My understanding of the diary of Anne is that Anne’s parents had a room, the other family had a room, Peter slept in a hallway, Anne’s sister slept in the parents room and Anne shared a room with the dentist.
Is there any reason why it was this way? It would have made much more sense for Anne to sleep in the hallway and make the two men of the attic (Peter and the dentist) share a room.
The dentist (Mr Dussel in the published text of the diary, Fritz Pfeffer in real life...Anne gave many of the people she dealt with in hiding pseudonyms) wasn’t originally supposed to be in the annexe with them at all.
- The Franks went into hiding on July 6th 1942, the day after their eldest daughter Margot received a notice telling her to report to the German occupation authorities for deportation.
- They were joined by the van Daan/van Pels family (Hermann, Auguste and Peter) a week later, on the 13th of July. At the time they hid together, Otto and Hermann had a working relationship; Otto’s employer Opekta dealt in spices and food preservation agents like pectin and nitrites, which a butcher like Hermann would have regular need to purchase.
- Dussel/Pfeffer doesn’t start asking around for a place to hide until October, and doesn’t FIND one until November. He knows both annex families as an acquaintance, he knows their helper Miep because she’s a patient of his...and in any case, his dental qualification means he’s as close as they can get to a doctor for the annexe. God knows, if anyone becomes seriously ill in hiding they won’t be able to leave to find a proper doctor! So they agree to take him on, and he joins the group on November 16th.
When the dentist arrived, everyone else had already been living there for months. They had staked out their little territories and set up routines. The Franks had two adjoining rooms with a door between them on the lower level of the annex. The van Daan/van Pels family had upstairs; a room for Hermann and Auguste, and a tiny box room backing on to that for Peter. Peter effectively slept tucked under a set of stairs leading to the attic and the roof.
The options to accomodate an extra person they hadn’t originally planned to take on were pretty limited.
Option one reshuffles EVERYONE. If you look at the annexe layout here, you can see how it all fits together; Peter’s tiny room would have been too small for a second bed, so he at least would have had to move if he was going to share with Fritz. Bearing in mind that Anne as the youngest would not necessarily have been trusted to live alone away from her family, this means that at minimum Peter moves to Anne’s room to share with the dentist, Anne moves to her parents room AND Margot moves to the box room. If they do it this way, then neither family gets ANY personal space or privacy from members of the other family whatsoever. Not even the tiny scraps they eked out when they first moved in.
Option two would be to set up an extra bed in Anne’s room and just sort of cope with it.