thursday, april 27, 1944

dearest kitty,

mrs. van d. was in a bad mood this morning. all she did was complain, first about her cold, not being able to get cough drops and the agony of having to blow her nose all the time. next she grumbled that the sun wasn't shining, the invasion hadn't started, we weren't allowed to look out the windows, etc., etc. we couldn't help but laugh at her, and it couldn't have been that bad, since she soon joined in.

our recipe for potato kugel, modified due to lack of onions:

put peeled potatoes through a food mill and add a little dry government-issue flour and salt. grease a mold or ovenproof dish with paraffin or stearin and bake for 21/2 hours. serve with rotten strawberry compote. (onions not available. nor oil for mold or dough!)

at the moment i'm reading emperor charles v, written by a professor at the university of gottingen; he's spent forty years working on this book. it took me five days to read fifty pages. i can't do any more than that. since the book has 598 pages, you can figure out just how long it's going to take me. and that's not even counting the second volume. but. . . very interesting!

the things a schoolgirl has to do in the course of a single day! take me, for example. first, i translated a passage on nelson's last battle from dutch into english. then, i read more about the northern war (1700-21) involving peter the great, charles xii, augustus the strong, stanislaus leczinsky, mazeppa, von gorz, bran- denburg, western pomerania, eastern pomerania and denmark, plus the usual dates. next, i wound up in brazil, where i read about bahia tobacco, the abundance of coffee, the one and a half million inhabitants of rio de janeiro, pernambuco and sao paulo and, last but not least, the amazon river. then about negroes, mulattoes, mestizos, whites, the illiteracy rate -- over 50 percent -- and malaria. since i had some time left, i glanced through a genealogical chart: john the old, william louis, ernest casimir i, henry casimir i, right up to little margriet franciska (born in 1943 in ottawa).

twelve o'clock: i resumed my studies in the attic, reading about deans, priests, ministers, popes and . . . whew, it was one o'clock!

at two the poor child (ho hum) was back at work. old world and new world monkeys were next. kitty, tell me quickly, how many toes does a hippopotamus have?

then came the bible, noah's ark, shem, ham and japheth. after that, charles v. then, with peter, thack- eray's book about the colonel, in english. a french test, and then a comparison between the mississippi and the missouri!

enough for today. adieu!

yours, anne m. fran

k