by M.Mohankumar
I imagine her, bent over the table, writing on,
filling the pages with the miseries of their life
in the hideout: eight of them huddled together
in the damp Annex, the deprivations, the tensions,
the constant fear of discovery. Mrs. Frank wants
a cup of coffee, Margot, a hot bath and she-
she wants to go back to school. Each one
with a simple desire unfulfilled. But she won’t
despair, the spirited girl that she is. The war,
she writes, will end soon, the camps will be
liberated, and she will grow to be a famous writer,
doing good to others. She speaks to dear Kitty –
her diary – of the raids and the bombardments,
and the distant rumblings heard over the radio;
but these are all aberrations that will soon pass.
Of man’s essential goodness she has no doubt.
Despite everything, I believe that people are
really good at heart. A sentence that makes me
sit up and think. Wisdom of a precocious child?
Or the aftermath of a tryst with Peter in the attic?
And I ask myself: Did she hold the same view,
as she lay, starved and dying in the camp, Margot
dead before her very eyes, parents torn away,
facing their separate destinies? Would she have
held the same view, if she had known enough
of the happenings in the death camps elsewhere?
