Anne Frank (18 page)

As a boy of five, Mozart was already composing. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Maturity and creativity are unpredictable over a lifetime, and the early appearance of genius frequently obliges us to rethink our preconceived notions of age. When I read in a book review or hear in a writing class that a child of a certain age would never have such a grown-up response or use such a sophisticated expression, I find myself resisting.

Even so, I can’t help thinking that the description of Miep and Margot riding “into the unknown, as far as I was concerned” does not sound like a thirteen-year-old who, days before, saw her sister threatened with deportation, and by the next morning had left her house and her life and moved into an attic. It was, it could only have been, the phrase of an older girl, looking back.

I
N
1995, the so-called
Definitive Edition
of the diary was published to heated media attention, warmer than the relative chill that had greeted
The Critical Edition
when it appeared in English six years before. Except for the “missing five pages,” all three drafts of the entire diary were included in
The Critical Edition.
But the publicity surrounding the more reader-friendly
Definitive Edition
implied that this was the English-language reader’s first chance to learn more about Anne than her father had chosen to reveal. The suggestion was that the hidden had finally been made public, and a certain amount of prurient interest was generated by Anne’s disquisition on female genitalia. “The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine
how a man could get in there, much alone how a whole baby can get out.”

In fact, the
Definitive Edition
begins with a foreword explaining that everything it contained was available in
The Critical Edition.
But even if you have
The Critical Edition
in front of you, it’s confusing to follow the three overlapping narratives in parallel bands, and it’s unsurprising that only a small number of scholars and critics (and probably fewer general readers) went to the trouble.

In an incisive essay, Laureen Nussbaum guides readers through the versions and revisions. She explains what Otto Frank did and didn’t do, and the controversies that have erupted over each successive revelation. “Otto Frank had picked and chosen from Anne’s extant diary versions when assembling the typescript on which the original (1947) edition and the subsequent translations into dozens of languages would be based. He had added some of the vignettes she had written separately about life in the back quarters, made several rearrangements and corrections, while omitting some passages which he deemed either too irrelevant or too personal to include. In other words, Otto Frank had edited his daughter’s diary, to which he had, of course, a perfect right: a prefatory note to this effect, however, would have saved him many future problems.”

The inclusion of Anne’s reflection on female anatomy, as well as the fact that the pacing in the longer
Definitive Edition
is slower than in the earlier edition of
The Diary of a Young Girl,
are likely among the reasons that the shorter, more accessible 1952 version is the one still taught in schools.

No one can determine what Anne’s final draft might have been like, but to ignore the time and energy she put into version “b” is to deny her own ideas about what she wanted her book to be, insofar as we can know them. Laureen Nussbaum makes a case for valuing Anne’s literary judgment: “A reader poring
over the
b
version will find it hard not to look at the parallel printed
a
version in order to make comparisons. In doing so,
this
reader could not help but be impressed with the amount of self-criticism and literary insight the barely fifteen-year-old Anne brought to bear upon her revision, omitting whole sections, reshuffling others, and adding supplementary information so as to create a more interesting and readable text. In the process, she must have used all her writing talent and the know-how gleaned from her extensive reading…

“My conclusion: readers who appreciate a well-written book, but who are not necessarily into women’s studies or literary criticism, have a right to read Frank’s wartime story in a form as close as possible to the author’s own final version. Conversely, we owe it to Anne Frank that at long last she be taken seriously as the writer she really was, before the Disney people market her as their next popular heroine, Pocahontas-style.”

M
ONTHS
before the minister-in-exile’s radio speech inspired Anne to go back and begin her diary again, she wrote an entry that explains why she took so readily to the project of massive revision. In the midst of a paper shortage, during her second winter in hiding, she searched the diary for pages that had been left blank, and filled them in. On one such page, dated January 22, 1944, Anne describes the shock of confronting the writing of a younger self. If Philip Roth noted that reading the diary was
like watching a fetus grow a face,
the face that has grown by this point is that of an author realizing that her early work could be improved upon.

THE ANNE FRANK MUSEUM OPENS AT NINE EVERY
morning, and by ten, even on cold winter days, a line reaches the corner, straggling along the sidewalk across from the picturesque Prinsengracht Canal. The majority of the people in line are young, as are the majority of visitors to Anne Frank’s house. Quite a few of the adults seem subdued, uneasy, perhaps because of what they’re about to encounter. But though the high school students understand that this is not supposed to be fun, their investment in coolness dictates that they exude the detached nonchalance of kids about to be taken through any art gallery or royal palace, or a guild hall where some historic treaty was signed.

Inside, nothing about the cheerful, modern, brightly lit reception area suggests that this will be any different from any other museum experience. Credit cards and cash are surrendered, tickets issued. But as soon as one enters the house itself, even the most garrulous teens fall silent, and a hush falls over
the visitors. It’s hard to walk through the former offices of the Opekta staff, then up into the storeroom and past the bookcase that once concealed the door to the secret annex without bordering on, or crossing over, the edge of tears.

Part of what makes the Anne Frank Museum so affecting is its simplicity and the sense that very little has changed since the furniture movers stripped the premises bare in the wake of the Jews’ arrest. Here and there, a video monitor plays an informational film strip—one about the role of the helpers who aided the Franks, another featuring an interview in which Hanneli Pick-Goslar describes her last sight of Anne at Bergen-Belsen. Here and there, simple glass vitrines display a few of the objects that remain from that period: Miep Gies’s identity card, Edith Frank’s prayer book. Here and there, a quote—from Primo Levi, or from Anne’s diary—has been stenciled on a wall. There are photos of the eight people who hid here, another of Jews being rounded up on an Amsterdam street. But these mostly bare rooms, these walls and floors and ceilings, are allowed to speak for themselves. One never feels that strong emotions are being artificially manufactured and extracted; nowhere is there a trace of the sentimentality and kitsch so problematic in, say, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, where visitors must trudge through a gallery partly filled with clanking metal frowny faces intended to represent the murdered Jews of Europe.

The decision to keep the rooms unfurnished was made by Otto Frank, who felt that the secret annex should appear just as it did after his family and all their possessions were seized. But in fact a great deal of labor, planning, construction, and restoration has been required to give visitors the impression that nothing has been touched.

In the early 1950s, a textile company, Berghaus, bought the block on which the Opekta company stood, and announced its plans to raze the old houses and businesses and replace them
with a modern office. By then, the diary had already acquired an international reputation, and its fans had begun making pilgrimages to 263 Prinsengracht, where Johannes Kleiman and others often agreed to take them on informal tours. With the support of Amsterdam’s mayor, a campaign was initiated to prevent the proposed demolition. Faced by widespread opposition, Berghaus withdrew, and a fund-raising drive gathered the requisite capital to buy the property. The success of this drive enabled the establishment of the Anne Frank Foundation, in May 1957, and Otto Frank financed the purchase of the building next door, specifying that it be used as an educational center.

Three years later, the Anne Frank Museum was officially opened. By then, thanks partly to the play and the film based on the diary, the book’s popularity had increased exponentially, and in the first year of operation, the museum hosted 9,000 visitors. In 1970, 180,000 people came to see Anne’s secret annex, by which point the volume of foot traffic necessitated architectural improvements to shore up and maintain the site. The front part of the building—the former Opekta office—was modernized to include a reception center, while the annex was left as it was.

As the number of visitors grew each year, an expansion plan evolved, and in the 1990s, a new building was added onto the museum. In contrast to the labyrinthine, confined spaces of the secret annex, the new structure that houses the reception area, the bookstore, and the cafeteria is airy and expansive. At the same time, the Opekta office was restored (with the aid of old photographs and floor plans, and with meticulous attention to the period authenticity of every doorknob and light switch) to allow museumgoers to experience something of the atmosphere of the rooms in which Miep Gies and her colleagues continued, throughout the war, to operate the business that sustained the Jews. More recently, in 2008, the scale model of the secret annex that Otto had made was given a permanent place, and the room
in which the checked diary is kept was redesigned to emphasize the central importance of Anne’s book.

But for the hundreds of school groups and the million visitors who, in 2007, passed the movable bookcase and climbed the steep stairs to the top of the building, the heart and soul of their visit is Anne’s room. Hardly anyone speaks as they file past the postcards that Anne glued on her wall: photos of cockatoos and wild strawberries, of movie stars, of the British royal princesses, and of chimpanzees at a tea party. Once more, the unspoiled simplicity of the room is eloquently communicative of everything that transpired inside it. The main difference is that, when the Franks and the others were in hiding, the windows, now admitting the bright Amsterdam sun, were covered, for safety. Only from the garret, which it is no longer possible to enter but which can be glimpsed in a mirror, could Anne see the sky outside, or the night stars, or the blossoms in her beloved chestnut tree, announcing that another spring had come.

A
ROUND
the corner from, and attached to, the Amsterdam warehouse above which the Franks spent twenty-five months, the Anne Frank Foundation is, in effect, the annex to Anne’s secret annex. Its corridors are decorated with posters, framed book covers, and images documenting the diary’s impact. On one wall is a photo of Nelson Mandela, who found encouragement in Anne Frank’s account of her incarceration in an attic during his own long imprisonment on Robben Island. Tacked to a bulletin board is a snapshot of two Afghan girls holding the diary translated into Dari, while a small shelf has become a sort of folk-art shrine featuring a portrait of Anne painted by a Russian student, another stitched in needlepoint by a reader from Ukraine.

More than fifty years after it was established, the foundation now has over a hundred employees. Staff members direct
the day-to-day operation of the Anne Frank Museum and raise funds to preserve the warehouse and the attic, where the wallpaper must be regularly replaced because so many pilgrims cannot resist the urge to touch it. The foundation develops educational materials, supports a traveling exhibition, monitors incidents of racism worldwide, facilitates research about the Holocaust and human rights, and oversees the Anne Frank archive. It publishes a quarterly journal and maintains a Web site, which, in 2006, attracted three million visitors.

It also operates in cooperation with the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, a separate institution—headed by Anne’s only surviving relative, her cousin Bernd Elias—that controls the rights to Anne’s writings and oversees humanitarian projects, including a school for India’s untouchables, a Jewish-Arab youth orchestra in Jerusalem, and a program to train teachers to work among the poorest citizens of Peru. On occasion, the two organizations have come into conflict. In 2008, the Anne Frank-Fonds questioned the appropriateness of a musical based on the diary and staged in Madrid, while the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam, where the play’s authors and stars had come to do research, viewed the production as a means of introducing Anne to new audiences. But by and large, the two institutions have worked amicably to facilitate the delicate balancing act of both publicizing and protecting Anne’s image, and her book.

I
N A
sunny office on the third floor of the Anne Frank Foundation, a young Argentinian woman named Mariela Chyrikins sorts through a stack of photographs. Taken in Argentina, in 2006, the pictures show a group of police cadets whose full-dress uniforms make them appear to be standing at attention even when they’re relaxed. Behind them are partitions and panels displaying an exhibition about the life and legacy of Anne Frank, whose diary they have gathered to discuss.

As in most of the 177 sites that hosted “Anne Frank—A History for Today” in 2006, venues ranging from Slovakia to Reno, from Croatia to Cyprus, the Argentinian program, held in Cordoba and Buenos Aires, involved local volunteers—in this case, chosen from among the cadets. These volunteers were trained to serve as guides who would teach their peers about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, and lead discussions that, it was hoped, would inspire the participants to talk about their own experiences with bigotry and violence. During the workshop, the cadets met for lunch with a delegation of university students—two groups that normally would never sit down together, let alone speak about what had happened to their families and their communities during the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

As a teenager, Mariela Chyrikins was drawn to the diary in the shocked aftermath of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center, which killed eighty-five people in her Buenos Aires neighborhood. She began to write, then to e-mail, the Anne Frank Foundation. She helped bring the Anne Frank exhibition to Argentina, then followed it back to Amsterdam, where, according to Jan Erik Dubbelman, head of the foundation’s international department, “she made us realize we had no choice but to hire her.”

“The moment that young people in Latin America become emotionally involved with Anne Frank’s story,” says Mariela, “they start to reflect about themselves. They say, ‘Ah, okay, in Europe there also happened something like what happened in our country.’ It’s like opening a Pandora’s box, you never know the consequences of the work you are doing, but you know that you are touching people’s hearts.

“The curriculum at the police academies is left over from the times of the dictatorship, very authoritarian. And when they put on the uniform they have the feeling that they are no
longer a human, but a god. Anne Frank’s story makes them more human. The cadets want to protect Anne Frank, as if she was their own child, as if she’s their best friend. They’re mad because Anne Frank was killed, but when they see some poor guy working on the street, they might want to kill
him.
The important thing is making a connection between this poor guy and Anne Frank.

“Maybe their parents were also police during the dictatorship, but they have never talked about it. Now they say they are going to talk to their parents. They have lunch with the university students, and for the first time they start to discuss: Who is the other, how do you see the other? They are human beings too! In some cases, the children and grandchildren of the disappeared are among the trainers. It brings a lot of very emotional things to the surface. It was hard for the police cadets to listen to the stories of the Dirty War. But Anne Frank’s story allows them to be inside someone else’s shoes. It allows young people in Latin America to raise their voices—and to flower.”

Similar programs have taken place in Guatemala and in Chile, at the Villa Grimaldi, a former torture center under the Pinochet regime and currently a memorial to its victims. In both countries, Anne’s diary has enabled its readers to confront their troubled past—and, in Guatemala, to discuss the ongoing violence that is still part of daily life.

Down the hall from Mariela Chyrikins’s office, Norbert Hinterleitner is engaged in a similar project, one that involves bringing programs about tolerance to provincial cities in Ukraine. Born and raised in Austria, Norbert has spent the past five years designing books and textbooks, distributing copies of Anne’s diary, and working with educators and teenagers to combat not only anti-Semitism but xenophobia, homophobia, and bias against the region’s ethnic and racial minorities. It’s
tricky, Norbert admits, even to gain admittance to schools and community centers whose administrators are more likely to hang up on him than to answer his phone calls. On an early visit to the former Soviet Union, he used, as a teaching tool, a recent article from a local newspaper, a four-page “factual” exposé of the worldwide conspiracy masterminded by American Jews in secret partnership with the Mafia.

Norbert says, “If you’re surprised and you show it, you’ve lost.” He’s satisfied if he can reach a few kids among the thousands, kids who normally never speak up, kids whose lives will be changed if they can be persuaded that they are not alone and that it is all right to take a public stand against bigotry. What makes Anne’s diary so useful, he has found, is Anne’s fundamental decency, her belief that human dignity will prevail.

“She was a victim of her society, but when you talk about her book, it gives people hope and inspiration. It’s a catalyst. They begin to think that they can do something different.” Norbert’s sincerity is infectious, but I can’t quite stifle the skeptical thought that, given the persecutions and pogroms that have transpired in that region of Eastern Europe, teaching certain Ukrainians not to be anti-Semitic is a bit like trying to teach cocker spaniels to fly. What could the success rate of such a program be, and how could it be quantified? Norbert, I think, is probably wise to keep his ambitions modest, to attempt to reach a few receptive kids. But despite my reservations, I’m delighted by Norbert’s hopeful determination. I’d like to imagine that he is right in his faith that entrenched hatred can be dissolved and dispelled, one Ukrainian teenager at a time.