Domestic cats

Domestic cats appear throughout Anne Frank’s diary as more than incidental household animals. Moortje, the cat Anne leaves behind when her family goes into hiding, remains an object of intense longing; Mouschi and Boche, encountered in and around the Annex, belong to the constrained routines of the new household. Their stories connect affection and absence to the practical, sometimes comic details of life in hiding.

Moortje: A Birthday Companion and a Farewell

On the morning of her thirteenth birthday, Anne recalls waking at six, waiting until she was allowed to get up, and going to the dining room, where Moortje rubs against her legs. The cat is part of the first scene in the diary’s account of the day: before Anne opens the presents on the table, Moortje welcomes her. This small greeting establishes the animal as familiar company within the family home.

When the Frank family leaves that home for hiding, Moortje is the only living creature Anne says goodbye to. The family has left a note for Mr. Goldschmidt asking that the cat be taken to neighbors who could give her a home. Anne’s account sets this personal farewell beside the practical signs of a hurried departure: stripped beds, breakfast things left on the table, and a pound of meat in the kitchen for the cat. The food is part of the attempt to make the house appear recently occupied, but for Anne, the goodbye is not a mere detail of the departure.

Longing for the Cat Left Behind

In the Annex, Moortje becomes one of Anne’s clearest expressions of homesickness. Anne says that the cat is her weak spot: she misses her every minute of the day, thinks of her often, and feels tears come to her eyes. She dreams that Moortje will come back, while recognizing that the family must remain indoors until the war is over. The cat’s absence gives that confinement a domestic and intimate measure: the loss is not only of freedom of movement, but also of an ordinary bond that cannot be resumed.

Anne also resists the way other people discuss Moortje. She is upset when family members talk about the cat, because their remarks touch a grief they do not understand in its full intensity. In the same passage she describes feeling out of step with the family’s shared sentimentality, while identifying her father as the only one who sometimes understands her. Moortje thus belongs to the diary’s account of both separation from home and Anne’s sense that her private feelings are not always recognized by those around her.

Mouschi and the Annex’s Shared Routine

The cats in and around the Annex are not all remembered as absences. Anne notes that Mouschi grows nicer to her over time, although she remains somewhat afraid of the cat. The change is modest, but it records an evolving familiarity during a life in which the residents’ daily world is sharply restricted.

Mouschi also appears amid shared work and recreation. While the residents prepare food, Peter plays with the cat as Anne, her mother, and Margot peel boiled potatoes; elsewhere, the diary describes Peter going downstairs with his father and Mouschi. These appearances place the cat among the rhythms of household labor and movement rather than outside them. The cat’s presence makes visible how even small domestic routines are shared, watched, and adapted to the confined space.

The Annex’s typewritten guide treats household pets as part of its imagined provision for residents, listing a separate department for their care, with vermin excluded. That jokingly practical detail makes animals part of the household’s improvised order: life in hiding is governed by arrangements for meals, work, space, and even pets. Against Moortje’s distance, this reference to pet care suggests the effort to preserve recognizable domestic life within unusual circumstances.

Boche and the Office Cats

Boche belongs to the office and warehouse rather than to Anne’s former home. Anne identifies her as the warehouse and office cat, whose presence keeps rats at bay in the storeroom. She was already there before the family went into hiding, and remains a familiar sight when residents go downstairs. Unlike Moortje, Boche is not described through Anne’s personal attachment; her role is practical and tied to the working building around the hidden household.

Anne explains Boche’s name through the history of two cats belonging to Gies & Co.: one associated with the warehouse and one with the attic. Their encounters reportedly ended in fights, with the warehouse cat as the aggressor and the attic cat ultimately victorious. The warehouse animal was called the German, or Boche, and the attic cat the Englishman, or Tommy. Tommy was later gone, while Boche continued to appear downstairs and amuse the residents. The account turns an office detail into a small political joke, rooted in the contrast between the cats’ assigned roles and the outcome of their encounters.

Cats as Measures of Ordinary Life

Across these episodes, cats occupy different places in Anne’s world: Moortje belongs to the home she has left and to the private grief of separation; Mouschi enters the residents’ changing routines; Boche is part of the office environment and its practical work. The diary does not make these animals interchangeable. Instead, their distinct settings and relationships show how memory, attachment, and daily necessity coexist in hiding.

Their recurrence also gives the diary a way to register the scale of deprivation without reducing it to broad statements. A birthday greeting, a planned new home, a pound of meat left behind, a cat accompanying Peter downstairs, and a warehouse animal keeping rats away are concrete details of ordinary life under extraordinary constraint. The cats remain part of that life, whether as a beloved presence remembered from before hiding or as companions encountered in the building where the residents must make a temporary home.