Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

Whatever Silberbauer believed about his job, he would not have wanted to think that his military service involved state-sponsored murder and theft. The search for the valuables must have been a simultaneously uncomfortable and titillating part of his work. Naturally, there was curiosity. How much did the hidden Jews have? But it was also a matter of duty. The money seized in this way was sensibly being used to finance the Jews’ own transportation to new lives, or death, in the east.

  The police asked the Jews where their valuables were, and Otto indicated the cupboard where his cash box was kept. Better thieves, professionals, would have brought a bag for the stolen goods. But how would it have looked if the enforcers of Nazi justice carried duffel bags for the swag? We can only be grateful that Silberbauer, forced to improvise, grabbed a briefcase stuffed with papers.

  The Jews and their Dutch helpers watched. All of them knew that the briefcase was where Anne kept her diary.

  On April 9, there had been a break-in downstairs. The intruders had knocked a hole in the door before being frightened away. Afraid that the police might investigate, the families discussed what to do if capture seemed imminent. Worried that Anne’s diary might be found, and that their helpers would be incriminated, the annex residents briefly considered the possibility of burning the diary. This, and when the police rattled the cupboard door, were my worst moments; not my diary; if my diary goes, I go with it!”

  A month later, Anne thought that an overturned vase of carnations had soaked through her papers. Nearly in tears, she was so upset that she began to babble in German and later had little memory of what she had said. According to Margot, she had “let fly something about ‘incalculable loss…. ’” The damage was not so severe as she’d feared, and she hung the damp sheets of paper on a clothesline to dry. Incalculable loss is a phrase that any writer might have used in response to the possibility that a manuscript could have been ruined, yet another indication of how seriously Anne took her work.

  Eventually, it was decided that the briefcase containing the diary would be among the things the family took with them if a fire or some other emergency necessitated a hasty escape from the attic. But now the briefcase was being put to a different use. Silberbauer dumped out the papers, along with some notebooks, and handed the satchel to his colleagues to stuff with jewels and cash.

  The detail of the briefcase could have come from one of those fairy tales that counsel reflection, patience, morality—lest one wind up like the thoughtless, greedy man or woman (usually the wife) who mistakes the rhinestones for diamonds or cooks the magic fish for dinner. Eventually, Silberbauer realized he’d filled the briefcase with pasteboard and scattered rubies across the attic floor.

  But how could he have imagined that what he had discarded—loose sheets of paper, exercise books—was not only a work of literary genius, not only a fortune in disguise, not only a record of the times in which he and its author lived, but a piece of evidence that would lead to the exposure of his role in the Nazis’ war against the Jews, even as so many like him slipped back into their old lives and kept up their furniture payments?

  There was no way he could have known what the briefcase contained. How could anyone have suspected that a masterpiece existed between the checked cloth covers of a young girl’s diary?

  ALMOST three hours elapsed between Silberbauer’s arrival and that of the closed truck that transported the Jews and two of their Dutch coconspirators to the headquarters of the Security Police.

  Only Miep Gies remained. For more than two years, she had brought food and supplies to the Jews and kept up their spirits by helping them maintain some semblance of contact with the outside world. Now, just when the progress of the Allies’ invasion had begun to offer hope, the catastrophe they’d feared had occurred.

  In Jon Blair’s documentary, Anne Frank Remembered, Miep comes across as a sensible, dignified woman, overly modest about her English. We intuit that it would never occur to her to boast about the heroism that, for two years, was ordinary life for her and her husband. Her memoir, Anne Frank Remembered, begins, “I am not a hero.” She writes that she was only one person in the “long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more—much more.”

  Heroic or not, the work took its toll. The bouts of illness—a gastric hemorrhage, fainting, fevers—that plagued the Franks’ helpers are a recurrent motif in the diary, as is the theme of their unflagging good humor: “Never have we heard one word of the burden which we must certainly be to them, never has one of them complained of all the trouble we cause. They all come upstairs every day, talk to the men about business and politics, to the women about food and wartime difficulties, and about newspapers and books with the children.” After Miep attended a party at which two policemen were among the guests, Anne wrote, “You can see that we are never far from Miep’s thoughts, because she memorized the addresses of these men at once, in case anything should happen at some time or other, and good Dutchmen might come in useful.” That Miep and the others were heroes is a fact that should not be overshadowed by the accusation—one of many controversies that have surrounded the diary—that the focus on the Franks’ helpers has served to distract attention from the less-than-stellar record of the Dutch people’s resistance to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign.

  During one scene in Anne Frank Remembered, an off-screen voice, presumably the filmmaker’s, reads a letter in which Otto Frank, who had died in 1980, thanks the Dutch friends who saved him. Perhaps for added drama, the voice announces that this is the first time Miep has heard the letter. It’s a touching acknowledgment, but certainly this intelligent woman must have known that her former employer realized that neither he, nor his daughter’s writings, could have survived without Miep.

  AFTER the Jews and the two Dutch office workers were taken away, Miep found the checked diary that Anne had kept from June until December 1942. Also scattered about were the exercise books in which she wrote subsequent volumes, the account book in which she composed the stories, essays, fairy tales, reminiscences, and novel fragments that would be collected and published as Tales from the Secret Annex, and finally, the hundreds of colored sheets of paper on which she had been revising the diary since the spring of 1944.

  Just before he was arrested with the Jews, Johannes Kleiman told Miep Gies that it was too late to save him and the others, so she should try to save what could be salvaged from the attic. Together with Bep Voskuijl, Miep gathered up Anne’s journals and the loose pages and brought them downstairs to the office. There she put them in the bottom drawer of her desk for safekeeping until, she hoped, Anne would return to reclaim them. Cannily, she left the drawer unlocked. The Nazis had had no interest in a child’s papers, but, if they came back, they might wonder why someone would think a girl’s diary worth locking up.

  Of course, Miep was not merely guarding Anne’s privacy, but protecting herself and her coworkers. Later, she would say that if she had read the diaries, she might have felt compelled to burn them, out of concern for her colleagues. It would have been safer for her to destroy the diary, just as it would have been safer not to hide eight Jews, and certainly safer for her not to go to the police headquarters on Euterpestraat on the Monday after the arrest. Even by the standards of the previous two years, Miep’s attempt to bribe Silberbauer into freeing the prisoners was extraordinarily brave, an almost recklessly dangerous act that demonstrated the strength of her attachment to the Franks.

  When the Opekta sales representatives were told that the Franks had been taken away, one of them (a man who was, in fact, a member of the Dutch Nazi party) took Miep aside and reminded her that the war was nearly over, the Germans were exhausted, and they would want to leave Holland with their pockets full. He himself would take up a collection from among the many friends and business associates who had been fond of Otto Frank, and Miep could go to the police and make the arresting officer, her fellow Austrian, an irresistible offer.

  When Miep phoned Silberbauer, he instructed her to come on Mon
day, but when she did so, he told her to wait until the next day. On Tuesday, he said that he lacked the authority to make such a decision and sent her upstairs, where some officers were listening to English-language radio, an illegal act. Presumably they were monitoring the bad news about the Allies’ progress. They ordered her out of the room. But in any case, there was nothing that Miep could have done. The prisoners had already been taken to the jail on Weteringschans in preparation for their transport to Westerbork.

  Before the movers arrived to strip the upper floors of 263 Prinsengracht of furniture that could be shipped to needy German families whose own possessions had been lost in the war, Miep told one of the warehousemen—the same worker several helpers suspected of having betrayed the Franks—to pick up any papers still left on the floor. All of this was done in haste. There is no way of knowing if any, or how much, of Anne’s writing was lost.

  ALONG with Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler was taken to the SS headquarters on Euterpestraat. The two men were briefly interrogated, then transferred to the prison on Amstelveenseweg, and later to the Amersfoort transit camp. In mid-September, Kleiman suffered a stomach hemorrhage and was released when the Red Cross interceded on his behalf. Kugler was sent to a series of labor camps. After escaping in the spring of 1945, he remained in hiding until the war’s end.

  When Kleiman returned to the office, Miep refused to let him or Bep read the diaries. The books and papers remained in her desk drawer for almost a year.

  In June 1945, Otto Frank made his way back to Amsterdam. Liberated from Auschwitz, he had traveled by train to Russia and then by boat to Marseilles, and eventually reached the Netherlands by train and truck. He moved in with Miep and her husband. A month after his arrival in Amsterdam, Otto, who had already learned of his wife’s death from a prisoner he’d met on the train to Odessa, was informed that his daughters were also dead—first by the Red Cross and then by a Dutch woman who had known the girls in Bergen-Belsen.

  In the film, Anne Frank Remembered, Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper recalls giving Otto Frank the sad news:

  He stood on the porch and rang the bell. He said, “Are you Janny Brandes?”…Because he was a very polite gentleman, he came into the hallway and remained standing there and said, “I am Otto.” I could hardly speak, because it was very difficult to tell someone that his children were not alive any more. I said, “They are no more.” He turned deathly pale and slumped down into a chair. I just put my arm around him.

  Like Otto, Miep had hoped that Anne might have survived. Planning to give the diary back to Anne upon her return, Miep concealed its existence from Otto until the day he learned that the girls had died at Bergen-Belsen.

  The scene in which Otto Frank first read his daughter’s diary is painful to imagine. Even when children have grown into thriving adults, a scrap of paper covered with childish writing can induce, in parents, a stab of nostalgia for those years that, parents may think later, were the happiest in their lives. How much more grief such pages must have occasioned when they had been written by a child so recently murdered?

  In Miep Gies’s memoir, she recalls that Otto Frank went to his former Opekta office and closed the door. A short time later, she brought him the papers and the checked book.

  I could tell that he recognized the diary. He had given it to her just over three years before, on her thirteenth birthday, right before going into hiding. He touched it with the tips of his fingers. I pressed everything into his hands; then I left his office, closing the door quietly.

  Shortly afterward, the phone on my desk rang. It was Mr. Frank’s voice. “Miep, please see to it that I’m not disturbed,” he said.

  “I’ve already done that,” I replied.

  Over the next months, Otto Frank tried, with little success, to reestablish himself in business. Meanwhile, he sorted through the diary, and the exercise and account books in which Anne had recorded her secrets and in which, he would say later, he met a daughter he had never really known. The same words that had consoled Anne may have provided some comfort for her father, or at least distraction, as he typed up sections of the manuscript, translated them into German, and sent them to his mother in Switzerland.

  Relying mainly on the draft that Anne had revised but also borrowing from the original version and from the stories and occasional pieces that would appear as Tales from the Secret Annex, Otto Frank typed up a second and much longer manuscript of the diary. By now he was persuaded that Anne had wanted her diary to be published as a book entitled Het Achterhuis. Once the idea occurred to him, he was obliged to read the diary as something other than a personal record and with a view to how it might be read by strangers. Otto changed the names, as Anne had directed. But he kept his own family’s real names, though Anne had wished the Franks to become the Robins: Frederik and Nora, and their daughters, Betty and Anne. He retained the first name of Peter van Pels, though Anne had specified that her young upstairs neighbor should appear in Het Achterhuis as Alfred van Daan.

  Over the last half century, Otto Frank has been accused of prudishness, of being too ready to forgive the Germans, of censoring and deracinating Anne, of anti-Semitism, of sentimentality and cowardice, of greed and personal ambition. In fact, what seems most probable is that his editing was guided by the instincts of a bereaved father wanting to give the reader the fullest sense of what his daughter had been like. Otto cut a number of Anne’s sharpest criticisms of her neighbors, either because of a desire to make her seem like a nicer person, or to protect the sensitivities of the living—for example, the dentist’s sweetheart, Charlotte Kaletta, who was made unhappy enough by the passages that remained. (She was even more upset when the Broadway play of the diary portrayed her husband as a buffoon so unfamiliar with his religious heritage that the meaning of Hanukkah had to be explained to him.)

  It’s true that Otto chose to remove Anne’s rare flashes of meanness and to tone down her impatience with smallness and hypocrisy. But if we search for the point at which her character was reduced from that of a young person with a complex, mature view of politics, history, and human nature to that of a cheerful teen, if we seek out the juncture at which her awareness that she was being made to suffer because she was a Jew became a more generalized identification with all of suffering humanity, we discover that those changes were not the result of Otto Frank’s editing but rather of the ways in which the Broadway play and the Hollywood film of her diary chose to represent its author. On stage and screen, the adorable was emphasized at the expense of the human, the particular was replaced by the so-called universal, and universal was interpreted to mean American—or, in any case, not Jewish, since Jewish was understood to signify a smaller audience, more limited earnings, and, more disturbingly, subject matter that might alienate a non-Jewish audience.

  NEWLY widowed, still in mourning for his wife, Otto Frank was understandably reluctant to see his marriage publicly judged and found wanting by his daughter. Later, Anne’s speculations about her parents’ relationship would become major news when the “suppressed” five pages of the diary were discovered. And yet the controversial conclusion that Anne reached—that her parents’ union was neither passionate nor romantic—was probably evident to the Franks’ relatives, to their friends in Amsterdam, and to anyone knowledgeable or even curious about how men and women behave in the presence or the absence of love and desire. Certainly, those questions were of great interest to Anne. In photographs of the Franks, charismatic, handsome Otto and his relatively plain wife appear to have accidentally wound up in the same frame. Otto’s snapshots of his daughters vastly outnumber those of Edith.

  But though Otto cut Anne’s most bitter references to Edith, to his marriage, and to his wife’s contentious relationship with their younger daughter, he chose not to excise Anne’s accounts of her own darkest moments. He retained her pessimistic observations about the murderousness of her fellow creatures, as well as her most enraged and despairing protests against the anti-Semitism that had forced her and
her family into hiding. Likewise, he left in the passage in which Anne asks why God has singled out the Jews to suffer. “If we bear all this suffering, and there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”

  After he had completed the preliminary editing, Otto asked a friend, the playwright Albert Cauvern, to check the manuscript for grammatical errors and mistakes in diction. The extant typescript suggests that at least someone besides Cauvern gave it a critical close reading. Also among its early readers was Kurt Baschwitz, a lecturer in psychology and journalism, who, in a letter to his daughter, called the diary “the most moving document about that time that I know” and “a literary masterpiece.”

  People who encountered Otto Frank during this period recall a handsome, distinguished man with the bearing and reserve of a Prussian officer—but whose eyes were perpetually red from weeping. He carried the manuscript with him wherever he went, and, at times, tears flowed down his face as he read a few pages aloud, or urged friends and strangers to read it.

  The edited typescript was passed from hand to hand and across desks that included those of Jan Romein and his wife, Annie, two prominent Dutch intellectuals who thought the book should be published but were unable to convince anyone who had the power to do so. The manuscript was rejected by every editor who read it, none of whom could imagine that readers would buy the intimate diary of a teenage girl, dead in the war. In addition, the Dutch had no desire to be reminded of the suffering they had so recently endured, and, regardless of what the Dutch cultural minister in exile had promised in his radio broadcast, it was assumed that there would be little interest in a first-person account by one of the Nazis’ young victims.

  Luckily, the book had tenacious supporters. In April 1946, Jan Romein wrote about the diary in the daily newspaper, Het Parool, formerly the underground paper of the Dutch Resistance. Romein’s essay, entitled “A Child’s Voice,” was at once impassioned and restrained. More than all the evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials, he wrote, the diary is an indictment of the “witless barbarity” of fascism, and of crimes that, only a year after the end of the war, his countrymen were already forgetting. Romein praised Anne’s gifts—“an insight into the failings of human nature—her own not excepted—so infallible that it would have astonished one in an adult, let alone a child”—and eloquently described the way that literature can affect us.