Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  It also operates in cooperation with the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, a separate institution—headed by Anne’s only surviving relative, her cousin Bernd Elias—that controls the rights to Anne’s writings and oversees humanitarian projects, including a school for India’s untouchables, a Jewish-Arab youth orchestra in Jerusalem, and a program to train teachers to work among the poorest citizens of Peru. On occasion, the two organizations have come into conflict. In 2008, the Anne Frank-Fonds questioned the appropriateness of a musical based on the diary and staged in Madrid, while the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam, where the play’s authors and stars had come to do research, viewed the production as a means of introducing Anne to new audiences. But by and large, the two institutions have worked amicably to facilitate the delicate balancing act of both publicizing and protecting Anne’s image, and her book.

  IN A sunny office on the third floor of the Anne Frank Foundation, a young Argentinian woman named Mariela Chyrikins sorts through a stack of photographs. Taken in Argentina, in 2006, the pictures show a group of police cadets whose full-dress uniforms make them appear to be standing at attention even when they’re relaxed. Behind them are partitions and panels displaying an exhibition about the life and legacy of Anne Frank, whose diary they have gathered to discuss.

  As in most of the 177 sites that hosted “Anne Frank—A History for Today” in 2006, venues ranging from Slovakia to Reno, from Croatia to Cyprus, the Argentinian program, held in Cordoba and Buenos Aires, involved local volunteers—in this case, chosen from among the cadets. These volunteers were trained to serve as guides who would teach their peers about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, and lead discussions that, it was hoped, would inspire the participants to talk about their own experiences with bigotry and violence. During the workshop, the cadets met for lunch with a delegation of university students—two groups that normally would never sit down together, let alone speak about what had happened to their families and their communities during the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

  As a teenager, Mariela Chyrikins was drawn to the diary in the shocked aftermath of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center, which killed eighty-five people in her Buenos Aires neighborhood. She began to write, then to e-mail, the Anne Frank Foundation. She helped bring the Anne Frank exhibition to Argentina, then followed it back to Amsterdam, where, according to Jan Erik Dubbelman, head of the foundation’s international department, “she made us realize we had no choice but to hire her.”

  “The moment that young people in Latin America become emotionally involved with Anne Frank’s story,” says Mariela, “they start to reflect about themselves. They say, ‘Ah, okay, in Europe there also happened something like what happened in our country.’ It’s like opening a Pandora’s box, you never know the consequences of the work you are doing, but you know that you are touching people’s hearts.

  “The curriculum at the police academies is left over from the times of the dictatorship, very authoritarian. And when they put on the uniform they have the feeling that they are no longer a human, but a god. Anne Frank’s story makes them more human. The cadets want to protect Anne Frank, as if she was their own child, as if she’s their best friend. They’re mad because Anne Frank was killed, but when they see some poor guy working on the street, they might want to kill him. The important thing is making a connection between this poor guy and Anne Frank.

  “Maybe their parents were also police during the dictatorship, but they have never talked about it. Now they say they are going to talk to their parents. They have lunch with the university students, and for the first time they start to discuss: Who is the other, how do you see the other? They are human beings too! In some cases, the children and grandchildren of the disappeared are among the trainers. It brings a lot of very emotional things to the surface. It was hard for the police cadets to listen to the stories of the Dirty War. But Anne Frank’s story allows them to be inside someone else’s shoes. It allows young people in Latin America to raise their voices—and to flower.”

  Similar programs have taken place in Guatemala and in Chile, at the Villa Grimaldi, a former torture center under the Pinochet regime and currently a memorial to its victims. In both countries, Anne’s diary has enabled its readers to confront their troubled past—and, in Guatemala, to discuss the ongoing violence that is still part of daily life.

  Down the hall from Mariela Chyrikins’s office, Norbert Hinterleitner is engaged in a similar project, one that involves bringing programs about tolerance to provincial cities in Ukraine. Born and raised in Austria, Norbert has spent the past five years designing books and textbooks, distributing copies of Anne’s diary, and working with educators and teenagers to combat not only anti-Semitism but xenophobia, homophobia, and bias against the region’s ethnic and racial minorities. It’s tricky, Norbert admits, even to gain admittance to schools and community centers whose administrators are more likely to hang up on him than to answer his phone calls. On an early visit to the former Soviet Union, he used, as a teaching tool, a recent article from a local newspaper, a four-page “factual” exposé of the worldwide conspiracy masterminded by American Jews in secret partnership with the Mafia.

  Norbert says, “If you’re surprised and you show it, you’ve lost.” He’s satisfied if he can reach a few kids among the thousands, kids who normally never speak up, kids whose lives will be changed if they can be persuaded that they are not alone and that it is all right to take a public stand against bigotry. What makes Anne’s diary so useful, he has found, is Anne’s fundamental decency, her belief that human dignity will prevail.

  “She was a victim of her society, but when you talk about her book, it gives people hope and inspiration. It’s a catalyst. They begin to think that they can do something different.” Norbert’s sincerity is infectious, but I can’t quite stifle the skeptical thought that, given the persecutions and pogroms that have transpired in that region of Eastern Europe, teaching certain Ukrainians not to be anti-Semitic is a bit like trying to teach cocker spaniels to fly. What could the success rate of such a program be, and how could it be quantified? Norbert, I think, is probably wise to keep his ambitions modest, to attempt to reach a few receptive kids. But despite my reservations, I’m delighted by Norbert’s hopeful determination. I’d like to imagine that he is right in his faith that entrenched hatred can be dissolved and dispelled, one Ukrainian teenager at a time.

  True, the ending happens just as the Franks and their friends had feared all along: their hiding place is discovered, and they are carried away to their doom. But the fictitious declaration of faith in the goodness of all men which concludes the play falsely reassures us since it impresses on us that in the combat between Nazi terror and continuance of intimate family living the latter wins out, since Anne has the last word. This is simply contrary to fact, because it was she who got killed. Her seeming survival through her moving statement about the goodness of men releases us effectively of the need to cope with the problems Auschwitz presents…It explains why millions love the play and movie, because while it confronts us with the fact that Auschwitz existed it encourages us at the same time to ignore its implications. If all men are good at heart, there never really was an Auschwitz; nor is there any possibility that it may recur.

  —BRUNO BETTELHEIM, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank”

  On the morning after my first visit to the Anne Frank Foundation, I cancel my appointments and spend the day in my hotel room so I can process what I’ve seen and heard. It’s not only that I’ve been moved by Mariela’s energized idealism, by Norbert’s sweet, quixotic hope that the ugly story of Eastern European anti-Semitism can have a different ending. It’s also that my conversations with them have changed my way of thinking about Anne Frank’s diary, and about the ways in which it has been received.

  I had become increasingly impatient with the notion of Anne Frank as the perky teenage messenger of peace and love, as a source of what Ian Buruma has ter
med “kitsch absolution,” a modern-day saint preaching tolerance from beyond the grave—in this case, a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen. Such a misreading of Anne’s book and of her “message,” I’d thought, constituted a denial of what happened to her after the diary ended, and of the cruel fates that befell millions of equally innocent men and women and children. That is what Bruno Bettelheim concludes in the paragraph above, taken from an otherwise quite mad essay in which he blames the Franks for the arrogance of insisting on going into hiding as a family, as well as for the crime of not having survived.

  The emphasis on redemption and forgiveness seemed all too reminiscent of the saccharine endings of the Broadway drama and the Hollywood film based on the diary. The play ends with Anne’s statement of her belief that, despite everything, people are really good at heart. At the conclusion of the film, music soars, birds twitter, the camera ascends toward the puffy clouds dotting the calm sky, while, on the sound track, the girlish fashion model playing Anne Frank reaffirms her faith in humanity. Clearly, people, or some people, are good at heart, but the reality of Anne’s story, the reality of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, would suggest that some people are basically evil at heart. “The line that concludes her play,” wrote Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer, “floating over the audience like a benediction assuring grace after momentary gloom, is the least appropriate epitaph conceivable for the millions of victims and thousands of survivors of Nazi genocide.”

  In fact, Anne herself had a sensibly and understandably mixed view of human nature. Among the most impressive aspects of her diary is the way in which its author is able to entertain and even embrace two apparently irreconcilable ideas about mankind. Anne’s book is a testament to certain individuals’ ability to develop, at an early age, a sophisticated moral consciousness, and to maintain compassion and humor under the most intense stress. Her “ambivalence about the hard questions of life” was, Buruma noted, a “mark of her intelligence.”

  On May 3, 1944, Anne wrote, “I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.”

  Almost three months later, and two weeks before her arrest, Anne composed the entry with which, for better or worse, she would become most closely identified. It’s worth quoting the entire passage as a corrective to the simplistic, falsely consoling idea of Anne Frank as an endlessly optimistic spirit. What’s striking is how beautifully written the entry is and how, like its author, it veers between extremes of hope and despair.

  Anyone who claims that the older ones have a more difficult time here certainly doesn’t realize to what extent our problems weigh down on us, problems for which we are probably much too young, but which thrust themselves upon us continually, until, after a long time, we think we’ve found a solution, but the solution doesn’t seem able to resist the facts which reduce it to nothing again. That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.

  It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.

  The sentence about human goodness has, as Cynthia Ozick observed in a searing 1997 New Yorker piece, “been torn out of its bed of thorns.” In her essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Ozick raged at how easy and how common it has become to dissociate the story of Anne Frank’s life from its tragic conclusion; playwrights, producers, and publishers have “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced…infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” the truth of the diary. That truth, claimed Ozick, resides in the crimes listed in the Nazi transport lists, which record that Anne Frank and the others were deported to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, along with 1,019 “Stucke (or ‘pieces,’ another commodities term).”

  By now, we know how Anne Frank’s story ended. The eyewitnesses have been deposed. We know about the horror of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and about her death, from typhus and malnutrition, at Bergen-Belsen.

  The fact that Anne’s journal concludes before the Franks’ arrest and deportation has been viewed as one of its shortcomings. In Literature, Persecution, Extermination, Sem Dresden argues that Anne’s diary is “not gruesome enough.” “The diary is taken to be a Holocaust document,” wrote Cynthia Ozick. “That is overridingly what it is not.”

  In his essay in the New Republic, Robert Alter agreed. “A girl’s journal about her family in hiding that ends with an editor’s note about her fate cannot convey the full actuality or meaning of a catastrophe in which millions of individuals and much of their culture were obliterated in camps built and operated by one of the great nations of Europe.” Ends with an editor’s note implies that Anne Frank’s diary is incomplete, as if she missed the main event, which, as we know, she did not. “There are no skeletal camp inmates, no gas chambers, no diabolical medical experiments and acts of sadism.”

  But according to Norbert Hinterleitner, one of the reasons the diary is such a useful teaching tool is because it allows students to develop an attachment to Anne Frank before they learn about the horrors of the Nazi camps. “It’s full of fear, but not of suffering.” The semblance of ordinary domesticity that the Franks preserved enables Anne’s audience to read her story without feeling the desire to turn away, the impulse we may experience when we see the photos and footage of the skeletal dead and dying.

  It has also been argued that there is something false or at least distorted about viewing this utterly singular girl as representative of the millions who were murdered. But whether we approve or not, her individuality is the reason—in some cases the only reason—students everywhere are taught about the Holocaust. “Statistics don’t bleed,” wrote Arthur Koestler, “it is the detail which counts.” A similar notion is expressed in the quote from Primo Levi that appears on a wall of the Anne Frank House Museum: “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

  Reviewing the diary in the July 1952 Saturday Review, Ludwig Lewisohn wrote, “If Anne Frank’s diary pierces the conscience of men in all its implications—the implications of her being and her people’s being, of her life and of her death…if that were possible, the publication of her diary would indeed be a moral event of inestimable import…. A million Anne Franks died in horror and misery; millions of human souls are perishing similarly today in the Soviet Union, in the ‘People’s Democracies’ in China…. Contrition for Anne Frank may rouse other contritions and from this one girl’s diary a gleam of redemption may arise.”

  Perhaps some part of that contrition does depend on our catching our last sight of Anne before she was stripped of everything we associate with being human. At the same time, it is crucial that the diary be read in its historical context, just as it is a distortion of everything Anne suffered to treat her book as the story of a teenager’s problems with her mother. It is essential to point out that, although there have be
en, and likely will be, other genocides, the methodical efficiency with which the country that had produced Goethe and Bach set out to eradicate an entire population is still so far unparalleled. Once the historical background has been established, once it is made clear that Anne’s being forced into hiding and murdered was the direct result of the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews, why not identify with Anne Frank as a suffering fellow creature? As Ian Buruma observed, “Such identification can result in sentimental self-pity, but it is more likely to give people at least some idea of the evil that was done.”

  In “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick railed against the American teenagers who burdened Otto Frank with the adolescent angst they imagined to be just like his daughter’s. Ozick derided Otto’s compulsion to answer their goofy, heartfelt letters, and singled out, as an especially egregious example, the 1995 book Love, Otto, drawn from the long correspondence between Otto Frank and a California girl who auditioned for the role of Anne in the Hollywood film. In one letter, Cara Weiss, later Cara Wilson, wrote, “Despite the monumental difference in our situations, to this day I feel that Anne helped me through the teens with a sense of inner focus. She spoke for me. She was strong for me. She had so much hope when I was ready to call it quits.” Ozick concludes, “The unabashed triflings of Cara Wilson—whose ‘identification’ with Anne Frank can be duplicated by the thousand, though she may be more audacious than most—point to a conundrum…. Did Otto Frank not comprehend that Cara Wilson was deaf to everything the loss of his daughter represented? Did he not see, in Wilson’s letters alone, how a denatured approach to the diary might serve to promote amnesia of what was rapidly turning into history?”