The Girl who was Anne Frank
- Louis De Jong
“And how do you know that the human race is worth saving?” an argumentative young student once asked his professor. Said the professor: “I have read Anne Frank’s Diary.”
How this diary of a teenage girl came to be written and saved is a story as dramatic as the diary itself. No one foresaw the tremendous impact that the small book would have-not even her father, who had it published after Anne’s death in a Nazi concentration camp.
The Diary of Anne Frank has now been published in 19 languages including German, and has sold nearly two million copies. Made into a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and, in the 1956-1957 season alone, played in 20 different countries to two million people. In London it ran for nearly six months at the Phoenix Theatre. Twentieth Century-Fox turned it into a film.
To understand this amazing response it is necessary first to understand the girl who was Anne Frank.
When Hitler came to power, Otto Frank was a banker, living in Germany. He had married in 1925. In 1926 his first daughter, Margot, was born and three years later his second, Annelies Marie. She was usually called “Anne,” sometimes, “Tender one.”
In the autumn of 1933, when Hitler was issuing one anti-Jewish decree after another, Otto Frank decided to emigrate to the hospitable Netherlands. He started a small firm in Amsterdam. Shortly before the outbreak of war he took in a partner, Mr. Van Daan, a fellow refugee. Mostly they traded in spices. Business was often slow. Once Otto Frank was forced to ask his small staff to accept a temporary cut in their modest wages. No one left. They all liked his warm personality. They admired his courage and the evident care he took to give his two girls a good education.
As a pupil Anne was not particularly brilliant. Most people believed with her parents that Margot, her elder sister, was more promising. Anne was chiefly remarkable for the early interest she took in other people. She was emotional and strong willed; “a real problem child,” her father once told me, “a great talker and fond of nice clothes.” Life in town, where she was usually surrounded by a chattering crowd of girl-friends, suited her exactly. This was a lucky fact because the Frank family could only rarely afford a holiday. Nor did they own a car.
When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Franks were trapped. Earlier than most Jews in Amsterdam, Otto Frank realized that the time might come when he and his family would have to go into hiding. He decided to hide in his own business office, which faced one of Amsterdam’s tree-lined canals. A few derelict rooms on the upper floors, called the "Annexe" were secretly prepared to house both the Frank and the Van Daan families.
Early in July 1942, Margot Frank was called up for deportation, but she did not go. Straight way the Franks moved into their hiding place, and the Van Daans followed shortly afterwards. Four months later they took into their cramped lodgings another Jew, a dentist.
Song-Bird in Hiding: They were eight hunted people. Any sound, any light might betray their presence. A tenuous link with the outside was provided by the radio and by four courageous members of Otto Frank’s staff, two of them typists, who in secret brought food, magazines, books. The only other company they had was a cat.
While in hiding, Anne decided to continue a diary which her parents had given her on her 13th birthday. She described life in the “Annexe” with all its inevitable tensions and quarrels. But she created first and foremost a wonderfully delicate record of adolescence, sketching with complete honesty a young girl’s thoughts and feelings, her longing and loneliness. “I feel like a song bird whose wings have been brutally torn out and who is flying in utter darkness against the bars of its own cage,” she wrote when she had been isolated from the outside world for nearly 16 months. Two months later she had filled every page of the diary, a small book bound in a tartan cloth, and one of the typists, Miep, gave her an ordinary exercise book. Later she used Margot’s chemistry exercise book.
Her diary reveals the trust she puts in a wise father; her grief because, as she feels it, her mother does not understand her; the ecstasy of a first, rapturous kiss, exchanged with the Van Daans’ 17-year-old son; finally, the flowering personality, eager to face life with adult courage and mature self-insight.
On a slip of paper Anne wrote faked names which she intended to use in case of publication. For the time the diary was her own secret which she wanted to keep from everyone, especially from the grumpy dentist with whom she had to share her tiny bed room. Her father allowed her to put her diaries in his briefcase.
He never read them until after her death.
Courageous Leader: On August 4, 1944, one German and four Dutch Nazi policemen suddenly stormed upstairs. (How the secret of the Annexe had been revealed is not known) “Where are your money and jewels?” they shouted. Mrs. Frank and Mrs. Van Daan had some gold and jewellery. It was quickly discovered. Looking round for something to carry it in, one of the policemen noticed Otto Frank’s briefcase. He emptied it on to the floor, barely giving a glance at the notebooks. Then the people of the Annexe were arrested.
In the beginning of September, while the Allied armies were rapidly approaching the Netherlands, the Franks and Van Daans and the dentist were carried in cattle-trucks to Auschwitz - the Nazi death-camp in southern Poland. There the Nazisseparated Otto Frank from his wife and daughters without giving them time to say farewell. Mrs. Frank, Anne and Margot were marched into the women’s part of the camp, where Mrs. Frank died from exhaustion. The Van Daans and the dentist, too, lost their lives.
Anne proved to be a courageous leader of her small Auschwitz group. When there was nothing to eat, she dared to go to the kitchen to ask for food. She constantly told Margot never to give in. Once she passed hundreds of Hungarian Jewish children who were standing naked in freezing rain, waiting to be led to the gas chambers, unable to grasp the horrors inflicted upon them in the world of adults. “Oh look, their eyes...” she whispered.
Later in the autumn she and her sister were transported to another camp, Belsen, between Berlin and Hamburg. A close friend saw her there: “cold and hungry, her head shaved and her skeleton-like form draped in the coarse, shapeless, striped garb of the concentration camp.” She was pitifully weak, her body racked by typhoid fever. She died early in March 1945, a few days after Margot. Both were buried in a mass grave.
In Auschwitz, Otto Frank had managed somehow to stay alive. He was freed early in 1945 by the Russians and in the summer he arrived back in liberated Amsterdam. A friend had told him that his wife had died, but he kept on hoping that Anne and Margot would return. After six weeks of waiting he met someone who had to tell him that both had perished. It was only then that Miep, his former typist, handed him Anne’s diaries.
Mission in Life: A week after the Frank family had been arrested, Miep had boldly returned to the Annexe. A heap of papers lay on the floor. Miep recognized Anne’s handwriting and decided to keep the diary but not to read it. Had she read it, she would have found detailed information on the help she and other people had given the Frank family at the risk of their own lives, and she might well have decided to destroy the diary for reasons of safety.
It took Otto Frank many weeks to finish reading what his dead child had written. He broke down after every few pages. As his old mother was still alive – she had emigrated to Switzerland where other near relatives lived – he started copying the manuscript for her. Some passages which he felt to be too intimate or which might hurt other people’s feelings were left out by him. The idea of publishing the diary did not enter his mind. He gave one typed copy to a close friend, who lent it to a professor of Modern History. Much to Otto Frank's surprise, the Professor devoted an article to it in a Dutch newspaper. His friends now urged Otto Frank to have Anne’s diary published as she herself had wished; in one passage she had written, “I want to publish a book entitled ‘The Annexe after the war...’ my diary can serve this purpose.” When Anne’s father finally consented to publication, the manuscript was refused by two well-known Dutch publishers. A third decided to accept it and he sold more than 150,000 copies of the Dutch edition.
Other editions followed – 250,000 sold in Britain, a like number in Japan, 435,000 in the United States. Otto Frank began to receive hundreds of letters. One, from Italy, was addressed: “Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, Amsterdam.” A few people doubted the authenticity of the diary; most wrote to express their admiration and grief. Girls of Anne’s age poured out their troubles: “Oh, Mr. Frank,” wrote one girl, “she is so much like me that sometimes I do not know where myself begins and Anne Frank ends.” Numerous people sent small presents. Some exquisite dolls were made for him by Japanese girls. A Dutch sculptress presented him with a statue of Anne. On the birthdays of Anne and Margot flowers arrived anonymously.
So many letters poured in that Otto Frank was forced to retire from business. The care of his daughter’s diary had become his passion, his mission in life. All royalties were devoted to humanitarian causes which, he felt, would have been approved by Anne. All letters were answered by him personally. Every day new ones sadly reminded him of the losses he had suffered, but he felt that there was truth and consolation in what the headmistress of one of England’s largest schools wrote to him: “It must be a source of deep joy to you – in all your sorrow – to know that Anne’s brief life is, in the deepest sense, only just the beginning.”
The most remarkable response came from Germany. When the book’s first printing of 4,500 copies came out in Germany in 1950, many booksellers were afraid to put it in their windows.
Mass Appeal: When the play opened in seven German cities simultaneously, no one knew how the audiences would react. The drama progressed through its eight brief scenes. No Nazis were seen on the stage, but their ominous presence made itself felt every minute. Finally, at the end, Nazi jackboots were heard storming upstairs to raid the hiding place. At the close of the epilogue only Anne’s father was on the stage, a lonely old man. Quietly he told how he received news that his wife and daughters had died. Picking up Anne’s slim diary, he turned back the pages to find a certain passage and, as he found it, her young, confident voice was heard, saying: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Packed audiences received Anne Frank’s tragedy in a silence heavy with remorse. In Dusseldorf people did not even go out during the interval. “They sat in their seats as if afraid of the lights outside, ashamed to face each other,” someone reported. The Dusseldorf producer, Kuno Epple, explained: “Anne Frank has succeeded because it enables the audience to come to grips with history, personally and without denunciation. We watch it as an indictment, in the most humble, pitiful terms, of inhumanity to fellow men. No one accuses us as Germans. We accuse ourselves.”
For years Germany’s post-war administrators toiled to make people feel the senseless and criminal nature of the Nazi regime. On the whole they failed. The Diary of Anne Frank succeeded. Leading actors received dozens of letters. “I was a good Nazi”, a typical letter read, “but I never knew what it meant until the other night.” German school children sent Otto Frank letters signed by entire classes, telling him that Anne’s diary had opened their eyes to the viciousness of racial persecution. In West Berlin an Anne Frank Home was opened, devoted to social work for young people. The people of Berlin had chosen her name “to symbolize the spirit of racial and social tolerance.” Elsewhere in Germany an organization was set up, named after her, to combat remaining vestiges of Anti-Semitism. In Vienna, money was collected for Anne Frank forest, to be planted in Israel.
In March 1957, a Hamburg student suggested that flowers should be laid on the mass graves in Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank had found her last resting place. More than 2000 young people eagerly answered his appeal. Hundreds peddled on bikes 120 kilometers in lashing rain. Standing in front of one of the mass graves, a seventeen-year-old school girl expressed what all felt: “Anne Frank was younger than we are when her life was so horribly ended. She had to die because others had decided to destroy her race. Never again among our people must such a diseased and inhuman hatred arise.”
Anne’s brief life is, indeed, only a beginning. She carries the message of courage and tolerance all over the world. She lives even after death.
Glossary
Nazi Party : the political party led by Adolf Hitler which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945.
concentration camp : a prison consisting of a set of buildings inside a fence, where political prisoners were kept in very bad conditions.
decree : an order having the force of a law.
emigrate : to leave the country permanently and go to live in another.
derelict : in bad condition.
annexe : a wing added to a building
deportation : forcing to leave the country
cramped : not having enough space, narrow
tenuous : so light that it hardly exists
inevitable : certain to happen.
adolescence : period of time in a person’s life when he/she is developing into an adult.
tartan : woollen cloth with a woven pattern of straight lines of different colours crossing at right angles
ecstasy : state of extreme happiness
rapturous : expressing great delight
grumpy : bad-tempered.
racked (v) : caused to suffer
authenticity : genuineness, truthfulness
exquisite : delicate
anonymously : unidentified
ominous : threatening
jackboot : a long boot which covers the leg up to the knee
epilogue : concluding speech
remorse : shame
denunciation : condemnation
indictment : accusation
viciousness : cruelty and violence
persecution : treating somebody in a cruel way
vestiges : traces
anti-Semitism : hatred, cruel treatment of Jewish people
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The Eyes are not Here
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A Village Cricket Match
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