The Fault in Our Stars

down it’s okay and my lungs telling my brain oh, God, we’re dying here. I didn’t even see
Augustus come upstairs, but he came over and wiped his brow with the back of his hand
like whew and said, “You’re a champion.”
After a few minutes of wall-leaning, I made it to the next room, which Anne had
shared with the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. It was tiny, empty of all furniture. You’d never know
anyone had ever lived there except that the pictures Anne had pasted onto the wall from
magazines and newspapers were still there.
Another staircase led up to the room where the van Pels family had lived, this one
steeper than the last and eighteen steps, essentially a glorified ladder. I got to the threshold
and looked up and figured I could not do it, but also knew the only way through was up.
“Let’s go back,” Gus said behind me.
“I’m okay,” I answered quietly. It’s stupid, but I kept thinking I owed it to her—to
Anne Frank, I mean—because she was dead and I wasn’t, because she had stayed quiet
and kept the blinds drawn and done everything right and still died, and so I should go up
the steps and see the rest of the world she’d lived in those years before the Gestapo came.
I began to climb the stairs, crawling up them like a little kid would, slow at first so I
could breathe, but then faster because I knew I couldn’t breathe and wanted to get to the
top before everything gave out. The blackness encroached around my field of vision as I
pulled myself up, eighteen steps, steep as hell. I finally crested the staircase mostly blind
and nauseated, the muscles in my arms and legs screaming for oxygen. I slumped seated
against a wall, heaving watered-down coughs. There was an empty glass case bolted to the
wall above me and I stared up through it to the ceiling and tried not to pass out.
Lidewij crouched down next to me, saying, “You are at the top, that is it,” and I
nodded. I had a vague awareness of the adults all around glancing down at me worriedly;
of Lidewij speaking quietly in one language and then another and then another to various
visitors; of Augustus standing above me, his hand on the top of my head, stroking my hair
along the part.
After a long time, Lidewij and Augustus pulled me to my feet and I saw what was
protected by the glass case: pencil marks on the wallpaper measuring the growth of all the
children in the annex during the period they lived there, inch after inch until they would
grow no more.

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From there, we left the Franks’ living area, but we were still in the museum: A long
narrow hallway showed pictures of each of the annex’s eight residents and described how
and where and when they died.
“The only member of his whole family who survived the war,” Lidewij told us,
referring to Anne’s father, Otto. Her voice was hushed like we were in church.
“But he didn’t survive a war, not really,” Augustus said. “He survived a genocide.”
“True,” Lidewij said. “I do not know how 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 anymore, left with a diary instead of a wife and two daughters. 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 name, but what got me about it was the fact that right 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 remember and pray for the
four Aron Franks as long as I was around. (Maybe some people need to believe in a proper
and omnipotent God to pray, but I don’t.)
As we got to the end of the room, Gus stopped and said, “You okay?” I nodded.
He gestured 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
we walked into the next room. It was an A-frame room with some letters Otto Frank had
written to people during his months-long search for his daughters. On the wall in the
middle of the room, a video of Otto Frank played. He was speaking in English.
“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 what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be
this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the
weak, protecting the endangered.”
Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged 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
compassion, they will remember us.”
“They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something 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 him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in
the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the

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Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to
have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.
“I must say,” Otto Frank said on the video in his accented English, “I was very much
surprised by the deep thoughts Anne had.”
And then we were 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 met mine, I
started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated,
and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I’d spent years
dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC
lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.
“It was quite a different Anne I had known as my daughter. 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 my
conclusion is,” he said, “since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that most parents
don’t know really their children.”
I realized that my eyes were closed and opened them. Augustus was staring at 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 hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a
former father.
I pulled away from Augustus, and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I stared down
at my Chuck Taylors. And then they started clapping. All the people, all these adults, just
started clapping, and one shouted “Bravo!” in a European accent. Augustus, smiling,
bowed. Laughing, I curtsied ever so slightly, which was met with another round of
applause.
We made our way downstairs, letting all the adults go 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) we saw 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