friday, march 19, 1943

dearest kitty,

in less than an hour, joy was followed by disappoint ment. turkey hasn't entered the war yet. it was only a cabinet minister talking about turkey giving up its neu trality sometime soon. the newspaper vendor in dam square was shouting "turkey on england's side!" and the papers were being snatched out of his hands. this was how we'd heard the encouraging rumor.

thousand-guilder notes are being declared invalid. that'll be a blow to the black marketeers and others like them, but even more to pe ie in hiding and anyone else with money that can't be accounted for. to turn in a thousand-guilder bill, you have to be able to state how you came by it and provide proof. they can still be used to pay taxes, but only until next week. the five-hundred notes will lapse at the same time. gies & co. still had some unaccounted-for thousand-guilder bills, which they used to pay their estimated taxes for the coming years, so everything seems to be aboveboard.

dussel has received an old-fashioned, foot-operated dentist's drill. that means i'll probably be getting a thorough checkup soon.

dussel is terribly lax when it comes to obeying the rules of the house. not only does he write letters to his charlotte, he's also carrying on a chatty correspondence with various other people. margot, the annex's dutch teacher, has been correcting these letters for him. father has forbidden him to keep up the practice and margot has stopped correcting the letters, but i think it won't be long before he starts up again.

the fuhrer has been talking to wounded soldiers. we listened on the radio, and it was pathetic. the questions and answers went something like this:

"my name is heinrich scheppel."

"where were you wounded?"

"near stalingrad."

"what kind of wound is it?"

"two frostbitten feet and a fracture of the left arm."

this is an exact report of the hideous puppet show aired on the radio. the wounded seemed proud of their wounds -- the more the better. one was so beside himself at the thought of shaking hands (i presume he still had one) with the fuhrer that he could barely say a word.

i happened to drop dussel's soap on the floor and step on it. now there's a whole piece missing. i've already asked father to compensate him for the damages, especially since dussel only gets one bar of inferior wartime soap a month.

yours, anne