Anne Frank (19 page)

On the morning after my first visit to the Anne Frank Foundation, I cancel my appointments and spend the day in my hotel room so I can process what I’ve seen and heard. It’s not only that I’ve been moved by Mariela’s energized idealism, by Norbert’s sweet, quixotic hope that the ugly story of Eastern European anti-Semitism can have a different ending. It’s also that my conversations with them have changed my way of thinking about Anne Frank’s diary, and about the ways in which it has been received.

I had become increasingly impatient with the notion of Anne Frank as the perky teenage messenger of peace and love, as a source of what Ian Buruma has termed “kitsch absolution,” a modern-day saint preaching tolerance from beyond the grave—in this case, a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen. Such a misreading of Anne’s book and of her “message,” I’d thought, constituted a denial of what happened to her after the diary ended, and of the cruel fates that befell millions of equally innocent
men and women and children. That is what Bruno Bettelheim concludes in the paragraph above, taken from an otherwise quite mad essay in which he blames the Franks for the arrogance of insisting on going into hiding as a family, as well as for the crime of not having survived.

The emphasis on redemption and forgiveness seemed all too reminiscent of the saccharine endings of the Broadway drama and the Hollywood film based on the diary. The play ends with Anne’s statement of her belief that, despite everything, people are really good at heart. At the conclusion of the film, music soars, birds twitter, the camera ascends toward the puffy clouds dotting the calm sky, while, on the sound track, the girlish fashion model playing Anne Frank reaffirms her faith in humanity. Clearly, people, or
some
people, are good at heart, but the reality of Anne’s story, the reality of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, would suggest that
some
people are basically evil at heart. “The line that concludes her play,” wrote Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer, “floating over the audience like a benediction assuring grace after momentary gloom, is the least appropriate epitaph conceivable for the millions of victims and thousands of survivors of Nazi genocide.”

In fact, Anne herself had a sensibly and understandably mixed view of human nature. Among the most impressive aspects of her diary is the way in which its author is able to entertain and even embrace two apparently irreconcilable ideas about mankind. Anne’s book is a testament to certain individuals’ ability to develop, at an early age, a sophisticated moral consciousness, and to maintain compassion and humor under the most intense stress. Her “ambivalence about the hard questions of life” was, Buruma noted, a “mark of her intelligence.”

On May 3, 1944, Anne wrote, “I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peo
ples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.”

Almost three months later, and two weeks before her arrest, Anne composed the entry with which, for better or worse, she would become most closely identified. It’s worth quoting the entire passage as a corrective to the simplistic, falsely consoling idea of Anne Frank as an endlessly optimistic spirit. What’s striking is how beautifully written the entry is and how, like its author, it veers between extremes of hope and despair.

The sentence about human goodness has, as Cynthia Ozick observed in a searing 1997
New Yorker
piece, “been torn out of its bed of thorns.” In her essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Ozick raged at how easy and how common it has become to dissociate the story of Anne Frank’s life from its tragic conclusion; playwrights, producers, and publishers have “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced…infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” the truth of the diary. That truth, claimed Ozick, resides in the crimes listed in the Nazi transport lists, which record that Anne Frank and the others were deported to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, along with 1,019
“Stucke
(or ‘pieces,’ another commodities term).”

By now, we know how Anne Frank’s story ended. The eyewitnesses have been deposed. We know about the horror of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and about her death, from typhus and malnutrition, at Bergen-Belsen.

The fact that Anne’s journal concludes before the Franks’ arrest and deportation has been viewed as one of its shortcomings. In
Literature, Persecution, Extermination,
Sem Dresden argues that Anne’s diary is “not gruesome enough.” “The diary is taken to be a Holocaust document,” wrote Cynthia Ozick. “That is overridingly what it is not.”

In his essay in the
New Republic,
Robert Alter agreed. “A girl’s journal about her family in hiding that ends with an editor’s note about her fate cannot convey the full actuality or meaning of a catastrophe in which millions of individuals and much of their culture were obliterated in camps built and operated by one of the great nations of Europe.”
Ends with an editor’s note
implies that Anne Frank’s diary is incomplete, as if she
missed the main event, which, as we know, she did not. “There are no skeletal camp inmates, no gas chambers, no diabolical medical experiments and acts of sadism.”

But according to Norbert Hinterleitner, one of the reasons the diary is such a useful teaching tool is
because
it allows students to develop an attachment to Anne Frank before they learn about the horrors of the Nazi camps. “It’s full of fear, but not of suffering.” The semblance of ordinary domesticity that the Franks preserved enables Anne’s audience to read her story without feeling the desire to turn away, the impulse we may experience when we see the photos and footage of the skeletal dead and dying.

It has also been argued that there is something false or at least distorted about viewing this utterly singular girl as representative of the millions who were murdered. But whether we approve or not, her individuality is the reason—in some cases the only reason—students everywhere are taught about the Holocaust. “Statistics don’t bleed,” wrote Arthur Koestler, “it is the detail which counts.” A similar notion is expressed in the quote from Primo Levi that appears on a wall of the Anne Frank House Museum: “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

Reviewing the diary in the July 1952
Saturday Review,
Ludwig Lewisohn wrote, “If Anne Frank’s diary pierces the conscience of men in all its implications—the implications of her being and her people’s being, of her life and of her death…if that were possible, the publication of her diary would indeed be a moral event of inestimable import…. A million Anne Franks died in horror and misery; millions of human souls are
perishing similarly today in the Soviet Union, in the ‘People’s Democracies’ in China…. Contrition for Anne Frank may rouse other contritions and from this one girl’s diary a gleam of redemption may arise.”

Perhaps some part of that contrition
does
depend on our catching our last sight of Anne before she was stripped of everything we associate with being human. At the same time, it is crucial that the diary be read in its historical context, just as it is a distortion of everything Anne suffered to treat her book as the story of a teenager’s problems with her mother. It is essential to point out that, although there have been, and likely will be, other genocides, the methodical efficiency with which the country that had produced Goethe and Bach set out to eradicate an entire population is still so far unparalleled. Once the historical background
has
been established, once it is made clear that Anne’s being forced into hiding and murdered was the direct result of the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews, why
not
identify with Anne Frank as a suffering fellow creature? As Ian Buruma observed, “Such identification can result in sentimental self-pity, but it is more likely to give people at least some idea of the evil that was done.”

In “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick railed against the American teenagers who burdened Otto Frank with the adolescent angst they imagined to be just like his daughter’s. Ozick derided Otto’s compulsion to answer their goofy, heartfelt letters, and singled out, as an especially egregious example, the 1995 book
Love, Otto,
drawn from the long correspondence between Otto Frank and a California girl who auditioned for the role of Anne in the Hollywood film. In one letter, Cara Weiss, later Cara Wilson, wrote, “Despite the monumental difference in our situations, to this day I feel that Anne helped me through the teens with a sense of inner focus. She spoke for me. She was strong for me. She had so much hope when I was ready to
call it quits.” Ozick concludes, “The unabashed triflings of Cara Wilson—whose ‘identification’ with Anne Frank can be duplicated by the thousand, though she may be more audacious than most—point to a conundrum…. Did Otto Frank not comprehend that Cara Wilson was deaf to everything the loss of his daughter represented? Did he not see, in Wilson’s letters alone, how a denatured approach to the diary might serve to promote amnesia of what was rapidly turning into history?”

But, one might ask, why
not
encourage and guide young readers’ responses? Why should they
not
imagine they have something in common with a girl whose life, so unlike their own protected ones, ended in Bergen-Belsen? Why should the diary not inspire people like Mariela Chyrikins and Norbert Hinterleitner to attempt to rid the world of hatred? Why
not
emphasize Anne’s optimism if it means that one Argentinian police cadet or one Ukrainian high school student might be more responsive to the humanity of others?

The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka. In Gitta Serenyi’s book,
Into That Darkness,
Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, explained that the brutality of the camp routine—the whips, the shouting, the stripping of the new arrivals and the forcing of them to run—was devised not for its effect on the prisoners but rather for the benefit of the guards, who would work more efficiently to the degree that they believed their victims were not human beings.

In my Amsterdam hotel room, I have what I suppose could be called a change of heart. It no longer strikes me as quite so reductive to see Anne’s “message,” as Otto Frank wished it to be interpreted, as one of tolerance and understanding. Poor Otto! As if losing his wife and daughters were not enough. How he
has been reviled for believing that Anne’s diary could leave its readers more conscious and compassionate! How often he has been accused of purging the book of Judaism, of sex, of its ferocious mother-daughter conflict, when in fact all those elements exist in the version he edited. And how he has been vilified for allegedly having turned (in Ozick’s phrase) a “deeply truth-telling work” into “an instrument of partial truth, surrogate truth, or antitruth,” and for having given his blessing to a foundation that has “washed away into do-gooder abstraction the explicit urge to rage that had devoured his daughter.”

It has yet to be explained to me how the existence of a human rights foundation denies and negates the sufferings of Anne Frank and so many others, how viewing her life exclusively through the lens of her death will bring her back from the dead, or how it will forestall a recurrence of the virulent anti-Semitism responsible for her murder. If it turns out to be even remotely possible to prevent further horrors, surely Mariela and Norbert are doing more to achieve that end than those who mock them as naive do-gooders? Once again, I am struck by the uniqueness—the anomalousness—of Anne Frank’s diary, which still moves people to fierce debate, to talk about the political and social realities of the society they inhabit, and about the life of a girl who hid for two years in an attic until she was arrested and deported and killed.

T
HERE
is, in the library of masterpieces, an entire subcategory of books whose authors could be said to have been forced into a collaboration with misfortune. Among the depressingly numerous products of that involuntary partnership are
Hope Against Hope,
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s account of the terror of life under Stalin, and
Into the Whirlwind,
Eugenia Ginsburg’s memoir of that same period. There are the poems of Szymbo
rska, Milosz, and Celan, Primo Levi’s
Survival in Auschwitz,
the slave narratives of the antebellum South, all manner of war and prison novels.