ONE PROBLEM CONFRONTING EVERY WRITER OF FICTION or nonfiction is the question of background. How much must a reader know in order to make sense of what the author is trying to convey? In a diary entry dated June 20, 1942, but written almost two years afterward, Anne acknowledges the necessity of giving Kitty, her invented confidante, enough information to enable her to follow the narrative. “I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do…but no one will grasp what I’m talking about if I begin my letters to Kitty just out of the blue, so I’ll start by sketching in brief the story of my life.”
We’ll return to this entry later, but, in passing, let’s note the phrase: “no one will grasp what I’m talking about if I begin my letters to Kitty just out of the blue.” Not only does it suggest that this is something other than a girl confiding in her diary, but it contradicts what Anne says in the same entry: “I don’t intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the proud name of ‘diary,’ to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably no one cares.”
The sketch that ensues, presumably intended for that “real friend,” and in truth for a wider audience, could hardly be more economical or concise. Anne begins by explaining that her father was thirty-six when he married her mother, who was twenty-five, that Anne’s sister, Margot, was born in 1926 in Frankfurt am Main, and that Anne herself—Annelies Marie Frank—was born three years later, on June 12, 1929.
In May 1944, Anne asks Kitty if she has ever really told her anything about her family and proceeds to flesh out her earlier outline. She explains that her father was born in Frankfurt am Main, where her grandfather Michael Frank owned a bank. As a boy, Otto attended dances, and there were parties every week. Surrounded by beautiful girls, he enjoyed waltzing and lavish dinners. After her grandfather’s death, much of the money was lost; war and inflation took what was left. Her mother wasn’t quite so rich, Anne informs Kitty, but still there was plenty of money, and Edith often delighted her daughters with stories about engagement parties attended by 250 guests.
Anne’s uncharacteristic longing for her parents’ lost wealth and their privileged childhoods has been precipitated by the deterioration of living conditions in the annex. Since the arrest of Miep’s trusted black-market coupon dealer, the hidden Jews have either starved or been forced to eat spoiled food. In case their diet isn’t demoralizing enough, Miep—meaning well, as always—has tried to cheer them up with a story about an engagement party she attended. At the celebration, her hosts served vegetable soup with meatballs, cheese, rolls, roast beef, cakes, and wine; this enviable menu inspired, in the hungry young writer, an uncharacteristic joke at the expense of her beloved helpers (“Miep had ten drinks and smoked 3 cigarettes; can that be the woman who calls herself a teetotaler? If Miep had all those, I wonder how many her spouse managed to knock back?”) that Otto cut from the published diary.
In any case, Miep’s description led Anne to compare the delights outside the annex with the privations inside it, and the present with the past. “Miep made our mouths water telling us about the food they had…. We, who get nothing but two spoonfuls of porridge for our breakfast and whose tummies were so empty that they were positively rattling, we, who get nothing but half-cooked spinach (to preserve the vitamins!) and rotten potatoes day after day, we, who get nothing but lettuce, cooked or raw, spinach and yet again spinach in our hollow stomachs. Perhaps we may yet grow to be as strong as Popeye, although I don’t see much sign of it at present!
“If Miep had taken us to the party we shouldn’t have left any rolls for the other guests. If we had been at the party we should undoubtedly have snatched up the whole lot and left not even the furniture in place…. And these are the granddaughters of a millionaire. The world is a queer place!”
THOUGH not quite the millionaire his granddaughter imagined, Michael Frank was the founder of the Bank Michael Frank, based in Frankfurt, where Otto grew up in a close-knit, assimilated German-Jewish community, surrounded by art and good furniture. Servants. Parties every week.
After one semester at Heidelberg, Otto left the university and traveled to New York with a school friend, Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy’s department store. Otto worked at the store until, in 1909, he was called back to Germany to deal with the family finances in the aftermath of his father’s sudden death. Like his brothers Herbert and Robert, Otto served in the German army during World War I. As part of a range-finding unit, Otto fought with an infantry corps composed largely of surveyors and mathematicians. By the time the war ended, he had been promoted to lieutenant, and in 1925 he married Edith Hollander, whose father ran a successful business dealing in scrap iron.
Otto spent his early adulthood attempting to save the family bank as it gradually went under, weakened by political and personal crises: the war, hyperinflation, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, a scandal in which Otto’s brother Herbert was accused of illegal dealings in foreign securities, and the end of Weimar democracy.
Though he has been charged with an ostrichlike refusal to understand the implications of the rise of National Socialism and to foresee the threat it would pose to his livelihood and his family, in fact Otto had a talent for apprising his situation and for operating under stress. Many years later, the producer and playwrights who brought Anne’s diary to Broadway remarked that Otto was not only the loving, grieving father of a murdered girl, but a gifted businessman who grasped the practical and financial ramifications of her diary’s success.
Having opened and then liquidated a branch of the Michael Frank bank in Amsterdam, in the 1920s, Otto knew and liked the Dutch capital. He had made contacts there who would prove useful when, in 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor and the Nazis’ increasingly vicious anti-Jewish laws convinced him that the wisest option was to leave Germany and move his wife and daughters to the deceptive safety of Holland.
Anne concludes the passage about the engagement party that Miep describes and about the Frank family’s fall from grace: “Daddy was therefore extremely well brought up and he laughed very much yesterday, when, for the first time in his fifty-five years, he scraped out the frying pan at the table.”
THE ENTRY dated June 20, 1942, continues: “…as we are Jewish, we emigrated to Holland in 1933…” Like any skilled writer wisely determined to omit unnecessary details, Anne brings us directly to the emigration that became urgent as we are Jewish.
In 1933, around the time that Nazi storm troopers initiated a boycott of German-Jewish businesses, the Franks bid good-bye to Frankfurt. Otto shut down the Michael Frank bank, left Edith and the girls with his mother-in-law in Aachen, and went ahead to Amsterdam. There, with the help of his brother-in-law, Erich Elias, who had emigrated to Basel and was employed by the Swiss branch of a German company selling jelling agents for jams and preserves, Otto established a branch of the Opekta pectin supplier, with a limited marketing range restricted to private customers. A few years later, Otto formed an additional company, Pectacon, trading in seasonings and spices. He had been raised to run a bank, but business was business, and he could adapt. He could protect and support his family, which, for Otto, was always the highest priority.
A short time later, Edith—who had made several trips to help Otto find new quarters—rejoined her husband. In December, Margot was reunited with her parents in Amsterdam. In February 1934, the Franks decided that Anne should appear as the surprise birthday present for her older sister; the family story was that little Anne was plunked on the table as a gift. So she joined the rest of her family in their home at 37 Merwedeplein, in a newly developed South Amsterdam district, the River Quarter, which had become a magnet for German-Jewish refugees.
The neighborhood, and the Frank home, became the center of a community. The parents of Anne’s playmates visited on weekends and holidays. On Purim, in either 1938 or 1939, as reports of the Nazi anti-Jewish violence in Germany were growing more disturbing, the father of one of Anne’s friends startled and amu
sed the other parents by dressing up as Hitler and standing at full attention when they came out to see who had rung the doorbell.
Already a reader, Anne was enrolled in the progressive Montessori kindergarten, a short walk from the Franks’ new apartment. Soon, far more rapidly than her mother, she learned to function in a new language.
A demanding and often sickly baby, Anne grew into a challenging child—mercurial, moody, humorous, alternately outgoing and shy. A natural performer, she liked to pop her elbow out of its socket to get her friends’ attention. She was bossy, theatrical, and outspoken. She was only four when she and her beloved grandmother Oma Hollander boarded a crowded Aachen streetcar, and Anne demanded, “Won’t someone offer a seat to this old lady?”
In Amsterdam, she grew close to Hanneli Goslar, the “Lies” about whom Anne would later have the waking nightmare she describes in the diary. (“I saw her in front of me, clothed in rags, her face thin and worn.”) A German refugee who had arrived in Holland around the same time as Anne, Hanneli met Anne in a grocery store; their mothers were glad to find someone with whom they could speak German. The Franks called on Hanneli Goslar’s parents every Friday evening, and the two families celebrated Passover together. Eventually, Hanneli’s mother, Ruth, would say about Anne, “God knows everything, but Anne knows everything better.”
At the Montessori kindergarten, the prevailing theory was that adults should encourage children to flourish and grow and have a voice in deciding what they wished to do—and what sort of person they wanted to become. Otto and Edith Frank agreed; later, in the annex, the Van Pelses would often criticize the Franks for their “modern” ideas about childrearing.
By nature more lenient than his wife, Otto was, perhaps consequently, more popular, not only with his daughters but also with the girls’ friends. Good looking, tall, patient, and courtly, Otto was the kind of father who taught the neighborhood children how to ride their bikes. How one pities the conventional, anxious Edith Frank, not confident, stiff, and far outmatched by her firecracker of a daughter, whom her husband adored.
The day after she and Anne met in the grocery, Hanneli began at the Montessori kindergarten, where, not knowing the language or any of the other children, she was hugely relieved to see Anne, from the back, playing music with bells. Anne turned, saw Hanneli, ran over to her, and threw her arms around her. “From then on we were friends.” Anne’s friendships, like those of many girls her age, had the intensity of love affairs, with all the concomitant jealousies, quarrels, separations, and reconciliations. Her high spirits and affectionate, impulsive generosity put her at the center of a tight clique that included Hanneli Goslar and Susanne Lederman. Their exclusive little trio was known, in their neighborhood, as Anne, Hanne, and Sanne.
Eva Geiringer-Schloss, Anne’s near neighbor on Merwedeplein, arrived from Vienna, via Brussels, in 1940. After the war, her mother, Fritzi, would marry the widowed Otto Frank. In her memoir, Eva’s Story, Anne’s former classmate describes the “inseparable” Anne-Hanne-Sanne troika as being more sophisticated, more like teenagers, than the other girls, whom the chosen three—giggling about boys and fashion and film magazines—viewed with barely concealed disdain. They were famously boy crazy, especially Anne. One friend remembered Anne assuming that every boy wanted to be her boyfriend. Hanneli Goslar remarked that Anne was “always fussing” with her long hair. “Her hair kept her busy all the time.”
Eva’s memories of the enviably stylish Anne Frank include this revealing story:
Once, when Mutti had taken me to the local dressmaker to have a coat altered, we were sitting waiting our turn and heard the dressmaker talking to her customer inside the fitting room. The customer was very determined to have things just right.
“It would look better with larger shoulder pads,” we could hear her saying in an authoritative tone of voice, “and the hemline should be just a little higher, don’t you think?”
We then heard the dressmaker agreeing with her and I sat there wishing I was allowed to choose exactly what I wanted to wear. I was flabbergasted when the curtains were drawn back and there was Anne, all alone, making decisions about her own dress. It was peach-coloured with a green trim.
She smiled at me. “Do you like it?” she said, twirling around.
Interviewed by Ernst Schnabel, a novelist and dramatist who served in the German navy during World War II and who wrote the 1958 book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, the mother of Anne’s friend Jopie van der Waal (Schnabel employed the pseudonym used in Anne’s diary for Jacqueline van Maarsen) also remembered making dresses for Anne. But what she mostly recalled is Anne’s forceful personality, her desire to be a writer, and her precocious sense of self. The phrase, “She knew who she was,” recurs, like a refrain, throughout the conversation, during which Mme. Van der Waal described the ceremony and the theater with which Anne arrived to spend the weekend:
“When Anne came to stay with us, she always brought a suitcase. A suitcase, mind you, when it wasn’t a stone’s throw between us. The suitcase was empty of course, but Anne insisted on it, because only with the suitcase did she feel as if she were really traveling.”
A FLICKER of a home movie. June 22, 1941. The whole thing lasts ten seconds.
The bicycles slipping by provide the only indication that we are in Holland. The brick Merwedeplein apartment block looks more like married students’ housing on an American state university campus than the quaint center-city canal houses we associate with Amsterdam.
The camera waits outside a door, peering up a stairwell. In search of something to focus on, it pans up the side of a building. In the open windows are neighborhood residents, girls and young women, their elbows propped on the sills, waiting. The women at the windows alter the look of the street, so the scene begins to look more like a village in southern Europe.
The newlywed couple appears, arm in arm, the groom in a top hat, cane, and formal wear, the bride in a flattering pale suit, a jaunty white fedora, and gloves; she carries a bouquet. They walk down the stairs and pause like movie stars obliging the paparazzi. Passersby lean against their bicycles, staring.
Suddenly, the camera zooms toward the sky and finds Anne Frank, watching from her window. She turns and speaks to someone inside the apartment. She looks back at the couple, then away. The camera appears to lose interest. It glances at a few more spectators, then returns to the Amsterdam street.
On the Web site for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you can watch those few seconds of Anne on film, in blurred and grainy close-up. Anne’s body language is quick, electric. A breeze, or maybe the motion of her body, lifts her hair as she turns, and her eyes smudge into dark ovals as she gazes down at the bridal couple.
As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank, as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face, the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. It is always shockingly short and always the same, and yet you are never entirely sure what you have, or haven’t, seen. It’s less like watching a film clip than like having one of those dreams in which you see a long-lost loved one or friend. In the dream, the person isn’t really dead. You must have been mistaken. You wake up, and it takes a few moments to understand why the dream was so cruelly deceptive.
The film was shot by a friend of the groom, who still had the footage when Ernst Schnabel interviewed him for Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage. The groom, identified only as Dr. K., showed it on a screen with a home-movie projector. Dr. K. explained that he didn’t know Anne Frank, and that his wife, the bride in the film, “knew her only from Anne’s girlhood days on Merwedeplein, simply as one knows the children of neighbors, from seeing them on the street and greeting them in the early morning. The friend who had filmed their wedding also did not know Anne, and the doctor guesses that there was a small strip of film left on the reel, not enough to do anything with, and so his friend had simply taken a shot into the blue. He had certainly never imagined that out of the blue he woul
d catch in his lens ten seconds of history.”
FROM the June 20, 1942, entry:
The rest of our family who were left in Germany felt the full impact of Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws, so life was filled with anxiety. In 1938 after the pogroms, my two uncles (my mother’s brothers) escaped to North America. My old grandmother came to us, she was then seventy-three. After May 1940 the good times rapidly fled: first the war, then the capitulation, followed by the German invasion, which is when the sufferings of us Jews really began.
Otto Frank was smart enough to leave Germany a full five years before the orgy of broken glass, intimidation, and gang violence that would become known as Kristallnacht. And he reached Holland before the Dutch had had time to become alarmed by the growing number of Jewish refugees streaming across the German border.
By 1939, when Edith’s mother finally left Germany and came to live with the Franks, the influx of Jews was so heavy that the Dutch government decided to build a resettlement station in the center of the country, a site to which the queen, Wilhelmina, objected because it was too near her estate. The proposed camp, which was to be financed by Jewish organizations, was relocated to Westerbork, in the raw, cold, sandy, fly-infested northeast. Later, as simply as reversing the hinges on a door, the pestilential camp was turned into a detention center for Jews being shipped out of the country by the Nazis. Tens of thousands, including the Franks and Van Pelses, were deported from Westerbork to their deaths in the east.
The Dutch remained so convinced that their neutrality would be respected that when the German invasion began, on May 10, 1940, even savvy Dutch journalists failed to pay attention to the evidence crashing around their ears. “All the correspondents report strange noises that have been audible along the border since nightfall. The heavy droning of motors, explosions, and other noises harder to identify. Also angry barking, apparently from startled farm dogs, and the lowing of restless cattle.”
Anne Frank Page 3