Anne Frank (17 page)

Although we are meant to be on Mrs. Frank’s side of this altercation, the calm double-edgedness of her responses alert us to what a difficult opponent she could be, as indeed Anne found her. The tweaks that turn Mrs. Frank’s rejoinder into the more polite and frostier response could serve as an example of why a writer revises, and of the difference a few words can make.

Mrs. Van Pels goes on to defend herself: if she weren’t pushy, she would starve to death. It bears repeating that the two families have been living together for only three months, and are simultaneously realizing the importance and the difficulty of remaining civil. Already there is trouble about food—shortages and rationing—about how much each resident consumes, tensions that can arise even in close families, when there is plenty to eat. It’s a freighted moment, and Mrs. Van Pels is being intentionally provocative when she suggests that they are involved in a Darwinian struggle requiring aggression and perseverance.

Mrs. Frank laughs—more, we assume, from discomfort than because Mrs. Van Pels has said something funny. The furious Mrs. Van Pels sees Anne shaking her head and gets even angrier. In the earlier draft, she “delivers another sermon,” but in the second she lets loose with “a lot of harsh German, common, and ill-mannered, just like a coarse, red-faced fishwife—it was a marvelous sight.”

By the end of the scene, Mrs. Van Pels’s defensiveness and peevishness have burbled to the surface, leaving a kind of residue that will slick whatever we read about her from that point on. It has been argued that casting Shelley Winters as Petronella van Daan in the film was such an inspired choice that Winters’s high-strung, flirtatious crudeness, as well as the fragility and terror underneath, forever formed our image of Otto’s business partner’s wife. But Winters’s performance, however inspired, is only a veneer, layered over what already exists in the diary.

Thousands of people died during the forced marches that followed the evacuation of Auschwitz, but Auguste van Pels’s name is one of the few, or only, ones we know. And all because of a diary in which a young girl recorded a petty argument in which the older woman could hardly have seemed more irritating—or more human. Among the reasons we remember her is a single instant, unrepeatable in time, when she sees a little girl shaking her head, and explodes. Anne may have judged her neighbor and exposed her frailties and flaws. But she also made her live on the page, thus allowing the facts of history and the passage of time to act upon, and soften, the severity of that judgment.

B
Y AND
large, the most useful revisions increase the clarity of the text. Confusing descriptions are sorted out and reordered, necessary facts added. In September 1942, there is a “big drama” in the “a” version; by the time Anne is editing, she has lived through enough
real
dramas to make the event seem more like “a little interruption in our monotonous life.” Margot and Peter, who are allowed to read everything, have been forbidden a certain book. Originally, it’s a book “about the last war” that Mr. Kleiman has brought to the attic. In the revision, Anne specifies that it is a book “on the subject of women.”

This explains the blowup that ensues, as well as the comedy of Mr. Van Pels grabbing the proscribed volume from his son and protecting the young peoples’ innocence by keeping it himself. As Sylvia P. Iskander explains in an essay about Anne’s reading, the controversial work was Jo van Ammers-Küller’s
Heren, knechten, en Vrouwen (Gentlemen, Servants, and Women).
“In this first book of a trilogy about the
burgemeester,
or mayor of Amsterdam, the mayor considers betraying his country’s alliance with England by assisting the French in sending arms to the American colonies in their fight for independence. Whether
the issues of patriotism, betrayal, or sex, or all of them made the Franks temporarily censor the book for their thirteen-year-old is impossible to say.” In any case, Anne was allowed to read the book a month later, and after another year or so, Anne’s parents let her read nearly everything she wanted.

In October 1942, Anne’s original entry makes it tricky to determine the chronology of events that led to a “terrible fright.” It requires effort to figure out that the incident begins when a noise is heard on the steps. First Anne thinks it’s Mummy or Bep, and then it turns out to be the carpenter, whose presence on the stairs traps Bep in the attic. Someone rattles the door, there’s whistling and thumping. Anne and the others are sure that the carpenter has found them out, but it turns out to be Mr. Kleiman, and they can relax.

On the second attempt, Anne not only gets it right, but lets the reader of
Het Achterhuis
know that the carpenters have come to fill the fire extinguishers. “Downstairs they are such geniuses” that no one has informed them about the workmen’s scheduled visit, and when the attic residents hear men on the stairs, a silence falls over their rollicking lunch with Bep. The anxious moment is dramatized so that now we see it from the perspective of the hidden Jews and their helper, and we are still in their viewpoint when the confusion is cleared up.

“After he’d been working for a quarter of an hour, he laid his hammer and tools down on top of our cupboard (as we thought!) and knocked at our door. We turned absolutely white. Perhaps he had heard something after all and wanted to investigate our secret den…. The knocking, pulling, pushing, and wrenching went on. I nearly fainted at the thought that this utter stranger might discover our beautiful secret hiding place. And just as I thought my last hour was at hand, we heard Mr. Kleiman’s voice say “open the door, it’s only me.’” The revision goes on to explain that the hook that holds the swinging book
case concealing the annex door had gotten jammed. So now both the chronology and the causes, hard to follow before, are unmistakable.

In the process, Anne changed her account of what went through her mind during those long minutes of uncertainty. In the earlier version, “I saw us all in a concentration camp or up against a wall.” In the revised draft, her thoughts have turned from herself to the intruder, from the fates threatening her and the others to a more literary personification of evil. It’s one of the rare instances in which the original diary is more persuasive than is the would-be author of the
Joop der Heul
-style thriller
Het Achterhuis:
“In my imagination the man who I thought was trying to get in had been growing and growing in size until in the end he appeared to be a giant and the greatest fascist that ever walked the earth.”

Writing purely for herself gave Anne the freedom to assume that every reference would be understood, but writing for others necessitated explanation. In the first version, Mr. Van Pels alludes to the trick that the Franks used to make their neighbors think they had escaped Holland:

“Mr. van Pels repeated the story about Daddy being friends with an army captain who had helped him get away to Belgium, the story is now on everyone’s lips and we are greatly amused.”

In the second draft, Anne has Mr. Van Pels tell the story—which involves the Franks’ landlord—in dialogue and in detail: “‘I discovered a writing pad on Mrs. Frank’s desk with an address in Maastricht written on it. Although I knew that this was done on purpose, I pretended to be very surprised and shocked and urged Mr. G. to tear up this unfortunate little piece of paper without delay. I went on pretending that I knew nothing of your disappearance all the time, but after seeing the paper I got a brain wave. “Mr. G.”—I said—“it suddenly dawns on me what
this address may refer to. It all comes back to me very clearly, a high-ranking officer was in the office about six months ago, he appeared to be very friendly with Mr. F. and offered to help him, should the need arise. He was indeed stationed in Maastricht. I think he must have kept his word and somehow or other managed to take Mr. F. along with him to Belgium and then on to Switzerland. I should tell this to any friends who may inquire, don’t of course mention Maastricht.”’”

In her revisions, Anne added blocks of information to help the reader envision the daily rituals and the quarters in which the attic residents barely managed to keep out of one another’s way. The floor plan of the annex doesn’t appear in the original diary. Anne would hardly have needed to map, for herself, an architecture with which she was so familiar. But the diagram is useful for the reader wondering how a bachelor and two families divided their tiny space during the day, and reapportioned it at night.

The elaborate system that the residents work out for bathing appears in the second draft; the first version focuses on how
Anne
manages this challenge. The charming and informative “Prospectus and Guide to the Secret Annex”—an ironic list of attractive features (“beautiful, quiet, free from woodland surroundings, in the heart of Amsterdam”) and house rules (“Residents may rest during the day, conditions permitting, as the directors indicate”) that portrays the cramped attic as a luxury health spa, does not appear in the original diary, but is incorporated in the revised version; it is identified as a “v. P product,” though Anne fails to explain which of the Van Pelses was responsible.

Another important distinction between the first version and the revision has to do with the development of Anne’s spirituality. In her book
Anne Frank: A Hidden Life,
Mirjam Pressler tracks Anne’s references to God, which begin to appear only
after her terrors—occasioned by the break-ins, the bombings, her growing sense of isolation and doom—move her to seek solace in religion. Until November 1943, most of the references to God appear in the revisions but not in the original. But “on November 27, 1943, Anne writes about praying for the first time, and directly asks God to help her. From now on God and nature—seen as interchangeable—take on the function of comforting her, cheering her, and soothing her fears.”

P
ERHAPS
the most startling clarification of a single event occurs in the entry for Sunday, July 5, the day on which the Franks received the call-up order for Margot to report for deportation.

Anne’s first account of the afternoon reflects the shock she was still feeling two days after her family’s arrival in the annex. The early version makes it sound as if Anne hears the policeman asking for her sister, and it’s hard to tell when and how Anne learned whom the call-up was really for.

In the second draft, it’s much easier to track the events of the interval during which the Frank women waited for Otto to
return from the Jewish hospital. It had taken Anne two years to be able to write lucidly about that day, yet she maintains, in the revision, the sense of emergency that consumed her family.

Most of what we know about the Franks’ walk from their apartment to the hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht comes from the additions that Anne made to her sketchy original entry. Soon after her arrival in the attic, she wrote this first account of how they had gotten there:

“We left the house by a quarter to eight I had a (combinash
ion) on then two vests and two pairs of pants then a dress and a skirt then a wool cardigan and a coat, it was pouring and so I put on a headscarf, and Mummy and I each carried a satchel under our arm. Margot went too with a satchel on her bicycle, and we all made for the office. Daddy and Mummy now told me lots of things. We would be going to Daddy’s office and over it a floor had been made ready for us.”

Two years later, that morning becomes a scene in a book—the event from which so much else will follow. Anne adds details, slows the narration, and contextualizes it so that there is no mistaking how everything happened, and why. In addition, there is a sprightliness to the prose, a vigor missing from the numbed, bare-bones outline of two years before. When Anne was revising, the Allied advance was under way, and Anne was probably hoping that the terrifying July morning might come to seem like the start of an adventure in a
Joop ter Heul
detective novel.
How amusing it would be for future generations.