Anne Frank has become so recognizable over the past seventy years that sometimes the reality of this child’s life and death have become interwoven with myth or even parody. As if Anne Frank wasn’t really real.
In Japan, the country that was allied with Nazi Germany during the war, an animated film, Anne No Nikke, was released in 1995 depicting Anne Frank as an angelic heroine. She had a likeness to Disney’s animated Snow White, but Anne was clothed in mid-twentieth century costume. A dark-haired and pale-skinned girl is shown gambolling through flowered meadows, with birds and butterflies swirling around her. Accompanied by a score composed by the American Michael Nyman, the film was not well received in the West. On his ‘Anime New Network’ website, Justin Sevakis, an expert on the culture of animation, stated that he ‘couldn’t think of a worse way to experience the story than watching this film’.
A scene in the long-running British soap series Eastenders in 1999 showed a group of the fictional women characters going on a hen weekend in Amsterdam. The ‘hen bride’ was due to marry a rather unsympathetic character called Ian Beale. Prior to hitting the bars of Amsterdam, the young women stood alongside the canal on the Prinsengracht staring up at Anne’s hiding place. A supposedly knowledgeable member of the group pondered on Anne having to hide from the Nazis, and another responded that ‘surely that was a better fate than marrying Ian Beale’. Actually, it wasn’t.
In November 2009, introducing a BBC radio comedy panel show called The Unbelievable Truth, the presenter David Mitchell started the show by stating that Anne Frank’s last diary entry was, ‘It’s my birthday and my Dad bought me a drum kit.’ It could be an amusing joke if we didn’t understand Anne’s daily terror of discovery. The BBC received almost fifty complaints about the comment, including my own on behalf of the Anne Frank Trust. The show’s commissioning editor Caroline Raphael responded on the station’s weekly Feedback show by apologizing to any people who had taken offence, but added that she did not regret the decision to broadcast the comment made on the show. She said:
Personally I did find this funny. I don’t think it was trivializing the Holocaust, the nature of her death or the situation they were in. For me it actually captures some of the extraordinary spirit of that remarkable girl, Anne Frank, and there was a certain note of affection towards her. After all she was young, and if she was a teenager now she might have got a drum kit. It was satirizing the situation they were in.
David Mitchell defended the comment himself in an article in the Observer newspaper. He wrote that, despite not writing the joke himself, he found it ‘funny’ and that ‘the tragic circumstances give it an edge and make the audience more likely to laugh, but that’s not the same as finding the Holocaust funny’.
Both the above shows had warranted a letter from myself to the producer, explaining that Anne Frank still had living relatives and friends – some of whom were themselves Holocaust survivors – and who could find these references offensive. In each case I received an apology explaining there was certainly no offence intended, and of course I do believe that’s the case. In 2015 I happened to bump into David Mitchell in a café and we discussed the joke in a very cordial way. Mitchell is a highly intelligent man. But these instances are indicative of Anne having gone beyond being thought of as a real person who lived in the twentieth century as a contemporary to the still-living elderly Holocaust survivors whom no-one would dream of joking about.
In 2012 the comedian Ricky Gervais was compelled, after a flood of criticism, to publicly defend his use of Anne Frank in a comedy routine he had been performing on stage for ten years. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle newspaper he said:
It [the routine] is about the misunderstanding and ignorance of what is clearly a tragic and horrific situation. My comic persona is that of a man who speaks with great arrogance and authority but who, along the way, reveals his immense stupidity. In this particular routine, I envisage an almost slapstick version of the Nazis entering the home of Anne Frank on a daily basis and always failing to bother to ‘look upstairs’.
Gervais continued to describe the scene he was portraying:
The first Nazi says: ‘What’s that tapping sound?’ – as I mime the tapping action of using an old-fashioned typewriter. Again the joke here is the supremely stupid assumption that Anne Frank obliviously and noisily typed her diary. The final layer of ignorance in the routine is that, instead of taking the obvious and correct stance that Nazis were disgusting, immoral and evil, I merely conclude that they were ‘rubbish’ because of their inability to find Anne Frank earlier – like it was all part of a big, mutually agreed game of hide-and-seek . . . I often get accused of finding comedy in places where no comedy is to be found. I feel you can make a joke about anything. It just depends on what the joke is.
Perhaps the most enduring Anne Frank joke has been deemed to be a true story and relates to a production of the stage play The Diary of Anne Frank being performed somewhere in the US, and attributed to the terrible acting skills of its leading lady. The joke goes that as the arresting officers came onto the stage for the tragic climax, a member of the audience, who had suffered two hours of the heroine’s dreadful acting, shouted, ‘She’s in the attic’. I have heard the story many times on my travels, but it is apparently apocryphal and several different American actresses are the supposed targets.
‘Fictional Anne Frank’, the one who actually survived Bergen-Belsen and was supposedly rescued by the British and American liberating armies, exists in literature. There have been representations of her as a Holocaust survivor, such as in Philip Roth’s 1979 book The Ghost Writer, wherein a woman author called Amy Bellette appears to believe she is actually Anne Frank. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, the critic Robert Towers noted, ‘The account of Anne’s survival of Auschwitz and Belsen and of her desperate adoption, after weeks of coma, of Amy Bellette’s identity is packed with circumstantial detail of great vividness; her reactions to the reading of her own diary in its Dutch edition and her breakdown after seeing its dramatization on Broadway – these episodes are persuasively narrated.’ It is surprising, and perhaps somewhat fearless, for Roth to write this post-Holocaust fantasy in 1979, just thirty-four years after the liberation of the camps, and a year after the American TV series ‘Holocaust’ opened the American public’s eyes, albeit in a dramatic interpretation, to what had happened to the victims of the Nazis.
Shalom Auslander’s satirical and acerbic first novel, Hope, A Tragedy, published in 2012, gives us the image of another post-war Anne Frank. This time she takes the form of an embittered old crone typing away in the attic of a New York State farmhouse. Auslander uses Anne Frank as a symbol not of hope, but of the futility of hope. This Anne powerfully negates the sentimentalized use of some of her writing and her iconic image. ‘Me, I’m the sufferer,’ Auslander’s Anne finally says to a character called Kugel. ‘I’m the dead girl. I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945. The prize is a crown of thorns and eternal victimhood. Jesus was a Jew, Mr. Kugel, but I’m the Jewish Jesus.’
Published in the US simultaneously with Auslander’s novel, Nathan Englander’s collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank uses her name as the title of the book even though Anne Frank features in a small, but nonetheless significant, section towards the end of the opening story. The focus here is not on Anne, but actually on the moral dilemma that the helpers of the persecuted Jews found themselves in. Through an imagination game, ‘a thought experiment’, presupposing a second Holocaust is taking place in contemporary south Florida (where the largest number of American Holocaust survivors actually live), the two couples think about which of their Gentile acquaintances would put their life on the line to save their Jewish neighbours. The four characters then turn their attention to each other. The characters are fictionalized but the moral dilemma is not, and the story also covers the premise that survivors have human failings like everyone else.
Over the decades, dramatic interpretations of life in the secret annexe have brought their own way of imagining the reality. The popular play The Diary of Anne Frank, written by husband-and-wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, reflected Otto Frank’s wish to universalize the story to attract as wide an audience as possible. He envisaged the play being performed in cities throughout America where, in the 1950s pre-Civil Rights era, and despite knowledge of the Holocaust, cultural acceptance of difference was in short supply. The play’s impact in the late 1950s was profound, but in recent years it has been accused of over sentimentality and two-dimensional characterisation.
Dr Shirli Gilbert, Karten Senior Lecturer in Jewish/non-Jewish relations at the University of Southampton, explored the de-Judaification of the Hackett and Goodrich play in a 2013 essay for the Oxford Journal.
Several of Anne’s entries focused on the Jews’ specific fate and offered thoughtful observations about Jewish history and identity. These were excised in the stage version, and in some striking instances references to Jews were deliberately replaced with universal alternatives. On April 11, 1944, for example, Anne wrote: ‘We’ve been strongly reminded of the fact that we’re Jews in chains, chained to one spot, without any rights . . . We can never be just Dutch, or just English, or whatever, we will always be Jews as well.’ In the American script, this passage was replaced with Anne’s lament that, ‘We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. There’ve always been people that’ve had to—sometimes one race—sometimes another.’
In 1997 the American writer Wendy Kesselman gave the play a makeover, re-establishing Anne as a girl from a Jewish family, not baulking from making references to Zionism and the specific persecution of the Jews. Scenes gave the celebration of Chanukah and other manifestations of Anne’s Jewishness more prominence.
In the first run on Broadway, Anne was played by 16-year-old Natalie Portman, who had actually been born in Jerusalem with the Hebrew name of Neta-Lee Hershlag. While playing the role of Anne each night, Portman was simultaneously studying for her public school exams in Syosset, Long Island. By casting a Jewish Israeli-born actor, this production was described as ‘Anne Frank comes home.’ In an interview on NBC’s Today programme two days before the opening, Portman described how she had been connected to Anne Frank since the age of 12, as many of her own family had been killed in the Holocaust. ‘I want to remind people of the wrongs of hatred and racism.’ She went on to talk about this new version of Anne, and how it differed from previous representations of her. ‘I wanted to present her as real. She was no saint, and it’s wrong to present people’s icons as saints, because they will feel they can’t achieve that goodness. She was outgoing and hyper almost to an irritating point.’
The Kesselman play opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in June 1997. I was present on the opening night along with Jack and Ina Polak, Dutch-born Holocaust survivors of Bergen-Belsen, and Herbert and Lilian Levy, Herbert being the German-born Principal Guide of the Anne Frank exhibition in the UK and Lilian having been rescued as a five-year-old orphan from the same camp of Bergen-Belsen. Jack Polak had arrived in New York in 1951 with his wife Ina and two sons, had built a successful investment business and was a founder of the Anne Frank Center USA. All five of us, Herbert, Lilian, Jack, Ina and myself, were supremely protective of telling Anne’s story as honestly as possible.
The Polaks and the Levys had met for the first time earlier that evening over drinks at Manhattan’s legendary Algonquin Hotel and, partly due to their shared experiences but also their love of theatre, were by later in the evening firm friends. They all agreed that the size of the large Broadway theatre staging, and the consequent shouting of the characters across the stage, didn’t leave any impression of the claustrophobic intensity of the small above-warehouse rooms and the need of the hiders to be oppressively quiet for most of the day. I had thought the same. At one point in the second act, I had found myself giving quiet instructions (actually whispered to myself) to the players, ‘Please, please quieten down or you’ll be discovered.’ I still believe, having seen many different theatrical productions of Anne’s story, from Broadway to local fringe theatres to school productions, that the dramatisation of life in the secret annexe works best in a small, intimate environment.
At the star-studded aftershow dinner, I approached the pretty young actress who had played ‘Anne Frank’ while juggling her school exams. She looked nervous and was carefully carrying her dinner plate over to her table. ‘She looks a lovely girl, she was very good, it was her Broadway debut, so I am sure she will appreciate my encouragement,’ I thought to myself as I walked towards her smiling. She thanked me with a sweet and polite smile when I told her supportively that I thought she would definitely go far in her acting career. Well, how was I to know that Miss Portman had already been cast as Padme Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy?
In 2013, a new play was commissioned by the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel. Simply entitled Anne, it was written by the Dutch husband-and-wife team Leon de Winter and Jessica Durlacher, and produced by the Tony Award winning Broadway producer Robin Levitan. It opened on 8 May 2014, the sixty-ninth anniversary of VE Day, in a purpose built theatre in Amsterdam’s port area. The new theatre was lavish and impressive, and the glittering first night attended by the recently crowned King of the Netherlands, Willem Alexander (Queen Beatrix had abdicated in her son’s favour the previous year), along with Dutch media and high society. I found myself sitting in the optimum seats between South African leisure mogul Sol Kerzner and British impresario Harvey Goldsmith, who was one of the play’s producers, and after the performance having a brief chat to the new King to inform him about our flourishing Anne Frank organization in the UK.
Naturally the play was performed in Dutch, and foreign guests were handed out headsets with a rudimentary version of the script translated into English. After a few scenes I gave up on the audio, feeling that I was familiar enough with the narrative to watch the action played out in Dutch. Although the revolving sets were a staggering three storeys high, and certainly did not convey any sense of intimacy and claustrophobia, they, and the accompanying large-screen film footage and crashing sound effects, did give a heightened sense of the terrifying harsh reality beyond the secret annexe, most especially the penultimate scene showing Anne in a barren windswept Bergen-Belsen.
The first scene, which was an introduction to the stunning stage sets that would follow, is set in a post-war Paris café, where an imagined Anne is discussing the publication of her diary with a handsome young publisher. He then joins us as the audience is taken back to Anne’s time in hiding. In an interview for CNN, the writer Leon De Winter explained the reason for using an imaginary post war Anne, ‘It’s all inspired by Anne’s own writing,’ he said. ‘It’s her dream to have this grand student bohemian life in Paris and London – and to become famous. We used these remarks to see glimpses of a life she never had.’
Peter van Pels, Anne’s ‘boyfriend’ in the hiding place, has also had his life, words and thoughts subject to imagination. In 2010, the American writer Sharon Dogar’s first novel Annexed looked at the Anne Frank story from Peter van Pels’s viewpoint. Although the Sunday Times first criticized the novel for the ‘sexing up’ of the Anne Frank story, I was described by the Guardian newspaper as angry about fictionalizing someone who was until relatively recently a real person. ‘I really don’t understand why we have to fictionalize the Anne Frank story, when young people engage with it anyway,’ I told the Guardian’s Richard Lea. ‘To me it seems like exploitation. If this woman writer is such a good novelist, why doesn’t she create characters from scratch?’
I was cynical too when Dogar explained in the same article her reason for writing the book, ‘The problem is that a writer doesn’t always choose what they write,’ she said. ‘The idea of this book plagued me for 15 years. I tried quite hard not to write it, mostly because I had similar concerns; I couldn’t do it justice, I wasn’t sure it was legitimate, I didn’t believe I had the talent to portray the horror of the Holocaust. But sometimes stories just come and you can’t stop them.’
The novel opens with Peter on the point of death in Mauthausen (in real life he tragically died just three days before it was liberated) and is told as a series of diary entries interspersed with the thoughts of the dying boy, charting the story of the time he spent hiding with the Frank family above 263 Prinsengracht, his discovery and arrest and then his time in the death camp. Regarding the part of the book that concerns Peter’s teenage sexuality, I accused Dogar of putting twenty-first-century mores on to young people from a different era. Dogar rejected the accusation of anachronism, countering that,
Whilst it’s true to say that children of the war years lived according to different cultural mores and social strictures, it’s also true that there are some fundamental and universal human feelings that are biological rather than social. The state of adolescence existed before ‘teenagers’ were invented. Adolescent hormones have always been in conflict with social rulings. This is why some of Anne’s thoughts remain as powerful and meaningful today as they were 60 years ago.
I found myself in conflict with Otto Frank’s step-daughter and my Anne Frank Trust Co-founder Eva Schloss over my response, who concurred with Dogar that adolescents in the 1940s spent a lot of time thinking about sex. But although the Guardian article had made this the focal point of my critique, the sexual aspect wasn’t really my prime concern. It was much more about taking real people, who were not around to correct the falsehoods, and making their thoughts and experiences not real. Especially in the light of neo-Nazi Holocaust denial.
John Boyne wrote the enormously popular but controversial novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which relates the story of two young boys, one the son of the camp commandant and the other a Jewish prisoner, who befriend each other on either side of the concentration camp’s perimeter fence. It’s a totally improbable scenario, but Boyne defended the role of children’s fiction in dealing with subjects as charged as the Holocaust, on the grounds that novels can play a ‘huge role’ in educating young people. ‘Children will switch off if they are lectured,’ He continued, ‘but tell them a good story with characters they can relate to and you’re halfway there.’
Well, I actually believe, from working with Anne Frank’s story and those of survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, that the genuine stories of these people succeed in engaging young people and motivating them to make the world better. Moving forward, there will be a role for Holocaust fiction, but as there will soon be no more eyewitnesses to verify the facts and write their own memoirs, such novels must be based on historical truth.
The Anne Frank House itself has been featured in novels, such as Aidan Chambers’s Carnegie Medal-winning 1999 novel set in the Netherlands, Postcards from No Man’s Land. John Green’s 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars was about a couple of teenage cancer victims who fall in love. The terminally-ill young couple fly from their home town in Indiana to Amsterdam to meet a reclusive Dutch author whom the girl has long admired. While in the city they take the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank House and share their first kiss in the attic where Anne Frank and Peter van Pels had done so seventy years before (this memorable scene is a fictional premise as the attic is closed to the visiting public).
The British novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach approached Anne Frank with an honesty and a determination to be as accurate as possible. In 2008, the BBC commissioned a new TV drama series The Diary of Anne Frank to mark the eightieth anniversary of Anne’s birth the following year. When Moggach was asked to write the screenplay for the series, she probed into the day-to-day privations of being in hiding for over two years. When Deborah came to visit the Anne Frank Trust office prior to the first screening in January 2009, she told me that she had wanted to depict a ‘dirty Anne Frank’, showing clothes that were not able to be washed, eight people who were squabbling over the use of the one bathroom basin, a toilet that could not be flushed in daytime hours, windows that had to be kept closed and covered even in the heat of summer, and many other daily miseries.
In an interview with the American Public Broadcasting Service’s online magazine Masterpiece, Moggach said that the wardrobe department, ‘had versions of the same clothes that the actors wore in practically every scene, but becoming shabbier; and in the case of the adults, bigger, because the adults were getting so thin; and in the case of the teenagers, smaller, because the teenagers were growing. That made it tragically real when I saw that.’ Her honesty paid off. Moggach later said that Anne’s cousin Buddy Elias described this dramatic interpretation as ‘the most truthful he had ever seen’. Following its prime time BBC1 screening over five consecutive nights in January 2009, Moggach was regularly invited to speak about the challenges of creating such a truthful screenplay, and the Anne Frank Trust team and I became ‘Deborah Groupies’ following her around London to hear her, as what she revealed about the process and her thinking was so fascinating.
Over the years many musical productions of the story have appeared. One of my first experiences of this was in 1990 when I was a ‘new player’ in the Anne Frank educational arena. The New York writer Enid Futterman wrote a piece called Yours Anne with a score specially composed by Michael Cohen. After its British premiere in Manchester, the piece then transferred to a small theatre in Islington, north London, where I went along to see it. I thought then, and still do, that this intimate production was one of the most truthful and moving ways of telling the story. Enid and I had lunch while she was in London and she described to me her personal connection to the persecution of Anne Frank. As a teenager in Poland in the early years of the twentieth century, Enid’s grandmother had witnessed the murder of her own father during a pogrom in their village. The trauma of this had filtered down through the ensuing generations, causing Enid’s mother to suffer from severe depression. As a child Enid had in turn suffered from her mother’s depression – four generations had borne the trauma of this 100-year-old family tragedy. I often think of Enid’s story when I see scenes of massacres and brutality on the present-day news and wonder how many future generations of the victims will go on to be affected.
James Whitbourn and Melanie Challenger’s ‘Anne Frank Oratorio’, written in 1995, is a soaring and serious classical interpretation often performed in cathedrals and at significant memorial events. A Spanish musical version of the story was given the thumbs-down by the Anne Frank-Fonds and closed its doors after a few days. There has been no shortage of British composers, as well as dramatists, sending me their own ‘unique’ take on the Anne Frank story, believing they would be providing the definitive Anne Frank work. They were discouraged in their ambitions when I had to tell them they would need to seek the rights from the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel. I am sure the flood will continue for many years. I hope it does and that Anne Frank will continue to inspire creativity, in all its varying degrees of merit.
Working in schools has shown that even children can give Anne Frank’s character their own interpretation. Possibly attributable to one particularly famous line in her diary being taken out of context, children have often told us that the characteristic they most admire in Anne is her ability to forgive, and that they hope they would be as forgiving too in her circumstances.
The line refers to her own wonder that she hasn’t abandoned all her ideals as in her view they seem so absurd and impractical. But she then decides to be positive, writing, ‘Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’ Over the years this line has been isolated from its context and has served as creating an ‘other-worldly’ Anne, more forgiving and saintly than us. This sentence of twenty words in fact comes towards the end of one of Anne’s longest entries, dated 15 July 1944, in which she rails against the loneliness of her situation, ‘It’s twice as hard for us young people to hold on to our opinions at a time when ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when the worst side of human nature predominates, when everyone has come to doubt truth, justice and God.’ She hears, almost in a premonition of her fate, ‘the distant thunder that will destroy us too’.
Giving the inaugural Anne Frank Lecture in London in January 2011, the cultural historian and writer Professor Simon Schama chose to analyse her smile:
When we conjure up the features of Anne Frank’s face, what do we remember first? Well surely the smile because it happens in the teeth of despair. Sometimes it’s nothing more than elfin mischief, the knowing cheekiness that ignites every so often through her writing. At other times it’s the full-on girly grin, so wide, artless and brilliant, that the rest of her countenance seems to arrange itself around it. And, as anyone who has ever written anything about Anne Frank has always noted, it is lit by an avidity for the life that was denied her in Bergen-Belsen.
Anne Frank, a fragile teenager who just wanted to grow up and live her life as an adult, a terrified girl who lived and laughed, who wanted to go back to school and hang out with her friends. Anne Frank, a frightened and vulnerable teenager, who was funny, cheeky, deeply driven, opinionated, bossy, happy with her hair and sometimes not, was as real as you or me.
Had she survived, Anne Frank may have returned to live in Amsterdam, or like Eva Schloss, who moved to London after the war, may have found it too hard to resume a normal life in a country where most of her non-Jewish peers could never really comprehend what Auschwitz was all about. She may have followed the dreams of her sister Margot and fled Europe for the Mediterranean climes of Israel, where in the early days of the fledgling state she would again have endured a lack of food, but I suspect she would have enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of Tel Aviv more than the rural life on a kibbutz. Or, like so many of the camp survivors, taken a ship across the Atlantic to America, where in the second half of the twentieth century she would have experienced the greatest prosperity in human history, tempered by the 1950s fears of nuclear war.
We can never speculate who Anne Frank would have been had she been able to hold on to the thread of life for just a few weeks longer to see the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Because she was a real person and her post-war life would have guided her choices, we’ll never know if she would have chosen to become a writer or journalist. She may have decided against this path, or tried and changed her mind and then chosen a completely different field. As it was not so usual in the 1950s for women to have careers, her pre-feminism yearning to ‘do more than Mother ever did’ may have not materialized and she may have spent her life as a wife, mother and homemaker.
All we know is that we will never know who or what she would have been or done or thought. Because Anne Frank was a real person and suffered and died as a real person.