Photo of Anne Frank’s Diary by Heather Cowper. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
A comment written in the visitors’ book in Anne Frank’s house, Amsterdam, August 2004
“¡No me lo creo!”
“I don’t believe a word of it!”
Intolerance speaks in all the tongues,
in every tongue under the sun,
and sun there was,
as tourists by the thousand
queued by the sad, old house
on the beautiful canal.
On that hot August day at five o’clock,
they sweltered.
And then the line of people
moved slowly round the little rooms.
The windows were closed,
“Give us air! We can’t breathe!”
Where they were shut in, two years or more,
and someone wrote,
“¡No me lo creo!”
On the wall the photos
that she pasted there
were still hanging where she glued them,
newspaper cuttings of
Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose,
who were just her age and young and happy,
and someone wrote,
“¡No me lo creo!”
The imminent tragedy was
two years in the making,
two years of hushed living in these little rooms,
and then they were betrayed,
And the house saw them no more.
And someone wrote,
“¡No me lo creo!”