the stories he told us were so gruesome and dreadful that one can’t get them out of one’s mind.
Yet we shall still have our jokes and tease each other, when these horrors have faded a bit in our minds. It won’t do us any good, or help those outside, to go on being as gloomy as we are at the moment. And what would be the object of making our ‘Secret Annexe’ into a ‘Secret Annexe of Gloom’? Must I keep thinking about those other people, whatever I am doing? And if I want to laugh about something, should I stop myself quickly and feel ashamed that I am cheerful? Ought I then to cry the whole day long? No, that I can’t do. Besides, in time this gloom will wear off.
Added to this misery there is another, but of a purely personal kind; and it pales into insignificance beside all the wretchedness I’ve just told you about. Still, I can’t refrain from telling you that lately I have begun to feel deserted. I am surrounded by too great a void. I never used to feel like this, my fun and amusements, and my girl friends, completely filled my thoughts. Now I either think about unhappy things, or about myself. And at long last I have made the discovery that Daddy, although he’s such a darling, still cannot take the place of my entire little world of bygone days.
But why do I bother you with such foolish things? I’m very ungrateful, Kitty, I know that. But it often makes my head swim if I’m jumped upon too much, and then on top of that have to think about all those other miseries!
Yours, Anne
Saturday, 28 November, 1942
Dear Kitty, We have used too much electricity, more than our ration. Result: the utmost economy and the prospect of having it cut off. No light for a
fortnight; a pleasant thought, that, but who knows, perhaps it won’t happen after all! It’s too dark to read in the afternoons after four or half past. We pass the time in all sorts of crazy ways: asking riddles, physical training in the dark, talking English and French, criticising books. But it all begins to pall in the end. Yesterday evening I discovered something new: to peer through a powerful pair of field glasses into the lighted rooms of the houses at the back. In the daytime we can’t allow even as much as a centimetres chink to appear between our curtains, but it can’t do any harm after dark. I never knew before that neighbours could be such interesting people. At any rate, ours are. I found one couple having a meal, one family was in the act of taking a home movie, and the dentist opposite was just attending to an old lady, who was awfully scared.
It was always said about Mr. Dussel that he could get on wonderfully with children and that he loved them all. Now he shows himself in his true colours, a stodgy, old-fashioned disciplinarian, and preacher of long, drawn- out sermons on manners.
As I have the unusual good fortune to share my bedroom—alas, a small one—with His Lordship, and as I’m generally considered to be the most badly behaved of the three young people, I have a lot to put up with and have to pretend to be deaf in order to escape the old, much repeated tickings off and warnings All this wouldn’t be too bad, if he wasn’t such a frightful sneak and he didn’t pick on Mummy of all people to sneak to every time.
When I’ve already just had a dose from him, Mummy goes over it all again, so I get a gale after as well as before. Then, if I’m really lucky, I’m called on to give an account of myself to Mrs. van Daan and then I get a veritable hurricane!
Honestly, you needn’t think it’s easy to be the badly brought up central figure of a hypercritical family in hiding. When I lie in bed at night and think over the many sins and shortcomings attributed to me, I get so confused by it all that I either laugh or cry; it depends what sort of mood I am in.
Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the
