The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging Read online

  As if plucking the thought from her mind, Mr. Hauser smiled with only one side of his mouth and said, “And you all got along like one big, happy family, right?”

  “No!” Anne said, so sharply that everybody laughed—everybody but her. She went on, “By the time the war ended, I never wanted to see any of those people again as long as I lived. My own mother was a cold fish. Auguste van Pels—that was Hermann’s wife—was an airhead. A ditz.”

  The students laughed again. Anne didn’t. She hadn’t had those words to describe Mrs. van Pels back then. She couldn’t find any that fit better, though.

  And she was just getting started. “Dr. Pfeffer was in love with Dr. Pfeffer. He hoarded food. And he complained I made too much noise and shushed me all the time, even when I just rolled over in bed.”

  “Why didn’t you, like, do something to him?” Yes, that was Jordan. Who else would it be?

  “I wanted to,” Anne answered honestly. Some of the kids snapped her picture with smartphones. She went on, “I thought about the different things I could do. But I didn’t do any of them. We were stuck there with each other for as long as the war lasted. We couldn’t go anywhere, not unless we wanted to get caught. We had to try to get along.”

  “You’ve said some hard things about the people who were in there with you—even about your own mom,” Mr. Hauser said. “What did they think of you?”

  “They thought I was stuck-up. They thought I was snippy. They thought I was too smart for my own good,” Anne answered, not without pride.

  “Were they right?” a kid asked.

  “Of course they were. We were all right about each other. That’s what made getting along so hard,” Anne said.

  “What did you do about food?” the pretty Asian girl asked. “Did you have piles and piles of canned things hidden with you, so you wouldn’t need to worry about it?”

  She wasn’t just pretty, Anne Berkowitz realized—she was smart, too. She knew which questions to ask. She wasn’t altogether unlike Anne herself at the same age, in other words. “We had some things stored away like that,” the old woman said, “but we tried to save those for emergencies. We had money saved up, too. The people who were helping us used it to get ration books for us, and they used the coupons from them to buy us food. They bought food on the black market, too, for themselves and for us.”

  “Can you explain that, please?” Mr. Hauser said.

  “You couldn’t get much food with your ration coupons, and you couldn’t get any good food with them,” Anne said. “The Germans stole food from Holland. They stole it from all the places they took over. They wanted it for themselves, and especially for their soldiers. So the Dutch people held on to as much as they could. That was against the Nazis’ rules, and getting that black-market food cost a lot of money. But almost everyone did it. You couldn’t live without it.”

  “What if the Nazis caught you doing it?” As usual, Jordan didn’t bother raising his hand. “What did they do to you?”

  “They arrested you. Even if you weren’t Jewish, you didn’t want to wind up in a German jail, or in a camp.” Anne paused, remembering. “It would have been right at the start of spring in 1944 when the people we’d been buying things from got arrested. We had to get by on what we could use our ration books for—potatoes and kale.”

  “What’s kale?” three kids asked at the same time.

  “It’s more like cabbage than anything else,” Anne told them. “This was old, stale kale, and it smelled so bad I had to put a hanky splashed with cologne up to my nose when I ate it. The potatoes were like that, too. We used to try to figure out which ones had measles and which ones had smallpox and which ones had cancer. Those were the kinds of jokes we made.”

  “Did things get better after that?” Mr. Hauser asked.

  “A little bit, for a while,” Anne said. “But the last winter of the war, the winter of 1944–45, was terrible. Not just for us—for everybody in Holland. They still call that the Hunger Winter. Nobody had anything then. People starved. There was no wood for coffins to bury the dead. People ate tulip bulbs, even. The bread—when there was bread—was gray and disgusting. Everyone knew the Germans had lost. Even they knew. But Holland was off to the side of the way the Americans and English and Canadians were going, so Seyss-Inquart and the Nazis hung on and on.”

  “Did you use up all your cans by the time the Hunger Winter was over?” the Asian girl asked.

  “Long before then. We were so skinny when Amsterdam finally got liberated. I wondered if we’d live to see it.”

  “Was being hungry all the time the worst thing about hiding out for so long?” Mr. Hauser asked.

  Anne Berkowitz sent him a hooded look. That was the first dumb question he’d asked. Maybe he didn’t really understand after all. Or maybe he was asking for his students’ benefit. After a moment, she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. She shook her head. “No. Remember, we were cooped up with each other for almost three years. That was worse. And we never went outside in all that time. That was worse, too. When the Germans in Holland finally quit, we were as white as ghosts. Everyone knew we’d been in hiding till we got some sun. Oh, Lord, fresh air was wonderful!” She smiled, recalling how marvelous it had been.

  “Anything else?” the teacher asked. Anne relaxed. The way he put the question showed he knew what he was doing, all right.

  She gave it to him: “The worst thing, I think, the very worst thing, was being afraid all the time. So many ways to be afraid. English bombers came over Amsterdam at night. The Americans flew over in the daytime. Most of the time, they’d go on to Germany, but sometimes they’d drop bombs on us. The Germans in Amsterdam would shoot big antiaircraft guns at them, too, and sometimes knock them down. The noise was terrible. It scared all of us—Mrs. van Pels most of all.”

  “What would you have done if a bomb hit the building where you were at?” irrepressible Jordan asked.

  No doubt at all, though, that that was a dumb question. “We would have died,” Anne said bleakly. Jordan opened his mouth. Then he closed it again—the most sensible thing he could have done.

  The Asian girl said, “You were most scared of getting caught, weren’t you?”

  “Yes!” Anne’s head bobbed up and down. She’d feared none of the kids would have any idea what she was talking about. Who was she? Just an old lady they’d never met before. But the Asian girl got it, whether the others did or not.

  Mr. Hauser saw the same thing. “Good question, Vicki,” he said, so Anne finally had a name for her. “While Mrs. Berkowitz was hiding in Amsterdam, Jean-Paul Sartre—who went through the German occupation in Paris—wrote ‘Hell is other people.’ Maybe he wasn’t talking about this, but maybe he was.”

  Some of the kids, Vicki among them, nodded thoughtfully. So did Anne Berkowitz. She’d heard the line before—who hadn’t?—but she’d never applied it to her own predicament till now. She wondered why not. It fit only too well. To hide what she was feeling, she sipped from the water bottle.

  “Can you tell us a little about that fear?” Mr. Hauser said.

  She sipped again before she answered. “To start with, not everybody who worked at the spice plant knew we were hiding there. And the people who came in to buy things didn’t know, of course. So we had to stay as quiet as we could during business hours. We’d sit on beds and chairs and try not to move unless we had to. We couldn’t flush the toilet. Sometimes we couldn’t even use the toilet—an empty can or a bottle would be a chamber pot. So that was bad. And when we did have to walk around, we never knew whether the noise would give us away.”

  “Wow,” one of the eighth-graders said, more to herself than to anyone else.

  “That wasn’t all,” Anne said. “We had burglars—more than once. Spices had to do with food, and people got hungrier and hungrier. And I suppose they hoped the office downstairs had money in it, or things they could steal and use to get money or food. The longer the war went on, the more people in Amsterdam st
ole. It was the only way to get what you needed.”

  “Did you hear them breaking in?” Mr. Hauser asked.

  “Yes. We ran into them once or twice, too. We would go downstairs at night, when we were the only people there. Sometimes we would put spices into packets. Or we would listen to the BBC on the radio. It was the only way to get news that wasn’t full of German lies.”

  “You could get in trouble for that, too, couldn’t you?” the teacher said.

  “Oh, yes,” Anne agreed. “For us it was no worry—being a Jew in hiding was a worse crime than listening to the BBC. But people who weren’t Jews did it, too. When the burglars broke in, though … They must have been as scared as we were. Almost, anyhow. They weren’t looking for anybody, and we didn’t want to see anybody we didn’t know. We’d shiver for days afterwards.”

  “How come?” a girl asked.

  Holding her patience, Anne explained, “Because even a burglar could turn us in to the Nazis. He’d probably get a reward if he did. If he knew we were Jews, or if he just guessed…” Her voice trailed away. She drank more water.

  “Were your rooms hidden well?” Mr. Hauser asked.

  “You couldn’t tell they were there just by looking,” Anne answered. “There was a bookcase built in front of the doorway on the second-floor landing. It was attached with hooks. But it wouldn’t keep anybody out who really wanted to come in. That was what we were most afraid of—a fat SS sergeant or a bunch of Dutch Nazis who would have packed us off to Auschwitz.” Her mouth narrowed. “If that had happened, I wouldn’t be sitting here now talking to you.”

  “But it didn’t,” Mr. Hauser said. “You all made it through till the Germans surrendered.”

  “That’s right.” Anne Berkowitz looked across almost seventy years. “Those were strange times. The Germans in Holland started letting in food a few days before they gave up. They could see it was over. And then, after the surrender, they kept order and handed out the food for a little while, till the Canadians came in.”

  “How did they get away with that?” Jordan demanded.

  “They were there. They still had guns. They were organized, too, so the Allies used them,” Anne told him. “They even shot a couple of deserters the Canadians handed back to them—this was after the surrender. It kicked up a big stink, and they didn’t get any more deserters back after that.”

  She looked across the years again. The Canadians marching into Amsterdam had been so ruddy, so fit, so splendid—so different from the shabby, scrawny, hangdog Dutchmen who’d gone through defeat and five years of occupation. They’d been delicious, was what they’d been. No wonder she lost her cherry that summer, and it wasn’t as if she were the only one: not even close.

  Well, that was something the middle-schoolers didn’t need to hear.

  She might have lost it to Peter van Pels while they hid together. She’d had a crush on him for a while. Margot had liked him, too, which made things … interesting in their cramped, smelly little refuge. But Peter’d stayed almost a perfect gentleman. No, people then hadn’t taken things that had to do with sex for granted. Was that better or worse than the way things worked these days? Anne didn’t know. It wasn’t the same. She knew that.

  “What happened to the rest of the Jews in Holland?” Mr. Hauser asked. “How many of them were there?”

  “There were about a hundred forty thousand Jews in Holland when the war started—a hundred ten thousand who’d lived there for a long time and the rest refugees like my family,” Anne Berkowitz answered. “Three-quarters of them died. We were lucky—very lucky.”

  “I guess you were,” the teacher said. “How did you come to America? Can you talk a little bit about your life after you got here?”

  “Sure. Like I told you, two of my uncles were already here. One of them was a citizen after the war. He helped arrange things so I could come. My father and mother moved to Switzerland. My sister stayed in Amsterdam and ended up marrying a Dutchman. We’d all seen too much of each other during the war. After it was over, we broke apart.”

  “And you learned English. You learned it just about perfectly,” Mr. Hauser said.

  “I was already studying it while we were hiding. I wasn’t very good, but I had a start. I soaked up Dutch like a sponge because I was so little when I went to Holland. I used to tease my parents—it came harder for them. And English came harder for me: I was older by then. I know people can still tell I wasn’t born here.”

  “Lots of people who live here weren’t,” Mr. Hauser said. By the way three or four of his students nodded, they weren’t, either.

  “True,” Anne said. “Anyway, I came here, and pretty soon I married Mr. Berkowitz. He’d been a gunner in a B-24 during the war. We wondered if I ever heard his plane flying over Amsterdam. I could have—who knows? He ran an advertising business. I helped him out with it here and there. Some of the songs and slogans people heard on radio and TV were mine, but we never said so. You didn’t always admit things like that in those days.”

  “It’s different now. Women have more of a chance to be independent,” Mr. Hauser said.

  “Oh, yes, and it’s good that they do. But they didn’t back when I was raising a family.” Anne held up a hand. “I’m not complaining. I’ve had a good life. Sheldon and I loved each other a lot as long as he lived. I watched my children grow up and do well, and my grandchildren, and now I’ve got a baby great-granddaughter.”

  “Aww,” a couple of girls said.

  “And I lived by myself and took care of myself till about a year and a half ago, when I finally got too frail. And now”—Anne shrugged—“I’m here.”

  “We’re glad you’re here. We’re glad you’re here all kinds of ways. And we’re so glad you were kind enough to take the time to talk with us this morning,” Mr. Hauser said. “Aren’t we, kids?” The children clapped. A couple of them whooped. It wasn’t the kind of noise the Hebrew Home for the Aging usually heard. Anne Berkowitz liked it anyhow.

  Vicki came up to her and held up a phone. “May I take your picture, please?”

  “Go ahead,” Anne said. The others had snapped away without asking.

  “Sweet.” Vicki took the photo. She turned the phone around and showed it to Anne.

  “Looks like me,” Anne admitted.

  “I’m gonna put it up on my Facebook page and talk about all the things you told us,” Vicki said. “That was awesome!”

  “Facebook…” Anne smiled in reminiscence. “We had nothing like that back then, of course. But I used to keep a diary when I was all cooped up. About a year before the end of the war, one of the Dutch Cabinet ministers in London said on the radio that they were going to collect papers like that so they could have a record of what things were like while we were occupied. I went back and polished mine up and wrote more about some things.”

  “So you gave it to them?” Vicki’s eyes glowed. “You’re part of history now, and everything? How cool is that?”

  A little sheepishly, Anne shook her head. “While the war was still going on, I intended to. But almost the first thing I did after we could come out was, I threw it in the trash.”

  “Why?” the Asian girl exclaimed.

  “Because I hated those times so much, all I wanted to do was forget them,” Anne Berkowitz replied. “I thought getting rid of the diary would help me do that—and some of the things in there were pretty personal. I didn’t want other people seeing them.”

  “Too bad!” Vicki said, and then, after a short pause for thought, “Did throwing it out help you forget?”

  “Maybe a little,” Anne said after thought of her own. “Not a lot. Less than I hoped. When you go through something like that, it sticks with you whether you want it to or not.”

  “I guess.” Vicki’d never needed to worry about such things. She was lucky, and, luckily, had no idea how lucky she was.

  From the doorway to the little meeting room, Mr. Hauser called her name. “Quit bothering Mrs. Berkowitz,” he added. “Th
e bus is waiting to take us back to school.”

  “She’s not bothering me at all,” Anne said, but Vicki scooted away.

  Lucy walked up to Anne. “I think that went very well,” the outreach worker said. “I’m sure the children learned a lot.”

  “I hope so,” Anne said.

  “I know I did,” Lucy told her. “So scary!” She gave a theatrical shiver.

  To her, though, it was scary like a movie. It wasn’t real. It had been real to Anne, so real she’d wanted to make it go away as soon as she could. As she’d said to Vicki, though, some ghosts weren’t so easy to exorcise.

  Lucy wanted to talk some more, but one of the privileges of being old was not listening when you didn’t feel like it. Anne walked out of the meeting room, out of the visitors’ center. She blinked a couple of times as her eyes adjusted to the change from fluorescents to bright California sun.

  She started back to her room. She wouldn’t get there very fast—even before she came to the Home for the Aging, one of her grandsons had taken to calling her Flash—but she’d get there.

  Or maybe she wouldn’t, not right away. There was a bench by the garden path where the olive tree gave some shade. She sat down on it and looked at the flowers swaying in the soft breeze. A lizard skittered across the concrete and vanished under a shrub.

  No, tossing out the diary hadn’t helped that much. She could still remember some of what she’d written in it, better than she could remember most of what happened the week before last. She’d wanted to be the best writer in the world. If she’d stuck with Dutch, she still thought she could have done well enough to make some money, anyhow.

  In English, it hadn’t quite happened. She’d taken too long to feel at home in the new language. The quiet help she’d given Sheldon, the brushes with Hollywood … She shrugged. She’d had more, more of almost everything from adventure to love, than most people ever got.