Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex (11 page)

A
T SEVEN-THIRTY
every morning the door of a cottage on the village outskirts swings open and out comes a rather small girl with a basket full of flowers on each arm. Once she’s shut the door behind her, she adjusts the two baskets and sets off.

Every person in the village who sees her go by and receives one of her friendly nods can’t help feeling sorry for her, and every day they think the same thing: ‘It’s too long and difficult a walk for a twelve-year-old child.’ But the little girl doesn’t know what the villagers are thinking, so as quickly and as cheerfully as she can she walks on…and on.

It’s really a very long way to the city: at least two and a half hours’ steady walking. And two heavy baskets don’t make it any easier. By the time she’s finally walking along the city’s pavements, she’s exhausted. The prospect of being able to sit down soon and rest is all that keeps her going. But she’s a plucky little thing, and she doesn’t slow her pace until she reaches her spot in the market. Then she sits down and waits…and waits…

Sometimes she has to wait all day, since not many people want to buy what the poor little flower girl is selling. More than once Krista has had to go back home with her baskets half full.

But today is different. It’s Wednesday, and unusually busy at the market. The women next to her are loudly hawking their wares, and all around her she hears shrill and angry voices. The passers-by can barely hear Krista, for the hustle and bustle of the market nearly drowns out her high little voice. But all day long she keeps calling out, ‘Beautiful flowers, ten cents a bunch! Buy my beautiful flowers!’ And when the people who’ve finished their shopping take a look into those full baskets, they end up giving Krista ten cents just to have one of her beautifully arranged bouquets.

Every day at twelve o’clock, Krista gets up from her chair and walks over to the other side of the market, where the owner of the coffee stand gives her a free cup of steaming hot coffee with plenty of sugar. Krista saves her prettiest bunch of flowers for him.

Then she returns to her chair and starts hawking her wares again. At last, when it’s three-thirty, she gets up, collects her baskets and heads back to her village. She walks more slowly now than in the morning. Krista is tired, terribly tired.

This time the trip takes three hours, so that it’s
six-thirty
before she finally reaches the door of her cramped old cottage. Inside, everything is just as she left it in the morning: cold, lonely and bleak. Her sister, who shares the cottage with her, works in the village from early in the morning to late at night.

Krista can’t allow herself a moment’s rest. As soon as she gets home, she starts peeling potatoes and boiling vegetables. Only when her sister arrives home at seven-thirty does she finally get to sit down and eat her meagre meal.

At eight o’clock the door of the cottage swings open again and out comes the little girl with the two big baskets on her arms. This time her steps take her to the meadows and fields surrounding the cottage. She doesn’t walk far, but leans over in the grass and begins to pick the flowers – all sorts of flowers, big ones, small ones, colours of every kind – into her baskets they go, and though the sun has nearly gone down, the little girl is still sitting in the grass, picking flower after flower.

At last she’s finished, her baskets are full. In the meantime the sun has set. Krista lies down in the grass, with her hands cupped behind her head and her eyes open, and looks at what’s left of the pale-blue sky.

This is the finest fifteen minutes of her day. You mustn’t think that the little flower girl, who’s worked so hard, is unhappy. She’s never unhappy, and as long as she has these few moments every day, she never will be.

There in the meadow, among the flowers and the grass, beneath the wide-open sky, Krista is content. Gone is her exhaustion, gone are the market and the people; she thinks and dreams only of the present. If only she can have this every day, a whole fifteen minutes of doing nothing, alone with God and nature.

Sunday, 20 February 1944

O
NCE UPON A TIME
there were two people, an old woman and her granddaughter, who lived for many years at the edge of a great big forest. The little girl’s parents had died when she was very young, and her grandmother had always looked after her. Their cottage was lonely and isolated, but they didn’t think so, and the two of them were always happy and content together.

One morning the old woman couldn’t get out of bed. She was in great pain. Her granddaughter was fourteen years old at the time, and she took care of her grandma as well as she knew how. Five days went by, then the grandmother died, leaving the girl all alone in the cottage. She knew almost no one, nor did she want to ask a stranger to bury her grandmother, so she dug a deep grave under an old tree in the forest, and there she laid her grandma to rest.

When the poor child came home again, she felt sad and utterly alone. She lay down on her bed and wept. She stayed in bed for the rest of the day, only getting up in the evening to have a bite to eat.

And so it went day after day. The poor child no longer felt like doing anything but mourning the loss of her dear sweet grandma. Then something happened that changed her life completely from one day to the next.

It was night and the girl was asleep. Suddenly her grandmother was standing before her – dressed all in white, with her white hair down round her shoulders, and a tiny lamp in her hand. The girl looked up from her bed and waited for her grandmother to speak.

‘My dear little girl,’ the grandmother began. ‘I’ve been watching you every day for the last four weeks. All you’ve done is cry and sleep. That’s not right. So I’ve come to tell you that you need to keep busy, to get back to your weaving and to clean our cottage, and also to put on pretty clothes again!

‘You mustn’t think that I’ll stop looking after you now that I’m dead. I’m in Heaven, watching you from up above. I’ve become your guardian angel, and I’ll always be at your side, just like I used to be. Go back to your work, my darling, and don’t ever forget that Grandma is with you!’

The grandmother faded away and the girl went on sleeping. However, when she woke up the next morning, she remembered her grandmother’s words and suddenly felt happy because she was no longer alone. She busied herself again, going to the market to sell her weaving, and she always followed her grandma’s advice.

Later, many years later, she was again no longer alone in the world, because she married a fine miller. She thanked her grandma for not having left her. And though
she now had a husband to keep her company, she knew that her guardian angel would be with her until the day she died.

Tuesday, 22 February 1944

I
T HAPPENED JUST
as I was going through a terrible time. The war was raging all round us, and none of us knew if we’d live to see the next hour. My parents, brothers and sisters and I were living in the city, but we thought we might have to flee or be evacuated at any moment. The days were filled with the roar of guns and rifle shots, the nights with mysterious flashes and explosions that seemed to come from deep within the earth.

I can’t describe it. I don’t remember the details of those tumultuous days any more, just the fact that I did nothing all day but feel frightened. My parents tried all sorts of things to calm me down, but none of them worked. I was scared inside and out. I couldn’t eat or sleep, all I could do was tremble. That went on for a week, until the night that I remember as though it happened yesterday.

It was eight-thirty in the evening. The shooting had just died down a bit and I was dozing, fully dressed, on the divan when we were suddenly startled by two horrendous booms. We all leapt to our feet as if we’d been 
pricked with a pin, and went to stand in the hall. Even Mother, who was normally so calm, looked pale. The booms were repeated at fairly regular intervals, then all of a sudden there was an enormous crash, followed by screams and the tinkle of broken glass, and I began running as fast as my legs would carry me. Bundled up in warm clothes with my rucksack on my back, I ran and ran, away from the horrible mass of flames.

I was surrounded on all sides by running and screaming people. The burning houses lit up the street and cast a fearful red glow on every object. I didn’t think about my parents or brothers and sisters, only about myself, how I had to get further and further away. I didn’t feel the exhaustion – my fear was stronger – or notice that I’d lost my rucksack. I just kept on running.

I have no idea how long I ran, spurred on by the image of burning houses, screaming and contorted faces, my fear of all that was happening. Suddenly I noticed that it had become quieter. I looked around, as if I’d just awakened from a dream, and saw nothing and no one. No fires, no bombs, no people.

I stopped running and looked more carefully. I was in a field of grass, the moon was shining and the stars were gleaming overhead, the weather was wonderful, the night was chilly but not cold. Hearing no more noise, I sank exhausted to the ground, spread out the blanket I was still carrying and lay down.

I gazed up at the sky and suddenly realized I was no longer afraid. On the contrary, I was quite calm. The odd thing was that I wasn’t thinking of my family at all, nor
did I long for them. I longed only for rest, and soon I fell fast asleep in the grass, beneath the starry sky.

When I awoke, the sun was just coming up. I instantly realized where I was: in the distance the morning light revealed a row of familiar houses on the outskirts of the city. I rubbed my eyes and took a closer look round. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The dandelions and the clover leaves in the grass were my only company. I lay back down on the blanket and thought about what I should do next, but my thoughts kept wandering back to the wondrous feeling that had come over me in the night, when I had sat all by myself in the grass and not been afraid.

Later, I found my parents and we all went to live in another city. Now that the war has long been over, I know why my fear vanished beneath that spacious sky. You see, once I was alone with nature I realized, without actually being aware of it, that fear doesn’t help, that it doesn’t get you anywhere. Anyone who’s as frightened as I was should look to nature and realize that God is much closer than most people think.

From that moment on, though countless bombs fell close by, I was never truly afraid again.

Saturday, 25 March 1944

O
NCE UPON A TIME
there was a little elf named Dora. Dora was rich and beautiful and terribly spoiled by her parents. No one ever saw Dora without a smile on her face. She smiled from early in the morning to late at night. She was happy with everything and never gave a thought to sorrow.

Dora lived in a forest, and in that same forest there was a little gnome named Peldron. Peldron was the exact opposite of Dora: she smiled at the beauty of life, while he wailed at all the misery in the world, especially in the world of elves and gnomes.

One day Dora’s mother sent her to the shoemaker’s in Elvesville, and what do you think happened? Lo and behold, she ran into the obnoxious and perpetually scowling Peldron. Now, Dora was nice, but since
everybody
liked her, she was also very stuck-up. And since she was bursting with confidence too, she ran over to Peldron, snatched off his adorable gnome’s cap and collapsed into
giggles a few yards away with the cap in her tiny little hands.

Peldron was furious at the hateful creature; he stamped his foot and cried, ‘Give it back, you ugly little imp. Give it back this instant!’ But Dora had no intention of giving it back. She ran even further away, and eventually hid the cap in a hollow log before rushing off to the shoemaker’s.

After searching for a long time, Peldron finally found his cap again. He couldn’t stand being teased, but most of all he couldn’t stand Dora. He was trudging on listlessly when suddenly a deep voice startled him out of his reverie. ‘Psst, Peldron, over here. I’m the oldest gnome in the world, but also the poorest. Can you spare some change so I can buy some food?’

Peldron shook his head. ‘I’m not going to give you a thing. You’d be better off dead, because then you wouldn’t have to put up with the world’s misery any longer,’ he said, and walked off without so much as a backward glance.

In the meantime, Dora had finished at the shoemaker’s, and on the way home the old gnome asked her for some money too. ‘No,’ said Dora. ‘You’ll not get a cent from me. You shouldn’t have let yourself get into such a fix. The world is too nice a place for me to bother my pretty little head with poor people.’ And she skipped off.

With a sigh, the old gnome sat down on the moss and thought about how to deal with these two children. One was too sad, the other too happy, and neither of them would get very far in life if they stayed that way.

As it turns out, this gnome, who was so very, very old,
was not an ordinary gnome. He was a sorcerer, though by no means an evil one. On the contrary, he wanted to bring out the best in gnomes, elves and people and to make the world a better place. He sat there, thinking, for an hour. Then he got up and walked slowly to Dora’s parents’ house.

One day after their encounter in the forest, both Dora and Peldron found themselves locked up in a cottage. They were being held prisoner. The old gnome had taken them from their homes because he wanted to straighten them out, and when he had his heart set on doing good, no parent was allowed to stand in his way.

What were the two of them supposed to do, now that they had been thrown together in the cottage? They weren’t allowed to go out, they weren’t allowed to argue, they were only allowed to work all day long. These were the three instructions the old gnome had given them. So Dora did her work, then laughed and joked, and Peldron did his work, then sat around feeling gloomy. Every evening at seven the old gnome came to see if they had done their work, then left them to fend for themselves.

So what did they have to do to regain their freedom? There was only one way, and that was to do everything the gnome asked of them. And he was asking a lot. They couldn’t go out, they couldn’t argue, all they could do was work – those were the gnome’s three orders.

Oh, how hard it was for Dora to see no one but the boring Peldron all day long. Everywhere you looked, there was Peldron. Still, Dora barely had time to talk to
him, because she had to do the cooking (which her mother had taught her), she had to make sure the house was spic and span and in her spare time, if she had any, she worked at her spinning wheel.

Peldron, on the other hand, chopped wood and dug over the enclosed garden, and when he’d finished his allotted tasks, he repaired shoes. At seven o’clock Dora called him in to dinner. After that they were both so tired that they could hardly talk to the old gnome when he came every evening to check up on their work.

This went on for one whole week. Dora still smiled a lot, but she also began to see the serious side of life, to realize that many people had a hard time of it, so that it was not a bad idea to give them whatever you could rather than send them packing with a flippant remark. Peldron lost some of his gloominess. Why, he even whistled occasionally as he went about his work, or laughed along with Dora at one of her jokes.

On Sunday morning, they were allowed to accompany the old gnome to the busy little chapel in Elvesville. They listened much more carefully to the words of the gnome minister and felt quite contented as they walked back through the green forest.

‘And because the two of you have been so good, you may spend the day outside, just as you used to. But remember, you can’t visit your family or anyone else, you have to stay together and tomorrow it’s back to work!’

Neither of them grumbled, for they were far too happy at being allowed to go into the forest. All day long they danced and looked at the flowers, the birds, the blue sky
and especially the warm and friendly sun. And they were content. In the evening, they went back to the cottage as their mentor had instructed them to do. They slept soundly until morning, then trotted off to do their work.

The old gnome kept them in the cottage for four whole months. On Sundays they were allowed to go to church and roam around outside, but during the week they worked their fingers to the bone.

One evening, at the end of the four months, the old gnome took them both by the hand and led them into the forest. ‘Look here, my children. I’m sure you’ve often been angry with me,’ he began. ‘I also think you’re longing to go home. Aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Dora said with a nod. ‘Yes,’ said Peldron with another nod.

‘But do you understand that being here has done you good?’

No, neither Dora nor Peldron understood what he meant. ‘Well, then, I’ll explain it to you,’ the old gnome said. ‘I brought you here so that you would learn that there is more to life than your own pleasure and sorrow. You’ll now be able to deal with life much better than you did before. Dora has become a bit more serious and Peldron a bit more cheerful, precisely because you were forced to make the best of the situation in which you found yourselves. I believe you two get along with each other much better now. Wouldn’t you say so, Peldron?’

‘Oh, yes, Dora’s a lot nicer than I used to think she was,’ the little gnome answered.

‘In that case, you may go home to your parents. Think
back sometimes to your stay in this wooden cottage. Enjoy the good things that life has to offer, but don’t forget the sad things, and do what you can to help lessen the sorrow. All people can help each other; all gnomes and elves too. Even little elves like Dora and little gnomes like Peldron can do quite a lot. So, go on your way and don’t be angry with me any more. I did what I could for you, and all for your own good. Farewell, my children, till we meet again.’

‘Bye-bye,’ said Dora and Peldron, and off they went to their separate homes.

The old gnome sat down in the grass. He had just one wish, and that was to get all children on the right path as quickly as he had these two.

Indeed, Dora and Peldron lived happily ever after. They had learned once and for all that there are appropriate moments for both laughter and tears. Later, much later, when they had grown up, they even decided to share a house, and Dora did the work inside and Peldron the work outside, just as they had when they were children!

Tuesday, 18 April 1944