The diary is a second kind of Secret Annex, and it is where we remain with Anne, hearing her speak to us only once every few days and sometimes only for a moment because we must keep quiet so as not to let anyone know that we’re there. It is where Anne hides to survive.
—JAMES MOLLOY, Bard College, class of 2010
LATE IN THE FALL OF 2007, I TAUGHT The Diary of Anne Frank to a class at Bard College. It was a course in close reading, in which we’d been studying the works of writers ranging from John Cheever to Hans Christian Andersen, from Mavis Gallant to Leonard Michaels, from Roberto Bolaño to Grace Paley. My students were not only intelligent, passionate, and engaged, but intuitive and remarkably well read, and I was often surprised and delighted by the leaps of imagination and association that led them from literature to the visual arts or music. A discussion of Bolaño had turned into a conversation about Borges. A class on Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” had inspired a discussion of the innocent, perverse, fairy-tale eroticism of the self-taught artist Henry Darger.
I was eager to hear what they would say about Anne Frank, but I wasn’t—nor were they—prepared for the intensity of their responses. I had been thinking and writing about the benefits and the risks of identifying with Anne Frank; my students demonstrated all of the former and none of the latter. Born long after her death, they felt as if she were speaking to them. As if she were one of them. They identified with her humanity, her sympathy, her humor, her impatience, her alienation, her adolescent struggles, without ever losing sight of the gap between their comfortable and privileged lives and the circumstances that had driven her into hiding. They were keenly aware of the gap between what Anne was forced to endure and the trivial setbacks that their contemporaries found nearly unendurable.
A student wrote, “I couldn’t believe how she kept resolving to be happier. She writes about a lot of experiences of joy. Even in those extremes she manages to maintain the psyche of a normal girl. Today such little things turn people into basket cases, they go on Prozac because they can’t pay their credit card bills. It’s hard to believe that she manages to maintain so much of herself. She can look out at Amsterdam on a sunny day and still be transfixed by beauty.”
I had asked them to send me brief response papers in advance of the class, and, perhaps because we’d placed so much emphasis on how writers wrote, quite a few of them focused on Anne Frank’s eloquence.
Not only was she a fabulous writer, but I felt a special connection to her because my grandparents were in hiding during the war, in France. At one point she says she wants to be a journalist, and I kept thinking that this is one of the best journalistic documents in history. She knows so much. She noticed all the warning signs, Jews are not allowed to do this, Jews are not allowed to do that. When her sister was called up, everyone knew what that meant. It’s amazingly beautifully written, and she does such a good job of making you feel the fear that was at the base of everything, all the time.
Wrote another student, “She creates characters so believable I had to keep reminding myself that they were real.” Another noted, “There’s something eerie and amazing about the level and the kind of details she gives us. Dialogue in chunks, descriptions of actions, and everywhere, character character character. This girl is an amazing writer. I find myself wondering, did she know what she was doing? It’s clear that Anne wrote this diary for herself, and it meant a lot to her, but was it ever anything else? Isn’t all writing inevitably ‘something else,’ meaning, it’s not just for the writer? How can the act of writing not be for someone else? Is it possible to write, to tell a story, without thinking of someone you’re telling it to?”
In class, I encouraged them to talk about the difference between their first encounter with the diary—most of them had read it on their own, or had been assigned to read it in junior high or high school—and how it seemed to them now, especially after having taken a class in close reading. One young woman wryly remarked that she hadn’t read the diary before because she’d grown up in Seattle, where “we did the Japanese internment camps instead.” A few admitted, with embarrassment, that, even though they’d read the diary in high school, they’d had no idea how Anne died, and were horrified to have finally learned the truth.
Nearly all of those who had read it before mentioned that they’d previously had almost no sense of the book as literature but only as a historical document, or as some sort of young-adult coming-of-age memoir. One student said he’d gotten funny looks and sarcastic remarks from his Bard schoolmates (not those enrolled in the class) when they saw him reading Anne Frank’s diary. They acted as if he were assuming some sort of ironic-regressive pose that involved carrying around a children’s classic, the equivalent of using his grade school lunch box as an attaché case.
Nearly all of them talked about how (perhaps because they’d been so young themselves) they’d had little sense of Anne as a character—and, specifically, of how much she had changed and grown in two years. “What got to me,” said one young man, “is that she starts out as a little kid and matures and can see things more objectively. Instead of being mad at people she can step back and see herself. She comes to be this really wonderful human being. I loved the way it ends with her thinking how good life would be without other people in it. It makes it more tragic that she couldn’t fulfill all the talent and humanity that she had.”
Another agreed. “She started out as such an innocent optimistic girl and she became so much more self-conscious and self-aware.”
Yet another wrote, “Anne is stunning. She is so powerfully alive. (To phrase it this way sounds a little stupid to me but I’m not sure how else to say it.) Everything she describes about their Secret Annex is interesting because she is interacting with it, and telling about it in her insightful, hilarious way. She often talks about her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan and Dussel trying to discipline her or shame her into changing her behavior. We never actually see what happens before the adults go after her, because Anne is always writing after the fact, not accounting for her own behavior, whatever she did, but it is not hard to imagine. Anne was probably very hard to be around! She talked constantly; she spoke her mind, she felt strongly, and was only a thirteen-year-old. What a person to live with in a Secret Annex!
“We get to be ‘Kitty,’ the friend she invents and addresses all of her entries to. Anne meets us for the first time and she slowly gets to know us and feel comfortable confiding in us. As Kitty, we are the depository for her secrets.”
Except for one young woman, who had somehow gotten hold of the entire Critical Edition and realized (as most readers have not) the implications of the “a,” “b,” and “c” versions, my students were amazed to hear that Anne had gone back and revised her journal. But as soon as they’d had a chance to think about that, they felt, as I did, that this made the diary more impressive rather than less authentic.
As the December dusk deepened outside the window and the classroom (I tried to avoid switching on the harsh fluorescent lights) grew darker, the students’ voices grew quieter, and they seemed sobered and saddened as they spoke about Anne’s last days. I kept thinking that these were precisely the sort of open-hearted, idealistic young people who might someday wind up working at a place like the Anne Frank Foundation, trying to improve our damaged and possibly doomed world. The tone in which they spoke about the diary evoked that of a eulogy, or of testimony. It was as if they were talking about a friend. One of my students summarized the essence of what he’d written in his response paper:
I wonder if it is just me or if her writing is so personal that it is symptomatic of every reader, but I feel an emotional connection to Anne Frank through her writing. This is a testament to both the power of her writing and her character. To feel a real connection with a girl who has been dead for almost 63 years…is a strange emotional experience, but I feel as though I know her well. I know that, given the chance, we would have been close in life. We have a lot in common in terms of our interests and desires. She and I both love writing and history and loathe math and figures, and I admire her deep sense of self-awareness and her emotional transparency that is evident in her writing. She has a passion for self-expression I find very moving, and I wish I could be that honest and clear when I write for myself…Anne and I also share a passion for nature and recognize the power in the simple beauty of everyday experiences of nature. I can picture many a night where I have stared out my window in the same way; the beauty of the night filling me with excitement and keeping me awake…I think I may have read this book in grade school but I am very glad to have afresh look at it again now that I am 20 years old. There is so much here that passed me by.
Listening to him, I thought: They would have been friends. She was a fifteen-year-old girl. She saw herself as both ordinary and special, growing up under circumstances that were in no way normal even as her parents insisted on going through the motions of everyday life. What was certain was that Anne did not grow up believing that she was going to be sent to Auschwitz, and die, at fifteen, in Bergen-Belsen.
I listened to my students, as fresh and eager as she had been, only a few years older than she was when she died. I asked one of them to read aloud from the diary, and he chose the final entry, the passage in which Anne imagined the person she could have been if there weren’t any other people living in the world.
When he finished, the class was silent. In the hush, I thought about Anne’s wish to go on living after her death. And it was clear to me, as it has been throughout the writing of this book, that her wish has been granted. I remembered how, more than fifty years ago, the first time I read the diary, I’d kept reading until the light had faded in my bedroom, as it had now, in this classroom. And for those few hours during which my students and I talked about her diary, it seemed to me that her spirit—or, in any case, her voice—had been there with us, fully present and utterly alive, audible in yet another slowly darkening room.