In the late 1930s, 18,000 German, Austrian and Polish Jewish refugees from the Nazis sought sanctuary in Shanghai, having been issued visas by Chinese diplomats. The Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara also helped them by issuing transit visas through Japan. By 1941, there were 20,000 Jewish refugees packed into a one-mile square area of Shanghai. Later in the war, the Nazis tried to pressure their Japanese allies who were controlling Shanghai to exterminate the city’s Jewish refugees. Fortunately by this time the Japanese were becoming fearful of further provoking the anger of the Allies. After the war, and as Chinese Communism was taking hold, most Jews left Shanghai to make new lives in other countries. The Jewish Refugee Museum of Shanghai continues to tell their story.
Michael Liu felt that linking Anne’s story to the refugee experience is a helpful entry point. ‘She was a refugee’, he said, ‘schools are talking about the global refugee crisis caused by the war in Syria, and China has its own internal migration issues to look at. With Anne Frank we speak of human values, such as love, tolerance and humanity.’
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Like the great explorers who journeyed along the Silk Road and the spice routes of the Far East, like the traders of the Dutch East India Company, Anne Frank has woven her silken thread from the north of Japan, westwards to South Korea, southwards through China and Hong Kong, through Vietnam, across the sea to the Philippines and all the way southwards to the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. With each community’s diverse history and experience, Anne Frank has a unique relevance – but the work in her name continues to leave behind changed people.
Chapter 26
Anne Frank was a Real Person
Anne Frank has become so recognizable over the past seventy years that sometimes the reality of this child’s life and death have become interwoven with myth or even parody. As if Anne Frank wasn’t really real.
In Japan, the country that was allied with Nazi Germany during the war, an animated film, Anne No Nikke, was released in 1995 depicting Anne Frank as an angelic heroine. She had a likeness to Disney’s animated Snow White, but Anne was clothed in mid-twentieth century costume. A dark-haired and pale-skinned girl is shown gambolling through flowered meadows, with birds and butterflies swirling around her. Accompanied by a score composed by the American Michael Nyman, the film was not well received in the West. On his ‘Anime New Network’ website, Justin Sevakis, an expert on the culture of animation, stated that he ‘couldn’t think of a worse way to experience the story than watching this film’.
A scene in the long-running British soap series Eastenders in 1999 showed a group of the fictional women characters going on a hen weekend in Amsterdam. The ‘hen bride’ was due to marry a rather unsympathetic character called Ian Beale. Prior to hitting the bars of Amsterdam, the young women stood alongside the canal on the Prinsengracht staring up at Anne’s hiding place. A supposedly knowledgeable member of the group pondered on Anne having to hide from the Nazis, and another responded that ‘surely that was a better fate than marrying Ian Beale’. Actually, it wasn’t.
In November 2009, introducing a BBC radio comedy panel show called The Unbelievable Truth, the presenter David Mitchell started the show by stating that Anne Frank’s last diary entry was, ‘It’s my birthday and my Dad bought me a drum kit.’ It could be an amusing joke if we didn’t understand Anne’s daily terror of discovery. The BBC received almost fifty complaints about the comment, including my own on behalf of the Anne Frank Trust. The show’s commissioning editor Caroline Raphael responded on the station’s weekly Feedback show by apologizing to any people who had taken offence, but added that she did not regret the decision to broadcast the comment made on the show. She said:
Personally I did find this funny. I don’t think it was trivializing the Holocaust, the nature of her death or the situation they were in. For me it actually captures some of the extraordinary spirit of that remarkable girl, Anne Frank, and there was a certain note of affection towards her. After all she was young, and if she was a teenager now she might have got a drum kit. It was satirizing the situation they were in.
David Mitchell defended the comment himself in an article in the Observer newspaper. He wrote that, despite not writing the joke himself, he found it ‘funny’ and that ‘the tragic circumstances give it an edge and make the audience more likely to laugh, but that’s not the same as finding the Holocaust funny’.
Both the above shows had warranted a letter from myself to the producer, explaining that Anne Frank still had living relatives and friends – some of whom were themselves Holocaust survivors – and who could find these references offensive. In each case I received an apology explaining there was certainly no offence intended, and of course I do believe that’s the case. In 2015 I happened to bump into David Mitchell in a café and we discussed the joke in a very cordial way. Mitchell is a highly intelligent man. But these instances are indicative of Anne having gone beyond being thought of as a real person who lived in the twentieth century as a contemporary to the still-living elderly Holocaust survivors whom no-one would dream of joking about.
In 2012 the comedian Ricky Gervais was compelled, after a flood of criticism, to publicly defend his use of Anne Frank in a comedy routine he had been performing on stage for ten years. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle newspaper he said:
It [the routine] is about the misunderstanding and ignorance of what is clearly a tragic and horrific situation. My comic persona is that of a man who speaks with great arrogance and authority but who, along the way, reveals his immense stupidity. In this particular routine, I envisage an almost slapstick version of the Nazis entering the home of Anne Frank on a daily basis and always failing to bother to ‘look upstairs’.
Gervais continued to describe the scene he was portraying:
The first Nazi says: ‘What’s that tapping sound?’ – as I mime the tapping action of using an old-fashioned typewriter. Again the joke here is the supremely stupid assumption that Anne Frank obliviously and noisily typed her diary. The final layer of ignorance in the routine is that, instead of taking the obvious and correct stance that Nazis were disgusting, immoral and evil, I merely conclude that they were ‘rubbish’ because of their inability to find Anne Frank earlier – like it was all part of a big, mutually agreed game of hide-and-seek . . . I often get accused of finding comedy in places where no comedy is to be found. I feel you can make a joke about anything. It just depends on what the joke is.
Perhaps the most enduring Anne Frank joke has been deemed to be a true story and relates to a production of the stage play The Diary of Anne Frank being performed somewhere in the US, and attributed to the terrible acting skills of its leading lady. The joke goes that as the arresting officers came onto the stage for the tragic climax, a member of the audience, who had suffered two hours of the heroine’s dreadful acting, shouted, ‘She’s in the attic’. I have heard the story many times on my travels, but it is apparently apocryphal and several different American actresses are the supposed targets.
‘Fictional Anne Frank’, the one who actually survived Bergen-Belsen and was supposedly rescued by the British and American liberating armies, exists in literature. There have been representations of her as a Holocaust survivor, such as in Philip Roth’s 1979 book The Ghost Writer, wherein a woman author called Amy Bellette appears to believe she is actually Anne Frank. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, the critic Robert Towers noted, ‘The account of Anne’s survival of Auschwitz and Belsen and of her desperate adoption, after weeks of coma, of Amy Bellette’s identity is packed with circumstantial detail of great vividness; her reactions to the reading of her own diary in its Dutch edition and her breakdown after seeing its dramatization on Broadway – these episodes are persuasively narrated.’ It is surprising, and perhaps somewhat fearless, for Roth to write this post-Holocaust fantasy in 1979, just thirty-four years after the liberation of the camps, and a year after the American TV series ‘Holocaust’ opened the American public’s eyes, albeit in a dramatic interpr
etation, to what had happened to the victims of the Nazis.
Shalom Auslander’s satirical and acerbic first novel, Hope, A Tragedy, published in 2012, gives us the image of another post-war Anne Frank. This time she takes the form of an embittered old crone typing away in the attic of a New York State farmhouse. Auslander uses Anne Frank as a symbol not of hope, but of the futility of hope. This Anne powerfully negates the sentimentalized use of some of her writing and her iconic image. ‘Me, I’m the sufferer,’ Auslander’s Anne finally says to a character called Kugel. ‘I’m the dead girl. I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945. The prize is a crown of thorns and eternal victimhood. Jesus was a Jew, Mr. Kugel, but I’m the Jewish Jesus.’
Published in the US simultaneously with Auslander’s novel, Nathan Englander’s collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank uses her name as the title of the book even though Anne Frank features in a small, but nonetheless significant, section towards the end of the opening story. The focus here is not on Anne, but actually on the moral dilemma that the helpers of the persecuted Jews found themselves in. Through an imagination game, ‘a thought experiment’, presupposing a second Holocaust is taking place in contemporary south Florida (where the largest number of American Holocaust survivors actually live), the two couples think about which of their Gentile acquaintances would put their life on the line to save their Jewish neighbours. The four characters then turn their attention to each other. The characters are fictionalized but the moral dilemma is not, and the story also covers the premise that survivors have human failings like everyone else.
Over the decades, dramatic interpretations of life in the secret annexe have brought their own way of imagining the reality. The popular play The Diary of Anne Frank, written by husband-and-wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, reflected Otto Frank’s wish to universalize the story to attract as wide an audience as possible. He envisaged the play being performed in cities throughout America where, in the 1950s pre-Civil Rights era, and despite knowledge of the Holocaust, cultural acceptance of difference was in short supply. The play’s impact in the late 1950s was profound, but in recent years it has been accused of over sentimentality and two-dimensional characterisation.
Dr Shirli Gilbert, Karten Senior Lecturer in Jewish/non-Jewish relations at the University of Southampton, explored the de-Judaification of the Hackett and Goodrich play in a 2013 essay for the Oxford Journal.
Several of Anne’s entries focused on the Jews’ specific fate and offered thoughtful observations about Jewish history and identity. These were excised in the stage version, and in some striking instances references to Jews were deliberately replaced with universal alternatives. On April 11, 1944, for example, Anne wrote: ‘We’ve been strongly reminded of the fact that we’re Jews in chains, chained to one spot, without any rights . . . We can never be just Dutch, or just English, or whatever, we will always be Jews as well.’ In the American script, this passage was replaced with Anne’s lament that, ‘We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. There’ve always been people that’ve had to—sometimes one race—sometimes another.’
In 1997 the American writer Wendy Kesselman gave the play a makeover, re-establishing Anne as a girl from a Jewish family, not baulking from making references to Zionism and the specific persecution of the Jews. Scenes gave the celebration of Chanukah and other manifestations of Anne’s Jewishness more prominence.
In the first run on Broadway, Anne was played by 16-year-old Natalie Portman, who had actually been born in Jerusalem with the Hebrew name of Neta-Lee Hershlag. While playing the role of Anne each night, Portman was simultaneously studying for her public school exams in Syosset, Long Island. By casting a Jewish Israeli-born actor, this production was described as ‘Anne Frank comes home.’ In an interview on NBC’s Today programme two days before the opening, Portman described how she had been connected to Anne Frank since the age of 12, as many of her own family had been killed in the Holocaust. ‘I want to remind people of the wrongs of hatred and racism.’ She went on to talk about this new version of Anne, and how it differed from previous representations of her. ‘I wanted to present her as real. She was no saint, and it’s wrong to present people’s icons as saints, because they will feel they can’t achieve that goodness. She was outgoing and hyper almost to an irritating point.’
The Kesselman play opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in June 1997. I was present on the opening night along with Jack and Ina Polak, Dutch-born Holocaust survivors of Bergen-Belsen, and Herbert and Lilian Levy, Herbert being the German-born Principal Guide of the Anne Frank exhibition in the UK and Lilian having been rescued as a five-year-old orphan from the same camp of Bergen-Belsen. Jack Polak had arrived in New York in 1951 with his wife Ina and two sons, had built a successful investment business and was a founder of the Anne Frank Center USA. All five of us, Herbert, Lilian, Jack, Ina and myself, were supremely protective of telling Anne’s story as honestly as possible.
The Polaks and the Levys had met for the first time earlier that evening over drinks at Manhattan’s legendary Algonquin Hotel and, partly due to their shared experiences but also their love of theatre, were by later in the evening firm friends. They all agreed that the size of the large Broadway theatre staging, and the consequent shouting of the characters across the stage, didn’t leave any impression of the claustrophobic intensity of the small above-warehouse rooms and the need of the hiders to be oppressively quiet for most of the day. I had thought the same. At one point in the second act, I had found myself giving quiet instructions (actually whispered to myself) to the players, ‘Please, please quieten down or you’ll be discovered.’ I still believe, having seen many different theatrical productions of Anne’s story, from Broadway to local fringe theatres to school productions, that the dramatisation of life in the secret annexe works best in a small, intimate environment.
At the star-studded aftershow dinner, I approached the pretty young actress who had played ‘Anne Frank’ while juggling her school exams. She looked nervous and was carefully carrying her dinner plate over to her table. ‘She looks a lovely girl, she was very good, it was her Broadway debut, so I am sure she will appreciate my encouragement,’ I thought to myself as I walked towards her smiling. She thanked me with a sweet and polite smile when I told her supportively that I thought she would definitely go far in her acting career. Well, how was I to know that Miss Portman had already been cast as Padme Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy?
In 2013, a new play was commissioned by the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel. Simply entitled Anne, it was written by the Dutch husband-and-wife team Leon de Winter and Jessica Durlacher, and produced by the Tony Award winning Broadway producer Robin Levitan. It opened on 8 May 2014, the sixty-ninth anniversary of VE Day, in a purpose built theatre in Amsterdam’s port area. The new theatre was lavish and impressive, and the glittering first night attended by the recently crowned King of the Netherlands, Willem Alexander (Queen Beatrix had abdicated in her son’s favour the previous year), along with Dutch media and high society. I found myself sitting in the optimum seats between South African leisure mogul Sol Kerzner and British impresario Harvey Goldsmith, who was one of the play’s producers, and after the performance having a brief chat to the new King to inform him about our flourishing Anne Frank organization in the UK.
Naturally the play was performed in Dutch, and foreign guests were handed out headsets with a rudimentary version of the script translated into English. After a few scenes I gave up on the audio, feeling that I was familiar enough with the narrative to watch the action played out in Dutch. Although the revolving sets were a staggering three storeys high, and certainly did not convey any sense of intimacy and claustrophobia, they, and the accompanying large-screen film footage and crashing sound effects, did give a heightened sense of the terrifying harsh reality beyond the secret annexe, most especially the penultimate scene showing Anne in a barren windswept Bergen-Belsen.
The first scene, which
was an introduction to the stunning stage sets that would follow, is set in a post-war Paris café, where an imagined Anne is discussing the publication of her diary with a handsome young publisher. He then joins us as the audience is taken back to Anne’s time in hiding. In an interview for CNN, the writer Leon De Winter explained the reason for using an imaginary post war Anne, ‘It’s all inspired by Anne’s own writing,’ he said. ‘It’s her dream to have this grand student bohemian life in Paris and London – and to become famous. We used these remarks to see glimpses of a life she never had.’
Peter van Pels, Anne’s ‘boyfriend’ in the hiding place, has also had his life, words and thoughts subject to imagination. In 2010, the American writer Sharon Dogar’s first novel Annexed looked at the Anne Frank story from Peter van Pels’s viewpoint. Although the Sunday Times first criticized the novel for the ‘sexing up’ of the Anne Frank story, I was described by the Guardian newspaper as angry about fictionalizing someone who was until relatively recently a real person. ‘I really don’t understand why we have to fictionalize the Anne Frank story, when young people engage with it anyway,’ I told the Guardian’s Richard Lea. ‘To me it seems like exploitation. If this woman writer is such a good novelist, why doesn’t she create characters from scratch?’
I was cynical too when Dogar explained in the same article her reason for writing the book, ‘The problem is that a writer doesn’t always choose what they write,’ she said. ‘The idea of this book plagued me for 15 years. I tried quite hard not to write it, mostly because I had similar concerns; I couldn’t do it justice, I wasn’t sure it was legitimate, I didn’t believe I had the talent to portray the horror of the Holocaust. But sometimes stories just come and you can’t stop them.’
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 38
