs to be
removed from Dussel’s bed, where it’s kept during the day.
In the next room there’s a terrible
creaking: that’s Margot’s [Anne’s older sister] folding bed being set up. More
blankets and pillows, anything to make the wooden slats a bit more comfortable.
Upstairs it sounds like thunder, but it’s only Mrs van D’s bed being shoved
against the window so that Her Majesty, arrayed in her pink bed jacket, can
sniff the night air through her delicate little nostrils.
Nine o’clock. After Peter’s
finished, it’s my turn for the bathroom. I wash myself from head to toe, and
more often than not I find a tiny flea floating in the sink (only during the
hot months, weeks or days). I brush my teeth, curl my hair, manicure my nails
and dab peroxide on my upper lip to bleach the black hairs – all this in less
than half an hour.
Nine-thirty. I throw on my
dressing-gown. With soap in one hand, and potty, hairpins, knickers, curlers
and cotton wool in the other, I hurry out of the bathroom. The next person in
invariably calls me back to remove the gracefully curved but unsightly hairs
that I’ve left in the sink.
Ten o’clock. Time to put up the black-out screen
and say good night. For the next fifteen minutes, at least, the house is filled
with creaking of beds and the sigh of broken springs, and then, provided our
upstairs neighbours aren’t having a marital tiff in bed, all is quiet.
Eleven-thirty. The bathroom
door creaks. A narrow strip of light falls into the room. Squeaking shoes, a
large coat, even larger than the man inside it … Dussel is returning from his
nightly work in Mr Kugler’s office. I hear him shuffling back and forth for ten
whole minutes, the rustle of paper (from the food he is tucking away in his cupboard)
and the bed being made up. Then the figure disappears again, and the only sound
is the suspicious noise from the lavatory.
Approximately three o’clock. I have to get up to use the tin
under my bed, which, to be on the safe side, has a rubber mat underneath in case
of leaks. I always hold my breath while I go, since it clatters into the tin
like a brook down a mountainside. The potty is returned to its pace, and the
figure in the white nightdress (the one that causes Margot to exclaim every evening,
“Oh, that indecent nightie!”) climbs back into bed. A certain somebody lies
awake for about fifteen minutes, listening to the sound of the night. In the
first place, to hear whether there are any burglars downstairs, and then to the
various beds – upstairs, next door and in my room – to tell whether the others
are asleep or half awake. This is no fun, especially when it concerns a member
of the family named Dr Dussel. First, there’s the sound of a fish gasping for
air, and this is repeated nine or ten times. Then, the lips are moistened
profusely. This is alternated with little smacking sounds, followed by a long
period of tossing and turning and rearranging the pillows. After five minutes
of perfect quiet, the same sequence repeats itself three more times, after
which he’s presumably lulled himself back to sleep for a while.
Sometimes the guns go off during the
night, between one and four. I’m never aware of it before it happens, but all
of a sudden I find myself standing beside my bed, out of sheer habit.
Occasionally I’m dreaming so deeply (of irregular French verbs or a quarrel upstairs)
that I realize only when my dream is over that the shooting has stopped and
that I’ve remained quietly in my room. But usually I wake up. Then I grab a
pillow and a handkerchief, throw on my dressing-gown and slippers and dash next
door to Father, just the way Margot described in this birthday poem:
When the shots ring out in the dark
of night
The door creaks open and into sight
Come a hanky, a pillow, a figure in
white
Once I’ve reached the big bed, the
worst is over, except when the shooting is extra loud.
Six forty-five. Brrring … the alarm clock, which raises
its shrill voice at any hour of the day or night, whether you want it or not.
Creak … wham … Mrs van D. turns it off. Screak ... Mr van D. gets up, puts on
the water and races to the bathroom.
Seven-fifteen. The door creaks again. Dussel can go
to the bathroom. Alone at last, I remove the black-out screen … and a new day
begins in the Annexe.
Yours,
Anne
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