During her time in hiding, Anne often wrote about her fear of betrayal, arrest by the Nazis and its consequences. But this fear, as described from the relative safety of the hiding place on the Prinsengracht in the city of Amsterdam, would have been as nothing compared to the terror of the long train journey to Auschwitz, the separation from her adored and protective father, the strength and luck needed to get through each day, and the emptiness and despair knowing there were no rescuers in sight.
On 25 March 1944 Anne wrote a story entitled ‘Fear’. She imagined not being in hiding, but nonetheless still trapped in war.
It was eight thirty in the evening. The shooting had died down a bit and I was dozing fully dressed on the divan when we were suddenly startled by two horrendous booms. We all leapt to our feet as if we had been pricked with a pin and went to stand in the hall. Even Mother, who was normally so calm, looked pale. The booms were repeated at fairly regular intervals, and then all of a sudden there was a crash, followed by screams and the tinkle of broken glass. I began running as fast as my legs would carry me. Bundled up with warm clothes and with my rucksack on my back, I ran and ran away from the horrible mass of flames.
But Anne had an answer to the fear that had taken hold of her. She describes what happened next.
I was in a field of grass, the moon was shining and the stars were gleaming overhead, the weather was wonderful, the night was chilly but not cold. Hearing no more noise, I sank exhausted to the ground, spread out the blanket I was still carrying and lay down. I gazed up at the sky and suddenly realized I was no longer afraid. On the contrary, I was quite calm. The odd thing was that I wasn’t thinking of my family at all, nor did I long for them. I longed only for rest, and soon I fell fast asleep in the grass beneath the starry sky. When I awoke, the sun was just coming up. I instantly realized where I was. In the distance the morning light revealed a row of familiar houses on the outskirts of the city. I rubbed my eyes and took a closer look around. There wasn’t a soul around. The dandelions and the clover leaves in the grass were my only company. I lay back down on the blanket and thought about what I should do next, but my thoughts kept wandering back to the wondrous feeling that had come over me in the night, when I had sat all by myself in the grass and not been afraid. Later I found my parents and we all went to live in another city. Now that the war has long been over I know why my fear vanished beneath that spacious sky. You see, once I was alone with nature, I realized, without actually being aware of it, that fear doesn’t help, it doesn’t get you anywhere. Anyone who is as frightened as I was should look to nature and realize that God is much closer than people think. From that moment on, though countless bombs fell close by, I was never really truly afraid again.
This is just one of several stories Anne wrote where she describes herself after the war, reaching adulthood or even as a 16-year-old, the age she didn’t reach. She writes in her diary too of the comfort she got from nature and the changing of the seasons, as displayed to her by the yearly stages of the deciduous chestnut tree she could see from the window.
In Bergen-Belsen camp, located on the barren and frozen Luneberg Heath in northern Germany, there was no chestnut tree, no verdant grass or dandelions to remind Anne of the wonder of nature. When Lien Brillesljper and her sister Jannie, who had described Anne and Margot’s final days in harrowing detail to Otto Frank, last saw the girls they seemed beyond the fear of their first weeks in captivity and way beyond the hope that Bergen-Belsen could offer more of a chance of life than Auschwitz. Consumed by the fever of typhus and by delirium from lack of food, surrounded by the dead and dying, Annelies Marie Frank, the girl who just seven months earlier had written, ‘I must hold on to my ideals, for perhaps the day will come when I will be able to realize them,’ was accepting of the inevitable.
Having been involved with the stories of so many people who experienced and witnessed brutality, I often think about their terror in their final days, moments, seconds of their lives or their freedom, and wish that by thinking hard, I could somehow lessen that terror. I have heard their stories first hand and witnessed their determination to live as normal lives as possible. I think about 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence, waiting for a bus home, perhaps musing on how he will spend the following day and then seeing and hearing the knife-wielding mob surging towards him intent on harm. I think of Daniel Pearl, who refused sedation in his final moments before the knife slit his throat, instead defiantly declaring himself a proud Jew. I think of Nelson Mandela, a qualified lawyer and tribal prince, standing erect in the dock hearing that he will spend the next thirty years in a bare prison cell. I think of the mothers trying to shield their children from the bloodstained machetes of Rwanda, the rifles of the Einzatsgruppen killing squads, or the suffocation by poisonous fumes in the gas chambers, the despair and fear of a helpless mother or father. I think of those I personally know who experienced horror. I think of Eva Schloss, a fifteen-year-old believing she was alone in the world as her beloved mother had been gassed. I think of Zlata Filipović, now a successful documentary maker, trembling as a child in a cellar in Sarajevo while the bombs rained down, and Saranda Bogujevci, an artist and fundraiser for Manchester Aid to Kosovo, playing dead while her family really lay dead all around her. I think of Ahmad Nawaz, at 14-years-old lying in the agony of a bullet in his arm, being trampled by a gunman while having to play dead and then seeing his teacher burned alive.
No words of compassion or understanding can ever lessen the fears and agonies of those who have suffered these atrocities. All we can do is our tiny little bit to help make the world better.