Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  What is there to speculate about? Otto’s restitution of these cuts created a more compelling drama. Had Otto expunged Anne’s romance with Peter, Broadway and Hollywood would likely have wanted to reinstate or invent it. And it wasn’t as if Otto created the sections in which his daughter tells Kitty about her nascent love affair in the way that an adolescent girl would confide, in her best friend, the details of her first serious crush. But after the onset of her disappointment in Peter, Anne did not imagine the heroine of Het Achterhuis as a lovesick teen, agonizing over every smile she got from the boy upstairs.

  TWO passages from the same entry that describes Minister Bolkestein’s radio speech typify the differences between successive drafts. In both, Anne’s focus shifts from inside the attic, where the scared “ladies” wait out the air raids, to the wider world outside, so that future generations can see, as the minister suggested, how the Dutch people suffered.

  In the first version, Anne reports what she has heard and read about the deterioration of civil society. More than four years into the Nazi occupation, the Dutch are now enduring the additional hardship of Allied bombings:

  …how the houses shake from the bombs, how many epidemics there are, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever etc. What the people eat, how they line up for vegetables, and all kinds of other things, it is almost indescribable.

  The doctors here are under incredible pressure, if they turn their backs on their cars for a moment they are stolen from the street, in the Hospitals there is no room for the many infectious cases, medicines are prescribed over the telephone.

  Above all the countless burglaries and thefts are beyond belief. You may wonder whether the Dutch have suddenly turned into a nation of thieves. Little children of 8 and 11 years break the windows of people’s homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on, you can’t leave your home unoccupied, for in the five minutes you are away your things are gone too.

  Here is the same account, from the draft Anne revised:

  …how the houses trembled like a wisp of grass in the wind, and who knows how many epidemics now rage…People have to line up for vegetables and all kinds of other things; doctors are unable to visit the sick, because if they turn their back on their cars for a moment they are stolen; burglaries and thefts abound, so much so that you wonder what has taken over the Dutch for them suddenly to have become such thieves. Little children of eight and eleven years break the windows of people’s homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. No one dares to leave his house unoccupied for five minutes, because if you go, your things go too.

  Admittedly, there’s an added bit of writing. Explosions may have shaken Holland, but did the houses really tremble like wisps in the wind? But every other large and small change is for the better. To say that epidemics rage is stronger than simply enumerating them. Words and phrases that writers are sensibly advised to avoid—“indescribable,” “incredible,” and “beyond belief”—have been eliminated or replaced by more descriptive adjectives.

  The detail of lining up for food has been selected from more vague ones, and the doctors’ problems have been distilled to the inability to make house calls without their cars being stolen. Minor alterations increase a sentence’s effect on the reader. Compare “You can’t leave your home unoccupied for in the five minutes you are away your things are gone too” with “if you go, your things go too.”

  Considering that Anne began her revisions in the spring of 1944 and that by August the family had been arrested, the above passage had to have been rewritten within a short time. Only a few weeks, months, or hours separated Anne’s two drafts.

  The differences between the drafts are naturally more pronounced when more time has elapsed between them. Some revisions are sobering corrections based on a less optimistic awareness of how things would turn out. On September 21, 1942, when Anne contemplates her first winter in hiding, she writes that all her warm sweaters have been left with friends, but that Miep may ask if she can store them for Anne, who will then get the sweaters back. By the time she is rewriting, this seems not to have happened: “We have some clothes deposited with friends, but unfortunately we shall not see them until after the war, that is if they are still there then.”

  Passages of remembered dialogue are altered and clarified. Near the diary’s beginning, several members of the household are speaking, observed by the others. Anne Frank finesses the scene, and then (in the second draft) improves it further.

  It is late September, almost three months after the two families have gone into hiding, long enough for them to have begun getting on each other’s nerves. Hermann van Pels tells Anne that it’s self-sabotaging to be overly modest. In part, he’s reacting to Otto Frank’s having just been praised for his modesty, but he’s also giving advice the way adults often do to children: reflexively, without bothering to notice who the child is, or to consider what advice she could actually use. The briefest acquaintance with Anne should have alerted Mr. Van Pels to the fact that modesty was not her problem.

  The first version of the scene does a perfectly adequate job of re-creating a conversation in which more is unspoken than expressed, and in which at least two of the speakers enjoy a foray into passive aggression:

  One Sunday morning we were sitting at breakfast, and we were talking about how modest Daddy is and then Mrs. v.P. said:

  “I too have an unassuming nature, more so than my husband!”

  Mr. v.P.: “I don’t wish to be modest,” and to me: “Take my advice, Anne, don’t be too unassuming, it will never get you anywhere!” with which Mummy agreed.

  Mrs. v.P.: “What a stupid thing to say to Anne, that outlook on life is just too silly!”

  Mummy: “I myself also think that you don’t get much further with it. Just look, my husband and Margot and Peter are exceptionally modest while Anne, your husband, and I are not modest at all. We are not immodest, but we are not modest either.”

  Mrs. v.P.: “Oh, no, on the contrary, I am very modest, how can you say that I am immodest?”

  Mummy: “I haven’t said that you are immodest, but you aren’t all that modest either.”

  But it’s in the second attempt that Anne succeeds in giving the moment its full complexity, animation, and humor:

  Somehow or other, we got on to the subject of Pim’s extreme modesty. Even the most stupid people have to admit this about Daddy. Suddenly Mrs. v.P. says, “I, too, have an unassuming nature, more so than my husband.”

  Did you ever! This sentence itself shows quite clearly how thoroughly forward and pushing she is! Mr. v.P. thought he ought to give an explanation regarding the reference to himself. “I don’t wish to be modest—in my experience it does not pay.” Then to me: “Take my advice, Anne, don’t be too unassuming, it doesn’t get you anywhere” Mummy agreed with this too. But Mrs. van Pels had to add, as always, her ideas on the subject. Her next remark was addressed to Mummy and Daddy. “You have a strange outlook on life. Fancy saying such a thing to Anne; it was very different when I was young. And I feel sure that it must still be so, except in your modern home.” This was a direct hit at the way Mummy brings up her daughters.

  Mrs. v.P. was scarlet by this time. Mummy calm and cool as a cucumber. People who blush get so hot and excited, it is quite a handicap in such a situation. Mummy, still entirely unruffled, but anxious to close the conversation as soon as possible, thought for a second and then said: “I find, too, Mrs. v.P., that one gets on better in life if one is not overmodest. My husband, now, and Margot, and Peter are exceptionally modest, whereas your husband, Anne, you, and I, though not exactly the opposite, don’t allow ourselves to be completely pushed to one side.” Mrs. v.P.: “But, Mrs. Frank, I don’t understand you; I’m so very modest and retiring, how can you think of calling me anything else?” Mummy: “I did not say you were exactly forward, but no one could say you had a retiring disposition.”

  THE REVISION not only displays a greater facility, but a sharper sense of who her relatives and roomm
ates are and of how they see themselves and each other. Anne’s ear is more attuned to the way they speak, and, more important, to what they mean. Two years after the event, she hears their voices more clearly, even as the redrawn portrait of Mrs. Van Pels shows the wear and tear of her neighbor’s perpetual insistence on having the last word.

  In the second version, Anne provides cues for her actors—the coolness, the blushing—and makes sure we notice Mrs. Van Pels’s vulgarity. Nor, this time, can we miss the fact that Mrs. Van Pels’s apparently offhand remark about modernity is a dig at Mrs. Frank’s child-rearing practices, a veiled insult that doesn’t quite show through, when, in the earlier draft, she merely comments on the silliness of “that outlook on life.” Mrs. Frank’s reply is not only more elegant, but funnier, slyer, and more pointed. Cleverly, she groups herself with the “immodest,” so that no one could accuse her of singling out Hermann and Auguste van Pels for special criticism. Unlike Hermann, Edith knows there is no point in even pretending that Anne is modest; indeed, Anne’s confident self-regard seems to have been one of the differences that generated friction with her mother.

  Although we are meant to be on Mrs. Frank’s side of this altercation, the calm double-edgedness of her responses alert us to what a difficult opponent she could be, as indeed Anne found her. The tweaks that turn Mrs. Frank’s rejoinder into the more polite and frostier response could serve as an example of why a writer revises, and of the difference a few words can make.

  Mrs. Van Pels goes on to defend herself: if she weren’t pushy, she would starve to death. It bears repeating that the two families have been living together for only three months, and are simultaneously realizing the importance and the difficulty of remaining civil. Already there is trouble about food—shortages and rationing—about how much each resident consumes, tensions that can arise even in close families, when there is plenty to eat. It’s a freighted moment, and Mrs. Van Pels is being intentionally provocative when she suggests that they are involved in a Darwinian struggle requiring aggression and perseverance.

  Mrs. Frank laughs—more, we assume, from discomfort than because Mrs. Van Pels has said something funny. The furious Mrs. Van Pels sees Anne shaking her head and gets even angrier. In the earlier draft, she “delivers another sermon,” but in the second she lets loose with “a lot of harsh German, common, and ill-mannered, just like a coarse, red-faced fishwife—it was a marvelous sight.”

  By the end of the scene, Mrs. Van Pels’s defensiveness and peevishness have burbled to the surface, leaving a kind of residue that will slick whatever we read about her from that point on. It has been argued that casting Shelley Winters as Petronella van Daan in the film was such an inspired choice that Winters’s high-strung, flirtatious crudeness, as well as the fragility and terror underneath, forever formed our image of Otto’s business partner’s wife. But Winters’s performance, however inspired, is only a veneer, layered over what already exists in the diary.

  Thousands of people died during the forced marches that followed the evacuation of Auschwitz, but Auguste van Pels’s name is one of the few, or only, ones we know. And all because of a diary in which a young girl recorded a petty argument in which the older woman could hardly have seemed more irritating—or more human. Among the reasons we remember her is a single instant, unrepeatable in time, when she sees a little girl shaking her head, and explodes. Anne may have judged her neighbor and exposed her frailties and flaws. But she also made her live on the page, thus allowing the facts of history and the passage of time to act upon, and soften, the severity of that judgment.

  BY AND large, the most useful revisions increase the clarity of the text. Confusing descriptions are sorted out and reordered, necessary facts added. In September 1942, there is a “big drama” in the “a” version; by the time Anne is editing, she has lived through enough real dramas to make the event seem more like “a little interruption in our monotonous life.” Margot and Peter, who are allowed to read everything, have been forbidden a certain book. Originally, it’s a book “about the last war” that Mr. Kleiman has brought to the attic. In the revision, Anne specifies that it is a book “on the subject of women.”

  This explains the blowup that ensues, as well as the comedy of Mr. Van Pels grabbing the proscribed volume from his son and protecting the young peoples’ innocence by keeping it himself. As Sylvia P. Iskander explains in an essay about Anne’s reading, the controversial work was Jo van Ammers-Küller’s Heren, knechten, en Vrouwen (Gentlemen, Servants, and Women). “In this first book of a trilogy about the burgemeester, or mayor of Amsterdam, the mayor considers betraying his country’s alliance with England by assisting the French in sending arms to the American colonies in their fight for independence. Whether the issues of patriotism, betrayal, or sex, or all of them made the Franks temporarily censor the book for their thirteen-year-old is impossible to say.” In any case, Anne was allowed to read the book a month later, and after another year or so, Anne’s parents let her read nearly everything she wanted.

  In October 1942, Anne’s original entry makes it tricky to determine the chronology of events that led to a “terrible fright.” It requires effort to figure out that the incident begins when a noise is heard on the steps. First Anne thinks it’s Mummy or Bep, and then it turns out to be the carpenter, whose presence on the stairs traps Bep in the attic. Someone rattles the door, there’s whistling and thumping. Anne and the others are sure that the carpenter has found them out, but it turns out to be Mr. Kleiman, and they can relax.

  On the second attempt, Anne not only gets it right, but lets the reader of Het Achterhuis know that the carpenters have come to fill the fire extinguishers. “Downstairs they are such geniuses” that no one has informed them about the workmen’s scheduled visit, and when the attic residents hear men on the stairs, a silence falls over their rollicking lunch with Bep. The anxious moment is dramatized so that now we see it from the perspective of the hidden Jews and their helper, and we are still in their viewpoint when the confusion is cleared up.

  “After he’d been working for a quarter of an hour, he laid his hammer and tools down on top of our cupboard (as we thought!) and knocked at our door. We turned absolutely white. Perhaps he had heard something after all and wanted to investigate our secret den…. The knocking, pulling, pushing, and wrenching went on. I nearly fainted at the thought that this utter stranger might discover our beautiful secret hiding place. And just as I thought my last hour was at hand, we heard Mr. Kleiman’s voice say “open the door, it’s only me.’” The revision goes on to explain that the hook that holds the swinging bookcase concealing the annex door had gotten jammed. So now both the chronology and the causes, hard to follow before, are unmistakable.

  In the process, Anne changed her account of what went through her mind during those long minutes of uncertainty. In the earlier version, “I saw us all in a concentration camp or up against a wall.” In the revised draft, her thoughts have turned from herself to the intruder, from the fates threatening her and the others to a more literary personification of evil. It’s one of the rare instances in which the original diary is more persuasive than is the would-be author of the Joop der Heul-style thriller Het Achterhuis: “In my imagination the man who I thought was trying to get in had been growing and growing in size until in the end he appeared to be a giant and the greatest fascist that ever walked the earth.”

  Writing purely for herself gave Anne the freedom to assume that every reference would be understood, but writing for others necessitated explanation. In the first version, Mr. Van Pels alludes to the trick that the Franks used to make their neighbors think they had escaped Holland:

  “Mr. van Pels repeated the story about Daddy being friends with an army captain who had helped him get away to Belgium, the story is now on everyone’s lips and we are greatly amused.”

  In the second draft, Anne has Mr. Van Pels tell the story—which involves the Franks’ landlord—in dialogue and in detail: “‘I discovered a writing pad on
Mrs. Frank’s desk with an address in Maastricht written on it. Although I knew that this was done on purpose, I pretended to be very surprised and shocked and urged Mr. G. to tear up this unfortunate little piece of paper without delay. I went on pretending that I knew nothing of your disappearance all the time, but after seeing the paper I got a brain wave. “Mr. G.”—I said—“it suddenly dawns on me what this address may refer to. It all comes back to me very clearly, a high-ranking officer was in the office about six months ago, he appeared to be very friendly with Mr. F. and offered to help him, should the need arise. He was indeed stationed in Maastricht. I think he must have kept his word and somehow or other managed to take Mr. F. along with him to Belgium and then on to Switzerland. I should tell this to any friends who may inquire, don’t of course mention Maastricht.”’”

  In her revisions, Anne added blocks of information to help the reader envision the daily rituals and the quarters in which the attic residents barely managed to keep out of one another’s way. The floor plan of the annex doesn’t appear in the original diary. Anne would hardly have needed to map, for herself, an architecture with which she was so familiar. But the diagram is useful for the reader wondering how a bachelor and two families divided their tiny space during the day, and reapportioned it at night.

  The elaborate system that the residents work out for bathing appears in the second draft; the first version focuses on how Anne manages this challenge. The charming and informative “Prospectus and Guide to the Secret Annex”—an ironic list of attractive features (“beautiful, quiet, free from woodland surroundings, in the heart of Amsterdam”) and house rules (“Residents may rest during the day, conditions permitting, as the directors indicate”) that portrays the cramped attic as a luxury health spa, does not appear in the original diary, but is incorporated in the revised version; it is identified as a “v. P product,” though Anne fails to explain which of the Van Pelses was responsible.