Tales From the Secret Annex Part 1

ANNE FRANK'S TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX.

Anne Frank.

With translations by Ralkph Manheim and Michel Mok

BOOK FLAP.

"To be interrupted just ast as you are thinking of a glorious future!"; this line from ANNE FRANK'S TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX fully describes the young girl's fate -- as she hid in an attic from a world that wanted her to pay for its past mistakes.

Anne Frank: Diary of A Young Girl was published in 1952 and gave her posthumous international recognition. What are less well known are the short storeis, fables, essays, and reminiscences which she kept in a separate journal. Here, for the first time in hardcover, are all of these "tales", including previously unpublished material and some of Anne's most ambitious writing. These new pieces, translated by the award-winning Ralph Manheim, add to o9ur sense of Anne as the personification of the human spirit's ability to live through h.e.l.l, never bowing to petty and degrading forces.

Anne Frank's stories display a real gift. With sensitivity and intelligence, she came to grips in her imagination with a world of which she had no experience. While the question of what she could have given the world had she lived lingers on every page, her courage in showing us her "secret self" is in its way a partial, heartbreaking answer. With wisdom beyond her years, she used her imagination to give her mind the freedom her body was denied. As her diary was a view of human nature in captivity, her stories are a view of the human soul flying free.

Editor's Note

This edition of Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex contains material appearing for the first time in hardcover: "Paula's Plane Trip," "Jackie," "Cady's LIfe," "The Flea," "The Battle of the Potatoes," "Villians!" "Sunday," and "Who Is Interesting?" These tales, as well as "Roomers or Subtenants," "The Porter's Family," and "The Sink of Iniquity" have been newly translated by Ralph Manheim. The other pieces in this collection have been translated by Michel Mok.

FABLES AND SHORT STORIES.

Kitty

August 7, 1943

Kitty is the girl next door. In fair weather, I can watch her playing in the yard through our window. Kitty has a wine-red velvet frock for Sundays and a cotton one for every day; she has pale-blond hair with tiny braids, and clear blue eyes.

Kitty has a sweet mother, but her father is dead. The mother is a laundress; sometimes she is gone during the day, cleaning other people's houses, and at night she does the wash for her customers.

Often she shakes out carpets late at night and hangs wash on the line. Kitty has six brothers and sisters. The smallest screams a lot and hangs onto the skirts of his eleven-year-old sister when Mother says, "Children, it's bedtime!"

Kitty has a small cat which is so black that it looks like a Moor. She takes good care of the kitten, and every eve- ning, before bedtime, you can hear her call, "Kitty, kitty, kitty!" That's how she came to be called Kitty, which may not be her name at all. She also has two rab- bits, a white one and a brown one, that hop up and down in the gra.s.s.

Sometimes Kitty is naughty, just like other children. This happens mostly when she quarrels with her brothers. It's a sight to see her fight with them-she beats, kicks, and even bites them, and the little boys respect their st.u.r.dy sister.

"There are errands to be done!" Mother calls. Quickly Kitty sticks her fingers in her ears, so that she'll be able to say that she didn't hear her mother. Kitty hates running errands, but she wouldn't lie to escape it; Kitty doesn't lie; you need only to look into her blue eyes to know that.

One of Kitty's brothers is sixteen and works as an office boy. This brother sometimes bosses the other children as if he were their father. Kitty doesn't dare to contradict him, for she knows from experience that he is quick with his fists and also that he doesn't mind standing treat if one obeys him. Peter is generous and Kitty loves sweets.

Sundays, when the bell tolls, Kitty's mother and all the children go to church. Kitty prays for her dear father, who is in heaven, and also for her mother, that she may have a long, long life. After church they all go for a walk. Kitty enjoys this a lot; she is fond of wandering through the park, or, better still, through the zoo. But that hap- pens only in September, when it costs a quarter.* [The Amsterdam Zoological Society is a members.h.i.+p organization. In the month of September, the public is admitted to the park for twenty-five Dutch cents - Trans.] Kitty's birthday is in September, and sometimes she asks for a trip to the zoo as a birthday gift. Other gifts her mother cannot afford.

Often Kitty comforts her mother who, after a day's hard work, weeps in the night. Then Kitty promises her Kitty all the things she, herself, would like to have when she is grown up. Kitty wants so badly to be grown up, to earn money, buy pretty clothes, and treat her sisters to sweets, as Peter does. But before she can do all that, Kitty has to learn a lot and go to school for a long time.

Mother wants Kitty to go to Domestic Science School, but the girl doesn't care for that idea at all. She doesn't want a job in the house of some stuck-up lady. She wants to work in a factory, like those jolly chattering girls she sees pa.s.sing by the window. In a factory you're never alone, you have company to gossip with. And Kitty loves gossiping. Once in a while she has to stand in the corner in school, because she talks too much.

Just the same, Kitty is fond of her teacher, who is sweet and terribly clever. How difficult it must be to study and get to know so much! But one can get along with less. Kitty's mother always says that a girl doesn't get a husband if she is too clever, and that, Kitty thinks, would be just awful. Later she should like to have dear little children, but not such children as her brothers and sisters. Kitty's children are going to be much prettier and sweeter. They will have curly brown hair instead of that straight flaxen stuff, and they will have no freckles, which Kitty has by the hundreds. Kitty doesn't want as many children as her mother has. Two or three would be enough, but, oh, it is so far, far off. . .

"Kitty!" her mother calls. "Come here. Where have you been, naughty girl? Just sitting there dreaming, I guess. Quick, to bed with you! "

Kitty sighs. To be interrupted just as you are thinking of a glorious future!

The Porter's Family

Sat.u.r.day, August 7, 1943

Neither in winter nor in summer do the porter's family observe the blackout regulations. It's like peacetime, the days when the light burned so sociably in everyone's apartment and you could see the people all sitting around the dining room table or tea table.

In this respect the porter's family don't seem to care whether it's war or peace; anyway, you can look through the brightly lighted window and see Papa, Mamma, the son, and the daughter sitting around the table.

Mamma simply won't have anything to do with the war; she refuses to make ersatz sauce, she'd rather have none at all, she won't drink ersatz tea, she takes peppermint tea instead, and when there's shooting and she doesn't want to hear it, she has an effective remedy for that too, namely, she goes and sits in the shower stall and plays the loudest jazz music on the gramophone. When the neighbors complain, that doesn't bother her, she just brings them some goodies next day to mollify them. The lady on the third floor, whose daughter is engaged to the son of the house, gets a fat pancake and she actually gives Mrs. Steen, her right-hand neighbor, fifty grams of sugar.

The lady dentist on the second floor rear, who employs her youngest daughter as an a.s.sistant, isn't neglected either, but Papa is good and mad at her, because every night of shooting costs him three cigarettes.

Papa and Mamma are alone all day. They take loving care of their five rabbits, who get fatter by the day. They have a cradle to sleep in, a shed to keep off the rain, and a tub for a dinner table. In winter they have a little house with windows and nice big rooms. Their daily menu consists of carrot tops and other delicacies. Papa works a lot in the garden; Mamma in the house. Everything is spic and span. Every week she does the windows front and back, every week the floors, every week the kitchenware, always helped by the fat cleaning woman who has had the same position for years.

Papa hasn't got much work now. At present he's porter for the big business office upstairs, and all he has to do is sleep lightly, so as to listen for possible burglars. Mamma used to clean the whole building with the help of the cleaning woman. But since her only daughter has got married and the other has had her tenth child, she has given it up.

It's Mamma's and Papa's greatest joy when the grandchildren come to see them. The whole time you hear them shouting across the garden: "Grampa, Grandma, look at the rabbits, they're doing such funny things." Then Grampa and Grandma go running over, because grand- children need to be spoiled, that's their opinion. Grandchildren aren't like one's own children, who should be made to toe the line.

Grampa is working hard for his oldest granddaughter; he's making her a canoe for her birthday. I wish I had that kind of grampa.

Eve's Dream

October 6, 1943

"Good night, Eve, sleep well."

"Same to you, Mum."

Click went the light and Eve lay in the dark, but only for a few moments, because when she got used to the darkness, she saw that her mother had closed the curtains in such a way that an opening was left through which she could look straight into the face of the moon. The moon stood so quietly in the sky; he didn't move, smiled, and was friendly to everyone.

"If I could only be like that," Eve said softly to herself, "always quiet and kind so that everybody would like me. That would be wonderful."

Eve thought and thought about the difference between the moon and herself, who was still so very small. She finally dozed off, and her thoughts seemed to be trans- formed into a dream, which Eve remembered so keenly next day that she afterward sometimes wondered whether it had not actually happened.

She stood at the entrance of a big park, looking through the fence and not quite daring to go in. Just as she was about to turn back, a little girl with wings came up to her and said, "Go right ahead, Eve, or don't you know the way?"

"No, I don't," said Eve shyly.

"Well, then I will guide you." And with those words, the smart little elf took Eve's hand.

Eve had walked in several parks with her mother and her grandmother, but a park like this one she had never seen.

She saw a wealth of flowers, trees, fields, every imaginable kind of insect, and small animals such as squirrels and turtles. The elf chatted gaily with her, and Eve had got over her fear enough to ask a question. But the elf stopped her by putting a finger to Eve's lips.

"I will show you and explain everything. After each explanation you may ask questions about things you don't understand, but otherwise you must be silent and not interrupt me. If you do, I shall take you home at once, and then you will know just as little as all the other stupid people.