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Dear Kitty, Wednesday, 29 March, 1944
Bolkestein, an M.P., was speaking on the Dutch News from London, and he said that they ought to make a collection of diaries and letters after the war. Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the "Secret Annexe." The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.
But seriously, it would seem quite funny ten years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here. Although I tell you a lot, still, even so, you only know very little of our lives.
How scared the ladies are during the air raids. For instance, on Sunday, when 350 British planes dropped half a million kilos of bombs on Ijmuiden, how the houses trembled like a wisp of grass in the wind, and who knows how many epidemics now rage. ... I would need to keep on writing the whole day if I were to tell you everything in detail. People have to line up for vegetables and kinds of other things; doctors are unable to visit the sick, because if they turn their back on their cars for a moment,
they are stolen, burglaries and thefts abound, so much so that you wonder what has taken hold of the Dutch for them suddenly to become such thieves. Little children of eight and eleven years break the windows of people's homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. No one dares to leave his house unoccupied for five minutes, because if you go, your things go too. Every day there are announcements in the newspapers offering rewards for the return of lost property ...Electric clocks in the streets are dismantled, public telephones are pulled to pieces--down to the last thread. Morale among the population can't be good, the weekly rations are not enought to last for two days except the coffee substitue. The invasion is a long time coming, and the men have to go to Germany. The children are ill or undernourished, everyone is wearing old clothes and old shoes. A new sole costs 7.50 florins in the black market; moreover, hardly any of the shoemakers will accept shoe repairs or, if they do, you have to wait months, during which time the shoes often disappear.
Yours, Anne
Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. New York: The American Reprint Co, 1959. 179-180. Print.
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