Inside the bare rooms time stopped; they moved like sleepwalkers. Alice touched the faded ochre wallpaper, frayed at its seams and edges from the erosion of thousands of brushing fingertips, air-stirring whispers.
... Standing in the back, where Anne and her sister Margot slept, looking out of the windows onto a chestnut tree, its branches bending to a light breeze, Alice realized this must be the same tree Anne Frank saw, the sum of the natural world available to her for those two years in hiding. Suddenly Alice was sucked pneumatically through a tunnel that brought her to thoughts of children broken by instruments of fate - both by huge, deliberate killing machines and small, foolish accidents. A child stopped dead in her tracks, held back from moving into life, everything in front of her rendered perfectly smooth, free of footprints.