‘Why don’t the girls ever carry potatoes upstairs, why don’t they ever haul hot water? They aren’t that weak, are they?’
‘You’re crazy!’ Mother suddenly exclaimed. I was actually pretty startled. I didn’t think she’d dare.
The rest is relatively unimportant. It all boiled down to the same thing: Margot and I were supposed to become housemaids in Villa Annexe. In this case we might as well use the not-so-polite expression ‘stuff it’, since it’s never going to happen anyway.
Mr van Daan also had the nerve to say that the washing up, which Margot’s done every morning and every evening for the last year, doesn’t count.
When Father heard what had happened, he wanted to rush upstairs and give Mr van D. a piece of his mind, but Mother thought it better to inform Mr van D. that if everyone had to fend for themselves, they’d also have to live on their own money.
My conclusion is this: The whole business is typical of the van Daans. Always rubbing salt into old wounds. If Father weren’t much too nice to people like them, he could remind them in no uncertain terms that without us and the others they’d literally be facing death. In a labour camp you have to do a whole lot more than peel potatoes…or look for cat fleas!
Wednesday, 4 August 1943
JUST BEFORE 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, pillow, blankets: everything has 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 folding bed being set up. More blankets and pillows, anything to make the wooden slats a bit more comfortable. Upstairs it sounds like bombs are falling, 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 – 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 in line 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 the 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 Kugler’s office.* I hear him shuffling back and forth for ten whole minutes, the rustle of paper (from the food he’s tucking away in his cupboard) and the bed being made up. Then the figure disappears again, and the only sound is the occasional 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 place,
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 sounds of the night: in the first place (when it’s about three-thirty or four o’clock) 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 alert. This is no fun, especially when it concerns a room-mate named Dr Dussel. First, I hear 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.
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