Rats

Rats are recurring intruders in Anne Frank’s account of hiding, where they move between the attic and the warehouse and turn familiar domestic spaces into places of uncertainty. At first their presence is registered through unexplained nighttime noises; later, they are identified as the source of the disturbance and one injures Peter van Pels. The responses to them—using a cat to keep them away and naming the warehouse cat through a joking political contrast—show how the residents adapt to the threat while making room for humor in a constrained life.

Presence in the Attic and Warehouse

The rats appear in two connected settings: the attic above the hiding place and the storeroom in the warehouse. In one episode, the entire van Pels family wakes to ghostly noises. Peter goes upstairs with a flashlight, and the movement he finds is not a person but a large group of rats running away. The suspense lies in the delay between sound and identification: the family is awakened before anyone knows what is moving, and the attic’s darkness makes the threat seem uncertain until Peter investigates.

Anne reports that, once the residents understand who has been making the noises, they let Mouschi sleep in the attic. After that, the unwelcome visitors are no longer seen at night. The account presents the cat’s presence as a practical deterrent, without claiming that the rats have been eradicated. Its qualification—that they at least cease appearing at night—keeps the resolution limited: the household has found a way to manage the disturbance, not proof that the problem has vanished.

A Rat Encounter on the Ladder

The danger becomes more immediate when Peter goes to the loft for old newspapers at about half past seven, while it is still light. To descend, he has to hold tightly to the trapdoor as he climbs the ladder. He puts down his hand without looking and encounters a rat; startled by the bite, he nearly falls from the ladder. The episode changes the rats from a hidden source of noise into a direct physical hazard in a space the residents must continue to use.

By the time Peter reaches the others, he is visibly shaken, and blood has soaked through his pajamas. Anne stresses how frightening the unexpected encounter was, particularly because Peter had not seen the rat before touching it. The scene’s force comes from the abruptness of the reversal: an ordinary errand for newspapers becomes a dangerous climb down from the loft. The evidence establishes that the rat bites Peter and that he is badly startled; it does not describe further consequences or suggest that the bite changes the household’s arrangements.

Cats, Names, and Control

The rats’ presence also gives practical importance to the cats associated with the building. Anne identifies Boche as the warehouse and office cat, who keeps rats away from the storeroom. Boche had been there before the Frank family went into hiding, so the cat belongs to the working environment around the Annex as well as to the residents’ daily experience. In one brief domestic detail, spoiled pickled tongue is set aside as a feast for Boche and Mouschi, placing the cats within the household’s everyday responses to scarce or unusable food.

Anne explains Boche’s name through the history of two cats kept by Gies & Co., one for the warehouse and one for the attic. Their paths sometimes crossed and led to fights. The warehouse cat, the aggressor, was eventually named Boche—the German—while the attic cat, who came out the victor, was called Tommy, the Englishman. The account adds that Tommy was later given away, whereas Boche remained and continued to amuse the residents when they went downstairs. The story is comic, but it also maps the cats onto the rats’ divided territory: one cat is associated with the warehouse, the other with the attic, and Mouschi’s later move to the attic gives the earlier account of feline rivalry a practical echo.

Narrative Role

The rats enter Anne’s diary through a sequence of changing knowledge. First there is a nighttime disturbance; then Peter’s flashlight reveals a group of animals; the residents respond by letting Mouschi sleep in the attic. A later incident renews the danger in a different form, when Peter meets a rat unexpectedly while descending the ladder. This progression keeps the threat grounded in recurring work and movement through the building, rather than turning it into a single resolved episode.

Anne’s account also balances fear with comic observation. The attic noises make the rats seem mysterious until they are seen, while the naming story about Boche and Tommy recasts the cats’ territorial fights as a miniature political contest. These shifts in tone do not make the animals harmless: Peter’s bite confirms the practical risk. Instead, the rats connect suspense, bodily vulnerability, improvised control, and humor in the residents’ daily life.