The Legacy of Anne Frank

by The Legacy of Anne Frank (retail) (epub)

  But outside her classroom things were getting more serious. In the same year Jewish-owned businesses were compelled to become ‘Aryanised’, i.e. their Jewish owners had to hand them over to non-Jews. Otto Frank divided up his companies, Opekta and Pectacon, and handed them to his trusted business associates Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler respectively. Pectacon became known as Gies and Co, taking the name of its new co-director Jan Gies, the husband of Otto’s office administrator Miep Gies. Behind the scenes, Otto was secretly very involved in the running of the companies, seeing all the account books and offering advice where needed.

  By 1942, Jews between the ages of 16 and 40 were being called up to report for work camps in Germany. Otto and Edith were terrified that 16-year-old Margot would be among those taken. They were right to be terrified; hardly anyone returned alive from this supposed ‘workforce’ project. The Frank family were trapped in the Netherlands with no escape. Otto was prompted by this threat of a call-up for his older daughter to prepare a hiding place. He shared his plan with his colleagues Johannes Kleiman, whom he had known for fifteen years, and Victor Kugler. It was Kugler who first suggested that the unused series of rooms above and behind the old building of the Prinsengracht offices would make an ideal hiding place.

  On 12 June 1942, Anne celebrated her thirteenth birthday. One of the presents she received was a notebook covered in a red and white checked fabric. This gift was not in fact a complete surprise. She had spotted it in the window of a neighbourhood bookshop when she had been out walking with her father not long before her birthday. Just as teenagers today will drop unsubtle hints about the latest-style trainers or techie devices as birthdays or Christmas approach, Anne had given a large hint to her father that she would rather like this notebook. Probably its main attraction was that it had a brass lock, essential for safeguarding intimate thoughts and gossip.

  Anne started writing in her notebook on the day she received it. Her first words were, ‘I hope I’ll be able to confide everything in you, as I’ve never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you’ll be a great source of comfort and support.’ She had no idea on that day that in three weeks’ time the diary was about to indeed become a vital source of ‘comfort and support’.

  She goes on to describe her birthday party and all the other gifts she received, and over the next few days she shares her privately held views about her school friends. On this matter, she doesn’t hold back, using adjectives such as ‘stuck up’, ‘sneaky’ and ‘vulgar’ for some of her unfortunate targets. By 20 June, Anne has given her new paper confidante the name Kitty, after one of the characters created by her favourite author Cissy van Marxveldt. Kitty is to become her friend, a surprising confession from a girl who says she has about thirty friends and a throng of boy admirers, who ‘can’t keep their eyes off me’. But with her human friends she feels the talk is superficial and about ordinary, everyday things. Kitty will be her ‘true friend’, paper will be her intimate confidante. And anyway, no-one is ever going to read it.

  Three weeks after Anne had started her diary, on the afternoon of Sunday, 5 July, the doorbell on the Frank family’s apartment unexpectedly rang. It was a postman delivering the dreaded notice for 16-year-old Margot to report at midnight for transportation to ‘a work camp’. According to the notice, she would be permitted to take a number of specified items in a single suitcase which had to have ‘first and last name, date of birth and the word Holland’ written on it. In a foreboding of the true fate of the deportees, this was explained to be ‘important because the owner’s suitcase would be sent by a separate train’. The hindsight of history gives us a grim insight into these bureaucratic instructions. By this time, not only Auschwitz, but Belzec and Chelmno concentration camps, were fully operational in carrying out the extermination of Jews.

  The very next day, early on the morning of 6 July, Otto, Edith and Anne left their Merwedeplein home together and trudged in the pouring rain across the city to the Prinsengracht offices of Opekta/Gies & Co. They were each wearing several layers of clothing and carrying one satchel, plus another bag laden with essential items. The city was still dark and people were scuttling about to get out of the downpour, so no-one would have taken much notice of the sodden group of people who were leaving their home for good. Having escorted Margot, Miep Gies had already arrived by bicycle at the Prinsengracht office to help with the moving in. To reach the stairs to the hiding place involved slipping through a door that had been carefully concealed by a strategically-placed wooden bookcase. The bookcase had been filled with the normal office paraphernalia of document folders so as not to arouse any suspicions from Mr Frank’s office workers. Even to this day, all visitors to Anne Frank’s hiding place access it by stepping behind this bookcase.

  Perhaps the Frank family thought on 6 July 1942 that by the following summer they would be returning to their home on the Merwedeplein. But the months in hiding stretched on and on. Over the course of the next two years and one month the Frank family remained within the confines of the 70m2 of stuffy rooms above 263 Prinsengracht. One week after moving into the hiding place, they were joined by another endangered Jewish family. This was Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their 15-year-old son Peter, refugees to Amsterdam from the German city of Osnabruck. Hermann van Pels was also a business associate of Otto Frank who had worked for the sister company of Pectacon. He had done his share in helping Otto and Johannes Kleiman with the preparation of the hiding place, knowing it would be for his own family’s use too.

  One cannot relate the experiences of the Frank family and their friends during their time in hiding without explaining the critical role of those who risked their lives to help them, bringing moral support and vital supplies. This was a small group of Otto Frank’s loyal office workers comprising Miep Gies, who was the general administrator; the aforementioned Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler; Bep Voskuijl, the young secretary; and also Jan Gies, Miep’s husband. It was actually Johannes Kleiman who had come up with the idea of building a bookcase to conceal the door, and Bep’s father Johannes Voskuijl who had built it. Over the course of two years, those in hiding relied totally on the courage and enduring goodwill of this group of people, who had to keep their dangerous secret from their own families, colleagues and the shopkeepers from whom they inveigled extra supplies.

  In December 1942, Miep asked Mr and Mrs Frank and Mr and Mrs van Pels whether they would be prepared to let another endangered Jew join them. The person in question happened to be her dentist. Fritz Pfeffer was, like the van Pels and Frank families, a refugee from Nazi Germany, which he had fled in 1938 along with his Catholic fiancée Charlotte Kaletta. Before doing so he had managed to send his young son Werner to safety in England. After the arrival of Pfeffer, the social and physical claustrophobia caused to these eight people, by being in the unremitting presence of each other, started to take its toll, and judging by her writing, none more so than on the teenage Anne. In her first entries written from the hiding place Anne describes every room of ‘our lovely Annexe’ in excited detail as though they were on holiday ‘in some kind of strange pension’. But after only three months, the boredom and despair have already set in, as she makes a retrospective addition to one of these earliest entries describing how upset she now feels about never going out.

  What has given Anne’s diary such enduring and universal appeal? Anne Frank was not the saintly figure of her portrayal in some of the sentimentalized dramatic interpretations that have appeared over the decades. She was a real teenager, lashing out in frustration at the failings, as she perceived them, of the adults hiding with her and the powerlessness to stop the wicked persecution inflicted on her. Perhaps it’s also how her writing fluidly juxtaposes the profound and the prosaic.

  The adults she is confined with are driving her mad. They are exasperating and interfering. Added to which, there are petty disagreements between Otto and Edith and Hermann and Auguste, two married couples accustomed to running their own homes and lives. In
April 1943, Anne reports that ‘the house is still shaking from the after-effects of the quarrels’. One can almost see her eyes rolling upwards as she writes this.

  Fritz Pfeffer, Anne’s roommate by necessity, is portrayed in her diary as an old buffoon, her resentment of the poor man compounded by the fact that she has to share her precious writing desk with him. Fritz was actually a handsome and athletic man of 53 when he joined the hiding place in 1942, proven by the photos kept by his beloved Charlotte. He was desperately lonely in hiding, being the only person there without any of his own family.

  Anne feels that her mother is favouring Margot too much, and taking her sister’s side in arguments because there is more of an affinity between them. Anne’s affection is undoubtedly focused more on her father, whom she regards as wise and fair, and who has taken the role of home tutor while in hiding. Because possessions are so hard to replace, they are more treasured. Auguste van Pels is distraught when her husband gives her precious fur coat to Miep to sell for food. Anne writes an entire chapter in her diary entitled ‘Ode to my Fountain Pen’ after the pen she loves to use, a gift from her grandmother for her ninth birthday, has accidentally been thrown on the fire and destroyed.

  Anne created fictional stories too, letting her vivid imagination fly out of the sealed and blacked out windows of her enforced imprisonment. Poignantly, in some of these stories she imagines being 16, the age she almost reached in real life but didn’t, and in some she becomes Anne the adult, visiting Hollywood for an acting audition or revising her views on the boringness of old people when she engages in conversation with an elderly couple during a train journey from Amsterdam to the town of Bussum. Her stories often contain an indication of her growing ethical beliefs, despite her own terrible circumstances, such as the story ‘Give!’ which is an entreaty for us to help others less fortunate. In it she writes:

  Everyone is born equal, we will all die and shed our earthly glory. Riches, power and fame last for but a few short years. Why do we cling so desperately to these fleeting things? Why can’t people who have more than enough for their own needs give the rest to their fellow human beings? Why should anyone have to have such a hard life for those few short years on earth?

  There is so much yearning for the previous life that the chimes of the nearby Westerkerk church clock and the snatched glimpses of the chestnut tree at the back of the building give Anne some degree of comfort. This young girl, whose previous interests revolved around boys, movie stars and clothes, writes of her longing to ‘ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free’. She re-evaluates her attitude to nature, something that once would not have interested or captivated her, and she even finds herself staying awake very late one night just to get a good look at the moon.

  Soon, there is another type of longing. After Anne has turned 14 in 1943, she is more aware of the changes that are occurring in her body. Her sexuality is being stirred and Peter van Pels becomes the object of a typical adolescent obsession. Together they climb the wooden steps up to the dusty and unfurnished attic in the eaves of the old building, spending time alone together, discussing everything from religion and why the Jews have been so unfairly persecuted, to the inner workings of the female sexual organs.

  She writes of her yearning for Peter, ‘I long for him to kiss me but that kiss is taking its own sweet time’. In the intimacy of the attic, they do eventually share sweet kisses and embraces. By the late spring of 1944, Anne has tired of spending time with Peter and replaces her ardour with, as she describes to Margot, ‘sisterly affection’. She finds Peter easy-going, but feels he has been hiding his inner-self too much from her. Meanwhile, Anne has meanwhile become busy with another project.

  On 28 March, Gerrit Bolkestein, the Dutch Education Minister who was in exile in London, clandestinely broadcasts to the Dutch people that after the war he plans to make a collection of diaries and letters written during the German occupation of their country. Anne is fired up. How interesting it would be if she were to publish a novel about the ‘Secret Annexe’. From then on she is writing feverishly, adding new entries to her diary while simultaneously editing the previous twenty-two months of writing, with her eye fixed on its publication.

  Those who have read early versions of Anne’s diary or seen productions of the 1955 play about her story may not be familiar with the names I have used of the other adults in hiding, or of their helpers. In her revised version of her diary entries after she began editing them in April 1944, Anne decided to give the main characters aliases, so Hermann and Auguste van Pels became Mr and Mrs van Daan, Fritz Pfeffer became the unfortunately-named Albert Dussel (‘Dussel’ being German for idiot) and Jan Gies became Henk van Santen. Victor Kugler and Jo Kleiman morphed into Mr Kraler and Mr Koophuis; Bep Voskuijl became Elli Vossen. On the publication of the diary in 1947, Otto Frank followed Anne’s wish to retain the real names of her immediate family. Writing for possible publication becomes her focus, and on 5 April, she describes how she feels about the gift of writing:

  I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. 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! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

  The craft of writing was in fact in the young girl’s genes. On her father’s side, she had come from a family of inveterate writers. Thousands of letters, stories and poems, dating back through several generations of Otto Frank’s family, had been discovered in the attic of Otto’s mother’s house in Basel and lovingly curated into an archive by Gerti Elias, the wife of Anne’s cousin Buddy. Many of these formed the basis of the Frank family saga published in 2011, entitled Treasures from the Attic.

  On 11 April 1944, Anne lays out a plan for her future life, tempered by the knowledge of the fragility of her survival:

  I’m becoming more and more independent of my parents. Young as I am, I face life with more courage and have a better and truer sense of justice than Mother. I know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions, a religion and love. If only I can be myself, I’ll be satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage! If God lets me live, I’ll achieve more than Mother ever did, I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind! I now know that courage and happiness are needed first!

  After nearly two years in the hiding place, Anne’s vulnerability spills over into despair. At the end of May she writes:

  I’ve asked myself again and again whether it wouldn’t have been better if we hadn’t gone into hiding, if we were dead now and didn’t have to go through this misery, especially so that the others could be spared the burden. But we all shrink from this thought. We still love life, we haven’t yet forgotten the voice of nature, and we keep hoping, hoping for . . . everything. Let something happen soon, even an air raid. Nothing can be more crushing than this anxiety. Let the end come, however cruel; at least then we’ll know whether we are to be the victors or the vanquished.

  The poor food supplies they have to get by on also become a focus of Anne’s descriptive writing. Potatoes are eaten at every meal, including breakfast, and all foodstuffs, even bread, consist of brown beans. The high point of the week is one slice of liver sausage and a scrape of jam on a slice of unbuttered bread. They can’t use a flushing toilet during the day in case it is heard by the workers below, talk is in whispers and coughs and sneezes have to be suppressed.

  And so the tedium of their cramped existence continues. That is until Tuesday, 6 June 1944. D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy. Anne writes, ‘This is THE day. The invasion has begun!’ Her excitement is palpable, ‘It fills us with fresh courage a
nd makes us strong again. We’ll need to be brave to endure the many fears and hardships and the suffering yet to come. It’s now a matter of remaining calm and steadfast, of gritting our teeth and keeping a stiff upper lip!’ At the end of this diary entry, the girl who was often in trouble with her teacher and disdainful of lessons, is happily speculating that she might be able to return to school by that autumn.

  Otto Frank started to plot the Allied advance across northern Europe by sticking pins into a small map he attached to the wall. Visitors to the hiding place can still see it displayed in the same place, but now protected under glass from millions of passing hands. Hopes were at long last building that the long months of hiding would soon be at an end. Anne was in turmoil, there was hope, but would their liberators reach Amsterdam in time? As food and necessary items were becoming scarcer in the Netherlands after more than four years of occupation, Dutch collaborators were betraying Jews for a few guilders.

  On 15 July Anne sat and poured out her heart to her paper friend Kitty in one of her longest diary entries, seesawing between her hope for the future and fear of the reality. ‘It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical.’ But by the end of the entry hope has prevailed. She is determined to hold on to her ideals, believing that perhaps one day she will be able to realize them.

  On the warm and bright summer morning of 4 August 1944, the Frank family, the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer were arrested. A car pulled up outside the front door of 263 Prinsengracht and two officers, Karl Joseph Silberbauer, an Austrian Nazi, along with a Dutch policeman, calmly entered the building. In an instant they had appeared in the office where Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl were working. Pointing a pistol towards them, the officers signalled towards the bookcase, which, with a heavy heart, Miep pulled open. The two men climbed the stairs towards the eight people above who were unknowingly going about another day in hiding. As they gathered their captives together at gunpoint, the officers spotted Otto Frank’s briefcase and emptied its contents to use it for gathering up any perceived valuables. Anne looked on in shock as her diary, so meticulously edited for its possible publication, lay discarded on the wooden floor.