Ten years later, at the premiere of the University of Houston’s production of Wendy Kesselman’s adaptation of the Goodrich-Hackett play, members of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, distributed copies of a leaflet entitled “Anne Frank Hoax Exposed” in the theater’s parking lot. The essay—purportedly by William Pierce, author of the infamous Turner Diaries, an apocalyptic race-war novel popular among white supremacists—again repeated the charges that Otto Frank had forged Anne’s journal.
In 2006, the mayor and the police chief of Pretzien, fifty miles from Berlin, watched a group of young, beer-drinking neo-Nazis throw Anne Frank’s diary into a bonfire, along with the American flag. When seven of the revelers were tried for sedition, a defense lawyer claimed that his client had been misunderstood, and that his intention had been to “‘symbolically free himself from the gloom cast by the Nazi period on ‘an evil chapter’ in German history.” Five of the seven men were convicted, fined, and sentenced to nine months’ probation.
A Google search using the words Anne Frank Holocaust denial first turns up pages of legitimate sites about Holocaust denial, then descends into the vortex of bigotry and hate. A more direct route is via Anne Frank Hoax, hoax being a buzzword and a coded entry into the world of defiant racism.
On Yahoo, there’s a list of Anne Frank chat rooms, each with a slogan hinting at what may be found at the end of one thread or another. The group that logs on to explore “The fictional life and times of Anne Frank, the young lover of Herr Adolph Hitler” is closed to new members, and membership is required to join the discussion on “Anne Frank—The Truth”—the truth apparently being that “Mr. Frank betrayed his own family to escape justice.” This theme has some currency, attracting yet another group under the rubric, “Anne Frank was betrayed by her own father, what more could you expect from the Jews?” The majority of the chat rooms have more obscene and violent slogans, and share graphic fantasies about Anne’s sexual kinks, her enthusiasm for oral sex, her fondness for showing her breasts.
What makes it all the more frightening is that these groups twist every mention of Anne Frank into new evidence that the diary is a fraud. For them, the very idea that a brilliant girl would keep a daily journal of her time in hiding and then go back and revise it because she wanted her book to be published is final, irrefutable proof that the Holocaust never happened.
PART IV
Anne Frank in the Schools
TEN
Teaching the Diary
The Diary is many things at one and the same time. It is an amusing, enlightening, and often moving account of the process of adolescence, as Anne describes her thoughts and feelings about herself and the people around her, the world at large, and life in general. It is an accurate record of the way a young girl grows up and matures, in the very special circumstances in which Anne found herself throughout the two years during which she was in hiding. And it is also a vividly terrifying description of what it was like to be a Jew—and in hiding—at a time when the Nazis sought to kill all the Jews of Europe.
—CLIFF’S NOTES ON The Diary of Anne Frank
According to a 1996 survey cited on the Anne Frank Museum Web site, 50 percent of American high school students had read The Diary of Anne Frank as a classroom assignment. Each year, Anne’s diary makes its way into thousands of schools, and onto the desks of teachers who discover that the book most certainly does not, as they say, teach itself. The diary and, more to the point, the circumstances surrounding the composition of the diary, are difficult for students to take in, especially if Anne’s story represents their first exposure to the horrors of the Nazis’ war against the Jews—which is often the case. Another survey, conducted in 2008, found that only a quarter of American teenagers were able to identify Hitler.
And so it happens that teachers—undercompensated and overburdened by crowded classrooms—must assume yet another challenging task, one that seems essential for their students’ historical, literary, and moral education. They must stand in front of a room of bright-faced young people and inform them that not very long ago, the German government and its army cold-bloodedly gassed and brutally murdered millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents, unless—in a very few cases—they managed to hide in caves and haylofts and attics, like the little girl whose book survived, though its young author did not.
Doreen Hazel, a former teacher, offers a course that meets once weekly, for ten weeks, at Manhattan’s Anne Frank Center, a nonprofit organization, allied with Amsterdam’s Anne Frank Museum, which develops educational programs and hosts exhibitions and workshops in its SoHo loft space. Hazel’s class, Bringing Anne Frank to Life in Your Classroom, is open to the public, and teachers can take it for continuing-education credit.
On the afternoon I visited, the class had three students. One was a grade school teacher, the second taught middle school. The third, who was Dutch, was not a teacher—just curious, she explained.
Hazel had loaned the middle school teacher a film about Anne Frank to show her class. When Hazel asked how it had gone, the teacher shook her head and handed back the tape. She reported that, during a scene in which naked female prisoners are being taken to the showers to be gassed, one of her students became completely hysterical and began sobbing with fear that the same thing might happen to her and her mother.
“It was too much for her,” the teacher said, shaking her head again. “I stopped it.” Her first concern was that the girl might be traumatized; a secondary worry was that, if the student turned out to be inconsolable, her mother might complain to the school. “The women were naked,” the teacher repeated, widening her eyes and communicating with a glance what the consequences of this could have been for her job. The helplessness, alarm, and sympathy she’d felt was still visible on her face. Watching her, I understood, as I had not before, how painful it can be for teachers to address this material, and why they so often cannot bring themselves to do what I had assumed any teacher could, and should, do—that is, to simply tell their students the facts of the Nazi genocide. Obviously, these truths constitute an important and necessary lesson, but it was suddenly clear to me how difficult that lesson can be, and why teachers may be so eager to move, as quickly as possible, from the devastating to the constructive, from the historical to the personal.
Faced with the challenge of presenting Anne’s diary to a class, even the most tough-minded and confident teacher might take a deep breath and look for some professional or collegial guidance. One essay, “Teaching the Holocaust,” by Rebecca Kelch Johnson, published in the English Journal, suggests that the Nazi war on the Jews is such an appalling narrative that to teach it as a singular historic event—without emphasizing the importance and value of human rights and the efficacy of nonviolence—would make it seem as if teachers were trying to shock their students with a gory, sensationalistic horror story that would only alienate and depress them:
Perhaps teachers hesitate to teach…students about an historical episode which is marked by incomprehensible savagery and abhorrence. The very idea of lecturing about the fact that between 1933 and 1945 six million Jews along with others…were dehumanized by starvation and subsequently annihilated by gassing, mass executions, and other methods employed by Hitler’s henchmen is unthinkable. Discussing the horrors that went on in concentration camps…may seem too barbaric. Yet, an understanding of the Holocaust should stimulate every Jew and non-Jew’s personal understanding of human rights…The adolescent’s idealistic nature encourages discussion and study of human rights and justice.
But even the most positive classroom discussion of human rights eventually comes up against the grim reality of what happened to Anne Frank, and even the most hopeful consideration of the power of nonviolence must address that aspect of human nature that Anne wrote about with honesty and concision: “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.” Teachers will inevitably be obliged to face the natural discomfort—particularly strong among the young, and, for some reason, among Americans—with questions for which there are no simple answers, or, worse, no answers at all. Here, the insoluble mystery is that of evil, of the aberrant strain in human nature that fueled the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate entire populations.
The bright thread that can be, and frequently has been, teased out of the diary’s dark content runs through a lecture delivered in 2003 by Dr. Lesley Shore, then an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Anne Frank, noted Shore, “champions goodness—and is frequently dismissed for it…Anne, like Sophocles’s Antigone, chooses to ‘join in loving not hating’ though, like Freud, she understands the evil that lurks within…Anne Frank brings out the best in us. We love her because we know that, could we believe as she did, in the face of terror, if not in the squalor of Bergen-Belsen, we want desperately to believe in the goodness of humankind. This is the power of her legacy. She, alone, dares to admit that she wants to believe that people are basically good at heart.”
THE prospective teacher of Anne Frank’s diary can find extensive help in the form of books, workbooks, essays, journals, and Web sites. Nearly all of these sources make interesting reading, even the jargon-laden academic essays larded with terms like emplotment and enfigurement. Predictably, attempts to reduce a historical catastrophe to a series of short-answer questions only succeed in highlighting its irreducibility. One classroom guide, Michelle Keller’s Remembering the Holocaust, features the following sample test.
True or false: The only people killed during the Holocaust were Jewish.
True or false: The Holocaust could never happen again.
True or false: The Holocaust took place during the American Revolution.
True or false: Anne Frank published her diary and made lots of money.
True or false: Two out of every 3 Jewish people in Europe were killed during the Holocaust.
Obviously, the Holocaust did not occur simultaneously with the American Revolution. But not even the simplest of the other questions is simple. The numbering of the Holocaust dead has caused bitter rifts among historians and political and religious figures. The issue of whether the term “Holocaust” applies only to the murder of the Jews or if it also refers to the Nazis’ other victims has been a divisive one. The reference to Anne making “lots of money” taps into a fixation of those who claim the diary is a hoax perpetrated by greedy Jews. How could the statement that “the Holocaust could never happen again” be either true or false, given that genocides have occurred after World War II. True would be the correct answer if we argue, as many have, that the Holocaust is a singular event, but the wrong one if we interpret the question more broadly to mean other attempts to destroy a race or religion, tribe or nationality.
A series of comprehension tests from 1993 include questions that any teacher—that anyone, really—would want students to get right. (“Hitler’s ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ was a. extermination, b. deportation, c. relocation.”) But other sections may direct the class’s attention in odd directions. (“The big disadvantage to keeping cats in the ‘Secret Annex ’was the a. litter box smell, b. horrible fights they got into, c. fleas.”) Some questions are all but impossible to answer: “Anne’s one golden rule was to laugh about everything and to a. not bother about the others, b. not take anything too seriously, c. keep your troubles to yourself.”
If the multiple-choice tests seem overly simple, essay suggestions and lesson plans are often bewilderingly abstract. According to A Guide for Using Anne Frank in the Classroom, students should prepare for the topics the diary raises by responding to the following statements with a simple “agree” or “disagree.”
1. I want my memory to live on after my death.
2. Until mankind undergoes a great change, there will be wars.
3. What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again.
4. The final forming of one’s character lies within one’s own hands.
5. It is good to always follow one’s conscience.
6. In spite of everything, people are really good at heart.
The metaphysical nature of these prompts seems like further evidence of the educator’s (and indeed, our own) distress at the horror of Anne’s fate. This discomfort often leads teachers to gloss over the pathology that drove Anne into the attic and to focus on the resilience and spirit of the Franks and their neighbors. However understandable, this impulse does Anne and her work a disservice, since, in her case, neither element—the will to survive with the maximum humanity and the will to extinguish with the maximum brutality—makes sense without the other.
The desire to extract an affirmative lesson from Anne’s story likewise explains the fact that the Anne who visits the classrooms, and whom the pedagogical literature describes, more closely resembles the Broadway and Hollywood Anne than the Anne we meet in the diary. Much is made by the teaching guides of her optimism and resilience, but there is little acknowledgment of the fact that she was a complicated young artist who died a tragic early death. An article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, by Stephanie Jones and Karen Spector, notes that students may actually resist the suggestion that Anne’s story is not the sunny narrative they wish to imagine:
Even when students were explicitly told of her cruel death, they still tended to imagine her in hopeful ways. When students answered a question in their textbook…that asked how Anne could have been happy in a concentration camp, Charlotte answered, “Knowing Anne, she was happy in the concentration camps. She didn’t have to be quiet anymore; she could frolic outside. She could be in nature. She loved nature. I think this was a welcome relief for her.” The basis for Charlotte’s version was simply, “Knowing Anne…” When Karen asked Charlotte’s classmates if they agreed with her, the room was filled with lifted arms; some had both hands raised, yet no one raised a voice or kept an arm down in protest of Charlotte’s statement. No one. This is a testament to the powerful pull of the Americanized Anne Frank.
One can imagine that Jews who had been in hiding would have been (however briefly) glad for the relative freedom of Westerbork. But the idea of Anne frolicking in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen suggests a flaw in the Holocaust units of which her diary often forms the core. Some responsibility for this may stem from the cognitive dissonance that must affect teachers attempting to present (and the student trying to grasp) the life of Anne Frank as an example of the triumph of the human spirit. The logical conclusion to that story is not the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, and so it must be tempting to proceed as if Anne’s story ended when her diary ends, as if Auschwitz never existed.
A “Cyberhunt Teacher’s Page” on the www.scholastic.com Web site includes a paragraph headlined “Anne’s Journal of Hope,” and instructs teachers to focus on the passage that the site entitles “On Still Believing,” the section in which Anne’s belief in human goodness is tempered by the vision of a catastrophic future. After reading this aloud with their students, teachers should “ask them to reflect on Anne Frank’s words in their own response journals. What do they think she meant by wilderness and approaching thunder? What does this passage tell us about her? How does it make them feel? Encourage students to add poems, drawings, and questions in response.”
The scope of the discussion suggested by these questions is fairly common in the teaching guides, but the mention of “Anne Frank’s words” represents a departure. Mostly, the lesson plans encourage the instructor to shift so rapidly from Anne Frank to the Holocaust and from there to the students’ own experience of prejudice and discrimination that, more often than not, Anne seems to be absent from school on the days when her diary is being taught.
Time and again, the diary itself is used to encourage students t
o talk about themselves. In an essay, “Literature as Invitation,” Robert Probst describes visiting a classroom outside San José, Costa Rica. Enthralled, the observers watched the talkative students move from a discussion of how people can treat one another as inhumanely as the Nazis did to questions about whether such an event could recur, perhaps nearby—and from there to the then-current fighting in Bosnia and Kosovo. The experience, writes Probst, represents “what literature is or might be in the classroom if we respect its power and respect what it offers.”
But even if some of these pedagogical approaches fall short of grappling directly with the beauty—and the terror—of Anne Frank’s life and work, there is something admirable about any instructor who teaches The Diary of Anne Frank in any way. (Except, of course, the way in which one can imagine it being taught by the evil Ditlieb Felderer or by Lothar Stielau, who, in addition to being one of the earliest Holocaust deniers to challenge the authenticity of the diary, was a high school teacher.) Ideally, the diary should be presented with the optimal balance of the literary, the historical, and the personal, engaging the entire class, informing each student of something he or she needs to know and leaving them all resolved to be more empathic human beings.
The question of how the diary is taught in our schools is in some ways similar to that of how it has been represented on stage and screen. Even the most unfocused schoolroom debate may inspire students—as it has audience members—to return to the primary source. Again, the diary remains the diary, and in each class, a few readers will feel a connection to its writer and learn something about the times in which she lived. Even when Anne’s journal is used primarily as a springboard for personal confession, students will respond to her voice and her sensibility.
Anne Frank Page 24
