"No me lo creo."

“No me lo creo!”

A comment written in the visitors’ book in Anne Frank’s house, Amsterdam, August 2004

“No me lo creo!”

“I don’t believe a word of it!”

Intolerance speaks in many tongues,

in every tongue under the sun,

and sun there was,

as tourists by the thousand

queued by the old, sad house

on the beautiful canal,

that hot August day at five o’clock,

they sweltered.

And then the line of people

moved slowly round the little rooms.

The windows were closed,

“Give us air!  We can’t breathe!”

where they were shut two years or more,

and someone wrote,

“No me lo creo!”

And on the wall the photos

that she pasted there

still hanging where she glued them,

newspaper cuttings of

Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose,

who were just her age and young and happy,

and someone wrote,

“No me lo creo!”

The imminent tragedy was

two years in the making,

and who was it who betrayed them?

What Judas sent them off to Germany?

And someone wrote,

“No me lo creo!”