I told him I was ten when I first read Het Achterhuis. I joined the Anne Frank fan club. It cost fifty cents to join and the money went to the upkeep of the Secret Annex. They would send photographs of Anne and some of the others she shared the annex with, Anne in Germany at various ages when there was as yet no need to move to Holland or for hiding out, Anne in a beach chair with a book on her lap, Anne wearing what looked like a new pair of glasses, Anne posing on a beach somewhere with her sister, Margot. Anne before the world went stark raving mad. There were quizzes about her life and her diary, and essay-writing contests about what Anne Frank meant to you or to the world. For a while, I thought of her as a fictional character like Anne of Green Gables. Anne of the Secret Annex. Often, I wished I was her.
Then I read survivors’ accounts of her time at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and soon I had pictures in my mind of her and Margot shorn of all their hair, unclothed, barefoot, peering through a barbed-wire fence as if they had never seen a camera before and assumed it to have some sinister purpose.
Nothing really bad happened in Het Achterhuis, so I tried to concentrate on that. But images of Bergen-Belsen kept interfering. I knew she was dead but I couldn’t stand to be reminded of it by my sisters, who did it because they grew so tired of hearing me talk about her that they began calling me the Anne Frank Freak, a nickname that caught on at school.
I often thought of her father, travelling by train from Auschwitz to Amsterdam in 1945, after the war ended. He found out on the train that his wife had died in Auschwitz, but he hoped to be told in Amsterdam that Anne and Margot had survived Bergen-Belsen.
My mother made me promise not to mention Het Achterhuis to my father and to keep the book hidden from him lest it remind him of the wartime suffering he endured and witnessed in Amsterdam, and of the Jewish girls of his daughters’ ages who, like Anne Frank, were mass murdered in the Holocaust. It was a book he couldn’t stand the sight of, she said, because it made him imagine what being helpless to save his own daughters from the Nazis, what being separated from them forever upon arrival at a concentration camp, would have been like. He knew Jewish fathers who had survived the camps but whose children had not—men like Otto Frank, who were heartbroken, haunted by guilt, conscience-stricken—fathers whose sons and daughters were failed by the Resistance, of which, she reminded me, my father was a member. That was how he thought of it, she said: he and his comrades had failed them. For no matter how many you saved, it was the ones you didn’t save that you remembered and imagined. She said he was too modest and too haunted by the horrors of the war to talk about it or stand to be publicly acknowledged for his heroism.
I didn’t keep my promise to my mother to be discreet with Het Achterhuis. I took to reading it in front of my father, the story of two Jewish families and an unmarried Jewish dentist who lived for years in hiding under the very noses of the Nazis, in defiance of them, held together and sustained by the most powerful of bonds, those of family, a shared past, a common origin and purpose, until they were secretly betrayed, possibly by a fellow Jew, the moral being—according to my mother—that unless everyone pulls together, they will be destroyed. “I want you to be proud of your father,” she said, “even if he never knows how proud you are.”
I read Het Achterhuis for hours on end right in front of my father and he didn’t seem to notice. I read and wore to pieces so many copies that I wound up wearing Band-Aids on my fingertips because of paper cuts.
Anne Frank had seen an autograph album in a store window and thought it would make a good diary because it had a clasp and it was bigger than most diaries, so it would take a long time to fill up all the pages. Yet she sometimes went for days without writing in it. I could never do that. Her first diary was covered in red and white plaid cloth and had a lock that she opened with a key. My first diary was a black date book that I stole from a stationery store.