The novel opens with Peter on the point of death in Mauthausen (in real life he tragically died just three days before it was liberated) and is told as a series of diary entries interspersed with the thoughts of the dying boy, charting the story of the time he spent hiding with the Frank family above 263 Prinsengracht, his discovery and arrest and then his time in the death camp. Regarding the part of the book that concerns Peter’s teenage sexuality, I accused Dogar of putting twenty-first-century mores on to young people from a different era. Dogar rejected the accusation of anachronism, countering that,
Whilst it’s true to say that children of the war years lived according to different cultural mores and social strictures, it’s also true that there are some fundamental and universal human feelings that are biological rather than social. The state of adolescence existed before ‘teenagers’ were invented. Adolescent hormones have always been in conflict with social rulings. This is why some of Anne’s thoughts remain as powerful and meaningful today as they were 60 years ago.
I found myself in conflict with Otto Frank’s step-daughter and my Anne Frank Trust Co-founder Eva Schloss over my response, who concurred with Dogar that adolescents in the 1940s spent a lot of time thinking about sex. But although the Guardian article had made this the focal point of my critique, the sexual aspect wasn’t really my prime concern. It was much more about taking real people, who were not around to correct the falsehoods, and making their thoughts and experiences not real. Especially in the light of neo-Nazi Holocaust denial.
John Boyne wrote the enormously popular but controversial novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which relates the story of two young boys, one the son of the camp commandant and the other a Jewish prisoner, who befriend each other on either side of the concentration camp’s perimeter fence. It’s a totally improbable scenario, but Boyne defended the role of children’s fiction in dealing with subjects as charged as the Holocaust, on the grounds that novels can play a ‘huge role’ in educating young people. ‘Children will switch off if they are lectured,’ He continued, ‘but tell them a good story with characters they can relate to and you’re halfway there.’
Well, I actually believe, from working with Anne Frank’s story and those of survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, that the genuine stories of these people succeed in engaging young people and motivating them to make the world better. Moving forward, there will be a role for Holocaust fiction, but as there will soon be no more eyewitnesses to verify the facts and write their own memoirs, such novels must be based on historical truth.
The Anne Frank House itself has been featured in novels, such as Aidan Chambers’s Carnegie Medal-winning 1999 novel set in the Netherlands, Postcards from No Man’s Land. John Green’s 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars was about a couple of teenage cancer victims who fall in love. The terminally-ill young couple fly from their home town in Indiana to Amsterdam to meet a reclusive Dutch author whom the girl has long admired. While in the city they take the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank House and share their first kiss in the attic where Anne Frank and Peter van Pels had done so seventy years before (this memorable scene is a fictional premise as the attic is closed to the visiting public).
The British novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach approached Anne Frank with an honesty and a determination to be as accurate as possible. In 2008, the BBC commissioned a new TV drama series The Diary of Anne Frank to mark the eightieth anniversary of Anne’s birth the following year. When Moggach was asked to write the screenplay for the series, she probed into the day-to-day privations of being in hiding for over two years. When Deborah came to visit the Anne Frank Trust office prior to the first screening in January 2009, she told me that she had wanted to depict a ‘dirty Anne Frank’, showing clothes that were not able to be washed, eight people who were squabbling over the use of the one bathroom basin, a toilet that could not be flushed in daytime hours, windows that had to be kept closed and covered even in the heat of summer, and many other daily miseries.
In an interview with the American Public Broadcasting Service’s online magazine Masterpiece, Moggach said that the wardrobe department, ‘had versions of the same clothes that the actors wore in practically every scene, but becoming shabbier; and in the case of the adults, bigger, because the adults were getting so thin; and in the case of the teenagers, smaller, because the teenagers were growing. That made it tragically real when I saw that.’ Her honesty paid off. Moggach later said that Anne’s cousin Buddy Elias described this dramatic interpretation as ‘the most truthful he had ever seen’. Following its prime time BBC1 screening over five consecutive nights in January 2009, Moggach was regularly invited to speak about the challenges of creating such a truthful screenplay, and the Anne Frank Trust team and I became ‘Deborah Groupies’ following her around London to hear her, as what she revealed about the process and her thinking was so fascinating.
Over the years many musical productions of the story have appeared. One of my first experiences of this was in 1990 when I was a ‘new player’ in the Anne Frank educational arena. The New York writer Enid Futterman wrote a piece called Yours Anne with a score specially composed by Michael Cohen. After its British premiere in Manchester, the piece then transferred to a small theatre in Islington, north London, where I went along to see it. I thought then, and still do, that this intimate production was one of the most truthful and moving ways of telling the story. Enid and I had lunch while she was in London and she described to me her personal connection to the persecution of Anne Frank. As a teenager in Poland in the early years of the twentieth century, Enid’s grandmother had witnessed the murder of her own father during a pogrom in their village. The trauma of this had filtered down through the ensuing generations, causing Enid’s mother to suffer from severe depression. As a child Enid had in turn suffered from her mother’s depression – four generations had borne the trauma of this 100-year-old family tragedy. I often think of Enid’s story when I see scenes of massacres and brutality on the present-day news and wonder how many future generations of the victims will go on to be affected.
James Whitbourn and Melanie Challenger’s ‘Anne Frank Oratorio’, written in 1995, is a soaring and serious classical interpretation often performed in cathedrals and at significant memorial events. A Spanish musical version of the story was given the thumbs-down by the Anne Frank-Fonds and closed its doors after a few days. There has been no shortage of British composers, as well as dramatists, sending me their own ‘unique’ take on the Anne Frank story, believing they would be providing the definitive Anne Frank work. They were discouraged in their ambitions when I had to tell them they would need to seek the rights from the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel. I am sure the flood will continue for many years. I hope it does and that Anne Frank will continue to inspire creativity, in all its varying degrees of merit.
Working in schools has shown that even children can give Anne Frank’s character their own interpretation. Possibly attributable to one particularly famous line in her diary being taken out of context, children have often told us that the characteristic they most admire in Anne is her ability to forgive, and that they hope they would be as forgiving too in her circumstances.
The line refers to her own wonder that she hasn’t abandoned all her ideals as in her view they seem so absurd and impractical. But she then decides to be positive, writing, ‘Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’ Over the years this line has been isolated from its context and has served as creating an ‘other-worldly’ Anne, more forgiving and saintly than us. This sentence of twenty words in fact comes towards the end of one of Anne’s longest entries, dated 15 July 1944, in which she rails against the loneliness of her situation, ‘It’s twice as hard for us young people to hold on to our opinions at a time when ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when the worst side of human nature predominates, when everyone has come to doubt truth, justice and God.’ She hears, almost in a premoniti
on of her fate, ‘the distant thunder that will destroy us too’.
Giving the inaugural Anne Frank Lecture in London in January 2011, the cultural historian and writer Professor Simon Schama chose to analyse her smile:
When we conjure up the features of Anne Frank’s face, what do we remember first? Well surely the smile because it happens in the teeth of despair. Sometimes it’s nothing more than elfin mischief, the knowing cheekiness that ignites every so often through her writing. At other times it’s the full-on girly grin, so wide, artless and brilliant, that the rest of her countenance seems to arrange itself around it. And, as anyone who has ever written anything about Anne Frank has always noted, it is lit by an avidity for the life that was denied her in Bergen-Belsen.
Anne Frank, a fragile teenager who just wanted to grow up and live her life as an adult, a terrified girl who lived and laughed, who wanted to go back to school and hang out with her friends. Anne Frank, a frightened and vulnerable teenager, who was funny, cheeky, deeply driven, opinionated, bossy, happy with her hair and sometimes not, was as real as you or me.
Had she survived, Anne Frank may have returned to live in Amsterdam, or like Eva Schloss, who moved to London after the war, may have found it too hard to resume a normal life in a country where most of her non-Jewish peers could never really comprehend what Auschwitz was all about. She may have followed the dreams of her sister Margot and fled Europe for the Mediterranean climes of Israel, where in the early days of the fledgling state she would again have endured a lack of food, but I suspect she would have enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of Tel Aviv more than the rural life on a kibbutz. Or, like so many of the camp survivors, taken a ship across the Atlantic to America, where in the second half of the twentieth century she would have experienced the greatest prosperity in human history, tempered by the 1950s fears of nuclear war.
We can never speculate who Anne Frank would have been had she been able to hold on to the thread of life for just a few weeks longer to see the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Because she was a real person and her post-war life would have guided her choices, we’ll never know if she would have chosen to become a writer or journalist. She may have decided against this path, or tried and changed her mind and then chosen a completely different field. As it was not so usual in the 1950s for women to have careers, her pre-feminism yearning to ‘do more than Mother ever did’ may have not materialized and she may have spent her life as a wife, mother and homemaker.
All we know is that we will never know who or what she would have been or done or thought. Because Anne Frank was a real person and suffered and died as a real person.
Chapter 27
Anne Frank in the Indian Subcontinent
In her diary entry dated 27 February 1943, Anne happened to mention that Mahatma Gandhi ‘the champion of Indian freedom’ was on one of his umpteen hunger strikes. In her next entry, on 4 March, she follows this up with a rather sardonic four-word line: ‘Gandhi is eating again.’
What would Anne Frank’s response be if she knew that her diary was to be read and admired in India, and that seventy years after she wrote about Gandhi’s freedom-fighting, an exhibition about her life was shown in Calcutta, Bangalore and Pondicherry, such exotic far-off places to a 1940s European girl? That the childhood photos of her family, her homes and her chosen friends and favourite clothes were gazed on by the children of India and her words avidly analysed across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal? That her writing has been published in Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam, five languages spoken in India that make up some of the seventy-three languages her words have been published and read in? That teachers in brightly-coloured saris have been learning and teaching about her life from her birth to the terrors of the camps? So what do you say, Anne?
India – the jewel in the crown of Queen Victoria’s huge empire. A country of spirituality, gurus, ashrams and silent meditation, sanctuaries of calm which bear little relation to the tough daily struggles of the teeming masses of the poor. A country of 1.3 billion people still affected by the archaic mores of the caste system and where educated professional women need to protest against the prevalence of rape.
I had toured India in 2004, arriving just three days after the Boxing Day tsunami. The day-to-day exigencies of the poor, both in the cities and the countryside, is evident everywhere. From the teenage shoe polisher in downtown Delhi who furtively threw dog poop over my husband’s shoes so he could run after him (pretending to be a Good Samaritan passer-by who had witnessed the unfortunate ‘accident’) and offer to clean them for a few rupees, to the beggar women proffering their deliberately-maimed babies for your compassion, to the children perilously chasing tourist taxis in dread of being beaten by their gang masters if they returned without money. It is hard to be inured in India from the harshness of the lives of millions.
The Anne Frank project in India was brought at the request of the Seagull Foundation for the Arts in Kolkata (the city Anne Frank would have known as Calcutta) and its special initiative called ‘Peace Works’. Their team works with young people on issues of discrimination and human rights through the media of arts, theatre and video. The director of PeaceWorks had participated in a workshop run by our Anne Frank House colleague Barry van Driel in Turkey in 2013, and she expressed her interest in the two organizations working together.
As no Anne Frank educational project had ever taken place in India, a feasibility study was first carried out in Kolkata. The research discovered that Anne was well known in India through the popularity of her diary. It also found a very positive reaction to the idea of an Anne Frank exhibition coming to the city.
Two women from the Anne Frank House, Loes Singels and Priya Machado, led the Anne Frank project in India. They were both volunteers who were giving of their time and expertise and, above all, utmost passion. Loes had known Jan Erik Dubbelman since university days, where she trained as a cultural anthropologist, and had recently retired from her role as a policy maker for the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports. Priya, of Indian heritage, had trained in London as a teacher, and had moved to Amsterdam to join her Dutch partner. Her field of special interest was in education in rural India, where there is an alarming lack of school facilities. Whilst in London she had worked in several NGOs related to education and women’s programmes: ActionAid, Christian Aid and in the Education Department of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Both having a shared interest in India, Loes and Priya had been friends for many years, and decided to team up to see how they could bring the Anne Frank exhibition and related activities to India.
In early 2013, Priya had popped by the Anne Frank Trust office while in London to tell us about her plans. She told me that in India students read Anne Frank’s diary in school but mostly it was not contextualized against the Holocaust, which was taught as a separate subject. The two were not always linked together. Anne’s diary was studied in English literature class; the course focusing on the writing of a diary by a young girl. Students were encouraged to think about what made writing in a diary ‘a strange experience’ for Anne Frank (as she herself described it in one of her first entries) and why she would have wanted to keep a chronicle of her life. And then separately, and surprisingly in an Asian country of colonial heritage, students learn about the Holocaust, the Second World War and Hitler in their History syllabus through a dedicated 25-page section giving information on Hitler’s rise to power and on the Nazis’ world view.
In preparation for the visit of the ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ exhibition, a team of local teachers were trained by Priya, Loes and their colleague Aaron Peterer, who had come with them from Amsterdam. Training was then given to a group of teenage peer educators. As part of the Anne Frank House’s programme, the Indian students were invited to film their own clips for a series of scenarios about human rights conundrums, to be part of a popular and long-running educational project called ‘Free2Choose’. The topic they decided to focus on was censorship.
Priya told me that some of the students who were trained as peer educators openly referred to the Indian caste system and societal inequalities when talking about Anne Frank’s situation. Some even mentioned that they felt that the less-privileged children should also get the opportunity to work with the exhibition, as they didn’t get to see many of these kind of activities and important experiences. Priya admitted that for logistical reasons this initial programme had been restricted to more privileged English-speaking students, but ‘These were in no way like Western rich kids who take everything for granted. They had an earnestness to learn and share what they had learnt for the good of their society.’ Echoing the response from Anne Frank peer educators in so many other parts of the world, the Kolkata students felt that learning how to be a peer educator gave them more self-confidence to tackle issues of discrimination within their own community.
Take the case of one of the Kolkata peer educators, a young man called Tanuj Luthra. After the exhibition had finished, he was invited to attend an international conference hosted and organized by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in August 2014, an event which perpetuated Otto Frank’s 1960s vision of international student conferences. The Anne Frank House had invited current and former exhibition peer guides from all over the world to exchange their experiences, discuss challenges and collect ideas for future activities in their respective countries. Tanuj was deemed ‘the star of the Ambassadors programme’ after he made a very impressive presentation at the closing ceremony.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 39
