Monday, 9 November, 1942
Dear Kitty, Yesterday was Peter’s birthday, he was sixteen. He had some nice presents. Among other things a game of Monopoly, a razor, and a lighter.
Not that he smokes much, it’s really just for show.
The biggest surprise came from Mr. van Daan when, at 1 o’clock, he announced that the British had landed in Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca, and Oran. “This is the beginning of the end,” everyone was saying, but Churchill, the British Prime Minister, who had probably heard the same thing in England, said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Do you see the difference? There is certainly reason for optimism. Stalingrad, the Russian town which they’ve already been defending for three months, still hasn’t fallen into German hands.
But to return to affairs in our secret den. I must tell you something about our food supply. As you know, we have some real greedy pigs on the top floor. We get our bread from a nice baker, a friend of Kleiman. We don’t get so much as we used to at home, naturally. But it’s sufficient. Four ration cards have also been bought illegally. Their price is going up all the time, it has now gone up from twenty-seven guilders to thirty-three. And all that for a little slip of printed paper! In order to have something in the house that will keep, apart from our 150 tins of vegetables, we have bought 270 pounds of dried peas and beans. They are not all for us, some are for the office people. They are in sacks which hang on hooks in our little passage (inside the hidden door). Owing to the weight of the contents, a few stitches in the sacks burst open. So we decided it would be better to put our winter store in the attic and Peter was given the job of dragging it all up there.
He had managed to get five of the six sacks upstairs intact, and he was just busy pulling up number six, when the bottom seam of the sack split and a shower, no a positive hailstorm, of brown beans came pouring down and rattled down the stairs. There were about fifty pounds in the sack and the noise was enough to waken the dead. Downstairs they thought the old house
