The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  We shall go on till the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and islands. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be …

  Or days later, as the Battle of Britain is about to begin:

  Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

  But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

  Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

  It seems to me that Churchill, after all he did for humanity, really ought to have received a portrait he liked for his 80th birthday. Maybe a gift wasn’t the right vehicle for Sutherland to present his idea of the ‘real’ Churchill. That’s why I like these sketches. I feel like the sparkle of possibility for a great portrait is in them.

  How lucky the sketches survive as a memory of a controversial moment in twentieth-century portraiture. Maybe if Churchill’s wife had come across them, she would have burnt them too, but I don’t think she would. I think she and her husband would probably have liked them.

  [Sutherland painting Churchill]

  As an 80th birthday gift to the prime minister, Winston Churchill, members of the House of Lords and House of Commons commissioned Graham Sutherland, an artist aligned with Surrealism, to paint Churchills portrait.

  [Churchill’s birthday gift]

  He was presented with the portrait on his birthday, 30 November 1954, in Parliament.

  [Preparatory sketch]

  There is a sense of melancholy, a trace of the ‘black dog’ Churchill said followed him around, right there, in the lines of the chalk.

  [Fourth sketch]

  Legs astride, feet planted on the ground, this is the classic Bulldog.

  [A full study of a hand in pencil and ink]

  The lines across the page were useful to Sutherland later when he scaled the study up in size.

  ANNE FRANK WROTE THIS POEM for her friend Juultje Ketellapper in a friendship book that lives in the archives of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

  Erika Prins, who is a historian working in the Collections Department of the Anne Frank House museum, lifted the book out of its storage box and laid it on a pillow.

  It is now rather scuffed but, once, the cover was of clean cream linen. It has green leather edging and a buckle to fasten it closed. On the front in red is the word ‘Poësie’.

  Poësiealbums were a tradition in Holland among schoolgirls well before the days of email and Facebook. Every girl had one. You would buy a book and hand it around to your parents, teacher and your friends, and each person would write a verse inside. Maybe you have a book like this too? I know I do: an autograph book from Disney World filled with poems and messages from my friends when we left primary school aged 11.

  Anne Frank and Juultje were just like every other schoolgirl. They were in a class together at the Montessori school in Amsterdam in 1939 and went to each other’s birthday parties. In a photograph of Anne at her tenth birthday party, on 12 June 1939, you can see Juultje and another friend of Anne’s, Kitty Egyedi. In the same month, Kitty gave Juultje the album I saw in the archives. It was a present for her 11th birthday.

  On the first page, Juultje wrote;

  I was given this album by my friend Kitty Egyedi on my birthday and I hope I’ll have happy memories of everyone who writes in it. Amsterdam 26 June 1939.

  She handed it to Kitty, and then to Anne. Anne wrote on pages three and four of the book. On the right hand page she wrote her poem; on the left hand side, she glued in a photograph of herself; and, in each corner of the left-hand page, she wrote the words ‘For-get-me-not.’

  I could imagine Anne sticking in that photograph of herself – that same fun, expressive face, now so famous – then carefully writing her words into her friend’s book. Her writing was very neat.

  Erika still has two of her own albums from school. She explained that girls would take a lot of care when writing in each other’s books – ‘We used to draw pencil lines, then write our poem, then rub the pencil out so our writing was in straight lines.’

  Anne Frank’s poem was written when Jews were (more or less) treated like other citizens in Amsterdam. Anne Frank’s family was Jewish and had left Germany to escape persecution. They had grown to love their new country. Anne had lots of friends and, as her determined poem shows, she was full of optimism, believing that life was going to offer her adventures.

  The words are written in Dutch, so Erika read the words aloud to me in translation. ‘Remember, every cloud has a silver lining.’ Knowing Anne’s fate, as we do now, the words are desperately sad. She never had a chance to blossom in life. She died, of typhus, starving and alone, three months before her 16th birthday, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

  Her story is world famous because of her diary, which is filled with closely observed detail about her life in hiding, and with self-reflection. It is a must-read. She pours her heart on to the pages, describing how she feels during those two years. Anne Frank often felt misunderstood by her mother, she adored her father (who she called Pim) and she longed to feel closer to her sister, Margot. She was irritated by the German dentist whom she barely knew and with whom she had to share a room. In her diary, she names him Dussel, which translates as ‘numbskull’. That tells you what she thought of him.

  Slowly, she begins to fall in love with the son of the family the Frank family shares their annexe with: Peter van Daan. She describes in intimate detail what went on day to day among the eight residents of this secret annexe until they were tragically betrayed, discovered by the Nazis and taken to concentration camps.

  Of the eight people who hid in the secret annexe only Otto, Anne’s father, survived the camps. When he made it back to Amsterdam he was given his daughter’s diary papers by Miep Gies, one of the small group of employees and friends who had helped, fed and kept the Frank family and their fellow hideaways undiscovered for so long.

  She had rescued the diary, and some stories Anne had written, from the secret annexe, hoping to return them to Anne after the war. She gave everything to Otto Frank, with the words, ‘Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.’

  Otto knew about the diary: Anne had kept it in his briefcase at night. He had promised her he would never read it, and he never had. It took him a great deal of courage to do so, knowing she was no longer alive. He had to read it in short bursts, because the memories were so painful.

  Although he recognized a lot of the scenes she described, and even some of the lines she wrote – as she had sometimes read bits of her diary aloud to everyone in the annexe – her father was surprised by the depth of emotion she described. He hadn’t known how she really felt, or how self-critical she was.

  In talking about her diary, he said, ‘My conclusion, as I had been on very, very good terms with Anne, is that most parents don’t really know their children.’

  He did know one thing for sure, though – that she would have wanted her diary to be published. Within its pages, she wrote: ‘You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to be a journalist and, later on, a famous writer. In any case, after the war, I’d like to publish a book called The Secret Annexe.’

  He hesitated to publish his daughter’s diary, but he finally decided to fulfil her wish.

  Before long, the diary was a sensation. Across the world, people got to know Anne Frank intimately through her own words, and everyone was moved by the story she told. A Broadway play based on her diary opened in 1955, and was shown in Germany the following year. A reviewer wrote, ‘In Berlin, after the final curtain, the audience sat in stunned silence. There
was no applause. Only the welling sound of deep sobs broke the absolute stillness. Then, still not speaking and seeming not to look at each other, the Berliners filed out of the theatre.’

  Otto Frank wanted Anne’s diary to be a message to humanity: ‘I hope Anne’s book will have an effect on the rest of your life so that, insofar as it is possible in your own circumstances, you will work for unity and peace.’ This was also his motivation for making the secret annexe into a museum.

  At the museum’s opening ceremony, he could not finish his speech: ‘I ask forgiveness because I can no longer speak of the events that took place here during the war. It’s too hard for me. I can’t.’ He hoped that the house would be ‘an earnest warning from the past and a mission of hope for the future’.

  Today, over a million people a year visit the Anne Frank House. I was very moved when I went there and walked through the secret annexe. The events of 70 years ago seem so immediate. Anne’s words are written on the walls of the rooms; her feelings pervade the space. The pictures she pinned on her bedroom wall are still there: beautiful brunette film stars, sweet blonde girls and reproductions of paintings. Next door, in her parents’ room, are the pencil lines they made to mark how tall Anne and Margot were at various ages. I was surprised by how high the top lines were drawn. I hadn’t imagined Anne as a tall teenager, but of course, six years had passed since she wrote in the friendship book kept in storage.

  Anne died, tragically, a month before the Allies liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp. Margot had already died, and Anne had no idea whether their parents were still alive.

  Hanneli Goslar – a schoolfriend of Anne who is also in that tenth-birthday photograph and also wrote a verse in the album in the archives was one of the last of Anne’s friends to see her, in the camp. Hanneli said after the war, ‘I have always thought that if Anne had known that her father was still alive, she would have found the strength to go on living.’

  Anne Frank’s story is one of the best-known stories of anyone who lived through the Second World War. She has become a symbol for the lost Jewish children of her generation. But she is only one of over a million children who, like her, were wrenched from happy childhoods, into hiding, into exile, or to their death.

  I wondered what had become of her dear schoolfriend Juultje Ketellapper, the owner of the poesiealbum. Erika told me. It was not a happy tale.

  While Anne’s family went into hiding, Juultje’s family, also Jewish, went on living in Amsterdam, hoping for the best. Their lives, lived out in the open, were very restricted and unsafe. As Jews, they were banned from riding bicycles, taking the tram, driving a car. They had to wear a yellow star, which of course Juultje didn’t like at all – neither had Anne before she went into hiding. People were disappearing all the time; taken to concentration camps.

  Juultje hadn’t a clue that her friend was living above Otto Frank’s office by the canal in secret. She believed the Franks had escaped to Switzerland. A year after Anne Frank went into hiding, a friend of Juultje’s family, a girl named Lineke van der Valk, was riding her bike one Sunday morning and headed out of Amsterdam. She came to a roadblock and saw there was about to be a raid on Jewish homes. She quickly cycled back to warn her friends. Juultje gave Lineke her poësiealbum for safekeeping. This is how the book survived when Juultje did not. She and her family were taken from their home.

  Juultje and Anne’s Montessori schoolteacher saw the raid happen, as did a neighbour and friend, Lilian van Delft. Lilian had often shopped for the Ketellapper family, as Jews were not allowed into shops, and she watched in horror as her neighbour, whom she said she loved for her honesty and openness, was taken away, wearing a backpack, a warm wind jacket, a skirt and a pair of good shoes: clothes Lillian had bought for her. Nobody could do a thing to help.

  Three weeks later, Juultje was murdered; gassed in Sobibor in occupied Poland with her father, mother and sister. Many of her family members from her mother’s and her father’s side were also killed.

  Years after the war was over, in the 1950s, Lineke van der Valk met Kitty Egyedi (also Jewish), who had survived the war, and returned the poësiealbum to her. Kitty remembered giving it to Juultje at her birthday party, before the war began and, years later, she gave it to the Anne Frank House.

  When Erika showed it to me, gently resting it on a pillow, I felt incredibly moved. I was looking at a true hidden treasure: a memory of a happy time when Anne Frank was a spirited girl writing a poem to her friend. I thought back to that photo of Anne’s tenth birthday. Then, Anne, Juultje, Kitty and their friends were normal, gorgeous girls at the beginning of their lives, all with a future to look forward to.

  Anne would have had her own poësiealbum just like it, filled with messages from her friends, but, unlike her diary, it wasn’t saved.

  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!

  Anne Frank, 5 April 1944

  [Friendship book]

  Poësiealbums were a tradition in Holland. This one, in the archives of the Anne Frank House, belonged to Juultje, a friend of Anne Frank. On page three of the book Anne glued in a photograph of herself, and in the corners wrote ‘For-get-me-not’. On page four she wrote her poem.

  [Anne Frank’s tenth birthday]

  From left to right: Lucie van Dijk, Anne, Sanne Ledermann, Hanneli Goslar, Juultje Ketellapper, Kitty Egyedi, Mary Bos, Letje Swillens, Martha van den Berg.

  [Anne Frank’s bedroom]

  The pictures Anne pinned on her bedroom walls are still there.

  [Entrance to the secret annexe]

  The steps that led up to the secret annexe were hidden behind a moveable bookcase.

  AS HIS NAME SUGGESTS, FROM the moment Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) was born, his family expected him to become a rabbi, but he followed his teacher to Berlin, which was then under the enlightened rule of Frederick II. He read the works of writers of the Enlightenment and turned all he learnt towards his religion, urging his fellow Jews to leave behind superstition and engage with modern culture. He translated the Bible into German and argued that the religious truths of Judaism were the same as the fundamental truths accessible to anyone, as demonstrated by philosophy. He believed that the soul is immortal and that God exists; and he championed religious tolerance.

  In the collections of the Jewish Museum in Berlin is a treasure that belonged to him and his wife, Fromet Guggenheim. It is a delicate, white, silk Torah Ark curtain embroidered with flowers, two lions and decorative motifs. He presented it to a Berlin synagogue in 1774 or 1775. It was a very personal gift, for it was made from his wife’s wedding dress and may have been given to the museum to celebrate the birth of their daughter, Henriette.

  For many years, during the two most important Jewish festivals of the year – the New Year Festival and the Day of Atonement – the Berlin synagogue hung it in front of their Torah cabinet containing the Torah scrolls. The scrolls in any synagogue are handwritten copies of the Torah, the Jewish sacred scriptures, made up of the Five Books of Moses. They are stored in the Torah Ark, built along the wall that faces Jerusalem, and are usually veiled with a decorative curtain, like this delicate silk that was once a wedding dress.

  Several years after Moses Mendelssohn’s death, Fromet went home to Hamburg and took her transformed wedding dress with her. She gave it to a synagogue in Altona, where it remained hanging for nearly 150 years.

  Then troubles began for the Jewish people. From 1938, they were no longer safe in Germany and elsewhere, and thousands upon thousands of Jewish people fled from Germany. One refugee took the precious silk with them to Antwerp, where it was used in a makeshift prayer room set up by refugees. In the evenings, the community warden, Leo Rothschild, kept it in his home. In May 1940, the Nazi Party occupied Belgium, and Leo’s wife, Betty, gave the precious silk to a family friend, who hid it in a wash basket filled with dirty clothes. Betty and her t
wo sons were murdered in Auschwitz; Leo and their son, Josep, survived. The Torah Ark curtain also made it through the war.

  It was found in terrible condition, in New York. It was in a genizah’, a storage place where Jewish religious items are put when they are no longer in a good enough condition to be used in rituals. The Jewish Museum in Berlin bought it and decided to conserve it.

  The museum is quite new – it opened on 9 September 2001. For a few years before they opened they began buying interesting treasures, the Torah Ark curtain was bought in 1997. When the museum first opened, the curtain was on display. However, the opening celebrations were muted because of 11 September. The curtain did not stay on display for long – just six months – then it was put away, in a secret location in the museum, hidden in complete darkness. The museum would love to display the Torah Ark curtain, made from the dress of the bride of one of the most important figures in Jewish history, but its job is to preserve its treasures. The quality of the silk and the colours of the thread would degrade and fade in daylight.

  Michal Friedlander, curator at the Jewish Museum, took me to see it. We went into a room filled with grey cabinets, and she pulled open a large, grey drawer. As the drawer rolled open, more and more of the soft silk fabric was revealed. The most striking figures on it are the two lions. They symbolize Judah, one of Israel’s 12 tribes. They have their paws up on a crown, the Keter Torah, or Torah crown. Around the lions is an arch with two columns adorned with wreaths of flowers, and across the top I could see several small motifs, which Michal told me symbolize the Temple in Jerusalem. An inscription was sewn on to the curtain saying that it was a gift from the couple and asking for their protection.