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By Root 715 0

hands on deck! With a funny feeling in my stomach, I entered the overcrowded office kitchen. Miep, Bep, Mr. Kleiman, Jan, Father, Peter: the Annex contingent and the Supply Corps all mixed up together, and that in the middle of the day! Curtains and windows open, loud voices, banging doors—I was trembling with excitement. I kept thinking, “Are we really in hiding?” This must be how it feels when you can finally go out into the world again. The pan was full, so I dashed upstairs, where the rest of the family was hulling strawberries around the kitchen table. At least that’s what they were supposed to be doing, but more was going into their mouths than into the buckets. They were bound to need another bucket soon. Peter went back downstairs, but then the doorbell rang twice. Leaving the bucket where it was, Peter raced upstairs and shut the bookcase behind him. We sat kicking our heels impatiently; the strawberries were waiting to be rinsed, but we stuck to the house rule: “No running water when strangers are downstairs—they might hear the drains.”

Jan came up at one to tell us it had been the mailman. Peter hurried downstairs again. Ding-dong … the doorbell, about-face. I listened to hear if anyone was coming, standing first at the bookcase, then at the top of the stairs. Finally Peter and I leaned over the banister, straining our ears like a couple of burglars to hear the sounds from downstairs. No unfamiliar voices. Peter tiptoed halfway down the stairs and called out, “Bep!” Once more: “Bep!” His voice was drowned out by the racket in the kitchen. So he ran down to the kitchen while I nervously kept watch from above.

“Go upstairs at once, Peter, the accountant’s here, you’ve got to leave!” It was Mr. Kugler’s voice. Sighing, Peter came upstairs and closed the bookcase.

Mr. Kugler finally came up at one-thirty. “My gosh, the whole world’s turned to strawberries. I had strawberries for breakfast, Jan’s having them for lunch, Kleiman’s eating them as a snack, Miep’s boiling them, Bep’s hulling them, and I can smell them everywhere I go. I come upstairs to get away from all that red and what do I see? People washing strawberries!”

The rest of the strawberries were canned. That evening: two jars came unsealed. Father quickly turned them into jam. The next morning: two more lids popped up; and that afternoon: four lids. Mr. van Daan hadn’t gotten the jars hot enough when he was sterilizing them, so Father ended up making jam every evening. We ate hot cereal with strawberries, buttermilk with strawberries, bread with strawberries, strawberries for dessert, strawberries with sugar, strawberries with sand. For two days there was nothing but strawberries, strawberries, strawberries, and then our supply was either exhausted or in jars, safely under lock and key.

“Hey, Anne,” Margot called out one day, “Mrs. van Hoeven has let us have some peas, twenty pounds!”

“That’s nice of her,” I replied. And it certainly was, but it’s so much work … ugh!

“On Saturday, you’ve all got to shell peas,” Mother announced at the table.

And sure enough, this morning after breakfast our biggest enamel pan appeared on the table, filled to the brim with peas. If you think shelling peas is boring work, you ought to try removing the inner linings. I don’t think many people realize that once you’ve pulled out the linings, the pods are soft, delicious and rich in vitamins. But an even greater advantage is that you get nearly three times as much as when you eat just the peas.

Stripping pods is a precise and meticulous job that might be suited to pedantic dentists or finicky spice experts, but it’s a horror for an impatient teenager like me. We started work at nine-thirty; I sat down at ten-thirty, got up again at eleven, sat down again at eleven-thirty. My ears were humming with the following refrain: snap the end, strip the pod, pull the string, pod in the pan, snap the end, strip the pod, pull the string, pod in the pan, etc., etc. My eyes were swimming: green, green, worm, string, rotten pod, green, green. To fight the boredom and have something