months ago now, I happened to be upstairs one evening when the window was open. I didn’t go downstairs until the window had to be shut. The dark, rainy evening, the gale, the scudding clouds held me entirely in their power, it was the first time in a year and a half that I’d seen the night face to face.
After that evening my longing to see it again was greater than my fear of burglars, rats, and raids on the house. I was downstairs all by myself and looked outside through the windows into the kitchen and the private office.
Lots of people are fond of nature, many sleep outdoors occasionally, and people in prisons and hospitals long for the day when they will be free to enjoy the beauties of nature, but few are so shut away and isolated as us from that which can be shared alike by rich and poor. It’s not imagination on my part when I say that to look up at the sky, the clouds, the moon, and the stars makes me calm and patient. It’s a better medicine than either valerian or bromide. Mother Nature makes me humble and prepared to face every blow courageously.
Alas, it has had to be that I am only able—except on a few rare occasions—to look at nature through dirty net curtains hanging before very dusty windows. And it’s no pleasure looking through these any longer, because nature is just the one thing that really must be unadulterated.
Yours, Anne
Friday, 16 June, 1944
Dear Kitty, New problems: Mrs. van Daan is desperate, talks about a bullet through her head, prison, hanging and suicide. She’s jealous that Peter confides in me and not her. She’s offended that Dussel doesn’t respond to her flirtations, afraid that her husband is smoking all the fur-coat money away, she quarrels, uses abusive language, cries, pities herself, laughs and then
