The Diary of a young girl
I have just had my heart broken by a thirteen year old girl.
And now, forced to explain why I waited so long to read Anne Frank’s diary (I'm already thirty-four) I must confess that I doubted the diary of a teenage girl could hold my interest for several hundred pages. But how wrong I was, and how sassy, intelligent, funny, lively, wise, vibrant, articulate and ultimately how loveable is Anne Frank. At quite a few points—whenever she made me laugh, or after her first kiss with Peter, or when relating her vision in which, "they come in the middle of the night to take us away and I crawl under my bed in desperation"—I actually felt a physical sob of tenderness and rage catch in my throat at the thought that this ordinary and yet also extraordinary little girl was in fact going to hear the very thing she most feared: The heavy thud of jackboots on the stairs. I waited, with a constant premonitory shudder, with a dread that rose in ratio to my growing affection for Anne, for that nightmare moment. And after the last entry, when Anne’s voice suddenly fell away, and the editor coolly informed me that, ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE, it was as though a barking German voice had just been heard at the entrance to the Secret Annex and the journal had dropped from her hands. Because of this foreknowledge, for me the diary was most harrowing where it was most charming. More than a few times my refusal to accept her approaching doom sought practical expression—and in these moments my reading was interrupted by pointless mental plans to renovate her family’s hiding place. I put down her diary and, gazing into space, replaced the swinging bookcase concealing the entrance to the annex with a hinged false wall, the same size as the wall it concealed, and that could be locked into place from within. The secret passageway accessed via a revolving bookcase is a familiar cinematic trope, even a cliché, but who would ever think of fumbling at an entire wall in the attempt to swing it open like a door? Sadly, the installation and operation of this wall presented technical difficulties, in response to which I tore down the entire building and built another from scratch that accommodated a complex system of tiny interconnecting rooms, crawlspaces and priest holes between its thick walls—a “solution” even more obviously impossible than the first. At last, out of sheer desperation, I abandoned my task and instead swept my gaze like a searchlight across the city of Amsterdam, circa 1944, until I had singled out the mysterious informant (for it is clear that there was an informant) and watched his face dissolve into a black, bubbling mess under the corrosive force of my concentrated hatred. But now that I have finished the book, and had some time to reflect on Anne’s story, I think that it may have been wrong of me to mentally tamper with the Secret Annex, even sacrilegious. Near the end of her diary, Anne writes, "God has not forsaken me so far," and then adds confidently, and seemingly in error, "nor ever will.” We know that after her arrest, Anne was transported to Auschwitz, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where she died just weeks before British troops liberated the camp. This fact might tempt some to conclude that her faith in God was misguided. But Anne also confided in her diary a secret passionate wish to be a famous writer: “I don’t want to have lived in vain,” she wrote. “I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!” Today, her fame and influence are truly colossal. It has been stated, several times and by several commentators, that her testimony embodies the hideousness of fascism more powerfully than all the evidence of the Nuremberg trials put together. Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Primo Levi are among those who have praised her voice, wisdom, courage and the moral and humanitarian importance of her account—and in terms that are (see for yourself) strikingly superlative. Meanwhile, millions of ordinary people, like me, have read her diary and others will continue to do so, for as long as there are still readers. There were, as Anne Frank explained in her last entry, two Annes: The flippant and friendly Anne she presented to others, and the more serious and soulful Anne whose thoughts and feelings she expressed in her diary. And she wished, with her very last written words, that she were brave enough to reveal more of this second Anne, which she considered her, “better half.” The story of Anne Frank, told through her diary and a laconic editorial afterword, moved me to tears. But my sadness was tempered by the thought that, while God may have forsaken the first Anne, the frightened child of flesh and blood who died of typhus in a Nazi death camp, he did not forsake the second: He raised her up to an unimaginable and unassailable height above the forces of evil that had tried to destroy her. |