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"But he didn’t survive a war, not really," Augustus said "He survived a genocide"
"True," Lidewij said "I do not kno you go on, without your family I do not know" As I read about each of the seven who died, I thought of Otto Frank not being a father anyhters At the end of the hallway, a huge book, bigger than a dictionary, contained the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust (Only 5,000 of the deported Dutch Jews, a wall label explained, had survived 5,000 Otto Franks) The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank’s naht beneath her name there were four Aron Franks Four Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them I silently resolved to re as I was around (Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and oot to the end of the rooestured back toward Anne’s picture "The worst part is that she almost lived, you know? She died weeks away from liberation"
Lidewij took a few steps away to watch a video, and I grabbed Augustus’s hand as alked into the next room It was an A-frame roo his hters On the wall in the middle of the roolish
"Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?" Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation
"I think they’re all dead But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil"
"True," he said "That’s e should do, Hazel Grace: We should teah the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered"
Although it was his dreaed mine, after all "Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon," I said
"The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself," he said
"And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and coh at our courageous folly," he said "But so in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand"
"Augustus Waters," I said, looking up at hi that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothingand irreparably broken sink into love
"I lish, "I was very hts Anne had"
And then ere kissing My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my tiptoes As his parted lips metway The space around us evaporated, and for a weirdI’d spent years dragging around suddenly seele, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tuhter She never really showed this kind of inner feeling," Otto Frank continued
The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me "And ood terms with Anne, that most parents don’t know really their children"
I realized thatat me, his blue eyes closer to me than they’d ever been, and behind him, a crowd of people three deep had sort of circled around us They were angry, I thought Horrified These teenagers, with their hor the shattered voice of a forustus, and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I stared down atAll the people, all these adults, just started clapping, and one shouted "Bravo!" in a European accent Augustus, shtly, which was met with another round of applause
We o down first, and right before we got to the café (where blessedly an elevator took us back down to ground level and the gift shop)pages of Anne’s diary, and also her unpublished book of quotations The quote book happened to be turned to a page of Shakespeare quotations For who so firm that cannot be seduced? she’d written
Lidewij drove us back to the Filosoof Outside the hotel, it was drizzling and Augustus and I stood on the brick sidewalk slowly getting wet
Augustus: "You probably need soustus: "Okay" (Pause) "What are you thinking about?"
Me: "You"
Augustus: "What about me?"
Me: "‘I do not knohich to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after’"
Augustus: "God, you are sexy"
Me: "We could go to your room"