Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  Another important distinction between the first version and the revision has to do with the development of Anne’s spirituality. In her book Anne Frank: A Hidden Life, Mirjam Pressler tracks Anne’s references to God, which begin to appear only after her terrors—occasioned by the break-ins, the bombings, her growing sense of isolation and doom—move her to seek solace in religion. Until November 1943, most of the references to God appear in the revisions but not in the original. But “on November 27, 1943, Anne writes about praying for the first time, and directly asks God to help her. From now on God and nature—seen as interchangeable—take on the function of comforting her, cheering her, and soothing her fears.”

  PERHAPS the most startling clarification of a single event occurs in the entry for Sunday, July 5, the day on which the Franks received the call-up order for Margot to report for deportation.

  Anne’s first account of the afternoon reflects the shock she was still feeling two days after her family’s arrival in the annex. The early version makes it sound as if Anne hears the policeman asking for her sister, and it’s hard to tell when and how Anne learned whom the call-up was really for.

  At about 3 o’clock a policeman arrived and called from the door downstairs, Miss Margot Frank, Mummy went downstairs and the policeman gave her a card which said that Margot Frank has to report to the S.S. Mummy was terribly upset and went straight to Mr. van Pels he came straight back to us and I was told that Daddy had been called up. The door was locked and no one was allowed to come into our house any more. Daddy and Mummy had long ago taken measures, and Mummy assured me that Margot would not have to go and that all of us would be leaving the next day. Of course I started to cry terribly and there was an awful to-do at our house.

  In the second draft, it’s much easier to track the events of the interval during which the Frank women waited for Otto to return from the Jewish hospital. It had taken Anne two years to be able to write lucidly about that day, yet she maintains, in the revision, the sense of emergency that consumed her family.

  At three o’clock…someone rang the front doorbell. I was lying lazily reading a book on the verandah in the sunshine so I didn’t hear it. A bit later, Margot appeared at the kitchen door looking very excited. “The S.S. has sent a call-up notice for Daddy,” she whispered. “Mummy has gone to see Mr. van Pels already…. Of course he won’t go…Mummy has gone to the v.P.s to ask whether we should move into our hiding place tomorrow…” We couldn’t talk any more, thinking about Daddy, who, little knowing what was going on, was visiting in the Joodse Invalide. [After Mummy and Mr. Van Pels return] Margot and I were sent out of the room, v.P. wanted to talk to Mummy alone…. When we were alone together in our bedroom, Margot told me that the call-up did not concern Daddy but her. I was more frightened than ever and began to cry…. Margot and I began to pack some of our most vital belongings into a school satchel, the first thing I put in was this diary, then hair curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a comb, old letters. I put in the craziest things with the idea that we were going into hiding, but I’m not sorry, memories mean more to me than dresses…At five o’clock Daddy finally arrived and we phoned Mr. Kleiman to ask if he could come round in the evening.

  Most of what we know about the Franks’ walk from their apartment to the hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht comes from the additions that Anne made to her sketchy original entry. Soon after her arrival in the attic, she wrote this first account of how they had gotten there:

  “We left the house by a quarter to eight I had a (combinashion) on then two vests and two pairs of pants then a dress and a skirt then a wool cardigan and a coat, it was pouring and so I put on a headscarf, and Mummy and I each carried a satchel under our arm. Margot went too with a satchel on her bicycle, and we all made for the office. Daddy and Mummy now told me lots of things. We would be going to Daddy’s office and over it a floor had been made ready for us.”

  Two years later, that morning becomes a scene in a book—the event from which so much else will follow. Anne adds details, slows the narration, and contextualizes it so that there is no mistaking how everything happened, and why. In addition, there is a sprightliness to the prose, a vigor missing from the numbed, bare-bones outline of two years before. When Anne was revising, the Allied advance was under way, and Anne was probably hoping that the terrifying July morning might come to seem like the start of an adventure in a Joop ter Heul detective novel. How amusing it would be for future generations.

  Luckily it was not so hot as Sunday. Warm rain fell all day. We put on heaps of clothes as if we were going to the North Pole, the sole reason being to take clothes with us. No Jew in our situation would have dreamed of going out with a suitcase full of clothing. I had on two vests, three pair of pants, a dress, on top of that a skirt, jacket, summer coat, two pairs, lace-up shoes, woolly cap, scarf, and still much more; I was nearly stifled before we started, but no one inquired about that. Margot filled her satchel with schoolbooks, fetched her bicycle and rode off behind Miep into the unknown, as far as I was concerned. You see I still didn’t know where our secret hiding place was to be…Only when we were on the road did Mummy and Daddy begin to tell me bits and pieces about the plan. For months as many of our goods and chattels and our necessities of life as possible had been sent away, and they were sufficiently ready for us to have gone into hiding of our own accord on July 16. The plan had had to be speeded up 10 days because of this call-up, so our quarters would not be so well organized but we had to make the best of it. The hiding place would be in the building where Daddy had his office.

  As a boy of five, Mozart was already composing. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Maturity and creativity are unpredictable over a lifetime, and the early appearance of genius frequently obliges us to rethink our preconceived notions of age. When I read in a book review or hear in a writing class that a child of a certain age would never have such a grown-up response or use such a sophisticated expression, I find myself resisting.

  Even so, I can’t help thinking that the description of Miep and Margot riding “into the unknown, as far as I was concerned” does not sound like a thirteen-year-old who, days before, saw her sister threatened with deportation, and by the next morning had left her house and her life and moved into an attic. It was, it could only have been, the phrase of an older girl, looking back.

  IN 1995, the so-called Definitive Edition of the diary was published to heated media attention, warmer than the relative chill that had greeted The Critical Edition when it appeared in English six years before. Except for the “missing five pages,” all three drafts of the entire diary were included in The Critical Edition. But the publicity surrounding the more reader-friendly Definitive Edition implied that this was the English-language reader’s first chance to learn more about Anne than her father had chosen to reveal. The suggestion was that the hidden had finally been made public, and a certain amount of prurient interest was generated by Anne’s disquisition on female genitalia. “The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man could get in there, much alone how a whole baby can get out.”

  In fact, the Definitive Edition begins with a foreword explaining that everything it contained was available in The Critical Edition. But even if you have The Critical Edition in front of you, it’s confusing to follow the three overlapping narratives in parallel bands, and it’s unsurprising that only a small number of scholars and critics (and probably fewer general readers) went to the trouble.

  In an incisive essay, Laureen Nussbaum guides readers through the versions and revisions. She explains what Otto Frank did and didn’t do, and the controversies that have erupted over each successive revelation. “Otto Frank had picked and chosen from Anne’s extant diary versions when assembling the typescript on which the original (1947) edition and the subsequent translations into dozens of languages would be based. He had added some of the vignettes she had written separately about life in the back quarters, made several rearrangements and corrections, whil
e omitting some passages which he deemed either too irrelevant or too personal to include. In other words, Otto Frank had edited his daughter’s diary, to which he had, of course, a perfect right: a prefatory note to this effect, however, would have saved him many future problems.”

  The inclusion of Anne’s reflection on female anatomy, as well as the fact that the pacing in the longer Definitive Edition is slower than in the earlier edition of The Diary of a Young Girl, are likely among the reasons that the shorter, more accessible 1952 version is the one still taught in schools.

  No one can determine what Anne’s final draft might have been like, but to ignore the time and energy she put into version “b” is to deny her own ideas about what she wanted her book to be, insofar as we can know them. Laureen Nussbaum makes a case for valuing Anne’s literary judgment: “A reader poring over the b version will find it hard not to look at the parallel printed a version in order to make comparisons. In doing so, this reader could not help but be impressed with the amount of self-criticism and literary insight the barely fifteen-year-old Anne brought to bear upon her revision, omitting whole sections, reshuffling others, and adding supplementary information so as to create a more interesting and readable text. In the process, she must have used all her writing talent and the know-how gleaned from her extensive reading…

  “My conclusion: readers who appreciate a well-written book, but who are not necessarily into women’s studies or literary criticism, have a right to read Frank’s wartime story in a form as close as possible to the author’s own final version. Conversely, we owe it to Anne Frank that at long last she be taken seriously as the writer she really was, before the Disney people market her as their next popular heroine, Pocahontas-style.”

  MONTHS before the minister-in-exile’s radio speech inspired Anne to go back and begin her diary again, she wrote an entry that explains why she took so readily to the project of massive revision. In the midst of a paper shortage, during her second winter in hiding, she searched the diary for pages that had been left blank, and filled them in. On one such page, dated January 22, 1944, Anne describes the shock of confronting the writing of a younger self. If Philip Roth noted that reading the diary was like watching a fetus grow a face, the face that has grown by this point is that of an author realizing that her early work could be improved upon.

  When I look over my diary today, 11/2 years on, I cannot believe that I was ever such an innocent young thing…. I still understand those moods, those remarks about Margot, Mummy and Daddy so well that I might have written them yesterday, but I no longer understand how I could write so freely about other things. I really blush with shame when I read the pages dealing with subjects that I’d much better have left to the imagination…. This diary is of great value to me, because it has become a book of memoirs in many places, but on a good many pages I could certainly put “past and done with.”

  PART III

  The Afterlife

  SIX

  The House

  THE ANNE FRANK MUSEUM OPENS AT NINE EVERY morning, and by ten, even on cold winter days, a line reaches the corner, straggling along the sidewalk across from the picturesque Prinsengracht Canal. The majority of the people in line are young, as are the majority of visitors to Anne Frank’s house. Quite a few of the adults seem subdued, uneasy, perhaps because of what they’re about to encounter. But though the high school students understand that this is not supposed to be fun, their investment in coolness dictates that they exude the detached nonchalance of kids about to be taken through any art gallery or royal palace, or a guild hall where some historic treaty was signed.

  Inside, nothing about the cheerful, modern, brightly lit reception area suggests that this will be any different from any other museum experience. Credit cards and cash are surrendered, tickets issued. But as soon as one enters the house itself, even the most garrulous teens fall silent, and a hush falls over the visitors. It’s hard to walk through the former offices of the Opekta staff, then up into the storeroom and past the bookcase that once concealed the door to the secret annex without bordering on, or crossing over, the edge of tears.

  Part of what makes the Anne Frank Museum so affecting is its simplicity and the sense that very little has changed since the furniture movers stripped the premises bare in the wake of the Jews’ arrest. Here and there, a video monitor plays an informational film strip—one about the role of the helpers who aided the Franks, another featuring an interview in which Hanneli Pick-Goslar describes her last sight of Anne at Bergen-Belsen. Here and there, simple glass vitrines display a few of the objects that remain from that period: Miep Gies’s identity card, Edith Frank’s prayer book. Here and there, a quote—from Primo Levi, or from Anne’s diary—has been stenciled on a wall. There are photos of the eight people who hid here, another of Jews being rounded up on an Amsterdam street. But these mostly bare rooms, these walls and floors and ceilings, are allowed to speak for themselves. One never feels that strong emotions are being artificially manufactured and extracted; nowhere is there a trace of the sentimentality and kitsch so problematic in, say, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, where visitors must trudge through a gallery partly filled with clanking metal frowny faces intended to represent the murdered Jews of Europe.

  The decision to keep the rooms unfurnished was made by Otto Frank, who felt that the secret annex should appear just as it did after his family and all their possessions were seized. But in fact a great deal of labor, planning, construction, and restoration has been required to give visitors the impression that nothing has been touched.

  In the early 1950s, a textile company, Berghaus, bought the block on which the Opekta company stood, and announced its plans to raze the old houses and businesses and replace them with a modern office. By then, the diary had already acquired an international reputation, and its fans had begun making pilgrimages to 263 Prinsengracht, where Johannes Kleiman and others often agreed to take them on informal tours. With the support of Amsterdam’s mayor, a campaign was initiated to prevent the proposed demolition. Faced by widespread opposition, Berghaus withdrew, and a fund-raising drive gathered the requisite capital to buy the property. The success of this drive enabled the establishment of the Anne Frank Foundation, in May 1957, and Otto Frank financed the purchase of the building next door, specifying that it be used as an educational center.

  Three years later, the Anne Frank Museum was officially opened. By then, thanks partly to the play and the film based on the diary, the book’s popularity had increased exponentially, and in the first year of operation, the museum hosted 9,000 visitors. In 1970, 180,000 people came to see Anne’s secret annex, by which point the volume of foot traffic necessitated architectural improvements to shore up and maintain the site. The front part of the building—the former Opekta office—was modernized to include a reception center, while the annex was left as it was.

  As the number of visitors grew each year, an expansion plan evolved, and in the 1990s, a new building was added onto the museum. In contrast to the labyrinthine, confined spaces of the secret annex, the new structure that houses the reception area, the bookstore, and the cafeteria is airy and expansive. At the same time, the Opekta office was restored (with the aid of old photographs and floor plans, and with meticulous attention to the period authenticity of every doorknob and light switch) to allow museumgoers to experience something of the atmosphere of the rooms in which Miep Gies and her colleagues continued, throughout the war, to operate the business that sustained the Jews. More recently, in 2008, the scale model of the secret annex that Otto had made was given a permanent place, and the room in which the checked diary is kept was redesigned to emphasize the central importance of Anne’s book.

  But for the hundreds of school groups and the million visitors who, in 2007, passed the movable bookcase and climbed the steep stairs to the top of the building, the heart and soul of their visit is Anne’s room. Hardly anyone speaks as they file past the postcards that Anne glued on her wall: photos of cockatoos and wi
ld strawberries, of movie stars, of the British royal princesses, and of chimpanzees at a tea party. Once more, the unspoiled simplicity of the room is eloquently communicative of everything that transpired inside it. The main difference is that, when the Franks and the others were in hiding, the windows, now admitting the bright Amsterdam sun, were covered, for safety. Only from the garret, which it is no longer possible to enter but which can be glimpsed in a mirror, could Anne see the sky outside, or the night stars, or the blossoms in her beloved chestnut tree, announcing that another spring had come.

  AROUND the corner from, and attached to, the Amsterdam warehouse above which the Franks spent twenty-five months, the Anne Frank Foundation is, in effect, the annex to Anne’s secret annex. Its corridors are decorated with posters, framed book covers, and images documenting the diary’s impact. On one wall is a photo of Nelson Mandela, who found encouragement in Anne Frank’s account of her incarceration in an attic during his own long imprisonment on Robben Island. Tacked to a bulletin board is a snapshot of two Afghan girls holding the diary translated into Dari, while a small shelf has become a sort of folk-art shrine featuring a portrait of Anne painted by a Russian student, another stitched in needlepoint by a reader from Ukraine.

  More than fifty years after it was established, the foundation now has over a hundred employees. Staff members direct the day-to-day operation of the Anne Frank Museum and raise funds to preserve the warehouse and the attic, where the wallpaper must be regularly replaced because so many pilgrims cannot resist the urge to touch it. The foundation develops educational materials, supports a traveling exhibition, monitors incidents of racism worldwide, facilitates research about the Holocaust and human rights, and oversees the Anne Frank archive. It publishes a quarterly journal and maintains a Web site, which, in 2006, attracted three million visitors.