CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Tuesday, 14 March 1944

I’m sitting at the van Daan’s table with a handkerchief over my mouth. Why? Let me start at the beginning. They’ve arrested the people who bring our ration tickets, so we don’t have any fats or oils. Miep and Mr Kleinian are ill again, and Bep can’t go shopping for us. The food is awful. Lunch today is potatoes and some very old vegetables out of bottles. They smell terrible, which is why I have the handkerchief! We’ve got to eat them too – I feel sick when I think about it! Half the potatoes have gone bad, and we have to throw them away.

If life here was pleasant, the food would not matter so much. But it’s the fourth year of the war, and we are all in bad moods.

Saturday, 18 March 1944

I’ve written so much about myself and my feelings, so why shouldn’t I write about sex too? Parents are very strange about sex. They should tell their sons and daughters everything at the age of twelve. But instead of that, they send them out of the room when anyone talks about sex, and the children have to try and find out everything by themselves. Then, later, the parents think that the children already know it all, but usually they don’t!

Soon after I was eleven, they told me about periods. But I didn’t know where the blood came from, or what it was for. When I was twelve and a half, one of my friends told me some more. She told me what a man and a woman do together. Well, I had already guessed! I was quite proud of myself! She also told me that babies don’t come out of their mothers’ stomachs. Where everything goes in is where the baby comes out!

Children hear about sex in bits and pieces, and that isn’t right.

Although it’s Saturday, I’m not bored! I’ve been up in the attic with Peter. I sat there dreaming with my eyes closed, and it was wonderful.